Utopia in Practice: Bishan Project and Rural Reconstruction [1st ed.] 9789811557903, 9789811557910

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CONTEMPORARY EAST ASIAN VISUAL CULTURES, SOCIETIES AND POLITICS

Utopia in Practice Bishan Project and Rural Reconstruction

Ou Ning

Contemporary East Asian Visual Cultures, Societies and Politics Series Editors Paul Gladston University of New South Wales Sydney, NSW, Australia Frank Vigneron Chinese University of Hong Kong Shatin, New Territories, Hong Kong Yeewan Koon University of Hong Kong Pokfulam, Hong Kong Island, Hong Kong Lynne Howarth-Gladston Sydney, NSW, Australia Chunchen Wang Central Academy of Fine Arts Beijing, China

Gladston, P. (Ed), Vigneron, F. (Ed), Koon, Y. (Ed), Howarth-Gladston, L. (Ed), Wang, C. (Ed) This series brings together diverse perspectives on present-day relationships between East Asian visual cultures, societies and politics. Its scope extends to visual cultures produced, disseminated and received/consumed in East Asia – comprising North and South Korea, Mongolia, Japan, mainland China, Hong Kong, Macau, and Taiwan – as well as related diasporas world-wide, and to all aspects of culture expressed through visual images, including across perceived boundaries between high and popular culture and the use of traditional and contemporary media. Taken into critical account are cultural, social and political ecologies currently shaped by geopolitical borders across the East Asia region in addition to their varied intersections with an increasingly trans-cultural world. The series emphasizes the importance of visual cultures in the critical investigation of contemporary socio-political issues relating to, for example, identity, social inequality, decoloniality and the environment. The editors welcome contributions from early career and established researchers. Advisory Board Prof Jason Kuo, University of Maryland Prof Chris Lupke, University of Alberta Prof Paul Manfredi, North Western Lutheran University, Seattle Prof Ted Snell, University of Western Australia Dr Hongwei Bao, University of Nottingham Dr Ting Chang, University of Nottingham Dr Gerald Cipriani, National University of Ireland Dr Katie Hill, Sotheby’s Institute, London Dr Birgit Hopfener, Carleton University Dr Takako Itoh, Faculty of Art and Design, Toyama University Dr Darren Jorgensen, University of Western Australia Dr Beccy Kennedy, Manchester Metropolitan University Dr Franziska Koch, Heidelberg University Ms Taliesin Thomas, Director AW Asia, New York Dr Wei-Hsiu Tung, University of Tainan Dr Ming Turner, National Cheng Kung University, Taiwan Dr Meiqin Wang, California State University, Northridge Dr Yungwen Yao, Ta Tung University Dr Bo Zheng, City University Hong Kong

More information about this series at http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/16532

Ou Ning

Utopia in Practice Bishan Project and Rural Reconstruction

Ou Ning Columbia University Jingzhou, Hubei, China

ISSN 2662-7701     ISSN 2662-771X (electronic) Contemporary East Asian Visual Cultures, Societies and Politics ISBN 978-981-15-5790-3    ISBN 978-981-15-5791-0 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-5791-0 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2020 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: By the author This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. The registered company address is: 152 Beach Road, #21-­01/04 Gateway East, Singapore 189721, Singapore

For Tang Xue, Tang Tang, and especially Niu Niu, the Bishan-born baby

Prologue

Night Show1 A visitor in the dead of night, a moonlit dance. Just for that quicksilver performance all the power goes out. The backhoe reposes in the riverbed, the cement mixer rests at the paddy’s edge. White walls and black tiles, row upon row; everything is dappled with light and shadow. Beauty and ugliness is whitewashed, all sound absorbed. The world pauses, the audience holds its breath, waiting— then the show spills forth.

1  Completed in Chinese on March 28, 2013, in Bishan. The English version was translated by Austin Woerner in 2019.

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Preface: Eternal Return1

Ou Ning has, without a trace of self-pity and with no arrogance at all, identified himself and his trajectory with Song Dynasty poet Chen Yuyi, this on his the only astonishingly recent initial trip to Chen’s native Luoyang. Luoyang is the historic eastern capital of China, on the Yellow River, in the North China Plain, China’s largest alluvial plain. Chen’s ancestral home was near Xi’an, China’s historic western capital. Beijing and Hebei and the far north came much later. Shanghai was not even on the map. China’s center of power was not coastal. It has become so. And Ou Ning is both Chinese and coastal. It has become so, above all, in Ou’s native Guangdong, perhaps the world’s most dynamic economic region. Luoyang’s Henan has declined in power and influence, not least in the Great Leap Forward as Guangdong has become by far the most dominant province in China. Dynasties have come to power in the West, the military northwest also under pressure from horseback-archer pastoral nomads to its north, while the capitals of one dynasty after the next (from Shang) have after a few generations been driven east and moved to Luoyang, less military, center of Confucian learning, the arts, the basis really of Chinese civilization and historic soft power. Ou in Luoyang could get in touch with a certain collective unconscious, an early precursor of violent termination of the Bishan Project: a recurrent motif, a seemingly Chinese eternal return. This offered some solace to Ou as it did to his predecessors. Poet Chen had to flee from what is today’s nearby Kaifeng, also in Henan, when Northern Song itself was crushed by the Jurchen (Manchuria) led Jin, the poet ending up eventually in the then far southern reaches of Fujian. You think of Sima Qian, castrated in the Han Dynasty, the imperial scribe (taishiling), astrologer, and author of the Records

1  Written on May 25–28, 2020 in London. Scott Lash is a professor of sociology and cultural studies at Goldsmiths, University of London.

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of the Grand Historian. Chen, Sima, and Ou partake of a collective unconscious, whose temporality is for us Westerners so very Nietzschean, of the Eternal Return, a temporality that escapes the metanarratives of Judaeo-Christianity and indeed Enlightenment and Marxist metanarratives, for instead the eternal return of the same. This is Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, whose Übermensch unlike man was opposed to the metanarratives of Augustine’s to-come City of God, but instead turned against the religion of the sky whose predecessor he (Zarathustra, Zoroaster) was and taught us to love or embrace fate, amor fati, again very Chinese. In this eternal return, as in Daoist cosmology, there is no creation and there is no redemption. But only the eternal return of the same which the Übermensch, who is the Antichrist, is to embrace. All metanarratives work from a priori, normally a transcendental a priori. Ou Ning’s anarchism and his utopia are in contrast thoroughly a posteriori. They start from the local, the particular; indeed they start from not the transcendental, but from the immanence of the earth.

Ou’s sensibility of Daoist, Confucian, and of the land lies in Fei Xiaotong’s sense in From the Soil. For me, yes Confucian, in how I see the chapter of the letter to his Mum who would not leave their small impoverished village in the very south of Guangdong, on the Leizhou Peninsula in the very southernmost tip of China, the impoverished bit of southwest Guangdong, known also for gangsters (hei shehui) today, just abutting Hainan. The peninsula is made up of only small bits of alluvial plain for intensive farming, made up mostly of basalt and marine terraces. The land hardly produced enough to eat in Ou’s childhood. The most wonderful spaces in the Bishan Project were the Bishan Bookstore set up by the owner of Librairie Avant-Garde, a Nanjing friend and Christian, Qian Xiaohua, paradigm-setting bookshop/café/social space, unmatched in London, New  York, or Paris. Clearly Ou’s design sensibility contributed to this. As it did to the School of Tillers. An art, exhibition, and cinema space, again with books, which was also literally a school: for locals from this southern corner of Anhui Province, not far from Huangshan, and for others. The educational dimension was central to Bishan, modeled on again Christian educationalist James Yen from the Rural Reconstruction Movement in Republican Era. Ou Ning’s anarchism has a lot to do with the School of the Tillers (not close to the WWI or Revolutionary Syndicalism). The School of the Tillers or Nongjia, where jia is home or family but also refers to the specialized, diverse knowledge including philosophical schools of pre-Han China, during the Hundred Schools of Thought that spanned the spring and autumn periods and Warring States. The Tillers had a base in Shandong, and had a relation to and contact with Mencius. Yet they were against Confucian hierarchy, and prescribed that the emperor or king must work

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alongside the tillers of the earth. In this there was no division of labor or stratification. This is Ou Ning’s anarchism (of the earth), in contrast to James C. Scott whose anti-stratification is of not earth but steppe, of the pastoral horseback-archer nomads, Xiongnu, Tujue, Mongols, Jurchens, Uighurs, whose tribute-for-peace decimated the treasuries of one dynasty after another. Ou’s School of Tillers in Bishan, like Xu Xing’s original in fourth-century BC Warring States, was about education through agriculture, again the influence of rural reconstructionist James Yen. Also, from Republican Reconstruction, Ou’s anarchist utopia is very much that of Liang Shuming, the “last Confucian” and Buddhist scholar who set up a decentralized commune system in 1930s Shandong. Ou Ning began as a teenage poet and stayed a poet; indeed his literary and activist magazine Chutzpah! was in part a poetry magazine, with political pieces. Anarchist Mai Dian from the post-punk scene in Wuhan, for example, published there. Ou comes from a Guangzhou intellectual community, who used to hang out in a legendary Guangzhou bookshop Libreria Borges. If artists and curators, like also Guangzhou’s Hou Hanru, born in the early 1960s de facto emigrated to Paris, a number of Ou’s slightly younger generation were able to thrive in China, the Libreria Borges embracing architects Doreen Heng Liu and Jiang Jun, film artist Cao Fei, gallerist and art-philosopher Zhang Wei and Hu Fang. All born between 1968 and 1978. In fact, it was the Pearl River Delta, very much Shenzhen and Guangzhou: Ou was a student at Shenzhen University. The Shenzhen Biennale of Urbanism \ Architecture has taken an important place from 2005, of which Ou was director in 2009. The architect group Urbanus included Meng Yan and Liu Xiaodu and had moved down to Shenzhen OCT (Overseas Chinese Town) from Beijing. Central to all this was Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas, who had brought his Harvard GSD students to Shenzhen, whose outcome was the Great Leap Forward in 2002. Koolhaas invited me to help on his bid to do conceptual master plan for the Shanghai Expo. When I arrived in January 2003, work on the CCTV building was already commencing. Ou’s Shenzhen was the cutting edge: of what? Of global China. Of Deng Xiaoping’s 1992 Tour of the South (nanxun), a major precipice of the gaige kaifang (Reform and Opening). Of Deng’s Hong Kong connection, and the opening of stock markets and mortgage markets. So, post-­Tiananmen from the mid-1990s for 15 years or more there was massive and sudden global opening as China moved East and became coastal. Ou’s was perhaps the most intense experience of this dawn of opening and then subsequent closing.

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He, more than anyone else, “got it,” being global and at the same time Chinese—he was not like many others educated in the US. This was visible in his intensely urban Guangzhou early documentary film San Yuan Li (2003), which he co-directed with Cao Fei. Ou and Cao were a couple for a number of years. Ou produced some of the very best and rawest (again Guangzhou) films in Cao’s repertoire. Shenzhen was the pilot with its special economic zone in 1984, some eight years before Deng’s southern trip. At this point Ou was a 15-year-old poet, living in west Guangdong’s Leizhou, a backwater, so early on helping organize informal publication and distribution with his poetry friends. But also, global China was starting to happen in the east of the province. After finishing university post-Tiananmen, Ou started working in advertising and designing more generally. And he became very much also a designer. I first met him in the connection to the Shenzhen and Hong Kong Bi-City Biennale in 2006–2007. A year or so later his flat in Beijing was featured in Wallpaper. His dress style was to be imitated. Ou has always been an organizer, a combinard, who makes things happen. Get It Louder was a Chinese art and design festival that began in 2005, launched by Ou and run by him every two years with support from Modern Media. But somewhere between 2009 and 2012 Ou changed directions. He stopped working on his space at Modern Media: he became instead very much a critic of capitalism. He moved from his designer flat in Beijing to Bishan. Yet the creative juices flowed as he made possible Chutzpah!, the Bishan incarnation branch of the Nanjing bookshop, winner of many awards. On my first visit to Bishan in 2015 we had lunch with two young guys from Nanjing, who were starting up an art and poetry magazine, taking advice from Ou. There was a shift from design and markets to activism and a return to poetics. We stayed at Bishan’s Pigs Inn set up by Shanghai poet Han Yu and her husband. Ou was connecting to Wen Tiejun and New Rural Reconstruction Movement. Yet everything in Bishan was incredibly designed. Ou has been influenced by David Graeber, yet his anarchism along with Liang Shuming is of an enhanced localism. After Bishan was shut down, I visited Ou and his wife Tang Xue in Yantai, Shandong. He’d put together another group of local intellectuals, centered again in a Yantai bookshop. I stayed on their WeChat group. We visited nearby villages and Ou was entranced by local seagrass thatched-roof cottages, intended for Shandong winter snow. Ou’s localism is much more concrete and embedded in the particular than Marc Augé’s notion of place. This particular is part of Ou’s

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fully a posteriori politics/aesthetics. One that starts from the particular in the here and invents itself as it goes along. This is politics and aesthetics against any a priori. Rules are by definition a priori: anarchism must be a posteriori. Power is always exercised through an a priori, whether that of the state or of capital. The capitalist subject indeed is ingrained in Kant’s transcendental a priori. Ou instead gives us not a transcendental, but a cosmology that is immanent, in the earth. He gives us not a transcendental a priori but this immanent a posteriori. Ou has written about the Well Field System (jingtianzhi). This is a land redistribution system of parcels of land, based on a figure of nine squares like a tic-tac-toe. Here peasant farmers spend most of their time working their own squares, but all contribute a bit of labor to the middle square which is owned by the “lord.” Several dynasties in Chinese history constructed such a system. It is egalitarian but at the same time is aimed by the emperor’s central government to break the power of local feudal nobility, to take away feudal yet decentralized taxation and control of the means of destruction. We have witnessed such centralization (without redistribution) in the recent past which has also put an end to the Bishan Project. The revenge of the a priori. Ou Ning in contrast represents a posteriori stream of Chinese thought. All of which is rooted in the amor fati of eternal return that unites Daoism with Nietzsche’s Zarathustra. At stake is not the Judaeo-Christian rectilinear hope of Kant and critical theory. It is instead the hope of eternal return of the same, anti-apocalyptic, that knows that one dynasty succeeds another, that apparent despair is not Doomsday. The word xing stands for happiness and luck in Chinese and is tied to fortune and fate. Amor fati, embrace fate, is for Ou and the rest of us also a (genealogical) morality of hope. London, Scott Lash

Contents

1 Pastoral Youth  1 My Urbanization   1 Searching for Hometown   4 Letter to My Mother   8 2 Huizhou Fieldwork 19 From Non-place to Place  19 Revisiting Bishan  25 3 Blueprints 29 Anarchism and Ruralism  29 The Possibility of a Rural Revival  36 The Reconstruction of the Agricultural Homeland  39 4 Bishan Harvestival 53 Go to the Countryside!  53 5 Reality and History 73 Beijing’s Climate Politics  73 What Wukan Means?  78 The Cultivators: Rural Reconstructionists in China  87

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6 Yixian International Photo Festival 99 The Interactions  99 In the Field of Hope 107 River Worship 110 7 Deep Plowing113 The Heart’s Home 113 The Unwillingness 126 Reproducing the History of Local Life 129 8 Controversies133 Symbolic Boundaries, Distinction, and Othering 133 The Savior of the Countryside? 137 9 Introspection153 The Organic Intellectuals 153 Informal Life Politics 161 10 The School of Tillers181 Song of the Earth 181 Timekeepers 196 Memoir in Southern Anhui 202 Cultural Production and Local Construction 206 11 New Commons227 Crises and Experiments of Commons 227 The Commons of Common Space 231 12 Handicraft, Design, and Art237 The Handicraft Renaissance 237 The Whole Earth Community 242 The Subject of Public Art 249 13 Food, Ecology, and Education267 The Politics of Eating 267 Children’s Sense of Reality 280

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14 City and Countryside289 After the Failure of Cities 289 Countryside as Countryside 300 Topophilia and Placemaking 308 15 Utopian Dreams319 You’re Too Shy to Talk About Utopia 319 Autonomy: Utopia or Realpolitik 322 The Discourse of Utopia in the Post-Mao Era 329 Utopian Nostalgia 334 Postscript357 Epilogue369 Glossary371 Appendix A381 Appendix B393 Appendix C417 Bibliography431

List of Illustrations

Book cover: Bishan Village, 2011. Photo by Ou Ning 01. Location Map: Bishan Village, Biyang Town, Yi County, Huangshan City, Anhui Province, P. R. of China. Drawing by Xu Yijing and Neil Mclean Gaddes / San Practices, 2012 394 02. Bishan map by Feng Zhiyin, in There is a Village Named Bishan in China, children’s picture book curated by Ou Ning, 2016 (unfinished)395 03. The mind map of Bishan Project by Ou Ning for the exhibition “Art and China after 1989: Theater of the World,” Guggenheim Museum, 2017-2018. Designed by Xiaoma + Chengzi, 2017 396 04. Zhang River, Bishan Nursing Home and Cloud Gate Pagoda, 1970s. Courtesy of Cultural Center of Yi County 397 05. Bishan militia, 1970s. Courtesy of Cultural Center of Yi County 398 06. Woman basketball team of Bishan, 1974. Courtesy of Cultural Center of Yi County 398 07. Bishan Supply and Marketing Cooperative, 1970s. Courtesy of Cultural Center of Yi County 399 08. Ou Ning, Bishan Commune: How to Start Your Own Utopia, Moleskine sketchbook, 108 pages, 13 x 21cm, heavy acid-free paper, 2010400 09. Ou Ning, Bishan Commune: How to Start Your Own Utopia, Moleskine sketchbook, 108 pages, 13 x 21cm, heavy acid-free paper, 2010401 10. Logo of Bishan Commune, designed by Xiaoma + Chengzi, 2011 402 11. Visual design of Bishan Harvestival by Xiaoma + Chengzi, 2011 403 12. Chudifang Dance by Bishan Villagers, Bishan Harvestival. Photo by Hu Xiaogeng, 2011 403 xix

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13. “Mutual Aid and Inheritance,” the main exhibition of 2011 Bishan Harvestival. Photo by Hu Xiaogeng, 2011 404 14. “Poetry Course,” the literary activities of 2011 Bishan Harvestival. Photo by Ou Ning, 2011 404 15. “Screen Nostalgia,” the film screening events of 2011 Bishan Harvestival. Photo by Hu Xiaogeng, 2011 405 16. The opening program and schedule of 2012 Yixian International Photo Festival and 2012 Bishan Harvestival. Poster designed by Xiaoma + Chengzi 406 17. The bronze statue of Wang Dazhi donated by Ou Ning and Zuo Jing before the opening of 2012 Bishan Harvestival. Photo by Zhu Rui, 2012407 18. The villagers were helping to install the “Coal + Ice” exhibition in 2012 Yixian International Photo Festival. Photo by Sun Yunfan, 2012 407 19. The Bishan Bookstore. Photo by Matjaž Tančič, 2012 408 20. The Bishan Bookstore. Photo by Matjaž Tančič, 2012 408 21. The Bishan Passports, designed by Xiaoma + Chengzi. Photo by Zhu Rui, 2012 409 22. A guide for how to use “Bishan Hours” in Taipei Fine Arts Museum. Designed by Xiaoma + Chengzi. 2014 410 23. Shennong, painting by Chen Duxi, 2015 411 24. The Chinese logotype of School of Tillers, designed by Xiaoma + Chengzi, 2015 411 25. The yard, School of Tillers. Photo by Zhu Rui, 2015 412 26. The library, School of Tillers. Photo by Zhu Rui, 2015 412 27. The gallery, School of Tillers. Photo by Zhu Rui, 2015 413 28. The villagers came to the School of Tiller for the film screening. Photo by Zhu Rui, 2015 413 29. The villagers at the opening of the School of Tillers, 2015. Photo by Cao Haili 414 30. The volunteers of School of Tillers, 2015. Photo by Jin Ming 414 31. The “Happiness Pavilion” in construction, January 20, 2016. Photo by Ou Ning 415 32. The villagers who built the “Happiness Pavilion”: Qian Shi’an, Cheng Guofu and Chu Chunhe, February 16, 2016. Photo by Ou Ning 416

Introduction

Utopia in Practice1 The Origins of Bishan Project Before I filled up a Moleskine notebook2 with the “blueprint” of Bishan Commune in 2010, I had curated three editions of Get It Louder (2005, 2007, 2010) and the Shenzhen and Hong Kong Bi-City Biennale of Urbanism\Architecture (2009), all of which are large-scale events with over sixty exhibitors in the Chinese metropolises of Shenzhen, Guangzhou, Shanghai, and Beijing. Based in Guangzhou and Beijing at that time, I made each of the two cities a documentary as part of my urban research— San Yuan Li (2003), portraying a rural village trapped within Guangdong, and Meishi Street (2006), delineating a slum in Beijing. I was also invited to various exhibitions at home and abroad as an artist. All the exhibitions took place in cities, as they are where cultural resources concentrate, and so much so that there is already an “excess” of exhibitions. Against this

1  Completed in Chinese on March 13, 2018, in Yantai. The English version was translated by Stephanie Lu and  Li Bing, published as  “Bishan Project: Efforts to  Build a  Utopian Community,” in  Janet Marstine and  Svetlana Mintcheva, eds., Curating Under Pressure: International Perspectives on  Negotiating Conflict and  Upholding Integrity (London: Routledge, 2020). 2  The notebook was translated into English and Danish by Mai Corlin, published under the title of Bishan Commune: How to Start Your Own Utopia (Aarhus: OVO Press and Antipyrine, 2015).

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backdrop, I decided to do something in villages, a vacuum of public cultural life, embracing my role as both a curator and an artist. My interest in the countryside originates from my family background. I was born into a rural family and brought up in the Leizhou Peninsula, the southern tip of the Chinese mainland. In the first thirty years of my life, my poor and backward hometown had always been a sore point for me. I studied hard to get away from the place and tried my best to get it out of my system. Only after I found my footing in the city and witnessed the drastic changes brought by urbanization did I realize my passionate attachment to the countryside. During research and shooting of the documentaries about urban villages in Guangzhou and slums in Beijing, I came across a multitude of broke farmers who followed the trend and crowded into cities to earn a living, but due to their lack of resources and the household registration system, they are also rejected in cities and confined to the dilapidated urban enclaves, struggling on the margin of society. My brothers and sisters, shut out by the iron gate of gaokao (college entrance exam) system, left hometown at young age and devoted their youth to assembly lines in urban factories. Back at home, the farmland is deserted and house is empty. Urbanization not only drains labor force in the countryside but also encroaches its land, degrades its social body, and atomizes the rural population. The status quo keeps me thinking: as a curator and an artist, what can I do? If a curator is a mere exhibition maker (Ausstellungsmacher), and an artist just signs his or her name on artworks, sends them to exhibitions, and puts them on markets, then the influence of artists can reach no further than the boundaries of the art system. If I want to intervene in and respond to China’s aggressive urbanization and massive rural decline, I have to expand the scope of my work and even to augment or change my identity, for instance, redefining myself as an activist, a participant in social movements in the broad sense, or as an artivist, a social actor with an artistic approach, or even more radically as an activator, relinquishing my identity and signature as an artist, reducing myself and delegating powers to facilitate social movements or changes. Such thoughts are provoked, on the one hand, by the pressing Chinese urban-rural problems and, on the other hand, the aphasia of Chinese contemporary art on social issues after its inclusion into the global art markets. Global attention on China’s contemporary art peaked before the 2008 Beijing Olympics. At that time, curators and artists were occupied in exhibitions of all sorts, intoxicated by soaring prices for artworks and the illusion of golden time for a rising big

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power. They turned a blind eye to the enormous social cost of development and simmering conflicts for the nation. Art became a spectacle to be produced and consumed, increasingly irrelevant to social reality. In 2005, I came across the New Rural Reconstruction Movement led by Wen Tiejun, which led me to the Rural Reconstruction Movement initiated by Y. C. James Yen, Liang Shuming, and others in the Republican Era. After historical research and fieldwork, I came to a better understanding of Chinese intellectuals’ practices in the past and at the present, and rural experiments in other areas of Asia3 also got on my radar. Meanwhile, I began to look for my rural base. In 2007, after visiting many villages in Yunnan, Sichuan, Jiangsu, Hebei, and Henan Provinces, I picked Bishan Village, Yi County, in Anhui Province to materialize my conceptions on rural reconstruction. Bishan Village is located in the area historically called Huizhou, home to famous Huizhou merchants trading across the country in the Ming and Qing dynasties. Reflux of wealth by the merchants funded the construction of a number of grandeur Huizhou-style residences and ancestral halls. With profound Confucius culture heritage, the local residents are genuine and even-tempered; social conflicts are relatively few. Despite tourism is its economic pillar (it is close to Mount Huangshan, a renowned tourist attraction), rural traditions dating back to ancient times are well preserved. All of these make Bishan almost a peach-blossom-­ paradise-­ like place in modern times. I didn’t choose my hometown Leizhou Peninsula and villages in other provinces because the reality there was even harsher. Besides interest in rural social improvement on the ground, I also harbor a personal “utopia” complex, which prompted me to take a mild place as the launch pad of my experiment. Although Bishan is not an extremely poor village, it is still an epitome of rural problems in the times of urbanization. Most young people of its nearly 3000 population are working in cities in the Yangtze River Delta region, leaving senior villagers and children behind. A lot of historic residential houses are left in disrepair. After the neighboring Xidi and Hongcun Villages made to the list of United Nations World Intangible Culture Heritage, the villagers in Bishan also benefit from the spillovers of the two villages and Mount Huangshan’s tourist economy. Selling tea leaves, local specialties, and antiques; running restaurants; and offering transportation services to tourists have become the main source of income for the locals. Only a few people still farm, and even fewer after the government 3

 See “The Cultivators: Rural Reconstructionists in China,” Chap. 5.

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expropriated farmland to develop scale farming or to sell to resort hotels as building land. Water facilities built in the People’s Commune period are long deserted. Collective consciousness crumbled, with few public activities except for women’s square dancing, and getting together to play Mahjong grew rampant. It is not until 2007 that the construction of a road connecting the county town and the village started, but cars still couldn’t get into the village. There were no flagstones on the narrow roads, and no road lamps either. In the same year, two of my poet friends Zheng Xiaoguang and Han Yu duplicated their Pig’s Inn in Xidi Village in an old residential building in Bishan. Afterwards, they transformed an old rapeseed oil factory into a third one. Also in the same year, I paid our first visit to Bishan, with my friend Zuo Jing, who was born in the Jingde County of Anhui Province, and decided to initiate the Bishan Project. Art and Rural Reconstruction From 2007 to 2010, I started to prepare for the Bishan Project while I was busy with two Get It Louder exhibitions and the Shenzhen and Hong Kong Bi-City Biennale of Urbanism\Architecture. In 2010, the Italian notebook brand Moleskin invited me to its exhibition tour “Detour: The Moleskine Notebook Experience” in Shanghai, and it gave me a notebook to doodle and jot down anything as I liked, which was later to be exhibited. I filled it with my research and thoughts since 2005 about China’s rural problems and worldwide utopian practices, as well as specific ideas of the Bishan Commune. When the exhibition kicked off, the Bishan “blueprint” received lots of attention, so I decided to put the Bishan Project on agenda. I bought an old Huizhou-style residence, empty for years, and renovated it into the Buffalo Institute as my base for life and work there. Meanwhile, the preparation for the 2011 Bishan Harvestival also started. In the early stage of the project, Zuo Jing and I had to resort to our resources as curators and artists. Although I envisioned the project to be a complex and multi-disciplinary (e.g., organic agriculture, deep ecology, rural finance, and progressive education) social collaboration, yet I had to take art as a launching pad due to my limitations. In 2011, the Bishan Harvestival took place in the village for the first time. The three-day event included various activities, including the chudifang show—a folk custom to celebrate harvest—by the villagers at the opening ceremony; the main body exhibition “Mutual Aids and Inheritance” featuring the collaboration between local craftsmen and twenty-five artists, designers, architects,

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musicians, and writers; “Huizhou History and Culture” exhibition; “Handicraft in Yi County” research exhibition; a craft market; early rural movies screening; contemporary countryside documentaries screening; “Rural China” seminar; “Poetry Classroom” (for children in the village); “New Folk” music concert; Huizhou Opera joint performance; and so on.4 Such public activities had been absent for a long time after the People’s Commune was canceled in 1980 and production was contracted to each household. Farmers from the Yi County and neighboring counties were attracted to the festivities. The Harvestival was the first cultural event solely funded and organized by ourselves, and the local government provided only venue and administrative and security support. My plan was to channel cultural resources at hand to the village, bring the event to public attention, and achieve publicity. Then more diverse social forces and professional teams would be attracted to get on board, so as to achieve the goal of making it a comprehensive social project. We expected more on-site practices but wouldn’t give up opportunities of off-site exhibitions, which popped up from time to time because of our role in the art system. The social influence attained from such exhibitions could magnetize or internalize resources and support we needed in the next step. When preparing for the Bishan Harvestival in 2011, we had our first museum exhibition of the Bishan Project at the invitation of the Times Museum in Guangzhou, showcasing artists’ research efforts and preliminary works. In the same year, the Bishan Project got on another relatively large-scale display as I was the curator for the International Design Exhibition, Chengdu Biennale. In the following years, the project was exhibited in Auckland (New Zealand), Vienna (Austria), Shenzhen, Taipei, Shanghai, Beijing, Aarhus (Denmark), Florence (Italy), and recently on the exhibition tour “Theater of the World: Art and China After 1989” launched by the Guggenheim Museum. Because of the mostly art-based activities in the village, exhibitions and publicity within the art system as well as signature aesthetics in visual design (tailor-made by the outstanding designer partners Xiaoma and Chengzi), the Bishan Project was later marked as the trailblazer of the so-called trendy “Artistic Rural Reconstruction.” In my opinion, the label itself is a denomination of the limits of such attempts, rather than a compliment of their creativity. Inspired by the Bishan Project, more and more artists and architects went to the countryside to develop their projects. Nevertheless, “Artistic 4

 See Peng Yanhan, ed., 2011 Bishan Harvestival (Bishan: self-published, 2011).

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Rural Reconstruction” is neither about moving from cities to the countryside to produce market-oriented artwork, nor about implanting out-of-­ the-place contemporary buildings into rural fields and communities, only to snatch image or literature for urban communication system and to boost artists’ profile. Otherwise, it is taking advantage of the countryside instead of helping it. As urban land reserves are diminishing, hot money is diverted to rural development. Besides, modern rural issues have a moral cherry on top, so everybody wants a piece of the cake. Governments want to gloss performance through “building a new socialist countryside,” and idle capital wants to pocket both money and moral superiority. As a result, the naturally eye-catching “Artistic Rural Reconstruction” sells like hotcakes, and many artists and architects become sought-after “Artistic Rural Reconstruction” professionals. Rural reconstruction of this kind and the injection of hot money into the Bed & Breakfast industry are leading to the “gentrification” of rural areas, turning the countryside into the vacation backyard of urban middle class. The subjectivity of countryside and farmers is undermined, and they are abandoned again, becoming spectators at their doorstep. As the “evil initiator,” the Bishan Project was very controversial in its later development. In retrospect of the whole project, I still believe in my vision—art is only the beginning of the Bishan Project, but it did not get enough time to mature. When conceptualizing the project, I was inspired by the practices of James Yen, Liang Shuming, and Wen Tiejun. However, I maintained that there is no “orthodox” in rural reconstruction, as each practitioner is faced with different historical and present conditions. So, the key is to proceed in the light of the specific conditions and find the corresponding approaches and methods. Taking art as the beginning of the Bishan Project is the choice after calculating what we had and what we could do. I am fully aware of the limitations of art, but I am still positive that art is conducive to the Chinese countryside. The key is to find the right kind of art. In the time of economic globalization and neoliberalism, besides marketized and spectaclized art, there are still many artists devoted to socially engaged art and community art.5 Despite most people are pursuing profit, such arts are nurturing people’s soul, empowering and 5  See “The Subject of Public Art,” Chap. 12. I was inspired by the two books: Claire Bishop, Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship (New York: Verso, 2012), and Nato Thompson, Living as Form: Socially Engaged Art from 1991-2011 (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2012).

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enabling the common. The Bishan Project is only interested in such arts and expecting more non-art forces to join us. Unfortunately, when exploring the synergy between art and countryside, we were frustrated by one after another setback. “Force Majeure” Because of the success and influence of the Bishan Harvestival, the local government invited Zuo Jing and me to curate the seventh Yixian Photo Festival that it sponsored. The festival used to be an official event promoting local countryside tourism, with domestic landscape photographers participating in the last six. We proposed to expand it into an international photo festival with global participants and gave it a theme—“The Interactions,” which criticized over-urbanization, promoted rural construction, and advocated urban-rural mutual reinforcement. The festival invited forty exhibitors6 and was scheduled to held in 2012. It was the same year as the 18th National Congress of the People’s Republic of China, when Xi Jinping was elected as the new Party secretary. The date of the national congress was not determined when we chose the opening day of the festival, but the two dates turned out to clash in the end. On the day before the festival’s opening, the local government canceled all exhibitions and events, including the second Bishan Harvestival, which was solely organized by ourselves and scheduled to concur with the photo festival. An order from Beijing said that large-scale activities were not appropriate during the congress. Only one month later did we learn that another reason for this move was that Orville Schell, the Arthur Ross Director of the Center on US-China Relations at Asia Society, was also invited to the festival. His exhibition Coal + Ice once staged in Beijing was placed in the festival as a sub-exhibition. Beijing national security authorities sent people to keep watch on him and required the local government to make the move. It was hard to prove whether this was true. Orville had organized and taken part in many public activities in Beijing, and nothing happened. Why did trouble find him in the countryside? Was it due to the special time period? But the focus of the congress’ security efforts should be in Beijing instead of other places. During the congress, some television 6  See Peng Yanhan, ed., The Interactions: 2012 Yixian International Photo Festival (Yixian: Yi County People’s Government, 2012).

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entertainment shows were suspended, and some dissidents were banned to post on Sina Weibo. The day before the festival was aborted, officials from cultural authorities at Anhui Province and Huangshan City went all the way to the site, censoring all works to be exhibited in the absence of curators. After the incident, we scrutinized the photo festival’s curatorial statement, works on exhibition, and text description by ourselves and found the problem might lie in the criticism against over-urbanization and some works exposing grave environment pollution and devastated countryside. But we were not sure about that. The local government made no announcement about the cancellation and did not respond to our doubts. As commissioned curators, we could do nothing but accept the decision and explanation of “Force Majeure.” It is not the first time I suffered such an incident. In 1995, I organized a concert tour for US musician John Zorn and Japanese musician Yamatsuka Eye in Shenzhen, Guangzhou, Foshan, and Beijing. Afterwards, I was co-censored by Shenzhen national security and culture authorities. They confiscated the New Masses, an underground music and culture magazine under my editorship, on the grounds of lacking performance and publishing licenses. Synonymous with a left-wing political magazine in the United States between 1926 and 1948, the New Masses mainly introduced independent music and it once published an article about anarchism authored by Lenny Kwok, the creator of Hong Kong band Blackbird. It only had two issues, distributed in various concerts that I organized for free. In 2004, that was the next year after San Yuan Li was shown at the fiftieth Venice Biennale, Guangzhou national security and culture authorities again imposed censorship on my co-author Cao Fei and me. They declared the independent film and video group U-thèque Organization I established in 1999 illegal. San Yuan Li was made in the name of U-thèque Organization, and it was categorized as an illegal documentary because it laid bare the darkness of a rural village in Guangdong. The screening of Chinese independent documentaries over the last years along with our free underground film publications was also outlawed. The incident was also related to the suppression of Southern Metropolis Daily by Guangdong authorities. The newspaper was subjected to reprisals as it revealed, in 2002, the real situation of SARS that first broke out in Guangdong and, in 2003, the fact that Sun Zhigang was beaten to death after he was taken to a homeless shelter as he didn’t have an identity card with him. This led to the arrest of chief editor Cheng Yizhong and general manager Yu

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Huafeng. As Southern Metropolis Daily had collaborated with U-thèque Organization in screening with financial support, I was asked many times about the details of our partnership during official investigation. Leaving no stones unturned to frame the newspaper, they would not even let go of such a remote clue as U-thèque Organization. Beijing-related authorities mentioned my “historical track records” on many occasions to the local government when the Bishan Project was halted, and I was evicted from Bishan Village with all my public activities in China under surveillance. The 2012 Yixian International Photo Festival was just the beginning. It cast a shadow over the Bishan Project. The local government began to keep a distance from the project, neither supporting it nor holding it back. Our channels of communication with the government were blocked. All we could do was to speculate on its intentions and make attempts of new activities to test how far things could go. In the spring of 2004, after almost three years’ preparation, the Bishan Bookstore opened in the village. It was the first branch store of the Nanjing-based Librairie Avant-Garde in the countryside. In 1997, I gave this French name and designed the logo for the newly founded bookstore, which was honored as the most beautiful bookstore in China by CNN in 2013 and as one of the top ten bookstores in the world by BBC in 2014. The idea of setting up a bookstore struck me during preparation for the Bishan Project. Inspired by the xiangcun shuju (Rural Press) that Liang Shuming established in Zouping, Shandong Province, in the 1930s, I hoped the Bishan Bookstore, besides selling books, could function as a rural knowledge production base, with reading services to villagers and visitors as well as publishing capacity. The local government agreed to provide an empty ancestral hall as the venue for the bookstore in 2011. It honored its words in 2014 when the store was open to business, and made no interference. Many people were pessimistic about the future of the Bishan Bookstore, predicting it would not live long in the countryside. Qian Xiaohua, founder of the Librairie Avant-Garde, was a Christian, and he told us that he worked not for money but for the God. Many villagers frequented the store to read books, and many visitors were very interested in this ancestral-­ hall-­converted space. The books sold well because most of them were about literary, historical, and rural studies, appealing to the taste of visitors. I organized reading parties featuring books in classical Chinese and Danish music group YOYOOYOY’s interactional music and art event “Bevægeligt Akkurat” (Movable Accurate). The Bishan Bookstore soon gained popularity. Young people returning to hometown for the Spring

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Festival and Qingming Festival came to learn more about this place, and one of them even rented the bookstore to host her wedding ceremony. People from Yi County town, Huangshan City, and other places came afar to visit. The bookstore even received tourist groups arriving on buses. Many county-level governments in neighboring provinces approached Qian Xiaohua and offered free venues for such rural bookstores. Bishan used to be one of the many unknown villages, short of tourist resources and overshadowed by Xidi and Hongcun. Although it got noticed in 2011 with the Bishan Harvestival, yet there were no fixed tourist attractions. Open every day, the Bishan Bookstore was the first place open to the public and many tourists took it as a must-see. “Night Stars vs. Street Lamps” It seemed that the local government was pretty happy with the outcome. Nevertheless, the calm water was ruffled again by the visit of a “China studies” expeditionary learning program organized by the Department of Sociology at Nanjing University in the Summer of 2014. They visited the Bishan Bookstore and invited me to introduce the Bishan Project. The next day, Zhou Yun, a student from Harvard University, posted an article online questioning the bookstore and project. She criticized the bookstore with Pierre Bourdieu’s theories, arguing that the bookstore’s “symbolic boundary” led to the “distinction” between the urban middle class and rural villagers, and the attempts of the Bishan Project were “othering” the local residents. She misinterpreted my words, saying I did not want road lamps because I was on the side of the urban intellectuals who liked watching stars in the countryside. I retorted with an article,7 and the controversy instantly escalated into an online hot button issue engaging more people. “Night Stars vs. Street Lamps” even became the G-spot of the debate.8 In fact, I was well aware of the villagers’ longing for street lamps from the very beginning. In their eyes, street lamps were a symbol of development  See “Symbolic Boundary, Distinction, and Othering,” Chap. 8.  For summary of the dispute, please see Mai Corlin, “Trojan Horses in the Chinese Countryside: Ou Ning and the Bishan Commune in Dialogue and Practice,” Field - a journal of socially engaged art criticism 9 (Winter, 2018). http://field-journal.com/issue-9/ trojan-horses-in-the-chinese-countryside-ou-ning-and-the-bishan-commune-in-dialogueand-practice. For full research on the Bishan Project, please refer to the author’s PhD dissertation: Trojan Horses in the Chinese Countryside: The Bishan Commune and the Practice of Socially Engaged Art in Rural China (PhD diss., China Studies, Aarhus University, 2017). 7 8

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and modernity, and they were ashamed of the darkness at night in Bishan, especially given that Xidi and Hongcun installed lamps a long time ago. During the Chinese lunar new year holidays, that was several months before the Bishan Bookstore opened, the village committee had a mobilization meeting for returning villagers, and I proposed the installation of street lamps on that exact meeting. Even earlier in the same year, when the village decided to build a driveway linking the outside and Bishan, Zuo Jing and I made donations in our own names. The only benefit of the month-long dispute was that Bishan had street lamps only a few months later, but it added to the woes of the Bishan Project, which was already in an awkward situation after the photo festival incident. The buzz on the Internet drew herds of media to Bishan. In the time of eyeball economy, it was only natural for the media to jump on the bandwagon. News reporting and production is always running against time. When a journalist wants to get his story published before a deadline, an editor would even sacrifice fact-checking in the eleventh hour. The more sensationalized the news title and rhetoric, the more eye-catching the news. As a result, reports on Bishan were ridden with misunderstandings and distortions, pushing the village into the teeth of the storm. The local government did not like such disputes and it refused interviews. As one could imagine, it blamed the hot mess on the project. What was worse, the attention to a civil rural reconstruction movement inevitably entailed interrogation of the government’s stance and acts in the issue. The Bishan Project volunteered loud explanations to the media, while the government remained silent. Such contrast did no good to the government. Pitting the Bishan Project against the government was the last thing I wanted to see. Throughout the project, we actively sought government support and partnership, because I knew nobody, be it James Yen and Liang Shuming in the Republican Era or Wen Tiejun at present, could succeed in rural reconstruction without the government. In essence, rural reconstruction can’t be separated from politics. Reform practices by grassroots intellectuals constitute only an auxiliary or complimentary plan within the current political regime framework, which has to be under government leadership and supervision. If we stood against the government, our practice would be a revolution rather than a reform, which was quite another story. Although I am an anarchist, I have never dreamt about revolution and never identified myself as a stiff opponent. In Chinese, anarchism is translated as “non-government-ism,” which is easily mistaken as “anti-­ government.” In the Chinese context, I prefer to transliterate it as annaqi.

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After the 1989 Tiananmen Square Incident, many dissidents were exiled. They were much weakened after leaving the country, but the political regime they opposed beefed up its governing power through the choice of free market and globalization as well as the advancement of Internet technologies. For those still living in the country, despite many disappointments, confrontation will only shrink their political and living space, and in the end, they will also be forced to leave, becoming powerless about their home country. Thus, choosing “reconstruction” over “confrontation” is a more rational option. In the post-Cold War period, the “informal life politics” practices mushroomed in the Arab region and northeastern Asia. When faced with extreme political and natural disasters, the public did not seek help from the government, political parties, and charities nor media. Instead, they relied on themselves to rebuild communities and life.9 In China, however, even if you are committed to “reconstruction,” your motives will be questioned and your acts will probably be checked. The two censorships in 1995 and 2004 are in their nature precautionary and defensive. My concerts, film screenings, and independent magazines never advocated political opposition, but authorities still worried that the communities gathered around New Masses and U-thèque Organization would become pressure groups. The Bishan Project is a spontaneous non-­ profit project, but they fret over the anarchism in it. About “non-profit,” the most interesting response came from some villagers. In the 2011 Bishan Harvestival, they thought Zuojing and I were two bosses who came here to develop tourism (that was what they expected). When I told them it was “non-profit,” they were very disappointed and would not understand nor believe there was such a thing as “non-profit” in the world. In 2013, my entire family moved from Beijing to Bishan, and I sent my stepson to a local school. As neighbors, the villagers and I had more daily interactions and they came to understand that we were not here for the money. Their fervent hopes for economic development made me reflect on my reservation about commerce entering villages. Although the Bishan Bookstore was criticized by Zhou Yun, yet it was acclaimed by villagers and the government. Benign commerce of this 9  For the concept of “informal life politics,” please see Asef Bayat, Life as Politics: How Ordinary People Change the Middle East (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009), and Tessa Morris-Suzuki and Eun Jeong Soh, eds., New Worlds from Below: Grassroots Networking and Informal Life Politics in Twenty-First Century East Asia (Canberra: The Australian National University Press, 2017).

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kind was very inspirational for me. Art exhibitions were not well received in the countryside because, on the one hand, art was not something familiar to the local and, on the other hand, the farmers could not see any practical use of art to their daily life. Besides, temporary exhibitions could not grow into routine events for the lack of venues and limited duration. In contrast, the bookstore sold books, and the villagers believed that reading was to learn useful knowledge, which was the only way to change their fortunes. What was more, it opened every day and attracted tourists. They could benefit from the traffic by doing some small businesses. The Bishan Bookstore was an attempt to introduce non-art resources into the village, and its remarkable social effects encouraged me to push forward similar experiments. The Political Erasure After the “Bishan Controversy” appeased, I bought another empty ancestral hall near the Buffalo Institute where I lived. The place was long deserted and the village committee tried many times to persuade me to take over it. I accepted the deal only when I came up with the idea to have another site for business. In 2015, the School of Tillers was opened up. It applied to the local government for business license as a coffee shop, but besides selling coffee, it also had an exhibition gallery, a screening hall, a small library offering different collections of non-sale titles in accordance with reading themes, a study center, and a zakka selling books, rural cultural and creative products, and villagers’ farm produce. Every evening, the School of Tillers showed movies and TV plays of the villagers’ choice on its big screen (e.g., 1955 Huangmei Opera movie Goddess Marriage; 1987 TV series Dream of Red Mansions). It also hosted a series of events, such as a 3D photo exhibition “Timekeepers,” featuring the portraits and family spaces of residents of Yi County villages, which were taken by Slovenia photographer Matjaž Tančič; artist Liu Chuanhong’s narrative painting exhibition “Memoir in Southern Anhui,” a visual fiction based on Huizhou villages; lectures and workshops on community art, plants, dyeing and weaving, and soil enhancement with micro-organism; “Talk & Buy” flea market where villagers presented their second-hand goods in front of a big screen. The School of Tillers helped farmers sell their farm produce at its zakka with free packaging and publicity. Villagers’ idle houses were collected and listed on Airbnb as part of the SOT Researchers

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in Residence Program. The School helped them with management and customer discovery, and all the income went to the villagers. All these activities were free. The goal was to create solidarity within the School of Tillers, in a bid to build it into a community culture center. However, it was more feasible to register as a commercial entity than operate as a non-profit organization. On the one hand, a license could help the villagers increase economic income, and on the other hand, it would seem less like a social movement, thus reassuring the government. It is very difficult to register an NGO or NPO in China, and that is one of the reasons why the Bishan Commune was neither NGO nor NPO from its inception. Another reason is my faith in anarchism. I am not in favor of any organization or institution, including NGO and NPO, which is increasingly hierarchical, bureaucratic, and corporatized. The commercial registration of the School is an adaptive strategy, with the aim of forming a community instead of a corporate or organization. After running through all the legal procedures, I successfully got the business license. The only trouble was that I was ignored by the local culture authorities when applying for an exhibition permit. It was same with the situation after the photo festival incident. The authorities did not nod, and they did not reject either. My strategy was to sound the government out  with action—executing my plans first without approval and then waiting for reactions from the authorities. Right before the Chinese lunar new year of 2016, I heard it from the grapevine that the Anhui authorities were going to rectify the Bishan Project. Local culture authorities later came to check the books sold at the Bishan Bookstore and School of Tillers, ordering to remove off shelves the Bishan Commune: How to Start Your Own Utopia published in Denmark. Security authorities required the Airbnb listings managed by the School to have guests registered. Market regulation authorities confiscated villagers’ produce for lack of production dates and quality certificates, and the goods were only returned later at the protest of villagers. One day after the lunar new year, my new-born baby woke up at midnight because the room was too cold and weirdly there was no electricity. When checking the electricity boxes in the morning, I found the electricity cables in the Buffalo Institute and School of Tillers were cut off, so were the water pipes. On the same day, the “Happiness Pavilion,” a bamboo-structured tea cottage built by villager Qian Shi’an and me, were burnt down. The “Bishan Craft Cooperative” that Zuo Jing was renovating was half-demolished, as it was said to have “ruined overall countryside landscape and appearance.” As it

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was freezing cold at that time, my family had to crash in the Pig’s Inn, but the next day local security authorities warned that it was the order from Beijing that we could not stay there anymore and had to leave the village. We were left with no choice but to buy air tickets to Shenzhen, and we stayed in a hotel in Huangshan City for the next-day flight.10 At that point, the Bishan Project was clamped down, violently. Later, they removed the statue of Wang Dazhi that we donated. (Wang was born in the Bishan village. He worked with Tao Xingzhi on rural education in the Nanjing Xiaozhuang Normal School at an early age. Later he became one of the initiators of the Xin’an Children Touring Troupe. Zuo Jing and I regarded him as a Rural Sage in rural reconstruction.) The signs of SOT Researchers in Residence Program were taken down from the front of Airbnb houses. The Buffalo Institute and School of Tillers were empty. All traces of the Bishan Project were erased. Zuo Jing’s Bishan Craft Cooperative soon reopened after it declared that it had nothing to do with the Bishan Project, but I was forbidden to conduct any public activities in Bishan. I could not believe it was Beijing’s order until my public speech about “Well-field System and Utopia” was canceled by a phone call from Beijing. I realized I was on Beijing’s blacklist. Later, I got to learn that, before the electricity and water outage, Yi County sent an ad hoc village Party secretary to Bishan. The secretary held several meetings for Party members, persuading and mobilizing them to abolish the Bishan Project. At meetings, the new secretary collected a lot of my public statements on “non-government-ism” and “utopia,” and he defined the nature of the problem as “avoiding the leadership of the Party.” Shortly after I was forced to leave, the new secretary had all footpaths in the village paved with flagstones. Anarchism and Utopianism Anarchism and utopianism only occur in my mind and words, and I have never put them into practice in the Bishan Project. I am fully aware that in China’s political reality, they are forbidden and cannot be put into action. Even against the global backdrop, anarchism is dismissed as an innocent 10  I decided to keep silent about the incident and refused interviews, yet some media still got word and made a report. See Calum Macleod, “Crushed Dreams of Utopia in Rural China,” Times, May 2, 2016. The report was then quoted by Amy Qin, “Architects See Potential in China’s Countryside,” New York Times, June 17, 2016.

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and romantic thought, marginalized even in academia. Worse still, utopia is mocked as a naïve delusion. Although the Occupy Wall Street movement is championed by anarchists, given its considerable impact, their efforts are still not recognized by the mainstream of society. The Invisible Committee is constantly published, but its influence is confined to a small audience. The committee’s spiritual mentor is Guy Debord, whose prophecies before the May 1968 events in France were looked up to by only a few radicals (especially in the art community) as legends. The Back-to-the-­ Land Movement that first broke out in North America last century spawned a large number of hippie communes, but they are nowhere to be found today. Indeed, some of the communes have evolved into the current intentional communities and ECO villages, but they are still peripheral to the mainstream. Even more unfortunate for the nineteenth-century classic anarchist Peter Kropotkin and utopia practitioner Robert Owen, their books are shelved and forgotten. In contrary to the disregard and disdain by the mainstream, I am obsessed with the concepts because of serendipities. My attachment to anarchism started in 1994. Lenny Kwok sent me an independent magazine he published called Blackbird Communique. In the magazine, I read about his life in the countryside of Lantau Island, Hong Kong, where he spent his time practicing guitar, composing songs, writing articles, fixing computers for friends, writing letters for villagers, typesetting for poor students, and producing records financed by a few music fans, among other things. He paid “mutual help in the mortal world” instead of selling himself.11 In further reading about different schools of anarchism, I selectively rejected violent branches and grew more attached to the warm social ideals it depicted. I believe that the tradition of huangong (labor exchange) and gift economy in the Chinese countryside is in consistent with the anarchist mutual-aid spirit. They represent a way of cooperation and life in the childhood of humanity when there was no currency, corporates, political parties, political agents, governments, or nations. Anarchism is unlikely to be realized at a national level, but it may come into shape in small human communities. When turning my attention to villages like Bishan, I did have the aspiration to put anarchism into practice at heart, but I was not optimistic about the outcome. Stemming 11  About Lenny Kwok and Blackbird Communique, please see Ou Ning, “The Revolutionary Imagination and Its Cultural Praxis,” in Jessie Chang, Christina Li and Kinwah Jaspar Lau, eds., CHiE! Culture Sieges Politics (Hong Kong: Para/Site, 2008).

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from my long-term personal interest, anarchism and utopianism have become my devoted field of study, as well as my thinking resources for discourse production. Even after the Bishan Project was called off, my passion did not wane. About anarchism and utopianism, my most explicit article is “Autonomy: Utopia or Realpolitik,”12 which was written in 2012 for the publication of an exhibition curated by Hou Hanru in Guangzhou, and was later incorporated into Bishan Commune: How to Start Your Own Utopia published in Denmark. Besides, my discussions on the topic can also be found in my narrative articles and interview scripts.13 Between 2013 and 2015, in between lectures and exhibitions abroad, I spontaneously conducted field study on “Practical Utopia.” I filled up my second Moleskine with the research, and I named it Bishan Commune: How to Continue Your Own Utopia (2014–2015). When back in China, I posted long articles in my own magazines and mainstream Internet media on the intentional communities movement in New Zealand, anarchist community Fristaden Christiania in Copenhagen, and the hippie movement in Australia. The writings elaborated on the concepts and methods I learned, including co-­ housing, consensus decision-making, permaculture, and community currency.14 Between 2016 and 2017, during my teaching at Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation, I finished reading Erik Reece’s new book Utopia Drive,15 and followed his route, visiting the Oneida Community in the upstate of New York, Shaker Village of Pleasant Hill in Kentucky, and New Harmony in Indiana. After the United States, I took a trip to the site of Robert Owen’s New Lanark in Britain.

 See “Autonomy: Utopia or Realpolitik,” Chap. 15.  See Chaps. 3, 9, 11, and 15. 14  See Ou Ning, “Looking for Utopia,” in Ou Ning, ed., V-ECO mook #1: Go Bush! Alternative Life in New Zealand (Beijing: China Youth Publishing Group, 2013); Ou Ning, “Life and Death of Fristaden Christiania,” Paper, November 5, 2014; Ou Ning, “Legend of a Collective Escape from a Dirty World,” iPress, October 4, 2015 (Tencent self-censored and closed iPress completely during the coronavirus epidemic in 2020). My fieldwork on historical sites and living communities of communitarian experiment and rural reconstruction in different corners of the world from the nineteenth century through today will be resulted as a new book Utopian Field. For a brief summary of this research project, please see “Utopian Nostalgia,” Chap. 15. 15  Erik Reece, Utopia Drive: A Road Trip Through America’s Most Radical Idea (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2016). 12 13

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In 2013, I met with David Graeber, who came up with the slogan “We are the 99%,” in London, and in 2014, I met with Prof. James C. Scott of Yale University in New Haven. I have read major monographs the two authored. In Debt,16 David Graeber described China’s nongjia (School of Tillers) in the pre-Qin period as the first anarchism in the world, and that is where the name of School of Tillers in Bishan came from. I was also inspired to further study utopia in ancient China (“Great Unity” in Confucianism and “Peach Blossom Spring” in Taoism), enriching the discourse of my self-invented “Ruralism” and “Contemporary Agrarianism.” Another two books by Graeber—Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology17 and The Democracy Project18—gave me a glimpse of anarchism’s contemporary developments in theory and practice. As for James C.  Scott, his book Seeing Like a State19 denounced state-making large-scale utopian projects in “High-Modernism.” The Art of Not Being Governed20 examined the history of shifting farming tribes in southeastern Asia escaping the centralized state and conducting self-barbarianization. The two books enlightened me on metis or on-the-ground knowledge and reassured that the construction of an ideal society on a small scale was harmless. In 2013, I paid a visit to the Community Oriented Mutual Economy Project made by the Hong Kong St. James’ Settlement. In the following year, I met with Paul Glover, the inventor of Ithaca Hours, in Philadelphia. Later I designed and printed Bishan Hours. It would be rash to circulate it in Bishan, so I chose to use it as a pay to volunteers for the exhibition at the Taipei Fine Arts Museum. They could use the Hours to exchange for all the publication in the Bishan Project. I used to believe perhaps “artists” were privileged to break rules, and to be immune from punishment. For example, in the first Moleskine, I excerpted the synopsis of how to build a personal mini country from a thin book called How to Start Your Own Country21 by Erwin S. Strauss. I whimsically designed a flag and passport  David Graeber, Debt: The First 5000 Years (New York: Melville House, 2012).  David Graeber, Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology (Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press, 2004). 18  David Graeber, The Democracy Project: A History, A Crisis, A Movement (New York: Spiegel & Grau, 2013). 19  James C.  Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999). 20  James C. Scott, The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010). 21  Erwin S. Strauss, How to Start Your Own Country (Colorado: Paladin Press, 1979). 16 17

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for the Bishan Commune (influenced by NSK, a new Slovenian art collective I came across a long time ago), and later the “Agritopia Dress.” What I did not expect was that once these behaviors were widespread, they were considered out of line and, along with the unpopular statements and articles, constituted evidence to crash the Bishan Project. In modern China, only Mao Zedong has achieved his “utopia.”22 In his youth, Mao Zedong was influenced by the Atarashiki-mura movement put forward by Japanese Writer Saneatsu Mushanokō ji. After coming into power, he combined Atarashiki-mura with Russian Kolkhoz and Zhang Lu’s wudoumidao (Way of the Five Pecks of Rice) and launched the nationwide People’s Commune movement. This twenty-year-long “utopian” movement thrust the Chinese countryside into utter disasters. Many Chinese left-wing intellectuals are now re-studying and re-evaluating the People’s Commune. They argue that the large number of water facilities built that time should be protected or reused as agricultural heritage. It is held that in the current context of agricultural capitalism encroaching countryside, the People’s Commune can enhance farmers’ bargaining power and risk resistance as well as production and marketing capacity. Nevertheless, I still cannot accept the People’s Commune with all my heart. In my eyes, the People’ Commune is a political movement first and foremost. It forced the concentration of means of production and labor in the countryside and resorted to semi-military management to increase agricultural output. The ultimate goal was to fuel the urgent industrialization and to cope with the delicate relations with Russia. It robbed farmers of agricultural surplus, destroyed rural family and social structures, and caused massive famine, cornering farmers into a situation where they could not even save themselves. The word gongshe (commune) in Chinese bears so much negative historical meaning, and this is why I did not use it to describe the Bishan Commune. Instead, I prefer gongtongti, which indicated communities and social groups. For its visual symbol, I chose the natural and prosperous green over the revolutionary red. The Bishan Project often reminds people of “Chinese Educated Urban Youth Going and Working in the Countryside and Mountain Areas” in the Mao era. However, the latter was started by the state, sending urban youth to the countryside to defuse the social crisis of no education or employment for the young in the cities. Whereas the Bishan Project was 22  For China’s utopian practices and imagination in the Mao era and afterwards, please see “The Discourse of Utopia in the Post-Mao Era,” Chap. 15.

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completely spontaneous, shifting from cities with strong economy and employment to tackle the harsh reality of rural hollowing and decline. Oftentimes, the Bishan Project is also misunderstood as the modern Chinese version of the Back-to-the-land Movement in North America in the 1960s and 1970s. Back then, the western hippies went to the countryside to escape economic crisis and seek a low-cost collective life. In contrast, the Chinese in favor of “anti-urbanization” are predominantly the urban middle class. They give up their stable income in cities as they cannot stand the poisoning air and population overload. When in the countryside, the urbanites without income have to live off their savings. My family did not move to the village for an escape (both urban and rural areas have their own problems), but we were also financially unsustainable. The Bishan Project not only brought no income to my family but also raised my spending. If I could not make ends meet through other means or projects, and the project itself could not raise more funds, sooner or later it would lose steam. From a financial perspective, it is fair enough to say “utopia” is naïve and childish. A “Facilitator” Approach In the few months before the Bishan Project was banned, I was secretly preparing a third exhibition in the School of Tillers. Qian Shi’an in his seventies was a very talented villager. He named his house and yard “Hillside Gardens,” which was the first Airbnb listing in the Researchers in Residence Program. Living by himself, he designed a bridge with flowing water underneath and a pond in his yard, where various trees and flowers were prosperous (some plants were innovatively grafted by him). He also made potted landscapes and kept dogs and birds. His place was like a well-attended garden of a retired literati. He liked poetry and photography and was good at many handicrafts. On the mountain, there was a piece of barren land where he planted trees and bamboos. He often collected strange-looking roots, branches, and bamboo joints and made them into furniture, articles of daily use, musical instruments, and toys for kids. I was an apprentice to him learning carpentry, and we were very close. I proposed to build a special-shaped all-bamboo tea pavilion with traditional techniques on his mountain land. He could take a rest in the pavilion when working. The School of Tillers would hold an exhibition of documents and pictures, showcasing his gardening, handicrafts, and photography as well as how the pavilion was built. Some student interns

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majoring in architecture and I offered some reference about the design and structure of the pavilion, but besides that, all the works to be exhibited were done by Qian himself, a representation of his personal taste. In this exhibition, I was a facilitator, not a curator or artist in charge of the content and aesthetics. After two exhibitions by outsider artists in the School, this time I intended to put two basic principles of socially engaged art into practice: de-authorization and de-aestheticization. To my luck, I raised some money from a friend. Qian together with other four villagers went about the project right away. They started from scratch, blazing a trail to the mountain and leveling the land. Unfortunately, when the pavilion was about to be completed, with only the roof to be installed, it was set on fire by the government. As a result, all our efforts for the exhibition went down the drain. There are many talented craftsmen in Huizhou villages. At the early stage of the Bishan Project, Zuo Jing executed a research project called “Handicraft of Yi County,” which was later compiled to a book.23 The research got on an exhibition tour to many places and secured financial support from the Yi County government. Bishan Village also had a few educated people (I regarded them as farmer-intellectuals). Villager Wang Shouchang’s ink drawings of Bishan’s historical and current views were made into postcards for sale at the bookstore, and he was paid royalties. Yao Lilan was a retired primary school teacher and his photography works were exhibited in a small showroom converted from a field-side shack by Pig’s Inn volunteer Jin Ming. There was an amateur Huangmei Opera troupe in the village, and Wang Chenglong, a young villager who returned from Beijing to the village because of the Bishan Project, created many performance opportunities to increase its income. Qian Shi’an was a versatile craftsman. It was a shame that his tea pavilion and exhibition fell victim to the cancellation of the Bishan Project. I have to admit that the idea of building the “Happiness Pavilion” has something to do with my utopian complex. I am a fan of the book Shelter, which was published in 1973 by Lloyd Kahn, who once was the architecture editor of The Whole Earth Catalog. Shelter collects vernacular architecture all over the world and interviews many hippie communes and introduces their hand-made houses. On its first page, the first line reads: “In times past, people built their own homes, grew their own food, made their own clothes…” I had tried to produce the “Agritopia Dress” and witnessed college graduate  Zuo Jing, ed., Handicraft in Yi County (Beijing: Jingcheng Press, 2014).

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village official Zhang Yu grow organic rice. So, I hoped to see how the villagers build their own houses with local materials and without the help of modern tools since there was no electricity on the mountain. I persuaded Qian to take part in the project (or more exactly, to lead the project), and I would learn from him. The pavilion could be taken as socially engaged art or simply as a shed on a farmer’s own land, so we did not report it to the government. It was mainly because of me that the pavilion was burnt. In fact, the Bishan Project was banned not only because its art events, thoughts, and statements touched the nerves of Chinese government cultural censorship but, more importantly, because it overstepped the Party’s leadership in the countryside. The Beijing central government is not unaware of the problems relating to agriculture, rural areas, and rural population. In fact, rural reform has always been high on the agenda of the central government, with new policies promoting rural construction coming out every year. It has made great strides forward in infrastructures like roads and telecommunications and poverty relief and social security systems. The vast rural land and huge rural population are cornerstones of Chinese society. No rulers of any generation could afford to ignore rural issues. During Xi Jinping’s administration, he famously said that “Lucid Waters and Lush Mountains Are Invaluable Assets,” stressing the importance not only of economic development based on natural and agricultural resources but also of environment protection and “ecological civilization.” Xi attaches great importance to Confucius traditions, advocating jiafeng (family ethos) and xiangxian (rural sages), and such cultural heritage is concentrated in the countryside. Nevertheless, his authoritarian thoughts are rising, with increasingly hardline diplomacy and tightening grip on Chinese society. After Mao Zedong and Deng Xiaoping’s administrations, “strongman politics” is back in China again.24 Despite sharing the same goals with the government, the new rural reconstruction movement initiated by unofficial intellectuals takes dramatically different approaches and methods. It doesn’t have the political freedom as the rural reconstruction movement in the Republican Era did. Back in that time of wars and warlordism, Liang Shuming could even get authorization from Shandong warlord Han Fuju to reform the Zouping County. Centralization of state 24  On March 11, 2018, the National People’s Congress adopted the amendment to the Constitution of the Republic of China, abolishing the two-term limits on president and enabling Xi Jinping to rule in longer time and even indefinitely.

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power can put a lid on chaos, but gambling the hope of good governance on one person or political party and blocking the efforts of other social channels can also lead to a catastrophic deluge. On the other hand, the Bishan Project also suffered “censorship” from public opinions. The “Theater of the World: Art and China After 1989” that opened in the Guggenheim Museum was boycotted and protested against by a large number of animal activists. For the same matter, some “public opinions” held up their banner of self-styled “political correctness” and pointed finger at the Bishan Project. Although “public opinions” did not have the power or motive to call off the project, yet the social controversy they stirred up gave the government another reason to stop the project. Surely, the criticism from the likes of Zhou Yun was a far cry from “censorship,” but the pressure it brought was the same. The social media give a loud voice to “public opinions” and commercial media augment the voice to stand out in attention marketing. Such social ecology creates a level playing field for two sides of debate where eloquence and stress tolerance are weapons. As a practitioner, I have never wavered in my principles and opinions because of praises and criticism. After the Bishan controversy, I did not go out of my way and put on the clothes of Russian farmers like Leo Tolstoy did. He was bedraggled and hobbled along into the public with the help of a stick, only to hide his intellectuality and nobility and show his “down-to-earth-ness.” To me, what Tolstoy did was simply “class transvestitism,” a kind of zhuangbility (a coined word mixing Chinese and English, which roughly means being pretentious) in disguise, because differences in family background, education, and ability cannot be concealed. On the contrary, the right attitude of intellectuals working in the countryside is to acknowledge that different people have different strengths and weaknesses and not to classify people with labels like the “elite” and “common.” Different people should respect and learn from each other. Looking down upon or “segregating” farmers shows nothing but a despicable and ridiculous sense of superiority; however, looking up to or deifying them displays a hypocrite moral thirst. Aftershock Although the six eventful years have taught me a lot, yet I lost the chance to do further work in the countryside. I am forbidden to conduct any public events in Bishan, and my urban renewal and historic preservation project Kwan-Yen Project in Yantai, Shandong Province, also went through

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interference from Beijing. The one-year teaching at Columbia University allowed me time to review and sort through the Bishan Project. Inspired by the French anthropologist Marc Augé’s “Place” and “Non-­ place” theory,25 I defined the Bishan Project as a “placemaking” praxis. With artistic and cultural forces, through community connection and social movement, “placemaking” not only creates a new physical space but also creates a common spiritual space, turning a village, a block, and even a city into a “Place” that encapsulates historical memory, identity, and social relations. It is the opposite of “Non-place” brought by James C.  Scott’s “High Modernism” and Marc Augé’s “Supermodernity.” I extended the Bishan experience to the urban project in Yantai City. I created a non-profit community library in Suochengli, the oldest historical neighborhood in Yantai. The site used to be an empty compound. Architect Dong Gong renovated the original space at my invitation, and I furnished it with books and magazines related to local history. The library hosts exhibitions and lectures for residents in the neighborhood on a regular basis. Suochengli Neighborhood Library bears some resemblance to the Bishan Bookstore and School of Tillers, but it is more similar to the Working Men’s Institute I saw in the New Harmony. The Institute is the prototype of American public libraries, and its primary aim is to spread knowledge among labor workers. My plan is to place more small libraries in different neighborhoods of Yantai, offering services to more people just like 7-Eleven convenience stores. I was asked by Beijing to back out, but luckily they did not say no to the KwanYen Project.26 After I was forced to leave Bishan, the young volunteers working with me also left. For some time, tourists decreased, but later villagers’ Bed & Breakfast hostels increased to over thirty, and the Pig’s Inn and Bishan Bookstore are still in business. The Alila boutique hotel project that bought over 200 mu (about 13.3-hectare) farmland is breaking ground. Some young people come to Bishan to set up their art studios and small libraries. Others try small-scale organic agriculture and still others run guesthouses. Ding Mu’er, son of Han Yu, the new manager of Pig’s Inn, begins to organize art exhibitions and even brews his own craft beer labeled with “Bishan.” Bishan does not transform into a rural utopia as I expected. Instead, it becomes a hot tourist destination on Lonely Planet. 25  See Marc Augé, Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity (New York: Verso, 1995). 26  For more about Kwan-Yen Project, please see “Topophilia and Placemaking,” Chap. 14.

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Just like the Shaker Village of Pleasant Hill in Kentucky and New Lanark in Scotland, all used-to-be utopias ended up as tourist attractions. Compared with the real McCoy utopias in the free and radical nineteenth century, the Bishan Commune is merely a fantasy in my head that has never materialized. The Bishan Commune I expected is neither an artist village nor an ivory tower. It is supposed to be a mutual-aid community where the villagers are the majority, and they live together, construct hand in hand, and share the results of their joint efforts. Reality shows that it is not easy to realize such a vision. What is impossible is often called a “utopia,” since the word originally means “nowhere.” Jingzhou, China

Ou Ning

CHAPTER 1

Pastoral Youth

My Urbanization1 I was born in the small town of Xialiu in Suixi County, Guangdong Province, at the end of 1969. My father was a tailor and a manmousang2 of a local amateur Cantonese opera troupe. He loved to sing opera in his free time, especially imitating Chan Siew Fong’s style.3 My hours of cultural exposure mainly consisted of the variety of Cantonese opera that my father would sing all day long, such as “Shanbo on His Deathbed”4 and other sorrowful, beautiful arias. I still remember them to this day; they cause one to feel deeply the melancholy and bitter suffering of this world. My father once played the leading role in the “Lu Bu Molested Diao Chan.”5 This Cantonese opera led me to pursue an interest in classical novels such as Romance of the Three Kingdoms. However, the book was not available for purchase in Xialiu, so I had to ask my aunt (the only relative who lived in the city) to buy it for me in Beihai City of Guangxi Province. Afterwards, I read Journey to the West and Water Margin and began to pluck passages and poems from these books.

1  Completed in  Chinese in  2001 and  published in  City Pictorial (July 13, 2001). The English version was translated by Stella Xu in 2019. 2  In Cantonese, manmousang literally means “civilized martial man,” a role known for a clean-shaven scholar-warrior in Cantonese opera. 3  Chan Siew Fong, born in 1926, is a famous Cantonese opera singer and actor based in Guangzhou. 4  An aria of Cantonese opera based on the story The Butterfly Lovers, originally sang by Chan Siew Fong. 5  A Cantonese opera based on the story Romance of the Three Kingdoms.

© The Author(s) 2020 O. Ning, Utopia in Practice, Contemporary East Asian Visual Cultures, Societies and Politics, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-5791-0_1

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In the small place of Xialiu, we could not see the outside world. I could only absorb the nourishment from local culture to grow. In 1999, when I curated a special retrospective screening of Ann Hui’s films in U-thèque Organization, the Cantonese opera often interspersed throughout the films reminded me of my distant childhood years. After experiencing the baptism of rock, jazz, and various alternative music, I now have a strong interest in vernacular operas. When I first started collecting Cantonese opera records, it was not only for research purposes, but also to return to my roots through this wonderful opera. In 1982, I tested into the best junior high school in Suixi County and enrolled there. The county town was located more than sixty kilometers from my secluded small hometown, which was very different. One could subscribe to the popular Yuwen Bao6 at the post office, and the school library contained copies of various literary magazines. The most potent novels at the time were Wreaths at the Foot of the Mountain7 and Life,8 which were both later made into films. The school’s intellectual atmosphere was very strong, so the students were all immersed in their homework and rarely developed extracurricular interests. Thus, I couldn’t find anyone to discuss the insights of literature with me. During junior high, I took reading notes in four big notebooks and copied the lyrics of many Taiwan Campus Folk Songs.9 These songs, such as “Grandma’s Penghu Bay” and “Father’s Straw Sandal,” are brimming with local, countryside sentiments, which especially touched me as a rural youth. In my second year of junior high school, I joined the Communist Youth League and began to read How the Steel Was Tempered.10 Since then, I have been obsessed with the power of the collective and enjoyed the feeling of the individual being conquered by the magnificent sound of waves from the collective. All day long, I imagined an era in which my humble self could be among them. In 1995, when I first listened to the industrial and neo-classical music by the Slovenian avant-garde group Laibach, the sound of steel, the beauty of discipline, suddenly connected to the collectivist 6  A weekly paper for learning Chinese language founded by Shanxi Normal College in 1981. 7  The novel written by Li Cunbao in 1982, and the film directed by Xie Jin, 1984. 8  The novel written by Lu Yao in 1982, and the film directed by Wu Tianming, 1984. 9  A genre of Taiwanese Music with its roots as student songs in the campuses of Taiwanese universities during the 1970s. 10  A socialist realist novel written by Nikolai Ostrovsky (1904–1936).

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fanaticism of my youth. For a while after I grew up, I considered myself an individualist, but sometimes life likes to bring you back to once again experience the thrill of self-submersion. In 1997, the Beijing rock band Catcher in the Rye, in their brash yet sentimental songs, sang with a revolutionary, romantic spirit like that of the communist Young Pioneers of China. They were the young rebels of the new era, who did not change their true character in the age of global information flows. For people in our generation, the first half of our resumes are all in red, and the second half is varied and difficult to distinguish. For me personally, the second half begins in high school. Because of my excellent grades, I was exempt from the entrance examination and was admitted to the best middle school in Zhanjiang City. In my first year of high school, I read A Collection of New Tide Poetry,11 edited by Lao Mu. It was the best selection of Misty Poetry to date, and it completely changed my life. Although Zhanjiang is a middle-tier city, quite a few talents were assigned to return there after going to college in Guangzhou or other provinces. Compared to the county seat, its world was more expansive. The 1980s was an unforgettable era. Despite being far from the large central cities, one could still capture the lingering influences of mainstream culture. I read Meishu magazine12 to follow the ’85 New Wave art movement, read Dushu magazine13 to follow the debate of “tradition and modernization” in ideological circles. Through teachers and friends, I could listen to the tapes of Qu Xiaosong, Tan Dun, Ye Xiaogang, and Guo Wenjing, who were the contemporary classical composers just graduated from Central Music Academy. At the cinema (although a bit later than in a big city), I could watch Zhang Yimou’s Red Sorghum, and at Xinhua Bookstore, it was not difficult to find a large number of newly published, foreign translations. One wave after another of waves you have never experienced before, as if crashing over whole mountains and plains, entering your heart with irresistible force. It is a blessing to spend one’s search for knowledge and extremely spirited adolescence in such an era.

 Self-published in 1985, two volumes, more than 800 pages.  A monthly Chinese art magazine founded in 1954, which became a very important platform for ’85 New Wave art movement in the 1980s. 13  A monthly Chinese literary magazine founded in 1979, which has great influence on Chinese intellectuals. 11 12

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From this moment on, I began my long process of “rooting out.” Dreams, independence, alternatives, individualism, survival outside the system—many individual personality traits were given birth to in the 1980s. In 1988, I was once again exempt from examination and enrolled in Shenzhen University’s Department of International Cultural Communication. After coming to Shenzhen, the most advanced city in China at the time, I started to expand the connections with other cities. There was less mud under my feet, and the fishy smell of growing up by the sea was gone. I was urbanized and became an urbanite, traveling to more and more places, but I was also getting farther and farther away from home. From a “pastoral youth,” to what people tout as a “talented scholar,” to the various kinds of roles I wear on my head today, decades have passed. I left home young and return old. At this time, the countryside and the city often become the aria of your heart and mind. The smallest place often pushes you the farthest. The most painful farewell can bring the most mellow homesickness.

Searching for Hometown14 The flight traveled across more than half of China and took no more than four hours to swiftly descend upon this barren red soil. Taking the car next, I sped through sugar cane fields on narrow roads. Familiar villages one by one appeared in front of me, then quickly vanished behind. The sky was gloaming and firecrackers resounded all around; under the longan trees loomed the shape of the house’s front gate. I walked through this last day of this last year holding light luggage. In front of the gate, the smiles on my welcoming parents’ face blossomed like fireworks. This place where I spent my childhood is called Xialiu, located 109°73′E, 21°33′N on the western side of the Leizhou Peninsula. It is a small town of around 60  square kilometers with a population of around 30,000. According to official historical records from Suixi County, its establishment can be traced back to year Jiaqing 4 (1799) in the Qing Dynasty, when it was but a small market. Since there are ponds near the market, next to which salted fish used to be sold, it had gotten the name Salted Fish Pond Market. The market was once moved west to busier streets, 14  Completed in  Chinese and  posted on  Ou Ning’s Blog in  2009. The  English version was translated by Isabella Yang in 2019.

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where it was called the New Market. At the end of the Qing Dynasty, since the market was in proximity to Xialiu Village, its name became Xialiu Market. After 1949 it went through multiple administrative adjustments, once a village, a commune (during the People’s Commune period), and a district, after all of which it became the town it is today. What I know of my family history can be traced back only to the Republican period. My grandfather, Ou Bingyi, passed away merely one year after my birth, and my grandmother Pang Zhaoyang just turned a hundred this year. Now she is bedridden, has lost all her memories, and recognizes no one: she calls any man she meets her brother and any woman her sister-in-law. My father, now, has become the storyteller at family chitchats. He often tells the dramatic story of looking for his sister, which I have always heard about yet never paid much attention to the details: My second-oldest sister had been a crybaby since birth; because of that and her lymphatic TB disease she was never favored by the family. Because they couldn’t afford to raise her, she was sent to be adopted by a man from Yanggan who opens a gambling house in Chikan, Zhanjiang when she was four or five. In 1943 the Japanese besieged Chikan and our family received news that she died of from an illness, but the truth was, her foster father sold her to others during the war. In 1965, a bunch of fishermen from Changhong went to fish in Beihai, Guangxi, and once when they were onshore watching people play basketball their accent was overheard by a couple standing next to them. The woman asked them if they were from Xihai, and then told them about her own past, how she was sold at a young age and now has settled down here, working in the Beihai Starch Factory. This woman was my second-oldest sister. She shared impressions of her hometown, but didn’t remember its name, only recalling there was a famous man people called the ‘Iron Gall’ (Dai Chao’en, the magistrate of Suixi County 1928–1947, born in the New Village of Xialiu Town). She expressed a desire to find her family, and requested the Changhong fishermen to ask around for her when they go back. Two years later, one of the fishermen came to Xialiu to look for a wife, and it happened to be pouring on that day; when seeking shelter from the rain he talked about the encounter in Beihai and asked the locals if any household has ever sent a daughter to Chikan. There was a neighbor in his audience who knew about our family’s incidents, so the news finally got to me. That year I was twenty-three, the only young man in the family, so I took it upon my shoulders to look for her. Back in the days a grocery buyer from Beihai often came to Xialiu, so I first asked for the address of the starch factory, then took a friend’s fishing boat to Beihai. I found the factory, and

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people there told me that Wang Yuyun (my sister’s new name) has been transferred to Beihai Food Factory, so I found the food factory again. It happened to be that her husband was the one on duty at the door, so he called out to an obese middle-aged woman. Initially, I didn’t quite believe she was a member of our family, but once I saw the lymph scars on her neck we recognized each other. My sister, when she saw me, she couldn’t help crying….

In this typical story of the “old world,” the spread of information takes a long time and relies on multiple random factors. Among all of them, the figure “Iron Gall” played an important identifying role: it was the equivalent of a keyword in one of today’s search engines. I have known the name Dai Chao’en since I was very young. In the eyes of Communists, he was a die-hard Kuomintang (KMT) partisan and a local despot; on March 7, 1947, he was shot down by guerilla forces in the Zhanjiang-Suixi highway. This incident is an important turning point in the communist history of Suixi County, and was even engraved on Suixi’s Monument of the People’s Heroes: “After this, the great changes took place in the entire county and southern China, the armed revolution was pushed to a climax.” Meanwhile, in Taiwan it is recorded in The History of the Republic of China as such: “On March 7th in the third year of the Republic, February 15th in the lunar calendar, Dai Chao’en the magistrate of Suixi County had fallen in battle with the rascals.” It is evident how important this “Iron Gall” is as a KMT major and commander of the anti-Communist fights in southern China. Curious about the “Iron Gall” I did more research online; it turned out that the Taiwanese composer Dai Hongxuan (Tai Hung-Hsuan, 1942–1994) was his descendant. An obituary published in the supplement of February 28, 1994, issue of United Daily News called “The End to Grief: Remembering my Teacher Mr. Dai Hongxuan” revealed this connection. “[His] father, Major Dai Chao’en, used to organize local armed forces in the Canton region and was called the ‘Iron Gall.’” Dai is a renowned composer and music educator featured in the Encyclopedia of Taiwan. Dai Hongxuan was also praised for supporting fellow composer Hou Dejian (Hou Te-Chien) in his censorship crisis. “The popularity of the song ‘Descendants of Dragon’ drew the attention of more important figures. Song Chuyu (James Soong Chu-yu), then Director of the News Bureau, first altered the original lyrics into propaganda and put them in his

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speech to military students at the Chenggongling Camp, then demanded Hou to have the new version be sung instead of the original one. Song even used his position and power to organize a group of intellectuals to pressure Hou. However, Hou would not listen nor believe a single word they said. What’s more, he too had a group of firm supporters, including Dai Hongxuan, producer Yao Housheng and playwright Zhang Yongxiang, all of whom contributed to the demise of Song’s schemes.”15 The day Dai Chao’en was killed was also the day the 1938 Huayuankou breach of Yellow River was sealed; the KMT and the Communist Party of China (CPC) had broken their peace treaty, a new round of civil war had begun, and the KMT were losing their power in mainland China. Dai Hongxuan was only five that year, and nothing can be found online about how he got to Taiwan. Some articles mention that he drank heavily, led a wild lifestyle, despised convention, and had a sharp writing style—all of which seem similar to the said-to-be temperaments of his father. Now that everything can be found online, I am also able to satisfy my curiosity and have answers to many more questions looming in my mind. Each time I go back home, I love to spend time on the Jiaotousha Beach. Villages there have an intersecting parallel layout and bungalows are identical to one another, with a fairly wide distance between units, which are divided by extremely straight roads that in no way could exist in a natural village. The entire village is built on a field of sand; villagers do not have land to farm on, but make their living by the sea. I have heard that they are “migrant households,” but never knew why they were called that. It wasn’t until I looked it up on the Internet that I learned that in the early 1980s, since the second-largest army shooting range in China was located to the Xiapo region and would take up seven  square kilometers, locals were driven out of their homes and had to become “migrant households.” There is still information about the Xiapo Shooting Range on the government website of the town of Gangmen: “Various army shooting drills happen here all year long, making it a great place for military sightseeing.” (Military sightseeing? As in we plebeians are allowed to have fun with military drills?) As time goes by, an alien land will become one’s homeland. To cooperate with military drills of the People’s Liberation Army, migrant households of Jiaotou Beach left their original abodes and came to this village 15  Sun Weimang, Descendants of Monkey: Hou Dejian, Beida Weiming BBS. https://bbs. pku.edu.cn/v2/post-read.php?bid=734&threadid=118.

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upon the sands, where they settle down and multiply, live and die. The coastline of Xialiu Town extends for 4200 meters and has 10,000 or so acres of beaches by the sea; Jiaotou Beach is only one part of it. Upon this land where I was born and raised, how many more stories are there that I never knew of? On the trip back home this year, I was as calm as I would be on any other day in the entire year. Because of knowing more and caring more, a sense of familiarity has been built deep in my heart, so familiar that it always dispels the nostalgic missing—even when I descend from the alien air of an alien land.

Letter to My Mother16 I am in Baan Mae village, Sanpatong County, Chiang Mai, Thailand. The sun has just gone down and night is drawing in. Darkness seeps across the rice fields, the bamboo forests, the banana palms, and rape flowers, and as my friends light the sky lanterns, I feel a light breeze. I’m thinking of you, Mum, in the bitter cold of a Beijing winter, and thinking too, of our home. Xialiu, the small town in Guangdong, where, just like here, smoke from kitchen fires fills the air. When I was a kid, you’d work all day in the field before rushing home to make dinner. We were all so poor back then, we could barely afford rice. Meals were mostly sweet potatoes stewed to a porridge with a little rice. Lately, I’ve been getting nostalgic for that porridge, so sweet, so perfectly thirst-slaking. I miss my life there and as the years go by, my memories grow more and more melancholy. But that is why I decided to bring you to Beijing. You were getting older, stuck in a place you had never left in your whole life, looking after an empty house, coping with the increasingly worrisome complications of rural life all on your own; I couldn’t help worrying about you. Even though I despair at what it has turned into, I love my hometown. But what I really miss are our memories—memories that are brought to life when I see you and hear you talk, memories of a time in our lives that will never return. Although of course the most important thing is that we should be able to take care of you, a part of me wanted to 16  Completed in Chinese on December 22, 2010, in Beijing, first published in Life Monthly 63 (February 2011), shortly before the launching of the Bishan Project. It was later republished in OW Magazine 16 (January 2018) and translated into English by Nicky Harman in collaboration with Read Paper Republic. The English version was published on Los Angeles Review of  Books China Channel, September 28, 2018. https://chinachannel. org/2018/09/28/letter-to-my-mother/.

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bring you to Beijing so that we could be surrounded by the memories that you carry. Xialiu is as poor and unwelcoming as ever, but that doesn’t mean we can’t go back on regular visits. After all our family graves are there, and so it is to Xialiu that our spirits will eventually return. I am glad that we have a place to return to, a point on the map, our spiritual home. No matter what, I will never turn my back on it. I still remember a couple of months ago, trying to talk you into coming to Beijing. We spent more than two hours on the phone but you were still unhappy; you kept saying that it would be too much trouble for us. When I finally put down the phone, I couldn’t hold back the tears. I wept because of your obstinacy, because I felt like a failure. All these years, you put your children first, refusing to consider your own needs. You’re used to being poor and frugal, on your own in the countryside. You’re afraid of the city, and you weren’t going to budge no matter what I said. I hated myself for not being able to persuade you, I hated having been away from home for so long, constantly on the move, getting further and further away from you, seeing you less, having less to say to you. You must find it very confusing and wonder what kind of person your son has turned into, what he is doing, and what he is thinking about. Since you came to Beijing, we’ve talked a lot, far into the night, but the years have created an unbridgeable gulf between us, and it grieves me. When did I begin to leave you? By my count, it’s twenty-eight years, starting with when I got into the county lower middle school as a boarder. The county town was more than sixty kilometers from our home, and every winter and summer I made the long journey along the country road with its surface of red earth, or mud, fringed with eucalyptus and sugar cane. I wasn’t homesick on that first trip away from home but, all the same, when winter approached, and I huddled under the thin, worn quilt that you had given me, too short for my growing body, I was unable to sleep from the cold. All I could do was weep. During my three years of middle school, with only five yuan a month from home to cover my expenses, I got used to poverty. I grew thin and sallow, a weedy youth. Summers, I went home to help with the farm work. I once spent so long in the fields transplanting rice seedlings that I got sunstroke. When it came time to pack up at dusk, I couldn’t see where I was going, and you let me hang onto the hem of your jacket so that you could lead me home. Another time, I was cycling home from the fields loaded down with two heavy bags of just-harvested rice and got jumped by some of the village hooligans. All of this left me determined to change my life by studying as hard as I could.

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I did well enough during those three years of middle school to get accepted to the best high school in the city. They even waived the entrance exams. That was 1985. Like many children from dirt-poor families, I used to climb to the rooftop of our hostel and look out over the bright city lights, swearing I was going to be head and shoulders above everyone else and was going to turn my family’s fortunes around. I had read and re-read Lu Yao’s novel Life in middle school and seen the film adaptation countless times. I was determined not to go back to a hardscrabble rural life— the same life that Gao Jialin (in the novel) had endured. But I soon left these kinds of ambitions behind and began to go my own way. My new north star was A Collection of New Tide Poetry edited by someone who went by the name of “Old Wood” (Lao Mu). One day in a maths lesson I wrote my first poem “Dreams” in imitation of Bai Dao’s style—and that was when my spirit left home, Mum, and acquired a life that you would never understand. My politics teacher lent me the book. The same teacher also got me reading the journal People’s Literature with its stories by Liu Suola, Xu Xing, Ma Jian, and Sun Ganlu17; he got me listening to the latest music cassettes by Qu Xiaosong, Tan Dun, Ye Xiaogang, and Guo Wenjing; and he introduced me to discussions on “new wave art” in the journal Meishu, and on “traditional culture and modernization” in the journal Dushu. In school, I set up an “Exploration Society,” publishing a stenciled newspaper with my own poems, and comments on all these new cultural phenomena. My first trip out of the province was to Shanghai, in 1987. Instead of going home for the summer holidays that year, I borrowed some money from a classmate, first going to Shenzhen to see a poet friend of mine, Meng Lang (Meng Junliang, you’ve seen his photo, he’s Shanghainese, the one with the bushy beard). Then I got on a train in Guangzhou and headed north; my head was full of the works of Republican-era writers like Mu Shiying, Liu Na’ou, and Shi Zhecun,18 as I imagined what Shanghai, the city of my dreams, would be like. As soon as I arrived, I dropped in on the poet Mo Mo (Zhu Weiguo). His younger brother Shang Feng (Zhu Weifeng) was also a poet. He was about the same age as me, and we wrote to each other often. Zhu Weifeng took me to the Bund. When I saw the vast expanse of the Huangpu River, and heard the chimes from the  The Chinese avant-garde writers, who were active in the 1980s.  They were major contributors to the 1930s’ literary movement in Shanghai known as New Sensationists. 17 18

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Customs House tower, I stood rooted to the spot, overwhelmed by the city’s history, my eyes welling with tears, feeling all of a sudden connected with the writers and intellectuals I worshipped, and who had fought their way through life’s battles. In that moment, I swore a new oath: that I would become like them, no matter how many obstacles might be standing in my way. It was on that trip that I met a Shanghainese girl who had just taken her university entrance exams (gaokao). That meant she was a year ahead of me. She wrote poetry too. Although I never told her how I felt about her, in my mind she and the city merged into one. I loved Shanghai in the 1980s. It had the largest concentration of industrial workers in China and was still permeated with the atmosphere of left-wing art and literature from the early days. Back then, all my poet friends lived on the outskirts, though these areas have now been swallowed up by the city. One day, I went to pay my respects at the grave of the anti-Qing revolutionary martyr Zou Rong; then in the evening I went to Baoshan Iron and Steel Factory19 to talk poetry and got drunk for the first time, on millet wine. My feelings for the Shanghainese girl flared up twice more in the next decade, until they finally petered out unrequited. Over those ten years, I graduated from Shenzhen University and got a job, got married, and got divorced; my younger sister, meanwhile, finished middle school and found work in a factory in Shenzhen, before marrying and having a child; my next younger brother finished high school and joined the ranks of factory workers in Shenzhen too; my second younger brother graduated from the same university as me, and was the first of us to move to Beijing; while the third, the youngest, overcame teenage depression to test into Shenzhen University with flying colors. As we grew up into adults, you got older. While your face became thin and gaunt, I began to put on weight. It seemed like a sign of the ever-widening gulf between us. Even though the love was still there, it was harder and harder for you to understand me. I rarely went to lectures in my four years at university. There were no teachers that I liked. The only exception was Liu Xiaofeng, whose works I had read, but he went to Basel to study theology the same year I arrived at the university. Instead, I spent my time exchanging letters with poets from all over, or chatting with artists in Shenzhen. I fell in love with Cui Jian’s music, and his music in turn led me to other musicians. I wrote more poetry than I had in high school, but most of it I could not get published  Today known as Baosteel Group.

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through regular outlets, only in mimeographed pamphlets produced by my friends from around the country. After I was accepted into university, I failed the physical—they discovered tuberculosis, so I had to defer for a year. During the months I spent recuperating at home, I was dogged once more by the despair I had felt toward rural life that started when I was a boy. We couldn’t afford a television (TV), and we didn’t have a radio, either. We couldn’t even get newspapers in the small town, so I didn’t hear much about what was happening in Beijing in 1989. In fact, I only caught the tail end of it when I joined the pre-term sessions, in the summer before the start of the academic year. There were hardly any students on campus, but they had set up a huge memorial in front of the library entrance, and in the evenings the distant shouts of the demonstrators floated across to our dormitory. History had woken up and yawned, but by the time I knew what was going on, it was already long way off. You might say that was lucky for me. Otherwise, I don’t know where I’d be now. I heard through the grapevine that a number of student leaders from Shenzhen had gone abroad, and the university chancellor, Luo Zhengqi, lost his job because he had supported the students. He had personally interviewed me in high school and offered me an unconditional place, so I felt his loss keenly. We labored under an atmosphere of extreme repression for the next three years. Writing poetry was the only escape. Then in 1992, Deng Xiaoping arrived on his Southern Tour, kick-starting the Reforms and Opening-Up again, and the atmosphere relaxed. Shenzhen became one great building site as buildings were thrown up everywhere, and the economic boom took off. Yet the growth and spread of commercialization represented a serious blow not only to poetry, but also to the morale of poets. Many became extremely depressed. Even Xu Jingya (who had organized “The Grand Exhibition of Chinese Modernist Poetry Groups” for The Poetry Press and The Shenzhen Youth Daily in 1986)20 skulked around at home, growing more demoralized by the day. Poetry no longer occupied the place in our culture that it once had; it was in full retreat. In 1991, I set up a poetry magazine called Voice, with the Hong Kong poet Huang Canran, and, in 1992, along with Xu Jingya and others, took over the running of the Mang Ke’s Beijing magazine Modern Chinese

20  The Exhibition’s subsequent book A Grand Overview of China’s Modernist Poetry Groups 1986–1988 (Shanghai: Tongji University Press, 1988) was edited by Xu Jingya, Meng Lang, Cao Changqing, and Lü Guipin.

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Poetry. But it was difficult to sustain independent literary activity in the China of those days. My spirit, you could say, was looking for a way out. Around then, a label in Taiwan called Magic Stone, under the Rock Records, started releasing music by the three famous singers from Beijing: Dou Wei, Zhang Chu, and He Yong. You could pick them up easily from any street vendor and I was very struck by their music, especially the lyrics of Zhang Chu. I felt his lyrics were more powerful than a lot of poetry I’d read. Thanks to the record companies’ distribution channels, the music could reach many more people, too, so I decided to throw my hat into the ring. Shenzhen had just opened what was probably China’s first bar, selling hugely popular Mexican beers like Sol and Corona (which arrived illicitly on Shekou Wharf), and people soon gave up Hong Kong-style nightspots for bars like this, where they could chat over a beer. Just like that, a new form of entertainment and social space were born. Music was more in demand than ever. I formed an organization called The New Masses, which was really an extension of the way we got our poetry out there in the past. We were still talking about the same things as in our writing, still desperate to educate and inspire the “masses,” just in a new space. I began to produce shows, but I had no interest in competing with the local showbiz impresarios. Instead, we brought in Beijing rock groups and alternative musicians from overseas. At every performance, we had hand-­ printed zines to give out for free to the audience—you could call that a development of the old tradition of printing poetry chapbooks. We promoted independent and alternative music, covering as wide a range as we could. We wanted people who listened to our music to use their heads and judge for themselves. Only then could they truly become the “new masses.” When it came to my final year at university, those classmates who knew me well and shared my interests joked that a person like me would never find a job. They said more likely than not I’d end up back home, working on the farm. It was true that I knew nothing about careers, and what they said made me very anxious. As a result, after dashing off my dissertation on Baudelaire, I went out job-hunting before anyone else did. The latest craze was for graphic design and it had just reached Shenzhen. I happened to come across the brochure from an exhibition called “Graphic Design in China,” and it introduced me to the burgeoning advertising industry. I decided that with my writing skills, I could become an advertising copywriter. Having indulged my passions for poetry and literature both on and off campus for years, I was under tremendous pressure to find paid work.

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I knew what you expected of me, and what the family expected of me. As it turned out, though, the world outside wasn’t as cruel and unfeeling as I had imagined. I quickly found a job in an advertising agency, continuing to make music and pursue other activities after office hours. It was an emotional moment when my first pay packet arrived. The family had lent me money to cover my four years of university fees. For food and other expenses, I had largely relied on support from my sister, who was earning a pittance in a factory, and my girlfriend (who became your daughter-in-law for a time). Little by little, I paid back my debts, but I always lacked the motivation to make money. I just wanted to pursue my own interests. I freely admit this was selfish of me. Luckily, China was going through a decade of great progress and engaging in my preferred cultural activities no longer meant condemning myself to a life of poverty and rejection. As the economy has developed, people have realized the importance of spending money on culture, and by the same token, culture has begun to acquire economic value. Finally, I can do the kind of work I am interested in and earn a decent income. Having you come to Beijing is really another way of paying you back, not only giving you better food to eat and clothes to wear, but also making more time for us, making up for the years when I was away and couldn’t spend time with you, allowing affection between us to grow again. But you are so used to being poor that the money for an air ticket seems like an astronomical sum, and it’s hard for you to comprehend the living costs in Beijing compared to Xialiu. Your stubbornness has caused me endless pain. I know you can’t get past the fact that I’m on my own in Beijing after my divorce and living in a rented apartment. To you, someone who doesn’t have a house or a family of their own cannot get on in life, let alone be happy. I know you thought I couldn’t afford a house or a wife because I am supporting my brothers and sisters and not putting myself first, and by coming to Beijing you would only make things more difficult for me. But I’m on my own now not because I’m poor, but because personal experience has made me wary. Your unhappy life with my father, whom you were forced to stay together with in spite of constant fights, has made me skeptical of marriage. It is nothing to do with whether I own my own home or not. Additionally, there is another reason: Beijing house prices have gone through the roof, for reasons I despise. With the growth of China’s cities, there’s been a boom in property development. Selling land has become the government’s chief source of wealth and benchmark

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for success. Once a piece of land comes on the market, everything on it gets pulled down and the newly barren piece of land becomes hot property. In theory, the government should do the demolition themselves, but they contract it out to commercial demolition companies and charge the cost of the demolition to the developers. This pushes up the price of the new buildings, which in turn is passed on to the buyers. The demolition companies want to make money so they pay out as little as they can get away with, keeping the evicted families from getting decent compensation. When they resist, the demolition companies call in the police or resort to violence. You must have heard of cases in recent years when evicted people have set themselves on fire in protest, or were killed. New houses then go up on the snatched land; when we buy them, we are colluding with these injustices. After writing poetry and making music, and doing graphic design, I also started organizing film screenings; eventually, I even made my own documentary films and got involved in a number of art exhibitions. In 2005, I made a documentary called Meishi Street, in which I filmed the demolition of a street in Beijing’s Dashilar district, telling the stories of three of the affected families. This gave me an in-depth understanding of how these demolitions happen, how they start, and how they end. Mum, I don’t believe that you will continue to pressure me to buy a house if you can understand what I have said above. You once told me that the only reason you can read a little now is because you were put in a Mao Zedong study group in the village before getting married, which also helped you understand what it meant to be poor. Because of where you came from, you know better than most what class means, and you have an innate sympathy for the weakest members of society. These evicted families are the most vulnerable people in China today. That’s why I think that my concern for them is something you taught me. When I was at university in Shenzhen, I went to my sister’s factory one day, and she poured out her heart to me, about how hard she found the endless assembly line work, and how homesick she was. I wrote a poem for her, and for the countless thousands of young women who are forced to drop out of school to scrape a living in the city. My sister sacrificed her youth to enable me to go to university and become an “educated man.” Every time I think of how much I owe her, my eyes fill with tears. I made another film, San Yuan Li, about the large numbers of country people, mostly from impoverished inland provinces, who scrape a living in the

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chengzhongcun (urban villages)21 of Guangzhou. Since I once lived in a Shenzhen chengzhongcun myself, I could identify with them. Every time I looked through the camera lens at the arduous jobs they were doing, the cramped rooms they rented, and the cheap nasty food they were eating, all the while with a satisfied smile on their faces, it reminded me that I came from Xialiu, that I was born and brought up in a dirt-poor place too. That is where my life began. They work their fingers to the bone scraping a living in the city, just as I once did, and what keeps them going are thoughts of the home and family that they live so far away from. They are the humblest people in China, forgotten by the rest of us; their contribution to our society is enormous and yet they are unable to enjoy it. My reason for putting them in front of the camera is that I can see my past in them, and I see their sorrow. Sometimes when I show my films, and explain the thinking behind them, people take me for a leftist. But I am like you, in that I feel for the vulnerable, and want to bear witness to injustice. Isn’t that the same as what you learned in your Mao Zedong study group? I doubt you will ever understand that shocking thing I once said about Mao Zedong to you, but it is because I have read some books and know a bit of history that my ideas about Mao conflict with yours. It’s complicated matter, but I am going to put it in simple terms: there have been people who believe in social justice since time immemorial, Mao did not invent it. A person can be on the left without being a Maoist. There are many people today who are confused by the world around them, not just you. I am currently involved in planning a number of arts and design exhibitions, I am also chief editor of a new literary magazine, and I have a few creative projects of my own underway. All of these projects bring me face-to-face with difficult social questions that I can’t avoid addressing. It takes all of my wisdom and strength to find solutions, to form and express my opinions. By reducing the chaos in the world around us, I hope we can create a bit more clarity. You’ve spent nearly four months with us in Beijing, and you haven’t put a foot out of doors, no matter how hard we try. You criticize me for 21  In Chinese, chengzhongcun literally means “village in city,” which are villages that appear on both the outskirts and the downtown segments of major Chinese cities, surrounded by skyscrapers, transportation infrastructures, and other modern urban constructions, inhabited by the poor and transient. These kinds of urban villages are a typical phenomenon that presents the conflicts of China’s urbanization process.

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wasting good money on a housekeeper and want me to get rid of her so you can do the work in her place. You don’t like frozen food, because you say it’s not as fresh as farm food. You don’t like going to restaurants with us because you think it’s an extravagance. You don’t like taking taxis because you say all the stopping and starting at traffic lights makes you carsick. You don’t like watching TV because none of the programs is in Cantonese. And now you’ve got it into your head that you want to go home. I don’t know how to make you stay. I have my misgivings about city life too. The air pollution index in Beijing keeps going up, the city is too big, and the public transport system is intimidating. Setting aside job opportunities and the cultural life, a big city like Beijing is really not a good place to live. I have been mulling over moving to a village for the last few years, not only because I have developed an interest in agriculture, farmers, and villages, but also because I want to find a way of living that is different from the city. This is not a retreat from the world, but a way of embracing a new reality. Now I am in Thailand, looking at how artists can work in rural areas. I have already been to a number of villages in China: in Anhui, Yunnan, Jiangsu, Hebei, and Henan. I have been to Taiwan, where I visited friends who are living and working in the countryside. Most Chinese villages are like Xialiu, depopulated and economically unviable. Some have given their land to the cities, others have given their workers, but they all have one thing in common: none of them can sustain their life and the livelihoods of their people. Moving to a village right now might seem like a huge step backward, choosing a way of life that most people can’t wait to leave behind. Even so, the idea has been growing on me. I still haven’t decided which village I will choose, and anyway the work I have in hand will take a while to complete. Maybe one day I will return to my beginnings in Xialiu, and it will give you and me a chance of going back to how we were when I was a child. No more distance between us, and no more arguing. And it will be wonderful, Mum, to be able to keep you company in your final years.

CHAPTER 2

Huizhou Fieldwork

From Non-place to Place1 On October 4, 2007, I packed some essentials, grabbed a book by Marc Augé, and boarded a plane to Hefei, where Zuo Jing was waiting for me. We were going to the south of Anhui Province together, to his hometown of Jingde, where correspondence as well as poetry magazines of our youth were packed away. We were also going to Xidi Village in Yi County, where the poets Han Yu and Zheng Xiaoguang had settled. Marc Augé’s book opens with the fictional account of a man named Pierre Dupont driving on the freeway to Paris’ Charles de Gaulle airport on a Sunday. From parking in the parking lot to getting a boarding pass, shopping in the duty-free shops, browsing airport magazines, entering the cabin, and listening to music with headphones on as he prepared to take off, no detail is omitted. The very descriptive prologue touches readers’ emotions so that they can better understand a central concept of the book: the “non-place.” His small book, Non-places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity, has three chapters (aside from the “Prologue” and “Epilogue”): “The Near and the Elsewhere,” “Anthropological Place,” and “From Places to Non-places.” The term “non-places” is referred to places in the process of globalization—those places that had become more 1  Completed in Chinese and published in Life Monthly 25 (December 2007). The English version was translated by Matt Turner and Haiying Weng in 2019.

© The Author(s) 2020 O. Ning, Utopia in Practice, Contemporary East Asian Visual Cultures, Societies and Politics, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-5791-0_2

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and more similar, where direct communication was removed from public spaces for better standardization, high speed, and efficiency. Although a large number of people flow through those kinds of spaces, they are unable to convey emotions, and neither do memories come together there. Airports are like that. On a connecting flight to Mexico via Los Angeles, I wrote, “The huge airliner on the tarmac is like a lonely, silent whale. Travelers lying around the waiting room floor all have computers—the necessary digital suitcase for travel today. All entertainment and work are compressed and packed. People come and go at the airport—not to their hometown, but to a series of strange addresses. They live, from one airport to another.” Waiting for another flight, to Toronto, I had a feeling: “I am tired of traveling, and I hate airports. People always think that the essence of a city can be procured in a short time, and all airports sell packaged urban symbols called local specialties—or use duty-free shopping to stimulate people’s habit of taking advantage of petty advantages. Buy and Bye, this is the most ruthless consumption. From this moment on, I swear never to shop at airports.” Aside from airports, there are many “non-places” in modern cities. This trip to the countryside of southern Anhui would be a different kind of travel—to escape from non-places and to locate a place of emotion and memory. Marc Augé called these “places.” Zuo Jing put me up at the best Hilton Hotel in Hefei. Unfortunately, the city I looked out at from my room was a typical “non-place,” where unrecognizable popular real estate crowded the urban space to form a dull skyline. The next day we set out, leaving a provincial capital struck as if by an epidemic of these buildings. The car raced along the newly built Hefei-­ Tongling-­ Huangshan expressway, where villages along the way would soon be wetted by waves of modernization. After going through many tunnels, across many mountains, into Jingde County, and after lunch at a roadside farmhouse restaurant, we finally arrived at Jiangcun Village. Jiangcun, built in the late Sui and early Tang dynasties, has a history of over 1300 years. Like the rest of the countryside in southern Anhui, there is a shuikou (water reservoir) at the front of the village. In the fengshui theory, shuikou is a site that can gather energy for the village, so temples or pavilions should be built on it to protect the energy. While within the village, the streets and lanes intersect, the residences have white walls with black eaves, there are towering archways for the ancestral halls, and clear streams circle the village. Since being confirmed as the ancestral residence of Jiang Zemin—receiving both Jiang’s visit and approval—the village has

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risen to fame, going from being a non-administrative village to an independent tourism company. It has set up entrance gates to collect tickets (48 yuan per person) and has tour guides, deeply affecting the “simple and natural” expectations of visitors to the countryside, greatly reducing any affinity they may have felt for the place. This kind of tourism development that relies solely on entrance fees cares neither about the protection and development of the environment, nor is it committed to the inheritance or revival of traditional agriculture. It only allows for more tourists to visit the area to watch lifeless demonstrations—not arousing any will to be involved in rural reconstruction. This is more distressing than the natural deprivations that affect villages. In southern Anhui, any village with popularity is in the same situation. That night we slept in the county town, population only 30,000, where Zuo Jing spent his childhood. Four former middle school classmates of his came to meet him. Every year since graduating in 1988, the five of them have taken a picture together. So far, nineteen pictures have been taken— it’s an interesting way of recording growth and age. The following day, Zuo Jing found three boxes of letters and other old things at his house and decided to take them on the road to the home of Han Yu and Zheng Xiaoguang and then to take them back to Beijing. He showed me a letter I wrote to him in 1987—the handwriting was wild and powerful, but the childish, agitated mood of my youth made it hard for me to read it today, however. Then, in the afternoon, we went to Shangzhuang Village (Hu Shih’s hometown) and Longchuan Village (Hu Jintao’s ancestral residence), both in Jixi County. The first sentence of Hu Shih’s autobiography says, “I am from Huizhou, Anhui Province.” He spent his childhood in Shangzhuang Village, Jixi County, where he married Jiang Dongxiu of neighboring Jiangcun. They grew old together. He was very proud to have shared the same hometown as Zhu Xi, Dai Zhen, and other famous scholars. Tang Degang (Tong Tekong) laughs at Hu Shih’s “Confucian pedigree” in his translation notes: “After all, he was born in the imperial examination era.” Because the scholars at that time “whenever they met, would talk about their hometowns, clans and ancestry to make connection, their birthplaces had a significant influence over a scholar’s provenance.” Tang believes that “this is a kind of psycho-social consequence of thousands of years of sedentary agricultural society and the transition into industrial society. This tradition is difficult to retain in a

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highly mobile, industrialized and modern society.”2 Yes, in the dusty metropolis, this kind of local blood and clan system has long since disappeared, but in the isolated countryside of southern Anhui, it has survived, protected by the mountains and waters—ancestral temples and genealogies in the Huizhou villages have been well preserved, which is a miracle. Hu Shih’s former residence is small, but it has a large, open courtyard. Although he did not come from a rich family, his life was decent. In his later years, he often read poems in the Jixi dialect. I can’t imagine that the standard-bearer of New Culture Movement is so nostalgic. Longchuan Village, not far from Shangzhuang, is advertised by a local tourism company as “the home of the great, the origin of harmony.” The admission ticket is 10 yuan more expensive than Jiangcun, but apart from the beautiful scenery, there really isn’t much to see. The home of Hu Zongxian, a general and government minister in the Ming Dynasty, was renovated and is operated by another company, requiring an additional ticket. His residence has a history of over 400 years and covers an area of over 3000 square meters. Looking at the residence from the distance, it isn’t ostentatious. But within is another world. Following the layers of doors, alleys, and corridors, there is an opera stage, a garden, a well, a kitchen, an officiating hall, a dining hall, a clinic, a school, a Buddhist hall, a women’s drawing room, a sedan pavilion, and even a temple to the local gods—although it was a private residence, it is equivalent to a small community today, with all of the facilities one would need: schools, cinemas, churches, parking lots, parks, green spaces, restaurants, hospitals, and so on. Such a unique design, utilizing its small scale, is truly exceptional. No wonder it surpasses all the other distinguished homes in the area and is honored as “the number one home of Huizhou.” I’ve been very frustrated as I write this, because the awful tickets (regardless of how much they cost) and tour guides have plunged me into the unavoidable world of tourism. I’m tired of similar urban scenes all over the world. The countryside of China that I’m looking for—the “places” in my imagination—is actually in such a state. At night, our car gradually 2  Tang Degang, An Oral Biography of Hu Shi (Guilin: Guangxi Normal University Press, 2005, Chap 1, footnote 4). This is the Chinese translation of the English manuscript of Hu Shi’s oral record, as documented by Tang Degang in the Department of Chinese Oral History of Columbia University. When Tang published it in Chinese, he added many interesting footnotes to the book.

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entered Yi County, with Xidi Village in the distance. How would our friends who haven’t seen us in so long greet us? What memories would be provoked? What memories would we create together? Han Yu and Zuo Jing are poetry friends who have known each other since my middle school days. We met for the first time at a gathering in Nanjing in 1987. After that, I kept in close contact with Zuo Jing. When I saw Han Yu again, it was 2003—at that time, she lived and worked in Shanghai, and we met at a Cui Jian performance. Zheng Xiaoguang, a middle school teacher of Zuo Jing’s and also a poet, now lives in Xidi with Han Yu. They bought a Ming dynasty house in the village and spent two years repairing and renovating it. At first, it was for their own use; later, because of frequent visitors, they turned it into a social space—not listing it for business and only accepting a few reservations. In addition to Zuo Jing and me, the Hefei photographer Xie Ze, his wife Zheng Dian, and their daughter Xie Andi, the guests of the evening also included Lin Jingjing, a female painter who came all the way from Guangzhou, who was also one of our poetry friends in middle school. Han Yu arranged comfortable rooms and a nice dinner for us, and then, in her backyard, at the famous Pigpen Bar—which was actually built from a pigpen—we ate the famous Huangshan dessert called “red paper bag,” drank some strong tea, and chatted about the past until late. The whole village was like a sleeping baby that made no sound. Overhead, stars covered the sky. The cool breeze brought the breath of the countryside, making us feel like we were living in another dynasty. The most fascinating thing was that Xidi still retained the old custom of making time announcements—the sound of the midnight announcement was like a mysterious pull, deepening our confusion of time and space. I began to imagine the announcer’s appearance, age, clothes, the speed of his walking, the weight of his mallet, his family life, and his inner world. Since the invention of clocks and watches by human beings, it is rare for us to see people doing this in the streets and alleys. In the modern world, in order to reduce manpower investments and improve social efficiency, we always try to invent various machines and equipment to do things for us. So, automated teller machines (ATMs) and vending machines began to appear in public places in large quantities. When you withdraw money or buy drinks, you can’t see a smiling face behind the counter, and you can’t hear the laughter of a beautiful shop owner—you just insert a bank card or coin and get what you want. At subway stations in every single city, people are in a hurry and don’t know each other. If they stop for a moment, it’s

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only to recharge their subway passes, or to go to the ATM to get cash, or to buy a pack of cigarettes from a vending machine. They stand in front of these machines and take orders from them. By the way, this is also typical of “Non-Space” scenes. In Xidi, I found not only mementos of my childhood addiction to literature, but also memories of a more remote rural life. In front of the house of Han Yu and Zheng Xiaoguang, there was an interesting couplet: “Daily do housework and read by night, have fewer children and have more pigs,” which portrays their daily life well. They not only renovated an old house in Huizhou for people to enjoy, but also abandoned their previous ambitions and careers to live there and begin to practice a new way of life—or to restore a way of life. Because of this, the 400-year-old house began to rejuvenate itself. Although Xidi had already been listed as one of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) World Heritage Sites, and their house had been listed as protected buildings along with over a hundred other old houses in the village before they moved in, if it was kept idle or just opened for visits with an entrance fee, it would at most delay its physical decay and would not be able to reproduce the vitality it had in the past. Real protection of physical space comes from people living in them; clarifying the ownership of property rights so that repairing and protecting them becomes the consciousness of the property owners. The two poets began with the romantic call of rural life, but in the end they developed a successful way to preserve the historical buildings in the village—they are no longer retreating, but expanding the new possibilities of rural reconstruction in Huizhou. Without Han Yu and Zheng Xiaoguang, the impression left to me by Xidi would not be better than that of Jiangcun, Shangzhuang, or Longchuan—but probably worse, since it and Hongcun Village are the two most famous villages in Huizhou, with the highest admission fees, at 80 yuan a head. Both of the tourist sites were boring, for vulgar tastes and snobbery alike. Bishan Village had been the best-feeling village on our trip, because it was still in its original state and not polluted by poorly developed tourism. Han Yu and Zheng Xiaoguang bought another old house in Bishan, bigger than the one in Xidi, covering two mu (about 1333 square meters). At present they are busy repairing and renovating it. Almost every day they have to discuss the construction with old builders in Huizhou. There is an abandoned clinic in Bishan, backed by green hills, and, covering an area of about six mu, the backyard is green and

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lush—and there are several ancient trees. There is also an empty home for the elderly in the village, which is in the architectural style of a Soviet-style auditorium. It would be interesting if they were to use it as an artists’ residence, a rural architect studio, or an experimental organic agricultural base. Huizhou’s rural areas should attract more people to go to the countryside and integrate into local life and participate in  local reconstruction—in order to achieve a comprehensive revival, not just the development of tourism. In those days in Xidi, what we enjoyed most was reading the old letters in old houses or reciting our old poems. Zuo Jing’s three boxes of old stuff he brought from Jingde were spread out on the floor, and Han Yu’s collection of old things was there too. We each searched for our handwriting from our past. Those innocent and presumptuous old words were often pronounced loudly and mischievously, making us blush and our hearts quicken. We all went through adolescence in the 1980s, one of the best times for Chinese thought and culture, and we deeply value the spiritual hunger and thirst of that time and the beginnings of love that bloomed at the time. Today, our reunion across different lives has moved us deeply—sometimes laughing, sometimes feeling regretful. In any case, these feelings are hard to come by. In Xidi, this intoxicating feeling made me suddenly understand that what Marc Augé calls “places” are not simply about cities or villages, the West or the East, the whole world, or a native land, but about people who have rich emotional lives, follow human nature, revere life, and cherish their memories, and who can create their own “places” anywhere and in any space!

Revisiting Bishan3 You ask me why I dwell in the green mountain; I smile and make no reply for my heart is free of care. As the peach-blossom flows down the stream and is gone into the unknown, I have a world apart that is not among people. —Li Bai, “Questions and Answers in the Mountain,” 729 AD

3  Completed in  Chinese and  posted on  Ou Ning’s Blog on  May 17, 2008. The  English version was translated by Mai Corlin and Austin Woerner and published in Ou Ning, Bishan Commune: How to Start Your Own Utopia (Aarhus: OVO Press and Antipyrine, 2015).

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We have no way of knowing whether the “green mountain” (bishan) of Li Bai’s poem is the same one that overlook Bishan Village in Yi County, Anhui Province.4 But whenever I visit this ancient village in southern Anhui, this poem always plucks at my heartstrings. Walking among the chockablock historical houses with their white walls and beautiful black-­ tiled roofs, gazing out over a pastoral landscape of tall mountains and open fields crisscrossed with winding footpaths, you find yourself searching your memory for lines of poetry, as if only the cadences of classical Chinese, long-submerged in the depths of time, could express the joy and agitation that you feel at this moment. But what I find dismaying is that often we can’t remember the poetry that we’ve read, or all we can call to mind are a few fragmentary phrases. Bishan not only kindles this age-old fantasy of living a simple, untrammeled life in the countryside, but it leads us to a distressing realization of how much of our culture we’ve forgotten. When I visited Bishan in 2007 for the first time, Zheng Xiaoguang and Han Yu were busy renovating an old house that they had bought. Now it’s ready to live in. Their new home, which covers a third of an acre, has completely preserved the structure of Huizhou architecture. They used local materials in the renovation, and added a flower garden, a fishpond, and a covered walkway. They’ve intentionally preserved some broken walls and wall paintings from the Cultural Revolution so that it’s possible to see the marks that history has made on the house. They also bought a small plot in front of the house where they intend to plant a vegetable garden. The rooms are equipped with everyday household articles purchased in Shanghai, the washrooms have hot water installations, and the entire house has wireless Internet access. The house is a quiet, cozy place to live in, but you can still stay in contact with the outside world. Xiaoguang and Han Yu have become local celebrities. Even the driver knows their names when you take a taxi from the county town to Bishan. Bishan Village covers an area of 58.5 square kilometers. In the district you’ll find the historical site of a private garden from the Song Dynasty, “The Peijun Garden” (peijun means bamboo cultivation); a private school 4  The poem was quoted in The Records of Yi County, edited and published in 1812 (Jiaqing 17, Qing Dynasty), to say Li Bai used to visit Yi County but with no detailed proof. According to a research, Li Bai wrote the poem “Questions and Answers in the Mountain” in 729 AD (Kaiyuan 17, Tang Dynasty), when he stayed in Mount Baizhao (aka Bishan), now in Yandian Town, Anlu City, Hubei Province. He lived in Anlu for ten years from 727 AD (Kaiyuan 15, Tang Dynasty). See Pei Fei, Li Bai’s Poetry Appreciation (Chengdu: Bashu Press, 1988), 401–402.

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from the Ming Dynasty, “The Book and Plow Gardens”; and an old tower from the Qing Dynasty, the “Cloud Gate Pagoda.” The village contains 370 intact Ming and Qing residential houses, and 36 of its buildings are ancestral halls. Accompanied by the party secretary for Yi County, Wu Wenda, we went to see the largest of the ancestral halls. Wu often goes to the villages to perform tasks for the government, so he is very familiar with the rural landscape and human resources of Yi County. To promote the preservation of Huizhou-style residential houses, he has explored different approaches including activation of the property trade, a government-­ established fund to attract non-governmental capital, and adoption by businesses. He believes that while physical preservation is extremely important, what’s even more essential is preserving intangible spiritual legacies such as culture and lifeways. Horsehead walls are convenient symbols, but clan structures and geomantic principles are the soul of Huizhou culture. Wu, who was a university student during the 1980s, also cherished the ideals of rural reconstruction. His belief that the key to solving China’s social problems lay in the countryside became the ideological starting point for his career in politics. He has held his current position for six years and paid close attention to, and is highly supportive of, urban elites like Xiaoguang and Han Yu returning to rural areas, purchasing land, buying homes, and practicing rural living. The rise of urbanization in China is not only consuming rural farmland but also draining away human resources from rural society. The price of urban prosperity is the decay of rural areas. In today’s China, where the urban-rural relationship is in dire straits, Xiaoguang and Han Yu’s choices can serve as a model. This is what has motivated me to return repeatedly to Bishan. Therefore, Wu Wenda has encouraged us to invest urban economic, cultural, and human resources in the countryside. The vigorous way in which he pursues his aims leaves us with no doubt as to his sincerity. James Yen, who pioneered rural reconstruction in China, once said: “China can get by without a good emperor, but not without good county magistrates.” He has a firm belief in the importance of county governments for China. Wu Wenda is one of the innumerable grassroots administrative cadres who hold up the entire Chinese pyramid of power. Through him, we have seen what a county administrator is capable of. But of course, rural reconstruction requires political support at higher levels. In the beginning, when James Yen launched his experiments in mass education and rural reconstruction in Hebei Province’s Ding County, he relied on

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resources from abroad. He wanted to be independent of political affairs, but later he came to understand that without political engagement, his efforts in rural reconstruction would not have a wide impact. Another one of the leaders of China’s rural reconstruction movement, Liang Shuming, viewed rural reconstruction from the very beginning as a way to solve China’s political problems. And Wen Tiejun, in his rural reconstruction practice today, will be unable to realize his ideals if he doesn’t break through the political bottleneck. Last time I was in Bishan, Xiaoguang and Han Yu took us to see the village’s abandoned health clinic and nursing home. This time we visited the deserted former premises of the village administration and an old oil factory at the foot of the mountains. After following a winding country road through rapeseed fields that stretched on either side of the horizon, we arrived at the empty courtyard of the oil factory. Once used to extract rapeseed oil, the building now serves as a processing plant for articles made of bamboo. There are only a handful of people working here. Not far away is a plant nursery, its buildings deserted, with eight acres of land and tall trees. We also had time to go out on our own to look at some old houses and chat with the locals. They told us that the cost of farming is too high now; the price of urea and phosphate fertilizer has almost doubled. Everybody owns an increasingly dilapidated old house and depends on remittances from young people, who are struggling to earn a living elsewhere. Only old people and children live in the village. There are no tourists. Even though the tourism industry is already flourishing in the villages of Hongcun and Xidi, it hasn’t spread here yet. At dusk, following the course of the river up into the mountains, we look back toward where the village lies behind us on the horizon. But we only see smoke from chimneys rising up into the twilight. The human and physical landscape of this place seems to be quietly awaiting a reawakening.

CHAPTER 3

Blueprints

Anarchism and Ruralism1 How did you come up with the idea of the Bishan Commune? During the last two or three years, I’ve constantly been reflecting on issues about the countryside, and I also read the book How to Start Your Own Country. It’s a handbook written by Erwin S. Strauss in the 1970s about how to establish one’s own country, and it centers on sixty to seventy independently established countries worldwide. It’s really interesting. For example, there’s the “Principality of Sealand,” which occupies an abandoned lighthouse from World War II in British territorial waters— they’ve established their own country there, and furthermore issue stamps and coins and do various kinds of trade. This kind of practice is a bit commercial, and also very interesting, but it’s not the kind I’m interested in. I’m interested in the social life of groups of intellectuals or anarchists with strong idealistic leanings. I envision starting a utopia in Bishan Village, Yi County, Anhui Province, tying together my thoughts on the countryside over the last few years, my ideas of utopia, and my understanding of anarchism. In a notebook, I sketch out my preliminary thoughts on these matters. The first half of the notebook is made up of investigation and research. 1  This is an interview by Li Lisha, completed in Chinese and published in 0086 Magazine in 2010. The English version was translated by Mai Corlin, published in Ou Ning, Bishan Commune: How to Start Your Own Utopia (Aarhus: OVO Press and Antipyrine, 2015).

© The Author(s) 2020 O. Ning, Utopia in Practice, Contemporary East Asian Visual Cultures, Societies and Politics, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-5791-0_3

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Through reading the book How to Start Your Own Country, I became familiar with independent micronations all over the world. Furthermore, I investigated the history of countries founded by peasants in China after 1949. The second half of the notebook is an outline of my ideas. It contains sketches envisioning the lifestyle, visual system, and architecture of this utopia. What is the Bishan Commune, actually? It’s a utopia, an idea of co-living. Even though it’s only an idea in a notebook, it’s a possibility that might be realized. For example, if I rent or buy a house in Bishan, I’ll go and live there first and slowly “lure” some of my own friends, including designers, writers, and so on, to come and stay as well. This rural community will primarily be composed of intellectuals, writers, and artists who are interested in the countryside and who reflect on rural issues. Everybody will be living together and working together. There will, for example, be a film group making documentaries and a “Bishan Bookstore” specializing in publishing books about the countryside. And of course there will be even larger-scale activities. This is a dream, but not one that’s too hard to realize. Will this idea simply remain on paper? In other words, is it just the battle plan of an armchair strategist? By no means, I’ll realize it step by step. After reading the ideas on my blog, some people have said: This is a wonderful idea, but if you make it a reality it’ll become uninteresting. But of course I want to make it a reality! And, of course, it’ll be very hard to realize. I need support in the form of resources and manpower, and I’ll need to think up ways to attain that. How will the Bishan Commune develop in the future? Last year I and two of my friends who have already bought a house and settled in Bishan wanted to buy an acre of open land near the village, at the foot of the mountains, and we had already cleared it with the local county secretary of Yi County. But because I was too busy working, the project was temporarily suspended. I’ve always wanted to set up a base there, to gather materials about local village architecture and do activities related to rural reconstruction, combining culture and the countryside. This isn’t just an ideal, it’s realistic. Next year I’ll be the curator of the international design exhibition for Chengdu Biennale, and I want the Bishan Commune to participate in the exhibition. Then I can use these ideas to organize some things in the Bishan area, including architectural models, a flag, a passport, clothing, and so on. During the production process, I’ve invited some people to go to Bishan and do some smaller-scale activities. The project will begin with these activities, and as its influence expands and

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more and more people know about it, there might be some people who would like to move there. Why did you choose Bishan as the site of your experiment in “nation-building”? I don’t like that phrase—a “nation” or “country” is connected to a system of government. The Bishan Commune can recruit members, doesn’t have a territory, doesn’t have a system of government, and doesn’t have a leader. It’s different from a country, it’s a utopia. The Bishan Commune’s name in English is “Bishan Commune,” but in Chinese “commune” (gongshe) is not a good word, so in Chinese I changed it to “community” (gongtongti). The concept of “commune” in English, for example the “Paris Commune,” has its roots in anarchist thought. A “commune” constitutes an autonomous unit, and the “Paris Commune” involved exactly this form of autonomous politics. Huizhou-style houses are comfortable places to live; they’re several hundred-year-old local-style dwellings from the Ming and Qing dynasties. The Huizhou countryside is typical of the countryside south of the Yangtze river, rich in historical resources, with strong social legacies. Many famous people came from this area, including Dai Zhen, Hu Shih, and many more. Bishan Village is surrounded by mountains and streams. The landscape is beautiful, and it’s right at the foot of Mount Huangshan. Speaking as an educated person, is the Bishan Commune the incarnation of your political ideals of forming communities? In the course of my research, I summarized my activities and why I’ve always been interested in creating communities. I recorded my trajectory over the past few years and realized that a lot of my work was connected to this idea of community formation. You can say that this is a kind of political interest, because politics is about how people live together, how they organize, and how they balance the various resources within a community. This is also a form of political practice, but it’s a moderate proposition; it doesn’t take anything as a enemy; it’s just a wish to one day live according to one’s own ideals, and make society a little better. Why do I call myself an anarchist? It’s because I already dread party fractions. I think there’s nothing new in party politics. As far as China’s politics today go, everyone hopes for a multiparty system, hopes that another party will arise and replace the ruling party. I don’t think this hope is of any use. If a new party were to emerge, it would still have its own interests. This model of party politics doesn’t work in the first place. Anarchism stands in opposition to that kind of model.

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Does anarchism oppose the current government? Ou Ning: Anarchism isn’t the enemy of the present government. Rather, it provides an alternative outside the existing government. In my understanding, anarchism is divided into many schools. Some advocate moral practice and self-discipline, others take certain actions. “Direct Action,” which is a kind of resistance movement, different from electoral politics, diplomacy, negotiation, protests, or arbitration, is an important idea within radical anarchism. For example, during the anti-World Trade Organization (WTO) demonstrations, the anarchists of Seattle surrounded the representatives of the global WTO meeting so that they couldn’t convene the meeting, which led to a clash with the police. I’ve also become very interested in “Direct Action” lately, but in China the space for practicing “Direct Action” is very narrow. So my current ideas fall very far from mainstream society. I want to establish my own ideal society, to provide an alternative to current society—one that’s not opposition but co-existence. Is this a form of escapism? It’s a moderate approach; it’s not an escape from the world. I’m not going to the countryside to avoid things; I’m going there to rebuild something, to focus on the more severe problems in Chinese society. How can Chinese rural society be a “land of the peach blossoms” when the reality of rural China is so difficult? What is the relationship between the local peasants in Bishan Village and your Bishan Commune? If the locals want to participate, they’re welcome to. We don’t oppose them, we’d like to cooperate with them. For example, with the work of James Yen in the 1930s, he wanted to do mass education in Ding County in Hebei Province. Mass education is also a part of our work. The Credo of Rural Reconstruction that James Yen articulated is especially convincing, one of which is: Begin with what is already there, begin with what the peasants already know, don’t impose a new system of knowledge on them, but begin with the knowledge they already have and slowly provide them with new things. Yen wanted to wake the strength of the people. This isn’t simple philanthropy; you need to integrate with them, because boundaries exist between intellectuals and villagers. James Yen won the support of many of the peasants. After 1949, he pledged allegiance neither to Chiang Kai-shek nor to Mao Zedong, but went to the Philippines to set up the International Institute of Rural Reconstruction, which still operates to this day, after more than sixty  years, training a lot of people to do rural

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reconstruction work in Asia, Africa, and South America. It’s an international enterprise.2 Why do you emphasize the continued use of old ancestral halls to worship the ideological forefathers of anarchism and rural reconstruction in the Bishan Commune? What’s the meaning of this? I think that to understand these ideas, we need to look toward history, because the thoughts of humankind are all mutually related. Whether you want to emphasize it or not, today everything is intimately connected with history. Ancestral halls were once very important public spaces in the Chinese countryside, but now the public life of many rural areas has been neglected for years, and these kinds of public spaces have vanished. We want to reinvigorate public life in rural areas, and moreover we attach great importance to history, to James Yen and Peter Kropotkin—the two people who influenced me the most—and express our esteem for our ideological predecessors. We plan to establish holidays like James Yen Memorial Day, as well as a Harvest Festival. How do you plan to reinvigorate public life through the Bishan Commune? During the yearly harvest festival and James Yen Memorial Day, we’ll have a lot of activities: parades, film screenings, and other events in the village, and we’ll invite a lot of people from outside. We’ll do the same kinds of activities I’m already doing, just change the location to the countryside and focus on the realities of rural life. Furthermore, we can hold wedding ceremonies in ancestral halls. First, we’ll consult the classics for the details of the wedding ceremony, then we’ll renew the entire ritual to set an example. Through the setting of examples, we can revive the rituals of the public life of rural society. How should we understand the notions of and the relations between anarchism, utopia, and community? The classical anarchist Kropotkin advocated “mutual aid,” which is a very significant characteristic of rural life. In Ding County in Hebei

2  The Credo of Rural Reconstruction by James Yen: “(1) Go to the people; (2) Live among them; (3) Learn from them; (4) Plan with them; (5) Work with them; (6) Start with what they know; (7) Build on what they have; (8) Teach by showing, learn by doing; (9) Not a showcase, but a pattern; (10) Not odds and ends, but a system; (11) Not piecemeal, but integrated approach; (12) Not to conform, but to transform; Not relief, but release.” Quoted from the statement of International Institute of Rural Reconstruction: https://iirr.org/ about-us/our-credo-and-logo/.

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province, when Hsieh Ying-chun3 taught the peasants to build houses, he once again brought the distribution of society’s workforce into play. For example, if your family wants to build a house, then another family will help build it for free, because when the time comes that the other family wants to build a house, your family will return the favor. The exchange of labor is a very important feature of “mutual aid,” and in this way we can avoid the use of money. It’s in rural society that the social model of “mutual aid” is actually the best preserved. Also, “mutual aid” is a core concept in anarchism. Anarchism argues that there is no need for government, because everybody lives together, helps each other, and there is no money. It’s really a very beautiful idea, and very utopian. There are many kinds of utopias. Because it’s related to many things I’ve been reflecting on over the years, my project has a direct focus. From researching the urban, I’ve slowly turned my focus toward rural areas, because I think that the urbanization movements of China, and of all Asia, are too intense. Excessive urbanization will cause a lot of problems. Rural areas will be completely neglected. They’ll become empty, and ways of living will become more and more homogeneous. Everyone will live in cities. So through imagining this ideal, I hope to address these problems, reflecting on them and attempting to solve them. The two forefathers of the Bishan Commune, Yen and Kropotkin, each represent one of its core ideals: Ruralism and Anarchism. What’s Ruralism? I coined a new English term, “Ruralism,” which is the opposite of “Urbanism.” It emphasizes rural areas, the diversity of human life, and the significance of agriculture and ecology within society, and regards rural issues as a very important social problem worthy of investigation. On the one hand you want to “form a community based on the rural,” and on the other hand you attach quite a bit of importance to Internet platforms, including recruitment of commune members online. There doesn’t seem to be much of a link between the Internet and the land. What possible connections do you see between them?

3  Hsiaeh Ying-chun is an architect from Taiwan, who designed and reconstructed houses for the victims of the 1999 Chi-Chi earthquake in Taiwan and the victims of the 2008 Wenchuan earthquake in Sichuan Province. He also designed the ecological toilets for the villages in Ding County, Hebei Province. He developed a model of “collaborative construction” as a way to strengthen the relationships between villagers.

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“To form a community based on the rural,” means that we make our home in the countryside, we can farm, reflect on agricultural issues, the peasants and the rural. We don’t have a notion of proprietary rights over the land; we don’t want to own land. Under the current system in China, in theory it’s not even possible to sell or buy land in rural areas; you can only rent. It’s very difficult to actually get to own a piece of land, because the land is state-owned. The Internet is just a new, effective tool to engage in the organization of society. To recruit like-minded people to participate in the commune is based on the idea of “Sharism.” The digital age has precipitated an assault on the concept of property rights, including intellectual property rights. Problems of land ownership continue to be the main cause of various social upheavals: The state owns the land, everybody vies for control over the land, and a lot of social contradictions erupt. So we want to abandon control and ownership of property rights and advocate sharing. You say that the Bishan Commune doesn’t have a leader. I don’t think this is possible. As the founder of this project, won’t you definitely become its central leadership force? In the beginning it will be like that, it will depend on me to drive it forward. After the communal life has been firmly established, we’ll set up a democratic decision-making process, and I won’t be the one who decides. Your community flag and logo make heavy use of English. Yes, that’s because when the time comes, we want to attract members from all over the world. The passport of the Bishan Commune is a good imitation. Is it intended as a parody of other passports? (Laughing) The passport doesn’t have any international functions; it’s only used for personal identification with the cause. Because we want to recruit members, we need rituals, and one of them is this passport. It signifies that you’re a member of the Bishan Commune. Our rituals also include establishing special holidays. All of these rituals are needed to create a coherent identity. Will the Bishan Commune become your life’s work? It depends on how the project develops. It faces not only financial problems but the limitations of the political system. This aspect of the project is still really sensitive. The worst that can happen is that my vision won’t be realized.

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The Possibility of a Rural Revival4 How are your friends who live in Bishan Village doing? Han Yu and Zheng Xiaoguang live a rural life, and they are very well known for it. The operation of their homestay does not advertise, so they depend on guests for a word of mouth recommendations. Now it seems to cost around 700–800 yuan for a night, but better rooms are more expensive. Why locate such a utopian idea in Bishan Village? Bishan was the ideal place to implement the idea, but it could also have been done in other places. On this trip to Chengdu, I took over the planning work for the International Design Exhibition of the 2011 Chengdu Biennale, and I want to include the Bishan Commune—which the local government especially likes. Chongqing and Chengdu in particular are promoting urban-rural integration, so they were very interested in the Bishan Project when the idea was introduced to the Publicity Department of the Chengdu Municipal Committee, the hosts of the Chengdu Biennale. The exhibition will be held in September, and I would definitely like to have something there. After the Spring Festival, I will go to Chengdu’s surrounding villages to see if there’s a suitable place. Do things like the “passports” designed for the Bishan Commune make the local government feel uneasy? It was just a drawing in a notebook when it was thought up. It’s easy to imagine it, on paper. When it was implemented, however, some adjustments needed to be made because of difficulties. Besides, the passport is symbolic, not to take abroad. What if someone used it to go abroad? Well, that would be more interesting. How do you recruit members of the Bishan Commune? People can come to join and to live together—but the cost of doing so is very high, and probably not many people are willing to do it. So, it can also be a symbolic gesture. If you agree with the ideas about lifestyle, then you can apply online. Is it a statement?

4  This is an interview by Xu Xiao, completed in Chinese and published in City Pictorial 272 (January 2011). The  English version was  translated by Matt Turner and  Haiying Weng in 2019.

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Yes. If you agree with this lifestyle, or promote the idea in the place that you live, we can issue you a “passport.” Is your personal ideal that all Commune members need to follow, making you like the spiritual leader of a utopia? Ideas are discussed and developed—don’t think of the Bishan Commune as a very tight-knit organization. As long as we are similar enough and have common ground, we can try to live together. I won’t ask members to be anarchists, and spiritual leaders are exactly what I oppose. There is no authority, no party, no government—anyone can participate. The most important thing is to develop the spirit of mutual aid, which is the most important principle of anarchism. But in your plan, the ancestral hall is designed to be the “Pantheon” of the Bishan Commune. Ancestral temples are authoritative things in China. I just value it as a physical building and for the public space it gives us. The original content has all been extracted. Ancestral halls do connote a kind of ancestor worship—but I think that can be very good, as blood ties are very important to the stability of Chinese society. Actually, I like ancestral halls because many of them are abandoned now, and they can be repurposed for new uses. When an idea is realized, what other design aspects need to be addressed? I’ll get Hsieh Ying-chun involved; he has rich experience in rural architectural projects. When that time comes, we’ll work together to study the landmass and the natural environment of the village, use local materials, and make some experimental buildings. In addition, we’ll also do activities like an agricultural expo, a harvest festival, make documentary films, and open a rural bookstore—all of which need planning and design. Any utopia also needs some visual elements to consolidate its identity, so we need to design some interesting things like passports. Of course, there are also clothes and other things for living to design. Are these things designed for intellectuals going to the countryside, or for local farmers? Hsieh’s relief work in Ding County, Hebei Province, or in the Tibetan areas of Sichuan Province, can answer this question. As a professional architect, he only provides a structural model for the local rural areas, and then mobilizes the villagers to build by exchanging labor, not cash. That stimulates the autonomy of the villagers—so the buildings become an open architecture that can continue to be enriched with personality. His work has gone beyond the role of an architect to an organizer of the workforce—it’s on the level of social action. When intellectuals work in the

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countryside, they do not have to force things into the hands of the villagers, but work according to what they already have. This is what James Yen said for a long time. It is very important to emphasize that the main body of rural reconstruction must be villagers, but is also open to other people and groups. What do you think of the current situation for China’s rural areas and villagers? The reality in China’s rural areas is very cruel. My own hometown is in the countryside. Every time I go back, my feeling is that the countryside is almost bankrupt. No one is farming, the village is full of old people, young people and middle-aged people have gone elsewhere to work, the original houses have collapsed into ruins, many of the bustling scenes of life in the countryside are gone—what we see is a desolate life. It is getting worse than before. When I was a child, I was already very desperate about the poverty and backwardness in the countryside, so I studied and worked hard to “root out.” Now I’ve come full circle and have begun to “root in.” What do you think are the causes of this phenomenon? The land system and the social management system developed out of it. The land in the countryside is owned by the collective rather than the individual. Why? Because before the founding of “New China,” many farmers needed to be mobilized to participate in the revolution. At that time, the promise was that land would be divided after victory. After the establishment of the country, it had to be realized, at least on the level of government, so “collective ownership of rural land” was specially designated. But at the stage of urbanization, farmers cannot share the fruits of urbanization. They have land, but they can’t enter the market and have no bargaining power. The popular values of society are to live in the city and to be successful. The popular view is to discriminate against agriculture. Since the countryside is at the bottom, everyone wants to climb up to a higher class—so they leave the countryside. The Bishan Commune was designed after realizing these problems? I don’t like countries, I don’t like governments, I don’t like parties. The Bishan Commune is a kind of utopian experiment in living together. Have you ever been to a utopian community to do research? Yuanmingyuan and Songzhuang5 are both places where artists live together, but that’s not what I want. They stay together to keep warm. My idea is an intentional choice. 5

 Two artist-villages on the outskirts of Beijing in the 1990s and 2000s.

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What fieldwork have you done? I’ve been to many places—such as the rural areas of Hebei, Henan, Jiangsu, Anhui, Fujian, Yunnan, and Sichuan, and to Taiwan’s agricultural regions of Yilan, Changhua, Meinung, Taitung, as well to as Japan and Thailand. That kind of research is ongoing. In addition, I’m reading a lot of books about rural society and agriculture. One book I just read was Liang Hong’s China in Liang Village, which is very good. My reading is very scattered. For example, I read about the history of the rural land system, village governance, rural social movements, rural architecture, agricultural capitalism and the food crisis, a biography of James Yen, Fei Xiaotong’s (Fei Hsiao-Tun’s) classic theory of rural social research, and more. Of course, there are plenty of literary works about the farmers in rural China that I’ve read, such as Liu Liangcheng’s prose on philosophical thinking about the countryside, which is very beautiful and moving. But we all know that the countryside is not so beautiful. As we all know, and Liu Liangcheng said as well, xiangcun (“pastoral place”) and nongcun (“laboring place”) embody two different concepts. xiangcun is an imaginary place but nongcun is a cruel reality. Many people begin to look for the xiangcun of their dreams, but they find the nongcun on their way.

The Reconstruction of the Agricultural Homeland6 Rural Homeland and Urban Enclave I was born and brought up in the countryside of Guangdong Province, and was a typical country kid. When I was a child, I hated the countryside very much because it was so poor, the environment was so bad, and there was no opportunity. So I studied very hard, and was able to test out of the rural school and into the county school, and from there to a city-level secondary school, and then on to university—slowly moving further and further away from my hometown. It was not until I had settled down in the city and found my place, when, as I grew older, I began to realize that poverty, which I hated when I was young, was not so terrible. Instead, it could be understood as a kind of wealth and one of life’s great motivators. 6  This is a  record of  the  speech delivered at  Hunan University on  June 12, 2011. The Chinese transcript was documented by the Changsha Aoba Reading Club, the English version was translated by Matt Turner and Haiying Weng in 2019.

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So, when I think about my hometown like that, it’s completely different in my mind. I begin to rediscover the value of the countryside and begin the process of searching my roots in the agricultural homeland. Why “agricultural homeland”? It is because, during the entire process of human social development, the process of modernization has only 200 years of history. In Asia, many countries were agricultural before they began the process of modernization—agriculture was their foundation. So, from the historical track of social development, we have a sort of nostalgia for agriculture amid the present-day process of urbanization. Today, agricultural areas are mostly bankrupt, and the kind of rural lives we experienced growing up are becoming less and less common. That’s why I use the word “homeland” to describe agriculture. It was only after I settled in the city that I began to rediscover the value of the countryside. In 2003, I began to do research on San Yuan Li, an urban village in Guangzhou, and made a documentary about it. Urban villages are a typical phenomenon that exists during the process of urbanization in China. In the late 1970s, Guangzhou began to reform and open up early, and its economic activity became particularly active. But the space of the city was insufficient, so it needed to expand outward. The government continued to expropriate land from rural areas in the suburbs for urban development. As we all know, there are two kinds of land in the countryside—one is nongdi (farmland), the other is the zhaijidi (homestead). A farmland is mainly for agricultural production, whereas a homestead is mainly where farmers build their houses. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, the Guangzhou government expropriated farmland in the suburbs. But it did not transfer farmers’ household registrations to urban household registrations, nor did it provide employment opportunities for farmers, only allowing them to retain their homesteads. So when the farmland around the homestead was built into high-rise buildings, the villages were surrounded, forming the so-called phenomenon of urban villages. After the countryside was incorporated into the city, land prices rose, farmers did not transform into legal residents of the city, and there were very few jobs—so they had to rent out the houses they built as homesteads to make a living. As a result, a large number of migrants live in urban villages (as the rent for houses built by farmers is relatively low), and the administrative system for urban villages in China occupies a very peculiar gray area. The administrative control over villages has disintegrated, and they have not been incorporated into the city’s subdistrict offices, so they are not governed by either city or rural administration. These places have

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become very convenient for migrants to live in, as nobody comes to check their temporary residence permits. Large numbers of people gathering in such places cause many problems, such as overcrowding, as well as safety issues since many residents there are also unemployed. On the one hand, the urban village is the result of typical contradictions in the process of urbanizing China’s land, and at the same time, it reflects the problem of the inverted relationship between urban and rural areas in China. Originally, my starting point was to study communities like these with high population densities and large numbers of poor people. But slowly, I found that these so-called slums or urban villages had considerable relationships: with the bankruptcy of the countryside, and with farmers who went to cities to become migrant workers. So I was led to rural research from urban research. In 2005, I went to Beijing to make a documentary about Dashilar, a typical low-income area in Beijing. Its problems were similar to those of the urban villages in Guangzhou, but for different reasons. After the 1990s, because the focus of Beijing’s development moved eastward, all the investment was transferred to Chaoyang District, leading to an imbalance of economic development among the administrative regions and the decline of the southern portion of the city. Because there were many ancient buildings in the southern portion of the city, and many policies of historical protection had limited the space for its economic development, Dashilar had become a typical low-income area there. Because of these two research projects, I attracted the attention of many urban planners and architects. Through the Taiwanese architect, Hsieh Ying-chun, I began to learn about James Yen, a pioneer of rural reconstruction in China in the 1930s and 1940s, who went to Yale University and Princeton University to study during World War I. At that time, the battlefields in Europe needed to be cleaned by people, so France needed around 100,000 peasants from China to clean up the corpses from the battlefields there. When these Chinese workers arrived in Europe, they had no language skills and felt very depressed. Dr. Yen then volunteered to go to Europe to run newspapers for these migrant workers and teach them literacy. Finally, a farmer donated the money he earned from working in Europe and cleaning corpses to Dr. Yen, because he felt that Dr. Yen’s civilian education work was very meaningful, and made these laborers literate. He also hoped that Dr. Yen would have the opportunity to return to China in the future to continue to do the same work. Dr. Yen was moved by the farmer. In the 1920s, he took his family with him and chose Zhaicheng Village, in Ding County, Hebei Province, to start his

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famous experiment there, where he engaged in mass education and rural construction. Agrarian Asia At that time, the experiment attracted a large number of intellectuals, including many university professors and college students, who rode donkeys to Ding County to do mass education and rural reconstruction work together. I learned from James Yen’s biography that rural reconstruction in China has had a great tradition since the 1930s. Coupled with the efforts of the contemporary Wen Tiejun, I am most interested in the work in this field. So given the chance, I always wanted to share my thoughts on this with everyone. You can read about it in the first issue of Chutzpah!, where I edited a special feature called “Agrarian Asia.” The feature concerned the history and reality of rural areas in different countries throughout Asia, and how intellectuals leave the cities and return to the countryside to engage in rural reconstruction—making an important social movement. The reason for using the title “Agrarian Asia” is that I particularly like the Chinese translation yaxiya of “Asia” that was used during the Republic of China, as it has strong pre-modern characteristics. The socalled pre-modern is a stage before society begins its transformation from agricultural society to industrial society, and begins its process of modernization. So I think it is very appropriate to use the old term yaxiya for “Asia,” with its pre-modern characteristics, to express the same agricultural culture and farming culture shared by all Asian countries. In addition, we particularly wanted to express the magazine’s broad international vision, so we paid attention to rural areas in India, Japan, Thailand, Taiwan, and mainland China. The most important article in the first issue of Chutzpah! was from Arundhati Roy, the famous Indian woman writer who wrote a very famous article in 1997 supporting the anti-dam movement in India. The 30,000-word article is very passionate, denouncing the Indian government for building a dam in pursuit of gross domestic product (GDP), borrowing money from the World Bank, becoming a puppet of the World Bank, and leaving the whole country heavily indebted. The government afterward transferred its debt to the farmers, leading to the bankruptcy of the countryside along the riverbank, and leaving farmers with no settlements—causing many social problems. Roy is a writer with a strong sense of social responsibility. In my opinion, if I ask how literature can intervene in society and reality, Roy has given us

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a very good example. She is now a public intellectual who is a great headache for the Indian government, often going to the mountains of northern India to support Maoist farmers there. Some mining areas in the mountains of northern India have been purchased by multinational corporations and large domestic companies, which predatorily exploit and infringe upon the land rights of local farmers. As the Communist Party of India was heavily influenced by Mao Zedong’s armed struggle, many farmers in northern India began to turn into Maoists, picking up guns and fighting against giant corporations—and Roy often went deep into these places to support them. At the same time, she wrote articles in English in well-known international newspapers to garner support for these disadvantaged farmers in India and to help give them a voice internationally. Because India is a very important country in Asia, we gave it a very important place in the first issue of Chutzpah!. At the same time, we were also concerned about Thailand. I went to Chiang Mai to do an interview about The Land project, and then wrote an article mainly examining the artistic experiments of Thai artists in rural areas.7 In the countryside of Chiang Mai, Rirkrit Tiravanija and Kamin Lertchaiprasert have bought a piece of land to carry out the experiment of non-property rights, that is, they do not claim ownership of the land, everyone can share it, everyone can use it. According to a Buddhist agricultural concept invented by a Thai farmer Chalaoy Keawkong, the artists laid out the land according to the structure of human body, cultivated it, dug ponds, and carried out cross-organic cultivation to form a healthy ecosystem. Every year, students and artists from all over the world were invited to grow rice and herbs and do yoga. They also invited many internationally renowned artists and architects to build a small experimental house for each person with a land area of two meters by four meters. The Land Project has a great reputation, and its starting point was a critique of the current art institutions. After my experience there, however, I pretty much thought it was a place for artists to entertain themselves, and not necessarily for the local people—although it did have a strong influence in the art world. In Chutzpah!, we also introduced the Japanese documentary master Shinsuke Ogawa whom I have enjoyed very much over the years, and his work on the countryside of Japan. Mr. Ogawa was a leftist youth in the 1960s, reading Das Kapital and Mao Zedong’s works. In the 1960s, 7  See Ou Ning, “Agrarian Utopia: An Artistic Experiment in Chiang Mai,” in the English companion Peregrine of Chutzpah! 1 (April 2011): 3–13.

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when Tokyo’s Narita Airport was built, several farmers opposed building an airport runway at their doorstep, and then began to fight against it. Slowly, Japanese left-wing students began to join the battle, expanding the Sanrizuka Struggle into an influential political event in Japan in the 1960s. The Sanrizuka Struggle was an Asian response to the events of May 1968 in Europe. At the time, Ogawa took his camera with him to join the fierce struggle. He fought alongside the farmers and recorded everything with his camera. Later, he made the famous documentary Summer in Narita (Nihon Kaiho sensen: Sanrizuka no natsu, 1968) That experience taught Ogawa about the enormous energy of Japanese farmers, and from that point on his documentary work began to focus on the countryside. He found a village in Yamagata Prefecture, Japan, and took his crew to stay there, where they rented some rice fields and began to learn to grow rice alongside the farmers. He said to the camera crew, “Let’s not turn on the camera, let’s learn to grow rice first. When you’ve learned how to bend down and transplant rice seedlings like the farmers in the village, when your body is so hard that the dragonflies will stop at your bent waist, it will prove that you’re almost like a farmer. Then we will begin shooting.”8 Ogawa was a natural when it came to working with farmers. He and James Yen are two of the great rural practitioners in Asia. They respected farmers most and attached great importance to farmers’ subjectivity. Besides introducing India, Thailand, and Japan, we also introduced Taiwan. In fact, in the Greater China region, Taiwan is a place where agricultural traditions are well preserved, and intellectuals have played an important role in the process. The physical distance between urban and rural areas in Taiwan is relatively short, as Taiwan is a very small island, unlike the distance between rural and urban areas in mainland China. In my impression, intellectuals have to pay a great price to go to the countryside, giving up everything from the city to endure the hard conditions of the countryside. So I visited Yilan, Changhua, Meinung, and Tainan with admiration for Taiwanese intellectuals. When I was there, they happened to be launching a campaign against the Rural Regeneration Ordinance of Ma Ying-jieou’s government. In fact, the situation was somewhat similar to our situation in mainland China. Presently, China is also promoting the construction of a new countryside. In fact, the new rural construction policy is very good, because the central government has begun to pay 8  Sadao Yamane ed., Shinsuke Ogawa: Harvesting the Cinema, trans. Feng Yan (Shanghai: Shanghai People’s Press, 2007).

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attention to rural issues. But when the policy is implemented, there are many problems. Many investors and developers often use the slogan of “building a new socialist countryside” to enclose land there. They negotiate with farmers, saying things like they will build a highly secure and surveilled community, and that farmers will be able to move in if they sell their land. After enclosure, a fancy resort is built. This so-called new rural construction basically serves the city and does not change the reality that the city plunders the countryside. The same happened in Taiwan, where the government issued a Rural Regeneration Ordinance to further allocate Taiwan’s arable land under the banner of resolving agricultural problems. Originally, the cultivated land was divided into four parcels, but later it was further cut into eight or sixteen. Allowing the area of cultivated land to become smaller meant that it was more likely to enter the market, being more conducive for the land to be sold. Taiwan’s intellectuals believed that this disguised policy of selling rural land to serve urban holidays and tourism had seriously damaged farming culture, so they launched a campaign against the Rural Regeneration Ordinance. Wu Yinning, a Taiwanese writer at the core of the movement, went to negotiate with Ma Ying-jeou as a representative elected by the “Taiwan Rural Front.” Like Arundhati Roy, I think she is an excellent example of literary intervention in society. Her father is Wu Sheng, a great poet in Taiwan. Many of his poems are in Taiwan’s textbooks, and the first issue of Chutzpah! published a poem by him about his rural life in manuscript form. After completing his junior college in Changhua, he never left his hometown, teaching, farming, and writing. He wrote much locally flavored poetry. Wu Sheng and Wu Yinning, two rural writers, are very important voices in forming Taiwan’s local consciousness and defending Taiwan’s agricultural tradition. When I went to Taiwan, I found that the agricultural landscape there was very well preserved. I could hardly see any fallow land! Crops were basically cross-cultivated, continuing small-scale farmers’ deep and intensive farming tradition. Therefore, the practice of Taiwan’s intellectuals is worth learning from. Yet it also makes me feel that we need to act, and not simply remain at the level of speaking. How to Start Your Own Utopia So I was looking for opportunities to do something when I was thinking about rural issues over the past five years. In 2010, I did a research on

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utopias. One of the books I looked at, called How to Start Your Own Country, was written in the 1970s and is currently available in Chinese only in Taiwan. The book is very interesting. The author Erwin S. Strauss is a science fiction fan, and in it, he gathered information on more than 300 countries established by individuals, all utopias, all of which are practices rather than ideas. He concludes that there are five ways to build your own country. Some are commercial, some are pirate-like, some are virtual, and some are experimental living practices. When I read the book, I thought that the founding of countries by individuals was actually do-it-­ yourself (DIY) politics; in fact, too many countries have gone through long histories, with countless people and numerous interest groups accumulating to form an extensive template, with the result that they deviate away from innovation and become stagnant. Individual statehood can be either a flight of fancy or a serious endeavor. It can provide a variety of political forms for the world, but can also provide a meaningful reflection and exploration of human community. Here are three examples of individual statehood. The first is the “Principality of Sealand.” A couple bought a World War II offshore lighthouse off the coast of Britain and registered the place as their country, forming the “Principality of Sealand,” and calling themselves king and queen. There are no means of transportation to get there. They have to fly by helicopter. Now, they are developing tourism, and many people go there by helicopter to visit. They also sell souvenirs on Facebook to survive. This “Principality of Sealand” does not mean much to me; it is a commercial act of statehood. I am more interested in countries founded by artists. About twenty years ago, an artist group called Neue Slowenische Kunst (NSK, New Slovenian Art) was established in Slovenia, composed of different groups of artists, architects, philosophers, filmmakers, musicians, and dancers. Last year, they began issuing passports and stamps and founding the “NSK State.” Another is in Denmark. In 1967, a group of young people who advocated freedom, autonomy, and dreams inherited the spirit of the Paris Commune and issued the Christiania Declaration of Freedom. At the same time, they also established an anarchic community Fristaden Christiania (Freetown Christiania) in Copenhagen, separated from the Kingdom of Denmark and the European Union, where they advocated mutual aid and adopted a form of organization of democratic agreement without leaders. This kind of practice is actually a small-scale political practice or a kind of utopia.

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The most incredible thing is that after “Liberation,” there were many farmers in China who founded their own countries. For example, many farmers set up “states” in the Daba Mountains, such as the “Huangqing Empire of the Central Plains” and the “Wanshun Heavenly Kingdom” and so on. The “states” established by these farmers include those claiming to be kings and queens, and those claiming a palace or something like that—when some of these people took over a clinic in their small town, it became their “palace.” But many of these so-called countries were raided by the Public Security Bureau in just a few days. These things may sound like jokes at first, but at the same time it should make us feel very sad. For example, many farmers are subject to the family planning policy, so they establish a “state” to resist it. Reading about them, we can better understand how important the mass education advocated by James Yen is. I think the most important issue in China today is not to carry out education in the university system, but to carry out social education. Social education is how Dr. Yen described mass education. It enables people to have subjectivity, a more positive attitude toward life, and to respond slightly more effectively to cruel realities, rather than doing ridiculous things guided by fantastic ideas. I started to have my own ideas after doing some research on individuals founding states abroad and at home. I chose Bishan Village in Yi County, in Anhui Province, and mobilized some intellectuals to live together there for experiments in utopian living. I had some rough ideas, including that its ideological core was “Ruralism” and “Anarchism,” how it should look as well as how living should be organized, its architecture and communications. We also planned to design passports, then flags, and clothes for everyone to wear. I asked Ye Qian, a designer, to look at Shen Congwen’s Ancient Chinese Clothing Research and find elements from the clothes of farmers and intellectuals in the Eastern Jin and Han Dynasties, and to design a kind of clothing suitable for work and leisure. I personally hoped the design would be based on the high-ancient style of the robe and the sleeve of the broad gown, reflecting the practice of contemporary intellectuals to return to history and migrate to the countryside. In the village, we would have an ancestral temple to commemorate the pioneers of two ideas—one is James Yen, the other is Peter Kropotkin. If it hadn’t been for World War II and Japan’s invasion of China, James Yen’s experiment in Ding County would not have been disturbed. I believe that China would have had another face. Dr. Yen chose to go to the Philippines after 1949 and establish an International Institute of Rural

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Reconstruction there, where he summarized the Credo of Rural Reconstruction from the Republic of China. Two of them, I am particularly convinced of, are very reasonable. He said to “Start with what they know” and “Not to conform, but to transform; Not relief, but release.” The latter is very correct, because intellectuals go to the countryside, often with a mentality of helping the countryside. Like doing charity work. That way, in fact, makes farmers more dependent and makes their subjectivity more impossible to establish. So Dr. Yen believed that going to the countryside was not to relieve, but to stimulate the subjectivity of farmers and their power. Kropotkin was the founder of classical anarchism, which is the belief that government is unnecessary. Today, it is misunderstood very much in China. According to Kropotkin’s exposition, its core idea is “mutual aid.” From the view of anarchists, it is human nature to support each other. In primitive societies, when living resources were poor, people shared food and fire together. Because of later socialization, tribes grew bigger and bigger, and then tribes split into communities, communities became ethnic groups, ethnic groups became cities, and cities became countries. Therefore, it was necessary to set up a government and establish public services to solve some public problems. Because of the government and public services, you have to pay taxes, because the operation of the government depends on tax revenue for support. This form of the state in modern society is basically a social model of public service and political representation operating under a tax system. However, in rural areas, social relations can be simplified. One reason is that the populations are relatively small, and another is that a tradition of “mutual aid” is retained in rural areas. For example, if you see a person hit by a car in a city, your first reaction will be to call the police—because you have paid taxes, so this kind of thing should be managed by the police—rather than helping the person up directly. But in the countryside, seeing a lonely old man hit by a car, anyone would go to help him personally. Anarchists advocate “mutual aid,” “direct action,” and “autonomy,” and do not require the government to act as an agent. If I have any appeals to express, I don’t need a political party to represent me; I will express my appeals directly. From this point of view, anarchist society is actually a very ideal society, but it is impossible for it to prevail today. The main practice of modern society is to govern the country and cities by a tax system and public services. However, it is possible for rural areas to realize this relatively

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primitive and warmer mode of “mutual aid.” What we want to do in Bishan is to turn the ideals of ruralism and anarchism into reality. The Bishan Project Not long ago, the Guangzhou Times Museum was very interested in my ideas and invited me to do an exhibition on the Bishan Project. In the exhibition, we first introduced the location of Yi County, which is at the foot of Mount Huangshan. Bishan Village is relatively closed, compared to Xidi and Hongcun, so it is not disturbed by too many tourists. Then it showed the practice of some of my friends who lived in the countryside. I have two friends, Han Yu and Zheng Xiaoguang, who write poems. They bought an old house in the area seven or eight years ago, then began to repair it and move in. Later, they bought old oil factory, a family workshop-­ style factory that used to make rapeseed oil in Bishan, as it was abandoned. Now they are repairing it, though the main things remain unchanged, preserving its structure and appearance but adding some living facilities to provide it with basic living quarters. In fact, they have also opened up a new way to protect and revitalize old buildings. Over the last two months, we communicated with the local government of Yi County, hoping that they would cooperate with us in conducting a census of the traditional cultural heritage, such as handicraft across the whole county, and forming a database to record the names and telephone numbers of local carpenters, stone carvers, and other skilled craftsmen, so that we could let outside artists and designers work with these people to develop new products. For example, there is a famous snack cake, called Yuting Cake, in Yi County, which has a history of over 400 years. However, due to problems with packaging and other things, it has been limited to local production and consumption. We hope that designers Xiaoma and Chengzi can redesign the mold, redesign packaging, and expand sales into other cities and regions. In that way, it would increase the vitality of the rural economy, activate various traditional products of rural life, and re-enter the consumer market. We also have some artists who have very romantic notions about farming life and ancient village culture, and are very poetic. An artist named Liang Shaoji put forward a plan—the “Water Sacrifice.” Because there is a lot of bamboo in the Yi County area, he wanted to make a raft with it, engrave some ancient poems he found in Yi County’s local chronicles on the raft, and then let the raft float along the Zhang River, across the village

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and past a peach orchard outside the village. We have also adopted such initiatives, although they do not activate the economy. The off-site exhibition in Guangzhou was only the first step of our Bishan Project; the second step is that we will do an on-site event called the “Bishan Harvestival.” For example, in the village ancestral hall, poets will teach Chinese classical and contemporary poetry to the children of the village and then put the works of twenty artists who participated in public spaces in the countryside, such as granaries and village halls, for exhibition. There will be open-air movies, music performances, Huangmei Opera performances, Yi County folk music, and so on. It will be very rich with activity. We hope that farmers across the whole county can participate, activating public life across the countryside. We would like to continue this “Bishan Harvestival,” and to develop more projects in the future. Questions and Answers One of my questions is about anarchist organizations. They all have common activities and interests, but their passion may be greatly magnified because of a similarity. How can we prevent that passion from turning into collective fanaticism or going to the extreme? The second question is about the Bishan Commune. What real benefits will it bring to local villagers? With more and more people going there, including tourists, what kind of negative impact will it have? Political fanaticism has always needed to be avoided, and people’s mentalities tend to follow the herd—but sober anarchists must have a rather calm and objective attitude about things. They are very particular about their own cultivation, and formulate certain precepts and disciplines to regulate their behavior. They have high demands for their own morality. So the most important way to avoid political fanaticism is independent thinking. As for the potential benefits of the Bishan Project, the local government is now very supportive of our idea. They think that the project can make Bishan Village famous, which as locals understand it is very beneficial. It is easy to make Bishan well known, but how to touch the core spirit of rural reconstruction and establish the subjectivity of villagers is very difficult. I’m also worried that Bishan Village is becoming more and more famous and tourism is growing and growing—which is something we can’t stop. Many utopian or collective communities go through this process, such as Greenwich Village in New York or 798 in Beijing. Beijing 798 started as a place for artists themselves to go and make their studios,

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but when it became more and more famous and tourism grew more and more, it became very commercial and the artists had to leave. Rural reconstruction also has the same problem: we cannot avoid great social enthusiasm, and cannot prevent the annexation by tourism or the culture industries. If that happens, if it turns out to be something contrary to our original intentions, that’s when we leave Bishan to open another working base elsewhere. We see that most of the people returning to the countryside have made such a choice after they are thirty years old and have very clear life goals. Today’s school education still pushes young people into cities, from villages to small cities, from small cities to big cities. Do you have any plans to promote the return of young people to work and live in the countryside? There are three representative figures, three systems, and three working methods in the rural reconstruction led by Wen Tiejun. Chutzpah! has a detailed record of the three working methods as represented by He Huili, Qiu Jiansheng, and Liu Xiangbo. For example, Liu Xiangbo’s work is mainly to mobilize college students to go to countryside and participate in rural reconstruction. He provides training for college students and links them to the villages that receive them. When I was in Lankao, in Henan Province, I met some sophomores and juniors from the Sannong Research Society of Henan University. It was winter at that time. Seven or eight girls slept on the floor of the dormitory. It was very cold. At that time, I was filming them and was moved to tears. I was not enthusiastic about some of the ways that college students worked in the countryside, because they, the Sannong Research Society, required that students who participate live like they are in the military, getting up at 6:00 a.m., going out to exercise, and then singing “red songs.” The work of rural reconstruction had been transformed into the very rigid and joyless life of an ascetic monk. Of course, you can also say that they are there to be tempered, but I really think that work for rural reconstruction should be “happy rural construction,” and it needs to accept different strengths, giving us a broader platform.

CHAPTER 4

Bishan Harvestival

Go to the Countryside!1 Preface Bishan Village, in Yi County, Anhui Province, is one of many famous ancient villages in the Huizhou area. One can get there in around an hour’s drive from Huangshan International Airport. There, “the mountains are high, the fields are vast, delicate paths are stitched across the fields, the walls are white, and the black roof tiles are lined up like scales.” Its total area is 58.5 square kilometers. There is the Peijun Garden from the Song Dynasty, the Book and Plow Gardens from the Ming Dynasty, and the Cloud Gate Pagoda from the Qing Dynasty—as well as hundreds of well-maintained residences and ancestral halls from the Ming and Qing dynasties. Historically, the village has held a prominent position—according to the records of the Xin’an Annals, in the twelfth year of Kaihuang in the Sui Dynasty (592 AD), Xin’an County was changed into Shezhou Prefecture, and the prefecture’s government was located in Bishan.

1  This is the  full text from  the  brochure of  the  2011 Bishan Harvestival, completed in Chinese by Ou Ning with other authors. In order to preserve the integrity of the literature, the full texts were translated to English by Matt Turner and Haiying Weng in 2019 and included here, and the names of the authors responsible for each part are indicated.

© The Author(s) 2020 O. Ning, Utopia in Practice, Contemporary East Asian Visual Cultures, Societies and Politics, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-5791-0_4

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Huizhou used to be a prefecture; it is now rich in natural resources, rural architectural resources, and historical and human resources—a rare sample of diverse human life. In the crowded metropolis, the local blood and clan systems have disintegrated—but they have survived here because they are protected by the natural surroundings and the distance to the metropolis. However, the existing single development model for tourism does not care about the protection and development of rural natural ecology, nor does it devote itself to the inheritance and revival of traditional agriculture. It only allows more tourists to visit the area and watch lifeless samples, not arousing participation in rural reconstruction. At the same time, it also fails the imaginations of the people who come to visit the Chinese countryside, greatly reducing any affection they might have felt for it. This is more distressing than the natural decline that villages face. In the next five to ten years, returning to rural life and anti-­urbanization will become a trend for urban residents in China. People are tired of the hustle and bustle of the city and want to start practicing a new agricultural lifestyle—or restoring it. To this end, we plan to create the “Bishan Commune” at Bishan Village, which began in worry over agricultural traditions and a critique of over-urbanization. It is about intellectuals returning home from the city, returning to history, taking up the cause of rural reconstruction from the beginning of the century, launching a communal life in rural areas, and practicing mutual aid. It is about reducing the prevailing dependence on public services in cities; contributing wisdom in various ways toward rural politics, economy, and culture; re-energizing rural areas; and re-establishing the concept of an agricultural homeland. In view of the compelling reality of today’s rural society, we decided to put this idea into practice. As an integral part of the Bishan Project, we are holding the Bishan Harvestival in Bishan Village from August 26 to 28, 2011. The harvest festival (fengnianji) was originally a sacrificial ritual for China’s traditional agricultural society, including prayer to the ancestors and gods, prayer for the successful harvest of crops, and wishing that the next year be a bumper crop of grain and flourishing for both livestock and human beings. This year there will be banquets, singing and dancing, games and bonfire parties following the ceremony. We borrow the ancient ritual name of the fengnianji in order to restore and rebuild one of the long-standing rural public activities and give it new connotations. At the same time, we also regard the Bishan Harvestival as being an intersectional experiment in globalization and localization.

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The Bishan Harvestival invites artists, architects, experts in rural construction, writers, directors, designers, musicians, and local scholars who have devoted themselves to the study of local culture. In addition, we have recruited folk craftsmen and folk opera artists from Yi County and even Huizhou area to work together in public spaces, such as ancestral halls and granaries in Bishan Village, and to hold exhibitions of architecture, the design of furniture and daily necessities, visual art, and other crafts related to rural life. There will also be academic seminars by scholars of rural reconstruction and researchers of rural architecture, and performances of local operas and dances, and more. The first off-site exhibition of the Bishan Project was implemented at the Guangdong Times Art Museum from June 5 to 19, 2011. It introduced the concept “Bishan Commune: How to Start Your Utopia” in the art museum in the form of preliminary research and implementation and provided the audience a new method of artistic intervention in the rural reconstruction. Following the Bishan Harvestival, the Bishan Commune plans to participate in a special project at the International Design Exhibition of the Chengdu Biennale in September of this year, and other exhibitions at home and abroad. In 2011 and 2012, the Nanjing Art Triennale will focus on the Bishan Project as its backbone, turning it into a large-scale exhibition focusing on rural reconstruction movements around the world. According to our plans, the Bishan Harvestival will be permanently settled in Bishan Village as an annual carnival. With the ongoing deepening of the time and depth of entering local society, we will further integrate into local life and participate in local reconstruction in the coming annual large-scale gatherings, making the Bishan Harvestival a carnival that truly belongs to local villagers and that closely relates to local life. We hope to explore new possibilities in rural reconstruction in Huizhou and to develop a new model of historical preservation and cultural regeneration besides the model of urban preservation and regeneration as seen at Beijing 798 Art District and Shanghai’s Moganshan Art District. (by Ou Ning) The Bishan Village Bishan Village is located in Yi County, in old Huizhou (today’s Huangshan City). It is located at the base of Bishan Mountain, part of the Huangshan mountain range, to its north, with Yixian Basin to the south. The Jianxi

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River passes through the village from the north to the south. The village is the site of the Peijun Garden from the Song Dynasty, the Book and Plow Gardens from the Ming Dynasty, and the Cloud Gate Pagoda from the Qing Dynasty. There are more than a hundred well-preserved ancient dwellings and ancestral halls from the Ming and Qing dynasties. According to historical records, the history of Bishan Village can be traced back to 592 AD, that is, the twelfth year of Kaihuang in the Sui Dynasty. At that time, the southern area of Mount Huangshan (it was called Mount Yishan) belonged to a newly founded prefecture Shezhou, and the prefecture seated its government in Bishan. It is a famous ancient village in Huizhou, where the Wang family is from. The Wang family members of Bishan are descendants of Wang Hua, the Tang Dynasty Duke of Yue. In the late Sui Dynasty, Wang Hua occupied the lands of Yi and She, calling himself King Wu, establishing Yizhou in now called Yixian County. In the fourth year of Wude (621 AD) in the Tang Dynasty, Wang Hua swore loyalty to the Tang Empire and was named the Duke of Yue. A duke in the Ming Dynasty, the fifty-seventh generation of the Wangs, descended from Wang Shuang, the seventh son of Wang Hua, moved to Bishan and settled down. He was the first ancestor of the Wang family in Bishan Village. Since then, Bishan Village has gradually become a famous village in Huizhou because of the Wang family’s presence and legacy. There were many talented people in Bishan Village over the past dynasties, and before the Qing Dynasty eleven held the title of jinshi.2 The immortal poet Li Bai once visited, and in admiration he wrote, “You ask me why I dwell in the green mountain; I smile and make no reply for my heart is free of care. As the peach-blossom flows down the stream and is gone into the unknown, I have a world apart that is not among people.” People in Bishan once built a pagoda to commemorate the poet, but only parts of the site remain. In the Southern Song Dynasty, Wang Bo, a privy counsellor, who used to serve the court together with the treacherous minister Qin Hui, resigned because he was dissatisfied with Qin Hui’s faction and influence. He retired to his hometown, built the Peijun Garden, and lived in seclusion. His good friend, Zhang Jiucheng, the top graduate in the imperial exams, came to visit him and wrote a poem, “Visiting a Friend in Bishan,” as a gift. “Layers of mountain tops, extending thousands of waves, deep ancient pines and flowers, sixty-six peaks of 2

 Jinshi is the highest and final degree in the imperial examination in Imperial China.

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Huangshan.” This poetry tablet is still preserved in Peijun Garden today. Although it has been eroded by wind and rain for more than 860 years, traces of handwriting are still there. The Wang family in Bishan has always had the traditional traits of both advancing together and retreating alone, all the while maintaining a high degree of integrity. On the stone wall of Jianxi Valley behind the village, there is a Song Dynasty inscription, the “Mount Zhang Note,” which records twelve villagers, including Wang Tinggui, in the third year of Kaixi in the Southern Song Dynasty (1207 AD), who visited the Zunxiao Temple (built in the Tang Dynasty and destroyed in the Ming Dynasty) during the guyu solar term.3 Among the inscription, the unique mentality of Bishan people is expressed by “all of them are well-off, not tired from visiting; they socialize vigorously, and return drunk.” The typical historical features of Huizhou’s ancient villages are still preserved at Bishan Village. The ancient dwellings with white walls and black tiles, the scattered horse-head walls, the winding streets, and the tall pagoda at the head of the village are all deeply impressed with the memories of time. Nowadays, Wang’s descendants in Bishan still live a leisurely and comfortable life from sunrise to sunset. Farming, silkworm rearing, tea picking, hemp planting, and handicrafts are still their traditional ways of making a living. Sacrifices, gatherings, singing folk songs, and performing arts are still their traditional customs. Bishan Village is one of the last preserved areas of Chinese agricultural civilization, and it is also the homeland that we are going to leave in the process of modern urban civilization. (by Jin Zhongmin) The Blueprint Ou Ning first visited the Huizhou countryside with Zuo Jing in 2007. He was attracted by the natural scenery, the settlement culture, and the historical relics there, and they were especially moved by the rural lives of their friends, the poets Zheng Xiaoguang and Han Yu, in Xidi and Bishan. In 2010, in his Moleskine notebook, Ou Ning launched a historic investigation into the experiment of individuals creating a micronation and

3  The guyu solar term begins when the Sun reaches the celestial longitude of 30° and ends when it reaches the longitude of 45°. It more often refers in particular to the day when the Sun is exactly at the celestial longitude of 30°.

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intellectuals setting up a utopia, and recorded his preliminary ideas for creating a communal utopia in Bishan Village, Yixian County. Since the publication of Erwin S.  Strauss’ How to Start Your Own Country in 1985, there have been more than 150 micronations created by individuals and groups in the world, which at that time did not include some of the individual states of contemporary Chinese farmers in the face of difficult situations. Whether they are intellectuals or the general public, their utopian practices have broadened the political experiences of humans outside of conventional sovereign states. The Bishan Commune that Ou Ning planned to set up with Zuo Jing in Bishan Village is expected to follow James Yen’s cause of rural reconstruction as well as Peter Kropotkin’s anarchist ideas, in order to revitalize the political, economic, and cultural life in rural areas. It mainly aims at the pressing reality of urbanization in Asia, and the crisis caused by global agricultural capitalism. It tries to find a way to revitalize the countryside. In his notebook, he elaborated his thinking on these things and invited some artists and designers to sketch the visual, living, and architectural systems of the Bishan Commune that he intended to implement in the future, becoming a long-term development project. The notebook, which records this utopian dream, was shown at the “Detour: The Moleskine Notebook Experience” exhibition in Shanghai and has now become a blueprint for ongoing practice. The Program 1. Chudifang Dance: Harvestival Ceremony Time: 11:30 a.m., August 26, 2011 Venue: Dunda Ancestral Hall, Bishan Village, Yi County, Anhui Province The traditional sacrificial rituals in Huizhou are closely related to the patriarchal clan system there. In order to strengthen internal management and the protection against external shocks, as well as to strengthen patriarchal identity and cohesion, sacrificial activities were very popular in Huizhou. The chudifang has been practiced throughout ancient times in the area. According to legend, during the reign of Jiaqing in Qing Dynasty, Chen Zhikui from the county magistrate introduced the practice from the province to the City God’s Temple and then established the folk custom of the “Chudifang Dance” on the first of October. According to historical

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records, the “Chudifang Dance” is a unique folk activity in Yi County, which advocates good, punishes evil, and prays for peace. The difang in “Chudifang” is another name for “impermanence,” which originally was the language of Buddhism. Later generations have adopted the term “impermanence” as the name for capricious ghosts who snatch the living souls of people who do bad things, taking them to hell. They have made Impermanence the messenger of justice to the world, and the object of worship by the people. “Chudifang” activities are rich in content, diverse in form, very grand, entertaining, and competitive. The harvest festival is a sacrificial ceremony of agricultural society of China. In addition to praying to the ancestors and gods, praying for the successful harvest of crops, and wishing that next year be a bumper crop of grain and that both livestock and humans flourish, there will be dinner, singing and dancing, and games and bonfire parties after the ceremony. We regard the unique Yi County folk activity of “chudifang” as the symbolic ceremony of the Harvestival, for precisely the purpose of continuing the local sacrificial tradition and hoping to restore and rebuild this long-standing rural public life, and endow it with new connotations. (by Zuo Jing) 2. Mutual Aid and Inheritance: Main Exhibition Time: August 26–28, 2011, 9:00–18:00 Venues: No. 1 and No. 2 Grain Depots of Bishan Granaries, Bishan Village, Yixian County, Anhui Province Participants: Chen Feibo, Dong Wensheng, Hu Xiaogeng, Hu Zhongquan, Liang Hong, Liang Shaoji, Liu Bingjian, Liu Qingyuan, Ou Ning, Qiu Anxiong, Shi Dayu, Tang Guo, Wang Yin, Xiao Ma+Chengzi, Hsieh Yingchun, Zhang Jianping, Zhang Lei, Zhang Zhenyan, Zheng Xiaoguang+Han Yu, Zhu Xiaojie, Dadawa Zhu Zheqin, and John Wong In his famous book Mutual Aid, Peter Kropotkin once said, “mutual aid is the real foundation of our ethical conceptions seems evident enough.”4 However, with the universalization of the organization and governance of the state, as well as the increasing prevalence of the tax 4  Peter Kropotkin, Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution (Mineola: Dover Publications, 2006), 246.

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system and public services in the world, direct mutual aid between people has become increasingly rare. In a tax-paying society, when people encounter problems, they will first rely on public services, rather than direct help. Perhaps the tradition of mutual aid will survive only in rural areas that have not yet been modernized but are still able to self-govern. Mutual aid is human nature. In ancient times, people depended on it to overcome harsh natural conditions. However, with the subdivision of ethnic communities and interest groups, people began to compete for living space. In order to negotiate and adjudicate disputes, an agent system comes into being—that is, the state and the government, and the operation of these agencies is maintained by taxation. When there are problems with agents and public services, people still go back to the old ways of direct action. In rural areas, people rely on a moral consciousness to carry out self-government, exchange their labor for economic activities, and help each other to maintain their communities. Unfortunately, such a beautiful society is also declining in today’s rural areas. The Bishan Commune’s plan is to restore this simple social model. The most important cornerstone of its concept of communal life is mutual aid. It requires moral self-discipline and a small-scale community. It chooses to locate itself in the countryside. Most of the participants relate to culture and art, and their integration into rural and local life involves the issues and practices of rural reconstruction on another level. In the realistic context of China, the participation of intellectuals and artists in rural reconstruction should not only follow the traditions of rural reconstruction since the Republic of China, but also invent their own methods under our new, realistic conditions. This is the task that the Bishan Commune plans to set for itself. In the past, when artists went to the countryside to gather creative inspiration, to a certain extent they were “taking” from the rural areas, and even if there were sometimes a sort of “compensation,” it remained at the level of the compilation and dissemination of culture, rarely contributing politically or economically to the countryside. The Bishan Commune has mobilized artists from all over to come to Bishan. On the one hand, they have carried out the experiment of living together, trying to help each other and selfgovern their social practice. On the other hand, they have also focused on surveying and interviewing the area’s long-standing historical heritage, local architecture, settlement culture, folk operas, and handicrafts. On these grounds, they have invited locals to cooperate with designs that work toward stimulation and regeneration. In addition to inheriting tradition, we hope to transform the work’s results into local production, bringing new opportunities for rural regeneration. The exhibition “Mutual Aid and Inheritance” presents these preliminary achievements.

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From among the Credo of Rural Reconstruction summarized by James Yen, the pioneer of rural construction in China, we emphasize these two: “Start with what they know,” and “Not to conform, but to transform; Not relief, but release.” The most important thing for intellectuals to participate in rural reconstruction is to help establish the subjectivity of the villagers. It is not to force a strange culture into the countryside, nor to simply accommodate everything in the countryside, nor is it a capitalist charity. It is not even a romantic imagining of pastoral life, but an in-depth action embracing reality. (by Ou Ning) 3. Research into Origins: Huizhou History and Culture Exhibition Time: August 26–28, 2011, 9:00–18:00 Venue: Dunda Ancestral Hall, Bishan Village, Yi County, Anhui Province Huizhou culture is a regional culture with local features. Its content is extensive, profound, and has a series of characteristics. It deeply reveals the mystery of Oriental society and culture and contains the basic elements of folk economy, society, life, and culture from the Ming and Qing dynasties up to the Republic of China. It is also regarded as a typical specimen of society from the Ming and Qing dynasties up to the Republic of China. Huizhou culture has rich connotations and almost contains all aspects of traditional Chinese culture. To pick the most important ones, they would be Xin’an Neo-Confucianism, the Huizhou School of Textology (puxue), the Xin’an Painting School, the School of Huizhou Seal Carving, Huizhou Prints, Huizhou Woodblock Book-Printing, Huizhou Opera, Xin’an Medicine, Huizhou Cuisine, and so on. Choosing this area for its rich historical and cultural accumulation, and intervening in rural reconstruction from the perspective of culture and art, is precisely because we deeply feel the decline of Huizhou culture in today’s world, which has reached the most dangerous situation of almost complete extinction—and any kind of decline and extinction is shocking. Due to the limitations of conditions, even such a small non-professional exhibition can tell people how profound and broad Huizhou’s history and culture was. The squeeze of urbanization, especially the destruction brought by excessive tourism development, which it bears in the contemporary era, has made Huizhou a lifeless sample, only existing within the romantic imaginations of intellectuals.

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Experience tells us that China’s rural life cannot be built on still water and rootless wood. The cultural rescue forces of the people and the government must be called upon and activated. The reconstruction and regeneration of rural China requires the cooperation of all walks of life. Let us participate in the specific action of historical protection. (by Zuo Jing) 4. Handicraft in Yi County: Research Project Exhibition Time: August 26–28, 2011, 9:00–18:00 Venue: No. 2 Grain Depot of Bishan Granaries, Bishan Village, Yi County, Anhui Province The “Handicraft in Yi County” research includes these thirty-four subjects: making conical hats; unicycles; fire barrels; bed screens; barrel hoops; candy; filled dried beans curd; brewing rice wine; sticky rice cake; Yuting cakes; blacksmithery; clock repair; shoemaking; bamboo weaving; root carving; wood carving; stone carving; silk thread painting; Yi County folk painting; brick carving; wall murals; figurine making; making bamboo slips; rice carving; children’s hats; sachets; children’s shoes; cradle chairs; Yi County folk songs; dragon and lion dances; the Zhishan Phoenix Dance; silkworm rearing; oil pressing; and hemp making. Members of the “Handicraft in Yi County” research team: Wu Zhiyuan, Liu Chaoran, Zhu Zheng, Jiang Caijie, Zhang Miao, and Wang Xu from the School of Journalism and Communication, Anhui University. The search for the crafts is not only the search for daily crafts scattered among the people, but also the search for the past in our memories. The research project “Handicraft in Yi County” opens in Yi County on July 15, 2011. Volunteers have located various traditional folk crafts, techniques, and creations, and have cultivated many skills with Huizhou features, as well as met many folk craftspeople, folk artists, and performers. For them, they carry forth information about production and lifestyle different from industrial society. Time always takes something away, but at the same time leaves deep traces. Ye Village’s hundred-year-old oil-processing mill, Yuting Town’s old iron shop, and Liyuan Village’s textile technology have begun to be gradually forgotten; rice sculpture skills at Guanlu Village have basically been lost; silk thread paintings created by the old man Fu Shanchang in Mukeng Village have also been followed by no one; Zhishan Phoenix Dance is a traditional folk art performance in Lu Village in the past, but now is largely unknown, especially to the young. Looking for these traces

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that are either forgotten or fading away, we hope to retrieve traces of the times and restore the local memories that are different from the noisy life of the city. We ask heaven and earth, and we hope that through research intellectuals will participate in the work of excavating folk treasures and allow more people to care about rural areas and rural life. Thank you very much to the people of Yi County who have given us all kinds of help in the process of investigation, as well as to the individuals who were our research projects. Without their enthusiastic support for our work, there would be no “Handicraft in Yi County” exhibition to be presented to you today. (by Wu Zhiyuan) 5. Temple Fair: Handicraft Markets Time: August 26, 2011, 9:00–18:00 Venue: The Entrance Road, Bishan Village, Yi County, Anhui Province Because of the inverted relationship between urban and rural areas and the large outflow of the rural population, the originally active public life has begun to decline. Whether clan activities, sacrificial activities, cultural activities, or economic activities, all are becoming increasingly rare, and the public spaces in which these activities are held have been left vacant or even deteriorated. The changes in social life directly affect the superposition of the rural landscape. Temple fairs used to be an important part of public life in the countryside. They combined the rituals of worshipping gods, celebrations, entertainment, various daily necessities, and local markets. They were also a major form of social interaction in the countryside. There was a custom to hold temple fairs on a regular basis in Yi County, but because of the impact of the mode of modern consumption, this social activity has declined. The handicraft markets of the Bishan Harvestival is a mobilization for the masses in villages and towns in Yi County. Every household and all walks of life can sign up to participate in it, display their handicraft products and traditional snacks, and sell them. Its organization presents all aspects of rural life. If the “Handicraft in Yi County” is the students’ field investigation and an academic project, then the “Temple Fair” is a lively rural festival. (by Ou Ning)

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6. Screen Nostalgia: Screening of Early Rural Films Time: August 28, 2011, 19:30–23:00 Venue: Bishan Granaries, Bishan Village, Yi County, Anhui Province After the founding of “New China,” film, as an important propaganda tool, was required to serve politics. In addition to shooting revolutionary historical themes, it should also show the brand-new features of the new socialist system and highlight the nature of workers and farmers of the new regime. So from the 1950s to the 1980s, many films on rural subjects emerged, and that image of rural life and reality became the collective memory of many people. The experience of screening and watching movies in the past is very unforgettable. In rural areas, because of the scarcity of entertainment, the same films were often replayed many times. If shown in open-air barnyards, it would be more equivalent to a festival. The children early-on took seats with chairs, stools, and mats, and the whole village attended the screening. Sometimes there were so many people that they had to watch from the opposite side of the screen. Movie dialogue was often recited, and classic scenes were always popular. The content of a film and this special way of viewing it have solidified many people’s childhood impressions after years of enculturation. The “Bishan Harvestival” scoured theaters and collectors all over the country to specially find the classic film Little Flower,5 which used Bishan for filming locations, as well as the rural feature film In-Laws6 and the documentary Peasant Paintings from Hu County.7 The films will be shown in the open air by volunteer projectors in the outdoor space of the Bishan Granaries, giving an opportunity for people to re-experience their childhood and find their homes on the screen. (by Ou Ning)

5  A 1979 Chinese movie starring Joan Chen and Liu Xiaoqing, directed by Zhang Zheng. Joan Chen became a star for this patriotic adventure film. 6  A 1981 Chinese movie directed by Zhao Huanzhang. 7  A 1974 documentary produced by Central Newsreel and Documentary Film Studio.

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 . The Mystery of Reality: Contemporary Rural Documentary 7 Film Screening Time: August 28, 2011, 10:00–18:00 Venue: Cinema of Xiuli Film and Television Studios, Yi County, Anhui Province Beginning in the early 1990s, China’s independent documentary movement penetrated into China’s vast reality, recording the era and shaping history from both personal and micro perspectives. Among the films, many filmmakers devoted great effort to social contradictions, political operations, religious beliefs, living customs, historical conservation, and farmers’ living conditions and their spiritual outlook over different periods in rural areas. Figures shuttled through farmhouses in the fields, carving the changes of agricultural society that have lasted for thousands of years under the impact of different realities with their own lens. These documentaries have become one of the most precious historical archives of rural society. The documentary program of the “Bishan Harvestival” has selected Li Yifan’s works on the operation and conflict of Sichuan folk religious organizations with the village government in daily life; Mao Chenyu’s three works on fertility, death, and mysticism in agricultural society; Guo Xizhi’s two works on the restructuring and relocation of small towns; Lu Xinyu case study recording a daily chronicle of a rural settlement in Huizhou; and two works independently filmed and edited by two villagers under the guidance of Wu Wenguang. The first four filmmakers gaze at the reality of villages and towns from outside, while the second is an autonomous image of village life. In the production of independent documentaries focusing on rural reality, the filmmakers try to weaken elite consciousness, sink to the grassroots level, construct a level perspective, and let the facts speak for themselves in order to forge the objectivity of documentaries; while in the self-produced films of villagers, professional documentary makers only provide reference opinions—they “exit” from the production process. To highlight the subjectivity of villagers, this attempt calls for a wide range of image democracy in the era of low-cost and civilian digital technology— which is great progress in a cultural landscape of elite overflow, coinciding with the spiritual traditions of rural reconstruction since the Republic of China. (by Ou Ning)

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8. Rural China: A Symposium Time: August 27, 2011, 10:00–18:00 Venue: Cinema of Xiuli Film and Television Studios, Yi County, Anhui Province Agenda: 1. Agriculture, Rural Areas, Farmers (10:00–12:00) Liang Hong, Author of China in Liang Village Chung Yung-feng, Taiwanese Musician and Social Activist Wu Yin-ning, Taiwanese Writer and Social Activist Lu Xinyu, Professor, Fudan University, Researcher on Rural Issues Wu Wenguang, Documentary Director Moderator: Ou Ning 2. Contemporary Rural Construction (14:00–16:00) Qiu Jiansheng, Director-General of James Yen Rural Reconstruction Institute, Rural Reconstruction Activist He Huili, Professor, China Agriculture University, Assistant to Mayor of Kaifeng, Rural Reconstruction Activist and Researcher Liang Xiaoyan, Secretary-General of Western Sunshine Foundation Hsieh Ying-chun, Taiwanese Architect Wang Mo-lin, Taiwanese Theater Activist Xu Lanxiang, founder of the Lily Land and organizer of the anti-­ pesticide campaign in Taiwan Moderator: Ou Ning 3. Preservation of Regional Culture and History (16:00–18:00) Bian Li, Professor, Anhui University, Director of Huizhou Research Center Rui Bifeng, Professor, Anhui University Zhang Jianping, Photographer, Director of the Friends of Huizhou Zheng Xiaoguang+Han Yu, Founder of Pig’s Inn Zhang Zhenyan, Founder of Xiuli Film and Television Studios Hu Xiangcheng, Art Director of Shanghai Jinze Craft Centre, Professor at Shanghai Theatre Academy Moderator: Zuo Jing

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Over-urbanization has become a major social problem. It breaks the relationship of mutual nurturing between urban and rural areas, makes a large amount of farmland fallow, and causes ecological deterioration, a sharp decline in grain production, and population imbalances that result in class differentiation and group conflict. Nowadays, many urban problems, such as land requisition and demolition, urban villages, slums, migrant workers, public security, and so on, all originate from the inverted urban-­ rural relationship and the unreasonable allocation of urban and rural resources. Thus, the study of cities often goes back to the root of villages. Cities and villages are two sides of the same problem and are often intertwined. Because of excessive development and construction, urban land reserves are increasingly exhausted, and urban capital further erodes rural land. Land-hungry people in cities often enter the countryside with the idea and habits of urbanization under the banner of “Building the Socialist New Countryside.” As a diversified mode of human existence, rural life is increasingly assimilated by cities. The traditional rural social structures are disintegrating, agricultural ecologies are destroyed, rural buildings and spatial layouts are becoming difficult to maintain, and the way of human settlement finally becomes a single thing—people will lose their spiritual homes, which have lasted for thousands of years. In the past decade, some biotechnology companies and agricultural investment companies in the United States have begun to patent DNA property. They use some genetically modified (GM) experiments to change species’ composition (such as soybeans or some flowers) and register patents first to monopolize agricultural production in the market. That means that Chinese farmers will not be able to exchange seeds freely in the future, and the sale of patents will create huge profits for international capital. Global capitalism is pervasive, and agricultural capitalism is actually a new form of colonialism. It not only affects rural areas, but also affects urban life. Since the 1930s, intellectuals such as James Yen, Liang Shuming, Tao Xingzhi, and Mao Zedong have devoted themselves to the Rural Reconstruction and Mass Education Movement in China. They all agreed that the key to solving China’s problems lies in the countryside, agriculture, and farmers. Today, Wen Tiejun and others have inherited their work, and are devoted to rural practice and research. Hsieh Ying-chun, an architect, went deep into China’s remote areas, launched a “collaborative construction” campaign, evaded currency and capitalist trading patterns

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by directly exchanging labor, and merged into today’s anti-globalization movement. His efforts have returned to classic anarchist and early communist ideals. More and more intellectuals have begun to pay close attention to urban-rural relations in different areas and the unavoidable reality of capitalist globalization. They call for attention to specific issues such as the loss of arable land, the crisis of agriculture, the loss of farmers’ rights, the decline of tradition, and so on. By sharing their respective rural construction campaigns, cultural and living practices in rural areas, and a series of academic studies on the countryside, these intellectuals have been devoted to restoring the vitality of the countryside, rebuilding the mutually nurturing relationship between urban and rural areas, and providing a profound reflection on excessive urbanization. These efforts have converged into the new social movement of Ruralism. The Symposium on “Rural China” held during the Bishan Harvestival is a continuation and deepening of the same topic of the 2009 Shenzhen and Hong Kong Bi-city Biennale of Urbanism\Architecture. Because the conference site is located in the rural area of Huizhou, the rich historical relics and cultural accumulation in the area make the importance of the protection and rejuvenation of local history all the more obvious. Therefore, besides discussing the Three Rural Issues (“agriculture, rural area, and farmers,” sannong wenti) and rural reconstruction, we have specially added a discussion on “Preservation of Regional Culture and History” to make this meeting more localized and targeted. (by Ou Ning) 9. Poetry Course: Literary Activities Time: August 26, 2011, 14:00–16:00 Venue: Dunda Ancestral Hall, Bishan Village, Yi County, Anhui Province Participating poets: Bing Shizhi (Shanghai), Chen Dongdong (Shanghai), Liang Xiaobin (Beijing/Hefei), Xiao Kaiyu (Beijing/Kaifeng), Xu Jingya (Shenzhen), and Zhu Fengming (Hefei) In the period (1980s) that modernist became popular in China, literature was defined as a kind of private writing that took exploring the meaning of individual life as its duty and emphasized the separation of writing from society. More recently, the overly close relationship between mainstream realism and politics may have been the main reason that this

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attitude bounced back. But at present, the relationship between literature and society has arrived at a new turning point. The times have changed, the definition of politics has changed, and society has evolved into a new form. People’s participation in public affairs was originally motivated by the mobilization of state organs, and the individual was a political tool. Now, people’s participation in society comes more from a need for empowerment. “Citizen” has become a keyword of our time. At the moment, literature is being asked by citizens to be their mouthpiece rather than the prop of partisan politics. How can literature intervene in today’s society? How do poets get out of their writing room? In the face of the decline of rural life and the hollowness of the countryside, besides lamentation and sadness, what can a poet do? The “Poetry Course” is only a simple educational activity. In the context of rural reconstruction, it is a small attempt to integrate literature into the countryside. Poets will, in the ancestral temple, teach and recite poetry to the children left behind in the countryside—but what they are actually doing is restoring the kind of life they once had. Literature will enter a rural public space once used to foster clan cohesion, and will try to enter and nurture the bloodline of the village, touching its future citizens and striving to be close to them. This is one small contribution of literature to the countryside. (by Ou Ning) 10. Returning Youth: New Folk Music Concert Time: August 27, 2011 19:30–21:30 Venue: Yishan Theater, Yi County, Anhui Province Farmers have been burdened by the cost of change across the country. Before the founding of the People’s Republic, they devoted their young lives to the revolution because they wanted a share of the land; in the industrialized era, they handed in their food for the country to export to the Soviet Union and exchange the technology and capital; in the urbanized era, agriculture went bankrupt, land was expropriated, and they left their homes and went to cities to devote their labor to the city. In today’s rural China, only the left-behind elderly and children are there. The new generation is growing up lonely in the empty villages, and when they grow up a bit more, they will have to go to the city to make a living.

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The vitality once possessed in the countryside has disappeared, and its young people work on the road. When will they be able to return to their homeland and live and work in peace and contentment? If urbanization continues to expand, if agriculture cannot be revitalized, rural areas will continue to be marginalized, and farmers will not share the fruits of urbanization after devoting their land and labor. Their dream will never be realized. The band Wu Tiao Ren sing of many of the young people wandering on lonely county roads as well as the countryside in their début album A Tale of Haifeng. They sing in Haifeng dialect8 and unfold their “local narrative” in the form of new folk songs. The reality of Hailufeng Area9 on the eastern coast of Guangdong Province as presented by them is the epitome of this era of urbanization. This early region of the Reform and Opening-up predicted the fate of vast rural areas under the county system in China today. They come to the countryside of Huizhou at our invitation to conduct research. In the process of going from village to village, they have experienced the same reality as in their hometown. They have listened to Yi Country folk songs, talked with local musicians, and decided to do something for here in musical form. They created some new songs for this place to express their feelings, and their performance at the Bishan Harvestival will be a dialogue between the Hailufeng and Huizhou areas. They will use their songs to call more young people back home. In order to increase interaction with the people in Yi County, we invite them to perform with Wu Tiao Ren on the same stage, including Huangmei Opera, Yi County folk songs, and Peking Opera. The repertoire will be as follows: “Open the Gate” (Wang Jianying, Zhu Genzhi singing); “Spring Wind Brings Warmth” (Wang Lei singing); “Herding Cattle” (Wang Yinsun, Li Zhonghong singing); “The Cowherd and the Weaver Girl” (Wang Jianying, Jiang Yongzhong singing); “The Couple Watching the Lanterns” (Jiang Dongyue, Wu Xingbo singing); “Borrowing Donkeys” (Zhu Genzhi, Wang Dianji singing); Peking Opera “Ganlu Temple” (Wang Xiaojiu singing); and Yi County songs (Chu Fuzhu singing). (by Ou Ning) 8  Haifeng dialect is one of Southern Min Languages, more similar to Hokkien (Chinchew/ Changchew) languages, a little different from Teo-Swa (Teochew/Swatow) languages. 9  Also named Shanwei (Swabue) Area, including Haifeng County, Lufeng County, and Luhe County. The local people speak Hokkien dialect.

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11. Opera Mix: A Selection of the Huizhou Operas Time: August 26, 2011 19:30–21:30 Venue: Yishan Theater, Yi County, Anhui Province The repertoire: Wuyuan Nuo Opera, “Opening up Heaven and Earth” and “Liuhai Teasing the Golden Toad” (performed by Wuyuan Hui Opera Troupe); Qimen Mulian Opera, “A Ghost Catches Mrs Liu” (performed by the Lixi Village Mulian Opera Group from Likou Town, Qimen County); Huangmei Opera, “Wind in the Mountain,” “Flower Lanterns,” “Peacock Flying Southeast,” “Blind Man Tells Fortunes,” “It’s Difficult to be an Official,” selections from “The Female Princess’ Consort,” “Collecting the Pig Grasses,” “Farewell on the Beach,” and “Birds in Pairs on Trees” (performed by the Anqing Huangmei Opera Troupe). Since the Ming and Qing dynasties, Huizhou operas have not only attracted the masses to the stage, but also affected and changed people’s living habits and social customs. Huizhou has always had the custom of holding temple fairs, and every temple fair would have performances of these operas. Traditionally, clans also used them as an important means for education. For those who violated clan rules and family laws, clans could resort to punishment by forcing them to invite and pay for the performances of operas. In the process of the formulation and implementation of certain township regulations and civil restrictions, there were also performances of operas. We can see that Huizhou’s operas were one of the most important aspects of its public life. Apart from the famous Hui Opera, the Nuo Opera from Wuyuan County and the Mulian Opera from Qimen County are the most distinctive forms of opera in the region, occupying an important position in the history of Chinese Opera. Nuo Opera and Mulian Opera have as their content making offerings to the gods and worshipping ancestors, praying for peace and praying for good fortune, and exorcising ghosts and sickness. They have a certain appeal to the people of Huizhou who believe in spirits. Nowadays, although opera activities have declined in Huizhou, its tenacious vitality still continues. One of the purposes of intervening in rural reconstruction from the perspective of culture and art is to restore and rebuild the spiritual life of the countryside, and Huizhou operas are an important symbol of this spiritual life. And fortunately, Bishan Village has its own Huangmei opera

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troupe founded by the villagers. The villagers’ enthusiasm for opera is unchanged, and the activities of opera still permeate their daily lives. This series of operas, spanning the six counties of Huizhou, can enhance the cohesion of local folk culture so as to achieve a regional cultural identity. This show is just the beginning. It will contribute a little to rebuilding the public life of the Huizhou countryside alongside our efforts in the future. In order to enrich the performances, we have also added Huangmei Opera programs originating from the Anqing area. (by Zuo Jing)

CHAPTER 5

Reality and History

Beijing’s Climate Politics1 A video published on January 27, 2013, on YouTube attracted a large number of hits: Matt Hope, a London artist based in Beijing, managed to create a “Breathing Bike” with waste materials to deal with the increasingly hazy weather in Beijing.2 The bike is equipped with an IKEA dustbin, fighter pilot mask, a wheeled motor, a filter, and a motor helmet connected by a rubber tube. The pedal-powered motor drives the filter, producing a positive charge that wipes out the dust in the air and generates a negative charge. This negative charge attracts the particulate matter in the smog, after which the clean air is supplied to the mask for the rider. The video recorded the whole process when Matt Hope rode along the streets in Beijing and explained the usage of this bike. “The bike actually makes 5000 volts of electricity … if you ride this in the rain you could potentially kill yourself.” Obviously, the defects made it unable to be popularized; however, it looked more like an “artwork” and drew more public

1  Completed in Chinese on May 15, 2013, in Bishan. The English version was translated by Peggy Pan Ziyi, first published on the online journal WdW Review in 2013, later published in Defne Ayas and Adam Kleinman eds., WdW Review: Arts, Culture, and Journalism (Rotterdam: Witte de With Publishers, 2017). 2  Cool Sparks, “One Man’s Mission to Combat Beijing Pollution,” YouTube, January 27, 2013. http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=p9VEj-cmb6w.

© The Author(s) 2020 O. Ning, Utopia in Practice, Contemporary East Asian Visual Cultures, Societies and Politics, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-5791-0_5

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and media attention to the discussion of air pollution in Beijing, which was already a key issue in the media in 2012. Much earlier, on December 21, 2009, Evan Osnos, The New Yorker’s correspondent in Beijing, referred to the horrible smoggy weather in Beijing in his special report about the rapid development of clean energy technology in China. “After four years in Beijing, I’ve learned how to gauge the pollution before I open the curtains; by dawn on the smoggiest days, the lungs ache. The city government does not dwell on the details; its daily air-quality measurement does not even tally the tiniest particles of pollution, which are the most damaging to the respiratory system.”3 After I moved from Guangzhou to Beijing in 2007, it took me several months to get rid of the throat discomfort and become accustomed to the weather. On days when the whole city is surrounded by the fog, you can barely see anything more than ten meters away, even at noon, creating a doomsday effect. And it happens, a lot. Not until I read the Chinese version of Evan Osnos’ article published in Duku in July 2010, did I realize this is called haze, a serious kind of air pollution. In Evan Osnos’ article, the US Embassy in Beijing was mentioned to have installed an air monitor on the roof of one of its buildings, and every hour it posts the results to a Twitter feed, with a score ranging from 1, which is the cleanest air, to 500, the dirtiest. Ever since then, I have been following the US Embassy’s @BeijingAir on Twitter. According to the Air Quality Index (AQI), American cities consider anything above 100 to be unhealthy. The rare times in which an American city has scored above 300 have been in the midst of forest fires. Nevertheless, the score shown on @ BeijingAir is often 500 with a public-health warning “hazardous.” On these days, I will minimize my activities outdoors, just staying at home. In 2012, heated discussions about air pollution in Beijing exploded on Sina Weibo, the biggest social media site (like Twitter) used in China. More and more people are aware of what PM2.5—particulate matter, 2.5 microns or less in diameter—is and they feel angry at the fact that the Beijing municipal government did nothing. According to the official story, the daily air-quality measurements published by the US Embassy on 3  Evan Osnos, “Green Giant: Beijing’s crash program for clean energy,” New Yorker, December 21, 2009. http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/12/21/091221 fa_fact_osnos?currentPage=1.

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Twitter are malicious attacks on Chinese authorities. From then on, a PM2.5 index has appeared in the Beijing government’s daily air-quality measurements, while the discrepancy from the American measurements brought about more taunts from netizens. Beijing is the capital of China, the location of central government, and the residence of officials who have “privileged” channels in housing, transportation, medical treatment, food, and goods supply. Some netizens said that air pollution is a great leveler, that is, no matter how privileged you are, we are all equal when it comes to the air we breathe. International environmentalists used the phrase “environmental justice” to describe environmental equality. But this seems almost sarcastic when we consider the level of haze in Beijing. On September 17, 2012, in Beijing, Chen Guangbiao, a Chinese businessman famous for “showing off,” announced his plan to sell 100,000 cans of fresh air collected from Jinggang Mountains, Yan’an, Xinjiang, Tibet, Yushu, Kangding, and his hometown Wuhe in Anhui Province, for 5 renminbi (RMB) per can. “After three swings, the can will be filled with air. When the chip inside detects a certain amount of negative oxygen ions, the cap will automatically close.” Chen Guangbiao said, “The amount of negative oxygen ions in one can equals that in five oxygen carriers in a hospital. And each can contains 400–1000 grams of air.”4 No one takes this seriously. (Anyway, who will treat fresh air as a rare commodity?) In the end, Chen Guangbiao gave these cans out for free, instead. In January 2013, under great pressure from the public, the ex-Premier Wen Jiabao and the newly elected Premier Li Keqiang both gave out directions that all efforts should be taken to tackle the air pollution in Beijing. The central government was furious. The Beijing Environmental Protection Bureau later claimed that there were three main factors causing the haze. First of all, Beijing is surrounded by mountains on three sides. When the atmosphere is stable, it is difficult for pollutants of various kinds to diffuse. The highly condensed air pollutants then transform in bulk into PM2.5 through chemical changes. Secondly, Beijing’s population of permanent residents had exceeded 20 million by 2012. All together, these households operate 5.2 million automobiles and burn 23 million tons of coal, with a total consumption of naphtha and diesel oil reaching 6.3 million tons, and total construction sites covering 190 million square meters. The total amount of emissions released remains high, due to large amounts 4

 Jianghuai Daily, September 17, 2012.

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of vehicle exhaust fumes, coal burning, industrial pollution, and dust spread from construction sites. Thirdly, the pollutants from neighboring cities, like Shijiazhuang, Baoding, and Xingtai, also affect Beijing, which makes the already severely polluted environment even worse.5 Mr. Wang Anshun, Mayor of Beijing, promised the central government, again, that 100 billion RMB worth of investment would be allocated to tackling pollution in the next three years.6 Beijing’s haze is only one of the unintended consequences of China’s rapid development in the last two decades. Following the Tiananmen Square Incident of 1989, the legitimacy and prestige of the Party were severely damaged. In 1992, another wave of reform and opening up began, as Deng Xiaoping made his famous remarks during his visit to southern China. Since then, China has fully embraced its new free market economy. His remarks opened a new route for China, as it diminished the negative effects of the Tiananmen Incident and the political appeals of the people, as well as consolidating the prestige of the ruling party and safeguarding political stability through a stronger economy and higher income for the people. Rural land was continuously being occupied or merged and the surplus of rural labor diminished significantly—they were all co-opted into the deepening of industrialization and urbanization. Rural areas started to go broke when rural laborers poured into urban areas. Having lost their land in rural areas, these people still had no access to public resources in the cities due to the household registration system, so they gathered in slums and fierce confrontation between classes began. As most job opportunities are in the cities, they witnessed rapid population growth, the expansion of urban space, and a construction boom, which made the entire nation a construction site. With its urban planning deeply influenced by the American model, the roads were mainly designed for cars. Hence, the number of vehicles rose sharply, creating an increasing demand for energy resources, and, as a consequence, the excessive dependence on natural resources also weakened the ecosystem. The overheated growth of the real estate industry resulted in a lack of available land, which required demolition of old towns for new ones. The government failed to keep its promise to protect historic sites and people across the country were thrown into a crisis of recognition: they experienced a sense of placelessness. All these factors cost China environmental and social justice. 5 6

 Beijing Morning Post, January 30, 2013.  Beijing Evening News, March 29, 2013.

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People will protest spontaneously when development jeopardizes their living environment. In the past few years, in spite of the inherent egoism and short-termism, a series of NIMBY—Not in My Back Yard—campaigns caused by numerous PX (p-Xylene) projects stimulated people’s democratic awareness to a certain degree. As a communication tool, the Internet has provided a convenient space for people to voice their opinions and mobilize others. Take the protest against the haze in Beijing as an example: here, the Internet played an important role in rallying popular will. Compared with the inept Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference and People’s Congress, the Internet contributes more to the development of Critical Mass in China. In Taiwan in the early 1980s, questioned on its legitimacy to govern the island, the Kuomintang (KMT) lifted martial law and focused on developing the economy and improving people’s livelihoods, in order to shift people’s attention from politics. Striving for position among the “Four Asian Tigers,” various environmental problems brought by rapid economic growth strengthened civil environmental protection movements, which, in cooperation with the surging non-party movements, converted Taiwan into a democratic society. Will the rise of environmental protection movements in China similarly trigger the process of social democracy? Chinese leaders have already sensed the environmental crisis. When the former president Hu Jintao put forward his “Scientific Outlook on Development” strategy, he was fully aware that it had been a dead end for China to develop at any cost and that “ecological civilization” had served as the key word in the conversion of the Communist Party’s thought. According to Evan Osnos, Chinese leaders made a huge investment in new energy technology early in 2001 and redoubled their commitment in 2006. They boosted funding for research and set targets for installing wind turbines, solar panels, hydroelectric dams, and other renewable sources of energy that were higher than goals in the United States. A green China can not only subside the domestic fight for a clean environment and calm the political unrest, but also gain initiative during global climate negotiations. The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is no longer as conservative, stubborn, or dictatorial as it used to be. The Party has updated their thoughts, broadened their horizons, absorbed all the possible supports, and strived to conquer their opposition by adjusting their strategies continuously. Therefore, it is still too early to say for certain that the current Chinese political system will be overturned by popular power.

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In April 2013, I packed all my stuff into nearly a hundred boxes and transported them by an eight-meter container truck from Beijing to Bishan, a village in Yi County, Anhui Province. Actually, I didn’t move here specifically to avoid the haze in Beijing, and my fear of air pollution was not so strong that I needed to buy canned fresh air from Chen Guangbiao. It is only a personal escape from a higher- to a lower-polluted place and this hasn’t solved the environmental problem. Like the NIMBY campaign, you only protect local safety by preventing the development of any polluting industry nearby, but the campaign didn’t realize the importance of joining the anti-pollution community. I moved to Bishan because I decided to reconstruct this rural area and conduct ecological experiments here. Instead of being overly dependent on the city, we should retrieve the value of the countryside through agricultural development and eco-environmental protection. Only in this way can we balance the population between urban and rural areas, reduce city pollution, and control energy use, solving environmental problems in the whole of society fundamentally. This point of view may still be more of a brainstorm or an “artwork,” like the bike designed by my friend Matt Hope, and it may still face many practical difficulties in reality, but, at least, we have made our first step.

What Wukan Means?7 It began, in the early stages, as a secret mobilization. Then came the protests, marches of ever-larger numbers, direct confrontation, occupations, blockades, anarchy, media exposure, a case of accidental death, the involvement of higher levels of authority, negotiation, and so on until, finally, after two years and eleven months, on February 2, 2012, in Guangdong Province, in the county of Lufeng, the village of Wukan at last held a democratic election. On this day, live reports continued to post on Sina Weibo, and a large number of press continued to pay attention to this village of the eastern Guangdong that was in the eye of the storm. Given the evolution of events, what took place in Wukan could be called a revolution. True, when compared to the waves of large-scale 7  Completed in Chinese on February 6, 2012, in Beijing. The English version was translated by Sun Yunfan and published on ChinaFile, an online magazine published by the Center on  U.S.-China Relations at  Asia Society, April 18, 2012. http://www.chinafile.com/ what-wukan-means.

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protests that broke out around the world in 2011, it may look like just a minor case of local unrest. It failed to spur a more widespread campaign. But it deserves to be seen, at least, as a micro-revolution—one that has particular significance for the politics of rural development in China today. The conflict had its origins in Wukan’s opaque system for transferring property rights and its unfair compensation for those whose land rights had been “transferred.” Initially, the protests were an expression of the villagers’ financial interests, a quest for profit. But because the financial interests involved were collective, as opposed to individual, and because the quest began to run up against the endemic corruption of the political system, inevitably, the movement began to express itself through politics: demanding new elections became a necessary tactic for the villagers’ defense of their self-interest. Under (what China’s leaders like to call its) “unique national conditions,” to claim one’s cause isn’t political is a crucial tactic groups fighting for their collective interests must employ to protect themselves from being labeled “anti-Party,” being accused of “subverting state power,” or otherwise running afoul of the government’s imperative to “safeguard social stability.” In China, avoiding politics is itself a form of politics. We need to update the way we think and talk about this word, “politics.” Today we have citizens whose politics do not revolve around the Party or ideology—their demands are based on either personal interests or non-ideological community interests. Their participation in public affairs already transcends the realm of traditional party politics. In recent years, this new kind of politics has been on the rise in many spheres and manifest in countless cases of “defending civil rights,” or weiquan. If the authorities still construe such demands as attacks on the Party, they will only produce more conflicts and generate more serious opposition. In this context, Wukan was a turning point. The Guangdong government moved beyond its habitual fixation with “maintaining stability” to recognize that the appeals of the Wukan villagers arose out of concern for their livelihoods, rather than out of some animus against the Party or China’s political system. As a result, after a rational negotiation, they allowed Wukan to hold a democratic election. For the moment, a case of unrest had been put to rest. But that did not mean that the long-simmering issues that caused the protests in the first place had been resolved. The 2005 riots in the village of Taishi (also in Guangdong Province) broke out for the same reason. Rural protests arising out of land confiscation and unfair compensation are already nothing

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new. Rather, they reveal the extent to which, for a long time, China’s peasants have been treated like dirt. Prior to the establishment of the People’s Republic of China, it was the promise of “land redistribution” that encouraged peasants to participate in the revolution. Once the Communists were in charge, they made good on their promise to the peasants. But over the next ten years, “temporary mutual aid teams,” “long-term mutual aid teams,” “elementary cooperatives,” and later “advanced cooperatives” took ownership of their land, completing the transition from private to collective land ownership and ushering in the era when, in the formulation of the day, “City land is state-­ owned, rural land is collectively owned.” The People’s Communes of 1958 were not so much manifestations of Communist utopianism as an attempt to support national industrialization by efficiently allotting land and labor resources through administrative fiat and militarization. In order to limit peasants’ social mobility and bind them to the land, that same year the government promulgated the “Household Registration Ordinance,” which set up a two-tiered system for the urban and rural populations that ensured that the industrializing cities would be able to squeeze every last drop out of the farm-bound countryside. In the three decades following the founding of the People’s Republic of China (PRC), the government used price scissors—keeping the price of agricultural products extremely low—to accumulate 600 billion RMB (approximately US$95 billion at 2012 exchange rates) worth of gross domestic product (GDP) from the countryside and transfer it to industry. In the twenty years after collectivization, about half of every hour of labor in the Chinese countryside went unpaid, according to the estimates of journalist Ling Zhijun and sociologist Xu Xinxin.8 In 1978, eighteen peasants in the Anhui Province village of Xiaogang grew dissatisfied with the bare subsistence conditions in the People’s Communes. Under heavy pressure to survive, they took the initiative to sign a contract pledging each household to take responsibility for its own agricultural production. Their audacious risk-taking quickly bore fruit, and large numbers of other farmers followed their example until soon it

8  Ling Zhijun, Rising and Falling: A Memorandum of Chinese Economic Reforms, 1989–1997 (Shanghai: Orient Publishing Center, 1998). 28. Xu Xinxin, Social Change and Social Mobility in Contemporary China (Beijing: Social Sciences Academic Press, 2000), 114.

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gained the approval of the central government.9 So began the next era of rural reform. Once again, land (which in the Chinese context is really “land use”) was returned to the peasants. The Chinese peasantry, seizing the moment to advance their interests, had changed the system from below. But as the “household contract system” spread through the country’s inland rural areas, the first wave of urbanization was also beginning along China’s southern coast. And soon, the new cities’ appetite for rural land began to eclipse enthusiasm for a revived rural economy based on the household agricultural output. The establishment of the Shenzhen Special Economic Zone transformed a remote fishing village into a metropolis. At the beginning, what was known as the “three supplies for processing and one compensation” system—in which foreigners provided supplies, investment capital, and management—attracted investment that transformed the vast rural areas of the Pearl River Delta into an enormous workshop. In 1992, after Deng Xiaoping’s Southern Tour, Shenzhen’s real estate market took off. The effects radiated to inland China and spurred the country’s second great wave of urbanization. As this wave advanced, the land available for cities to develop grew increasingly scarce and rural land was suddenly a coveted resource. The government used administrative measures to amass collectively owned rural land on the cheap and then sell it to property developers. Expropriation of land became a major source of government revenue and indeed the most significant contributor to the country’s GDP. According to a 2011 article by Huang Xiaohu in the Study Times, “the revenue from land expropriation was 129.6 billion RMB (US$20 billion) in 2001, and soon increased to 1.6 trillion RMB (US$254 billion) in 2009. In 2010, the number leapt to 2.7 trillion RMB (US$429 billion).”10 “Of the enormous sums the central government collected this way, only 20-30% were disbursed to township and village governments and then only 5-10% of that 9  The “household contract system” originated from the “all-round contract” (dabaogan) of Xiaogang Village in 1978, which was different from “fixing farm output quotas for each household” (baochandaohu) that started from the early 1960s to produce more food from the land and reduce the huge number of people that starved to death in the three-year Great Famine. According to the peasantry’s words, “fixing farm output quotas for each household” was pre-accounting while “all-round contract” was post-accounting. See Shukai Zhao, Regeneration of Peasants (Singapore: Springer Nature, 2017), 64. 10  Huang Xiaohu, “The Pros and Cons of Public Land Financing and Paths for Future Development,” Study Times, January 17, 2011.

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returned to the peasants as direct compensation for the loss of their land,” wrote Wang Ping in 2005.11 “During the past two decades,” observed rural development researcher Yu Jianrong, “more than 100 million mu of rural land (or roughly 16 million acres) was requisitioned and the compensation to its former occupants fell 2 trillion RMB (US$318 billion) short of its market value. … Since 1978, at least 50-60 million peasants have lost their land entirely.”12 “During the fifty years from 1952 to 2002, the revenue generated from the land that peasants gave away for free totaled 5.1535 trillion RMB (US$819 billion),” according to Dang Guoying. But after the implementation of the Law of Land Administration in 1986, “China’s total payments in compensation for requisitioned land totaled less than 100 billion RMB (US$16 billion).”13 During the era of urbanization, peasants donated their labor as well as their land. The financial ruin of Chinese agriculture has meant that many peasants have no choice but to move to cities to look for work. But because of the still-inescapable household registration system, they are unable to benefit from public services accorded to their urban counterparts. The group of people who make up the majority of China’s population, who have made unceasing sacrifices through the eras of revolution, industrialization, and urbanization, are nevertheless prevented from claiming their fair share of their country’s success. This is the historical context of the events in Wukan. Its residents had already been exploited by the very design and policy orientation of China’s political system; now the system’s corruption had made matters even worse. After their rights had been violated so many times, the peasants had no choice but to resort to protest and to stand for justice and to secure their rights and interests by electing a new village committee. The ruling party has to face the fact that its “stability preservation” strategies have short-term impact. What the country’s leaders ought to do is try to launch political reforms, adjusting system and policy, establishing effective organs for public supervision of the political process eradicating the corruption. For if the Taishi protest sounded an alarm, then Wukan was its even more resounding echo. 11  Wang Ping, “Grassroots government: A comprehensive analysis of China’s land system,” China Reform, July 2005. 12  Yu Jianrong, “Enclosure is the city’s plunder of the countryside,” Beijing News, November 5, 2010. 13  Dang Guoying, “The land system’s expropriation of farmers’ property,” China Reform, July 2005.

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The Wukan protest demonstrated both the rationality of rural people and their ability to organize effectively. This is a sign of progress. Travel to cities has expanded the extent to which many peasants are aware of their rights, and the Internet and social media have given them an enhanced ability to communicate and mobilize. More importantly, the increased economic activity and social mobility peasants have experienced in recent years have actually strengthened traditional village institutions centered on family lineages. Since Reform and Opening, ancestor worship and maintenance of ancestral halls—which had been devastated during the Cultural Revolution—have enjoyed a revival. This is particularly pronounced in Guangdong. The old patriarchal social structure in rural areas is gradually turning into the social foundation for rural self-governance. The linchpin of the Wukan protests was a group of young people who had left the village to do business or work as migrant laborers. They kept in touch over the Chinese instant-message service QQ and through it formed a group they called the Wukan Ardent Youth Corps. Corps members discussed the unfairness of Wukan land transfers. They bemoaned the fact that their village committee hadn’t held an election in forty-one years. They railed against the lack of openness in government affairs and public finance. And they planned to petition higher authorities to address their grievances. When the conflicts in Wukan escalated, one by one the group’s members returned home, where they became a core of strength for the protests. They registered social media accounts to provide up-to-the-minute news of what was happening in Wukan. They made videos and disseminated them widely online. They talked to local and international journalists. When the village was blockaded, they even spontaneously organized a team of security guards to maintain order. These returnees were deeply connected to their native soil, but the knowledge and skills they had gained while away from home were what gave the Wukan protests coordination and power. They made Wukan a model for organizing social movements at the village level. The man elected village head was the respected and trusted protest leader Lin Zuluan. Lin, a sixty-five-year-old Communist Party member and former soldier, had served as a cadre in Wukan and the nearby township of Donghai before leaving officialdom to go into business. In many ways he resembled a member of the traditional rural gentry. His party membership and years as an official ensured that he knew his way around China’s political system. Although he’d returned home to retire, he still

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maintained a kind of emotional connection to the regime. His years in business had given him a web of social connections that kept his worldview from getting stale. These are the qualities that tend to confer authority and build popular support in today’s Chinese countryside, and they allowed Lin to keep the protesters rational and their protests orderly. Lin’s participation demonstrated the enormous role that gentry-like figures can play in ensuring the success of attempts at rural self-governance. By September 21, 2011, Wukan was in a state of anarchy. The village party secretary had fled, and some 5000 people were engaged in direct confrontation with the county government in Lufeng. It was Lin Zuluan who proposed and organized a village election. First, each of the forty-­ seven lineages in the village (each of which has its own surname) chose between one and five representatives. Next, from out of this initial group of 117 “village representatives,” thirty-eight nominees for a temporary village council were selected. Then the 117 voted to select thirteen from among the thirty-eight, who would now serve as a temporary village council that could respond to Wukan’s most pressing immediate needs. That this kind of multi-centered, multi-phased system of representation could grow spontaneously out of the traditional local lineage system demonstrates the power that lineage still holds to shape local society. When, at long last, the conflict between Wukan’s villagers and government reached an accommodation, the villagers were able to hold a legal and binding election to choose a new village government. Their conduct ought to spell the demise of the belief that Chinese peasants are incapable of participating in democratic politics. This year, discussions of village self-­ governance have been especially heated and the center of debate has been whether village self-governance could become the basis for political reform at the national level. From the perspective of population, if 80% of China’s population that is classified as rural can successfully govern itself that would make for quite a sturdy foundation for social stability across the country. To choose the countryside as the first step of political reform is also a necessity of history. China’s system of prefectures and counties, which allowed the arm of the central state to reach all the way to the village level, began in the Qin Dynasty (221–208 BC). During the Northern Song Dynasty (960–1127), the scholar-statesman Wang Anshi put into practice the baojia system,14 a 14  The baojia system was an invention of Wang Anshi of the Song Dynasty, who created this community-based system of law enforcement and civil control that was included in his large reform of the Chinese government from 1069 to 1076.

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community-based form of law enforcement and civil control. Under this system, imperial power reached only to the county level. The substance of rural self-governance arose out of a mutually beneficial relationship between the central state and the local gentry. Under the baojia, responsibility for tax collection and law and order at the village level was left to local gentry and lineages. This reduced costs for the central government and at the same time allowed the local lineages to protect their own interests. At the beginning of the eighteenth century, Emperor Yongzheng of the Qing Dynasty changed the tax code so that rural households would be taxed by the size of their land-holdings rather than by the number of people in their family. This lowered the tax burden on the poorest Chinese farmers and gave them a new measure of freedom. The termination of the imperial civil service examination system in 1905 was a watershed moment in the history of China’s countryside. It closed off the channel through which people in rural villages could ascend to positions of power in the imperial central government. Society had to reshuffle the cards. Peasants would have to find another way to the center of history; the modern transformation of the countryside thus began at this point. During the Republican Era (1912–1949) that followed the abdication of the Qing emperor, both the Nationalist Party (KMT) and Communist Party (CCP) realized that the situation of China’s peasantry was its most pressing issue and a source of political power worth fighting over. The CCP mobilized peasants to practice class struggle, while the KMT launched a “Rural Reconstruction Movement,” in part to counter the influence of the Communists, with more than 1200 pilot projects throughout the country, including Huang Yanpei’s Kuanshan project in Jiangsu, Liang Shuming’s Zouping project in Shandong, and James Yen’s Dingxian project in Hebei. In Yan’an in 1938, Liang Shuming and Mao Zedong had a debate on China’s future. The reformism and revolutionism are inconsistent with each other. The history then revealed its options later. If you look back at the past hundred years of interventions in the Chinese countryside, it’s impossible to deny that the CCP is unsurpassed in this regard. It understood best what peasants wanted, it was the best at mobilizing them, and it was, thus, the most successful at using and controlling them. This was the most important reason for its victory over the KMT.

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Although the peasant movement in Hunan led by Mao Zedong is a political party operation, the resources it can rely on are definitely not as good as James Yen. From 1934 to 1939, Yen raised a total of 1.5 million US dollars from the Rockefeller Foundation for his experiments in Dingxian.15 Although no account is available, Hunan’s political mobilization must be operating at a low cost, and it is desire and interest that motivate farmers to participate in high-risk violent revolutions. Prior to their victory, the Communists had already dealt serious blows to the power of clans and gentry families in the countryside. Once in power, they used land reform, collectivization, and the establishment of the People’s Communes to thoroughly destroy what remained of China’s traditional rural social structure, and they replaced it with their own apparatus of total political control, penetrating all the way down to the village level. But with the beginning of Reform and Opening (in 1978) and the first wave of urbanization that followed it, this level of control became problematic. Excessive urbanization, the government’s over-reliance on land requisition, official corruption, and the lack of transparency in the political process led to increasing number of rural protests. You could say that Wukan is just one such protest, but the nature of its resolution demonstrates that the countryside possesses the resources to govern itself. History demands that for China to progress, top-down control in the countryside ought to be replaced with direct democracy at the village level. It is also time for a new definition of “revolution.” Revolution doesn’t need to mean seizing power. It doesn’t need to mean one political party replacing another. It doesn’t need to mean violence. Revolution can mean the melting away of conflict, a common search for a road through our problems. It can mean sharing, rather than seizing. It can bring smiles instead of terror. It can be a storm of ideas rather than a call to arms. Revolution doesn’t need to mean the burying of a system; it can mean the system’s renewal. Revolution doesn’t need to mean chaos; it can also mean order. Wukan has already set an example. It is time for history to follow.

15  Zi Zhongyun, “Rockefeller Foundation and China,” Selected Writings by Zi Zhongyun: Sit and Watch the World (Guilin: Guangxi Normal University Press, 2011), 262.

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The Cultivators: Rural Reconstructionists in China16 Rural reconstruction, one of the most significant insurmountable problems in China’s relentless pursuit of modernity, has had its ups and downs over the last hundred years. It again has emerged as a lens through which to examine the role of different political and intellectual forces in China’s process of social reform. Chinese elites began exploring the concept of rural reform in the late Qing Dynasty, when Mi Jiansan and his Japan-educated son Mi Digang, members of a distinguished local family in the village of Zhaicheng in Ding County of Hebei Province, experimented with the idea of “village government” in 1902 through literacy campaigns, civic education, and local self-government. County magistrate Sun Faxu developed their idea further as he took the post of governor in neighboring Shanxi Province, and it later also was embraced by the warlord Yan Xishan, who effectively controlled Shanxi in the Republican Era and turned the province into a model of rural reconstruction. The “Village Government Group” was established as a school of thought in 1924, when some north China landed gentry, including Wang Hongyi, Mi Digang, Mi Jieping, Peng Yuting, Liang Zhonghua, Yi Zhongcai, and Wang Yike, launched the Chung Hwa Daily and the Village Government Monthly. In 1925, the then four-year-­ old Chinese Communist Party, having realized the importance of farmers to its revolution, decided to try to mobilize support in the countryside with their “Letter to Farmers,” encouraging the establishment of farmers’ unions. The ensuing class struggles and land revolution provoked urban intellectuals into seeking different approaches to rural reform. The May 30, 1925, shooting of protesters in the Shanghai International Settlement sparked a nationwide labor and anti-imperialist movement, and many parts of China saw a surge in rural reconstruction experiments. By 1934, official statistics show that there were more than 600 rural reconstruction

16  Completed in Chinese on September 24, 2012, in Beijing. The English version was translated by Asia Society’s editorial team of  the  online magazine ChinaFile, published in  Ou Ning, ed., The South of Southern: Space, Geography, History and the Biennale (Beijing: China Youth Press, 2014); republished under the  title “Rediscovering Rural Reconstruction in  China” in  Tessa Morris-Suzuki and  Eun Jeong Soh, eds., New Worlds from  Below: Grassroots Networking and Informal Life Politics in Twenty-First Century East Asia (Canberra: The Australian National University Press, 2017)

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groups and over 1000 experiments across China.17 Newspapers and magazines filled with reports, commentaries, and debates on rural reconstruction. The two most influential experiments were those conducted by Liang Shuming’s Rural Reconstruction Institute in Zouping County, Shandong Province, and James Yen’s Mass Education Association in Ding County, Hebei Province. Liang, inspired by the “Village Government Group,” developed a Confucianism-based philosophy for rural reconstruction and thus was considered a member of the “Old Group” while Yen, who was Christian and received funding from the United States, belonged to the “New Group.” In the thirteenth volume of The Cambridge History of China, historian John K.  Fairbank devoted a whole section, “The Rural Reconstruction Movement,” to the massive rural reconstruction campaigns of the time. Fairbank identified six types of campaigns: (1) Western-influenced (James Yen); (2) nativist (the “Village Government Group,” Liang Shuming and Tao Xingzhi, the founder of the Xiaozhuang Normal College in Nanjing); (3) educational (James Yen and Tao Xingzhi); (4) military (Peng Yuting, who established a local defense regime in Zhenping County, Henan Province); (5) populist (James Yen and Tao Xingzhi); (6) and bureaucratic (the two “experimental counties” administered by the Nanjing authorities in Lanxi, Zhejiang Province, and Jiangning, Jiangsu Province). But Fairbank’s volume overlooked several other important experiments— those carried out by Lu Zuofu’s Chongqing Beibei Defense Bureau in the Gorges region along the Yangtze tributary of Jialing River, Gao Jiansi’s Jiangsu Provincial Institute of Education in Huangxiang, Wuxi, Jiangsu Province, and Huang Yanpei’s National Association of Vocational Education of China in Xugongqiao, Kunshan, Jiangsu Province. The Cambridge History of China stated that all rural reconstruction experiments were linked inextricably to politics: “To revitalize the countryside through educational and economic reforms meant working out relationships of patronage and protection with political authorities. This was surely because any attempt to work with the peasantry in an organized project inevitably raised questions of political orientation and legitimacy, whether or not the project had any explicitly political aims or activities.”18  Zhang Yuanshan and Xu Shilian eds., Rural Reconstruction Experiments, Volume 2 (Shanghai: Chung Hwa Book Company, 1935), 19. 18  Philip A. Kuhn, “The Rural Reconstruction Movement,” in John K. Fairbank and Albert Feuerwerker, eds., The Cambridge History of China, vol. 13, Republican China 1912–1949, Part 2 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 359. 17

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Owing to political uncertainty, these educational, social, and economic reforms—though not without a local effect—were unable to provide a comprehensive solution to China’s rural problems. Politics was not only a barrier to China’s rural reconstruction but also a key factor contributing to its ultimate failure. Yen first claimed that his experiment had nothing to do with politics but had to admit later that, “Given the circumstances, we couldn’t keep ourselves away from politics.”19 Liang said that the “two major difficulties” he encountered were “speaking highly of social transformation while relying on authorities” and “claiming to be a rural movement while not moving the rural.”20 Rural reconstruction was doomed to failure if it did not seek “a political solution.”21 In fact, the multitude of experiments focused on local self-government, mass education, and agricultural development was preceded by the brief existence in China of a utopian philosophy called “New Village-ism”—a mixture of Japanese writer Saneatsu Mushanokō ji’s idea of Atarashikimura (“New Village”), Peter Kropotkin’s theory of mutual aid, and Leo Tolstoy’s view of labor and the North American practice of combining studies with part-time work. Adherents to Mushanokō ji’s philosophy were called the Shirakaba-ha (“White Birch Group”) for the name of the literary magazine Shirakaba (“White Birch”) he founded in 1910. In 1918, in the mountains of Miyazaki Prefecture in Kyūshū, members of the “White Birch Group” carried out their plan to build an intentional community without government, exploitation, or social class and to live an idyllically pastoral life. Chinese writer Zhou Zuoren was a long-time subscriber to the commune’s literary magazine Atarashiki-mura, expressing his support for the movement in his articles “Humanist Literature” and “Japan’s New Village,” published in 1918 and 1919  in the influential magazine La Jeunesse, during China’s New Culture Movement of the 1910s and 1920s. Zhou even visited Miyazaki himself and in 1920 founded a branch of the Atarashiki-mura commune in his Beijing home, attracting early  James Yen, “The Past and Future of the Mass Education Movement,” in Song Enrong, ed., To the People (Guilin: Guangxi Normal University Press, 2003), 197. 20  Liang Shuming, Rural Reconstruction Theories (Shanghai: Shanghai People’s Press, 2006), 368. 21  Cao Lixin made an in-depth analysis of the political dilemma faced by the Rural Reconstruction Movement in the Republican Era in comparison with the rural revolution of the Communist Party of China. See Cao Lixin, “Rural Reconstruction: Toward a Political Solution,” Twenty-First Century 91 (October 2005). 19

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communist leaders such as Li Dazhao, Mao Zedong, Cai Hesen, and Yun Daiying. The same year, a similar and influential experiment was started in the village of Xiaowuying of Xihua County, Henan Province, by Wang Gongbi, a member of the former Tongmenghui,22 a revolutionary alliance absorbed by the Kuomintang in 1912. Xiaowuying was soon renamed Youth Village. Mao Zedong was also an admirer of “New Village-ism” but chose the path of revolution in the end. It was only after the founding of the People’s Republic of China in 1949 that Mao would transform this utopian philosophy into People’s Communes. The idealistic values of “New Village-­ ism,” unlike the pragmatic approach of the Rural Reconstruction Movement, soon fell into decline in China. In fact, “New Village-ism” was not only a Japanese import but also a continuation of ancient Chinese Agriculturalism (Nongjia), the most marginalized and overlooked of all the schools of thought, and one that dates back to the golden age of Chinese philosophy from 770 to 221 BC. The Agriculturalism (aka: School of Tillers) was discussed in a volume “Treatise on Literature” of the Book of Han, a history written in the Han Dynasty: The first Agriculturalists may have been agriculture officials, who grew different kinds of grain and encouraged people to till land and plant mulberry trees to produce enough food and clothing. Food is so important that it ranks first among the eight major areas of a state’s policy, followed by property. The merit of early Agriculturalists is their emphasis on food production, which Confucius said should be a priority for any ruler. However, their vulgar successors, who believe that a saint-king in the Confucian sense would be useless, attempt to disrupt the social hierarchy by calling on rulers to plough alongside their people.

In his book Debt: The First 5000 Years, American anthropologist and anarchist David Graeber referred to Agriculturalism as an anarchist movement in the pre-Qin period.23 22  The Tongmenghui (or Chinese United League) was a secret society and underground resistance movement founded by Sun Yat-sen, Song Jiaoren, and others in Tokyo, Japan, on August 20, 1905. It was formed from the merger of multiple Chinese revolutionary groups in the late Qing Dynasty. 23  “In China, while many of the founders of the ‘hundred schools’ of philosophy that blossomed under the Warring States were wandering sages who spent their days moving from city to city trying to catch the ears of princes, other were leaders of social movements from the very start. Some of these movements didn’t even have leaders, like the School of the Tillers, an anarchist movement of peasant intellectuals who set out to create egalitarian com-

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The Rural Reconstruction Movement turned out to be short-lived as well. Reformers saw their hopes crushed in 1937, when the national crisis following Japan’s invasion took precedence over rural impoverishment and decline as the most urgent problem faced by the country. Still, had the war not broken out, the Rural Reconstruction Movement would have eventually failed because of its own limitations. In 1930, Peng Yuting was assassinated by a rival faction and Chiang Kai-shek ordered Tao Xingzhi to close his Xiaozhuang Normal College. Wang Dazhi, one of Tao’s students, carried on the work of his alma mater after being appointed principal of the Xin’an Primary School. He organized the Xin’an Traveling Group, whose students spent more than ten years visiting different parts of China and calling for resistance to the Japanese invasion. As different political forces joined the resistance movement, Liang Shuming’s Shandong Rural Reconstruction Institute was disbanded and James Yen’s Mass Education Association moved to Chongqing with the Kuomintang government. But Yen did not give up his rural reform efforts. In Chongqing, he established the Chinese Institute of Rural Reconstruction, which was declared a “reactionary organization” and taken over by the local Military Control Commission in 1950. Nevertheless, his International Institute of Rural Reconstruction, founded in 1960 in the Philippines, still operates today. Yen dedicated his whole life to rural reconstruction. These reformers often were criticized for their superficial understanding of the complexity of Chinese society, especially China’s stubborn social problems. In 1936, the New Knowledge Bookstore published Critiques of China’s Rural Reconstruction, a collection of commentaries on Liang’s and Yen’s experiments written by pro-Communist intellectuals such as Qian Jiaju and Li Zixiang. Qian pointed out that Yen did not fully understand Chinese society: They attribute China’s social ills to the ignorance, poverty, weakness and selfishness of farmers, who account for over 85 percent of China’s population, and believe they need to address those four problems to save Chinese society. But they overlook the fact that farmers’ ignorance, poverty, weakness and selfishness are only the symptoms of China’s social ills. The root cause cannot be removed simply by treating the symptoms.24 munities in the cracks and fissures between states.” David Graeber, Debt: The First 5000 Years (New York: Melville House, 2012), 237. 24  Qian Jiaju, “Where Is the Path to China’s Rural Reconstruction?” in Qian Jiaju and Li Zixiang, eds., Critiques of China’s Rural Reconstruction (Shanghai: New Knowledge Bookstore, 1936), 101.

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Qian argued that Liang, as a “rural philosopher,” had a more in-depth understanding of Chinese society than Yen but offered only an old solution repackaged as a new one: Mr. Liang’s new approach appears to be a perfect solution that could immediately lead people into ‘a kingdom of liberty, equality and fraternity’. But that is actually just an old trick invented by Confucius, who once said, ‘The people only need to be told what to do but not why they should do it.’ His theories of rural reconstruction, under the new disguise of farmer organizations and farmer education, are nothing more than a clever redesign of the current social order.25

These two kinds of experiments, as Qian suggested, would lead China astray. Although he did not put forward any feasible solution in his articles, it can be inferred from his arguments that he advocated anti-­ imperialist, anti-feudal class struggles aimed at subverting the established system. The theory of class struggle also served as the ideological basis for the Chinese Communist Party’s revolution. If the only viable option for the Communist Party at that time was to seize power through revolution, what would it do about the unresolved issue of rural reconstruction after its revolution succeeded? Shortly after the People’s Republic of China was founded in 1949, private ownership was abolished in the countryside through the agricultural cooperative movement. People’s Communes were introduced in 1958 as a quintessential example of Mao’s vision of rural reconstruction. The concept of People’s Communes is a blend of the utopian “New Village-ism,” Liang Shuming’s theory of combining politics with education, and Peng Yuting’s military-style management. Land and labor were pooled to boost agricultural production so that China could build a communist society, in which people would work to their best ability and have all their needs satisfied. However, before being gradually dismantled by the new market economy created in 1984, the Communes did not bring about any fundamental improvement in the rural economy or farmers’ lives. Instead, they severely damaged Chinese rural society: the concentration of land and other means of production disrupted traditional small-scale farming; intense class struggles and frequent political movements destroyed the family structure  Qian Jiaju, “China’s Wrong Road,” ibid., 142.

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and ethics in rural areas; and forced labor and egalitarianism demoralized farmers. Thanks to the “Household Responsibility System” adopted in 1982, rural China was revitalized temporarily. But the fast-growing urbanization that followed has left the countryside increasingly deprived and marginalized and has given rise to myriad problems, including agricultural decline, the loss of agrarian land, rural emigration, reliance on imported food, rural depopulation, insufficient public resources, local gangs, ruralurban imbalance, and social conflicts, especially the numerous mass protests staged against arbitrary land acquisitions by the government. Rural reconstruction has reemerged as a critical issue for China. In 2003, researcher Wen Tiejun, who coined the phrase “Three Rural Issues” (agriculture, rural areas, and farmers), founded the James Yen Rural Reconstruction Institute at the village of Zhaicheng of Hebei Province, where Mi Jiansan, Mi Digang, and James Yen had done their pioneering work. Farmers from all parts of China arrived at Zhaicheng to participate in his project, which generated significant media coverage. In 2004, Wen was appointed dean of the School of Agricultural Economics and Rural Development at Renmin University of China. He also founded the Liang Shuming Rural Reconstruction Center, a branch of which he moved to Renmin in 2005. The founding of this research institute with multiple affiliate organizations suggested a considerable revival of the Rural Reconstruction Movement of the Republican Era. The same year, the Fifth Plenum of the 16th Central Committee of the Communist Party of China resolved to create a “New Socialist Countryside” to address the “Three Rural Issues.” As Wen and other intellectuals became more involved in rural reconstruction in different parts of the country, governments of all levels were ready to implement the Party’s new policy. For example, Sichuan province and Chongqing municipality launched experimental projects to coordinate rural and urban development. The issue of rural reconstruction returned to public view, drawing the attention of both the government and civil society. Wen was sent to live and work in rural Shanxi Province during the Cultural Revolution. He went to Renmin University to study journalism in 1979 and joined the Rural Policy Research Office of the Party’s Central Committee in 1985, where he assisted Du Runsheng, an important promoter of the Household Responsibility System, in research and fieldwork. Thus, he gained first-hand experience of the hardships of rural life. Wen studied at the University of Michigan in 1987 and at Columbia University in 1991. He visited Cornell University and the University of South

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California as a visiting scholar in 1991. However, compared with James Yen, who also received Western academic training and embraced an international perspective, Wen has been able to make more insightful observations about the “Three Rural Issues” and put forward theories in a broader context by using the research methodology he learned from the distinguished economist Wu Jinglian. Familiar with the philosophy behind the Rural Reconstruction Movement of the Republican Era and the rural revolution of the Communist Party, Wen argues that owing to China’s enormous population and limited available land, “neither the revolution nor the reform led to anything other than ‘equal’ distribution of arable land.” He believes that the main cause of the social conflicts in rural areas, unknown to his predecessors, is the excessive extraction of agricultural surplus, which undermines “the property and income distribution system inherent in the small-scale peasant economy.” That system, in his opinion, is the norm and a stabilizing factor for Chinese society and is “naturally resistant to the Western Industrial Revolution and the ensuing ‘social progress’ in the capitalist sense.”26 Wen asserts that China, like the West, has been passing on the huge institutional costs of industrialization and urbanization to its countryside. He also believes that China’s development strategy oriented toward industrial capital, international trade, and economic globalization not only has imposed an onerous burden on agriculture, rural areas, and farmers but also involves significant risk itself because excessive dependence on imported food and resources means potential vulnerability to global shocks especially financial crises. Wen often says in self-mockery that his attitude toward urbanization is too “conservative” but, in a country obsessed with urban life and high economic growth, his commitment to rural reconstruction is more likely to be considered radical. Compared with the pioneers in the Republican Era, he has accomplished more with fewer resources. But he has encountered the same problem as his predecessors—local authorities shut down the James Yen Rural Reconstruction Institute in 2006 on the grounds that it had built an environmentally friendly building without official approval, missed the annual inspection by the local government, and advised farmers on petition matters. 26  Wen Tiejun, “The Three Rural Issues: Some Reflections at the End of the Twentieth Century,” Dushu (December 1999). For the longer version of this article, see Wen Tiejun, The Three Rural Issues: Some Reflections at the End of the Twentieth Century (Beijing: Joint Publishing, 2005).

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Nevertheless, Wen and his followers are as resilient as James Yen. After the institute was closed, Qiu Jiansheng, who had joined the cause of rural reconstruction because of Wen, launched new projects in Hainan and Fujian provinces. One of Wen’s PhD students He Huili continued to work as an assistant to the mayor of Kaifeng city, Henan Province, and help local farmers to form cooperatives. The Liang Shuming Rural Reconstruction Center is still in operation, encouraging university students to do their part for rural reconstruction, though its former director Liu Xiangbo died in a car accident in 2011. The Little Donkey Farm in the western suburbs of Beijing is working on ecological agriculture and devising new methods to provide organic produce for city dwellers. They all have benefited from Wen’s theories and support, sharing resources among themselves.27 In addition to Wen’s movement, there are other important projects such as the ones run by He Xuefeng in Hubei Province, Li Changping in Henan Province, and Liao Xiaoyi in Sichuan Province. By combining the traditional approach to rural reconstruction focused on mass education and agriculture with their insights into contemporary problems, these people have developed various new programs and concepts such as community colleges, community supported agriculture, ecological villages, and “Workers’ Homes,” programs targeting migrant workers living in cities. Many urban writers and artists have settled in the countryside and become involved in the Rural Reconstruction Movement either because they have noticed the inextricable link between rural and urban areas or because they aspire to rediscover and revive the traditional culture eroded by urbanization. A well-known example is Johnson Chang Tsong-zung and Hu Xiangcheng’s project in the small town of Jinze near Shanghai. They transformed an abandoned industrial site there into a village featuring architecture typical of traditional buildings in the region. Their project covers a number of areas, including reviving traditional folk arts, developing organic farming (they are running a farm as part of the project), and restoring traditional values.28 Other examples include writer Ye Fu’s experiment in representative democracy and rural drama in Luojiang County, Sichuan Province, and Li Yinqiang’s China Rural Library, a 27  For more information about the Rural Reconstruction Movement led by Wen Tiejun, see Liang Hong, “Action on Land,” Chutzpah! 1 (April 2011). 28  Australian writer Tony Perrottet visited and wrote about Jinze. See Tony Perrottet, “The Shock of the Old,” Wall Street Journal, June 28, 2012. https://www.wsj.com/articles/ SB10001424052702304765304577482580429791656.

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non-­governmental organization (NGO) that often invites urban writers and intellectuals to give talks to rural children. The strength of these projects lies in their ability to leverage the unique cultural resources at their disposal.29 China’s urban-rural relations first came to my attention when I was doing research and making documentary film in Guangzhou’s urban village San Yuan Li from 2002 to 2003. I realized that urban villages and slums were actually rooted in the failure of the rural economy. From then on, I became interested in studying rural issues, learned about Wen Tiejun’s theories and work, and read the biography of James Yen as well as works on the Rural Reconstruction Movement of the Republican Era. Before starting my own project, the Bishan Commune, in the village of Bishan of Yi County, Anhui Province, in 2011, I spent years studying rural society and social movements. I visited the closed James Yen Rural Reconstruction Institute, Qiu Jiansheng’s project in Fujian, and He Huili’s workplace in Henan. I attended the “Ecology and the Revival of Rural Culture” seminar hosted by Wen Tiejun, talked with intellectuals engaged in rural movements in Taiwan, and examined the diverse body of literature on Chinese rural society. I also watched Shinsuke Ogawa’s documentaries about rural Japan, visited Thai artists Rirkrit Tiravanija and Kamin Lertchaiprasert’s Land Foundation in Chiang Mai, and read about Indian writer Arundhati Roy’s criticism of the controversial Narmada Dam project and of the Indian government’s armed actions against the Maoist insurgents supported by rural populations. My Bishan Commune thus turned out to be a melting pot of fascinating ideas—a mixture of the benevolent society described in Peter Kropotkin’s Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution, the concept of “direct action” advocated by neo-anarchism, the utopian artist collective Neue Slowenische Kunst established by Slovenian artists, the Rural Reconstruction Movement of the Republican Era, and the vision of contemporary reformers like Wen Tiejun. In 2011, Zuo Jing and I purchased two antique Hui-style houses in the villages of Bishan and Guanlu of Yi County to start our project. We raised funds to hold the first Bishan Harvestival, a cultural feast in the form of a harvest celebration. Based on a project called “Handicraft in Yi County,” the event invited artists, architects, and designers from other parts of the country to work with local craftsmen and folk artists to create modern 29  For more information about these projects, see “Their Rural Reconstruction” in China Fortune (November 2011).

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versions of traditional objects, which were put on display in Bishan’s ancestral halls and old granaries. There also were exhibitions of historical documents about Bishan Village and the region, performances by musicians from other places and local Chinese opera groups, poetry classes for local children, the screening of documentary and drama films about rural China, seminars on rural reconstruction attended by participants from both mainland China and Taiwan, and farmers’ fairs.30 As the first step of our plan, the Bishan Harvestival is aimed at reinvigorating public life in rural areas. We believe that reviving traditional folk arts is, at this stage, the only way to transform our cultural resources into job opportunities and tangible economic benefits for farmers because, although Bishan attracts many tourists every year thanks to its proximity to the beautiful Mount Huangshan, its heavy reliance on admission charges to generate tourism revenue may be unsustainable. However, we hope that the Bishan Commune will go beyond arts and culture and take on economic and social dimensions by encouraging farmers to engage in jiaogong (“exchange of labor”), for example, and through other forms of mutual aid so that they can depend less on public services. As our project progresses, the annual Bishan Harvestival will become a showcase for the work we carry out each year. In fact, the 2011 Bishan Harvestival was so well received that the county government asked us to organize the 2012 Yixian International Photo Festival, which is scheduled to take place at the same time as this year’s Bishan Harvestival. My own project in Bishan has given me a deeper understanding of the difficulties of rural reconstruction. First of all, since the Republican Era, rural reconstruction, as a spontaneous movement independent of the government, always has faced a major constraint—its legitimacy and social space depend on its delicate relationship with politics. Any misstep could lead to failure, as in the examples of Tao Xingzhi’s Xiaozhuang Normal College, Peng Yuting’s experiment in Zhenping, and Wen Tiejun’s James Yen Rural Reconstruction Institute. So we need to be cautious about engaging local authorities ourselves and avoid compromising the independence and sustainability of the Bishan Commune when seeking the government’s support. Second, although rural reconstruction needs financing, corporate and government funds would undermine the movement’s independence while funding from the general public is inadequate at this time and will not be a viable source of financing without persistent efforts.  For details about the Bishan Harvestival, see Echo Zhao’s report in Leap (October 2011).

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James Yen received funding from the Rockefeller Foundation but was criticized for relying on “imperialism.” His case, though successful in a sense, was an exception that cannot serve as an example to everyone. A fundamental element of Wen Tiejun’s rural reconstruction philosophy is his disapproval of “big capital.” Wen refuses funding from large corporations and even NGOs, which means that his colleagues may be doing their work for their own sake without any material reward. At the Bishan Commune, we secure the necessary funding by including our programs in the budgets of the large arts exhibitions and events we are commissioned to organize, paying from our own pockets or asking our friends for donations. None of these methods, nevertheless, is sustainable. Third, local communities’ understanding of rural reconstruction is sometimes at odds with the lofty ideals of intellectuals. Local people seldom recognize the value of outsiders’ work if they do not perceive any practical benefits. Some of them even become your enemies if other groups are helped at their expense. For example, cotton farmers in Ding County were grateful to James Yen because the cooperatives he helped to form made it unnecessary for them to borrow from banks or through intermediaries and thus reduced their costs. But, as a result, many local banks went bankrupt. Failed banks laid siege to Yen’s Mass Education Association and demanded it leave the county. Similarly, we found it both amusing and frustrating when some villagers called the Bishan Harvestival, which was free to all local farmers, a profitable investment in tourism. So why bother engaging in rural reconstruction if it is so difficult? Wen once said, “Personally, it’s because I can’t stand doing nothing about it. Humans, particularly intellectuals, inevitably possess a feminine kindness. If intellectuals, as part of the social mainstream, didn’t have that quality or didn’t reflect on this issue, the social mainstream would be a masculine one or, in other words, would have a tendency toward extreme beliefs.”31 As a man who was born in rural China, struggled to find his footing in the city, and then aspired to return to the countryside, I do not sense in Wen’s words any condescension but a genuine compassion for his fellow Chinese.

 Liang Hong, “Action on Land,” Chutzpah! 1 (April 2011): 83.

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CHAPTER 6

Yixian International Photo Festival

The Interactions1 Preface Yixian County was founded in the twenty-sixth year of the reign of China’s first emperor, Qin Shi Huang (221 BCE), and, despite more than 2000 years of history, remains the place of towering craggy mountains, elegant vistas, fields embroidered with crisscrossing paths as far as the eye can see, as well as white walls, black roof tiles, and row upon row of Hui-style rural architecture. Here farmers have lived peacefully for generations, working the land with honesty and decency and living ancient customs. The county is nestled up against the foothills of Mount Huangshan, whose beauty has been admired by visitors since antiquity. This kind of places can be called paradise, now ever more accessible through better transport and information networks and plugged into the global economy, but growing rarer and rarer. The desire to preserve the area’s cultural heritage for future generations, while at the same time opening it up to the contemporary 1  This is the curatorial statement published in Peng Yanhan, ed., The Interactions (Yixian: Yi County People Government, 2012), the  publication of  Yixian International Photo Festival. Completed in  Chinese by Ou Ning and  Zuo Jing in  2012, the  English version was translated by Anna Holmwood and Sun Yunfan in the same year. In order to preserve the integrity of the literature, the full texts were included here, and the names of the authors responsible for each part are indicated.

© The Author(s) 2020 O. Ning, Utopia in Practice, Contemporary East Asian Visual Cultures, Societies and Politics, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-5791-0_6

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society, is a conundrum redoubled and one that is constantly testing the wisdom of the local population. Urbanization continues at a formidable pace in today’s China, assaulting older patterns of city and country and redistributing resources. Freedom is following these new economic forces, but they are also confusing urban borders and altering preexisting social structures. Transformation of industry and the rise of the service and tourist sectors are radically changing the economic links between urban and country. China is in a period of intense change, and huge challenges remain such as how to balance the relationship between urban and rural communities, how to safeguard a plurality of ways of life, how to sustain a balanced ecology and agriculture, and how to navigate a path between protecting history and promoting economic development. Yixian is a county with a long history, a rich cultural heritage, and a vast organizational system that maintains rural and agricultural traditions. You could say that it is a perfect representative sample for researchers of contemporary Chinese society. For thousands of years Chinese society has relied on a profound mutually beneficial relationship between urban and rural communities. Yixian sits in the Huizhou area of Anhui, one of the finest examples of this harmonious balance between city and country. In the Ming and Qing dynasties the peasants of Huizhou had sent their younger sons and brothers to the cities to engage in trade where they accumulated considerable wealth. Huizhou’s traders were always a dynamic force within China’s economy as a whole in that period. When away from home they formed trading associations for support and assistance, before bringing their wealth back home from the cities to the countryside so that their wives, children, and parents could build large homes and ancestral halls, and set up free schools, orphanages, and organizations to look after the poor and elderly. This all ensured the continued prosperity of rural society and clan culture. However, as social structures began to divide along urban and rural lines, reinforced by the creation of the household registration system, the urbanization deepened and the rural communities were marginalized. The mutual nurturing of city and country that had existed in China for so long has slowly been turned upside down. In rural China today, large swathes of farming land are either merged into surrounding cities or abandoned. Farmers struggle to continue working the land and so have no choice but to flood into the cities in order to take up unskilled work. Those who have grown up in agricultural communities have suffered from poor levels of education, added to barriers

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established by the household registration system, these rural residents are unable to share in the spoils of urban growth. It is hard for them to compete for jobs and it remains difficult to accumulate money to send back home. Because of Huizhou’s relative wealth historically, cultural heritage sites are providing the foundations for tourism, meaning these problems are not as common as in other rural areas. But when it comes to the preservation of history and ecology, the tourism industry is a double-edged sword, and finding the balance between heritage, environment, and economic gain is now forming an additional layer to the problem of city and countryside. Yixian International Photo Festival is organized every year by the local government, and 2012 will mark its seventh year. Since its inception it has attracted photographers from all over to use images to record and display local scenes, both natural and human, and to dig up historical riches while bringing information and culture from outside to Yixian. This year’s festival is extending the invitation wider to photographers, artists, filmmakers, and researchers, to bring together a plurality of ideas and ways of thinking, as well as experiences from other frontiers in the city and country divide. We want to make Yixian a research site in order to open up research into today’s Chinese and Asian urban/rural divide. For this reason, the subject for this year’s festival is “Interactions.” We’ve divided the festival into five sections: The Enigma of Urbanization; The Continuity of Rural Society; Between City and Country; Realism and Surrealism; Intellectual’s Vision; and a special project Coal + Ice. The festival will devote itself to exploring positive models for the relationship between city and countryside, working hard to make this a mutually nurturing relationship in the contemporary context. This year’s festival will be held in Yixian Museum of Art as well as ancestral halls and local houses dotted around the four villages of Xidi, Nanping, Pingshan, and Lucun. As well as admiring the exhibits, visitors will also be able to experience local architectural spaces and the everyday life in these ancient villages. The festival will  take place November 2–8, 2012, with each venue hosting its own exhibitions, films, workshops, lectures, and talks. This year’s festival is curated by Zuo Jing and me, who made bases for ourselves in two villages Bishan and Guanlu in Yixian, respectively, in 2010. In 2011 we founded Bishan Commune, in which we brought together artists and intellectuals to get involved in rural reconstruction in the local area, putting together the first Bishan Harvestival, which is set to become a yearly artistic event designed to use art to reactivate community

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life. This year, Bishan Harvestival will be held simultaneously with Yixian International Photo Festival. (by Ou Ning) The Enigma of Urbanization Time: November 2–8, 2012, 9:00–18:00 Venue: Jin’ai Hall, Xidi Village, Yixian County, Anhui Province Participants: Tong Lam, Lu Guang, Aglaia Konrad, Wang Jiuliang, Greg Girard, and Sze Tsung Leong Why are cities in Europe and America such as Liverpool, Manchester, and Detroit shrinking, while China’s cities continue to grow? Why does urban development bankrupt agriculture and result in the decline of the countryside? Why are people all over the world surging toward the cities? This vigorous urbanization conceals many enigmas. Urbanization is the outcome of global economic integration; it is the result of liquid capital’s constant search for new spaces within which to make profit. As industry moves from developed nations and consumerism is newly distributed around the world, developing areas have become the testing grounds for urbanization. Urban areas are the principal fields for economic activity and the models for people’s pursuit of “modernization.” Their thirst for capital, land, and resources is swallowing up everything that surrounds them. As they have the capacity to absorb large-scale economic activity and the vast numbers of people arriving each day, but as land reserves can’t satisfy their rampant appetites, cities are having to implement high-density planning. They swallow up rural land or renew old urban centers, redistributing society’s resources as they do so. Cities demand rapid development, but at considerable cost to society. The desolation that follows in industrialization’s wake is captured in these photographers’ lenses, as is the excessive exploitation of resources, the tiny spaces into which city dwellers are squeezed, the extreme concentration of population and the resulting slums, the dreamlike man-made landscapes, and the unmanageable amounts of rubbish caused by new consumption—these images anticipate the need for our deeper reflection on the price we pay for this urbanization, and tell us that we must keep our guard against overheated development. (by Ou Ning)

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The Continuity of Rural Society Time: November 2–8, 2012, 9:00–18:00 Venues: Ye’s Ancestral Hall, Yang’s Dyehouse and Shuli House, Nanping Village and Lu Village, Yixian County, Anhui Province Participants: He Chongyue, Matjaž Tančič, Iwan Baan, Shao Yinong+Mu Chen, Qu Yan, Wei Bi, Hou Dengke, Ouyang Xingkai, Zhu Rui, Guo Zhenming, Huang Yen-pei, and Deke Erh Ever since the late Qing, Chinese rural society has been plagued by various forces: the disintegration of clan culture at the demand of modernization; the excessive extraction of agricultural surplus by industrialization; and the invasion of its land by urbanization, thus choking agriculture and forcing the peasants into the cities to become “migrant workers,” gradually laying the rural political, economic, and cultural life increasingly barren. Chinese traditional agriculture has always relied on labor-intensive techniques, but by entering the global market it has been forced to turn to chemical fertilizers in order to increase yields, causing serious damage to the soil and ecology. The social organization linked by blood ties, determined by the mode of intensive cultivation, disintegrated accordingly. Urbanization and globalization have diluted any sense of rural identity, causing the previously mutually nurturing relationship between city and country to become one of confrontation and conflict. Rural citizens are greatly influenced by modern mainstream values, while their wisdom and power are constantly belittled, eroding confidence in their rural ways of life and erasing their subjectivity in wider society. These problems should make us rethink the course of rural modernization and explore new avenues for the construction of the countryside and the continuity of rural life. We have collected historical images of the countryside, as well as asked photographers to immerse themselves in village life, to record its realities, reveal its problems. These photographs not only reminisce on the pastoral poetry of peasant life but also reveal the diseases at the heart of rural communities in an attempt to find their source. Social transformation is a gradual process that demands different forces and kinds of participation. Most probably these artworks won’t be able to provide instant solutions, but in revealing problems so is found the first step to solving them. (by Ou Ning)

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Between City and Country Time: November 2–8, 2012, 9:00–18:00 Venue: Yixian Museum of Art, Biyang Town, Yixian County, Anhui Province Participants: Luo Dan, Wang Qingsong, Wang Tiewei, and Ou Ning+Cao Fei China is a country vast in size and rich in resources, which historically always had a considerable physical distance between urban and country, as well as huge differences in terms of production technique, economic level, household registration system, and lifestyle. But after urbanization was set in motion, the boundaries between city and country began to blur and spaces have appeared for urban and rural integration, alongside the appearance of the city-country fringes, urban villages, and “no man’s land,” and the incorporation of land into new production units and categories. These transitional spaces present challenges for the systems that proceeded them in terms of population composition, administration, and management. The problems facing the cities and the country are not independent of each other but just two sides of the same problem. Therefore, in exploring the urban and rural divide as a whole, focus has turned to the need to construct new relationships between them. In recent years many photographers have chosen the relationship between city and country as their entry point into an examination of Chinese society. Some choose to follow a determined geographic route, photographing the people and scenes they encounter along the way; some throw themselves into city-country fringes and urban villages in order to explore the problems and structural origins of these special social spaces; some document the movement of people between the cities and the countryside, especially the large-scale movement of rural migrants during Spring Festival, using portraits to tell the moving stories of their journeys home. The balance between city and country must include a consideration of the rational distribution of industry and agriculture, the scientific education of the populous, safety guarantees in food production and consumption, as well as touch upon social justice in terms of resource distribution. The observations made by these photographers on the one hand tell us of the demands made on ordinary people and on the other hand provide consultative material for macro policy. Their creative work that is thus socially engaged has become an important new strand in contemporary art. (by Ou Ning)

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Realism and Surrealism Time: November 2–8, 2012, 9:00–18:00 Venues: Daoguang Hall, Baibu Hall and Xianyi Hall, Pingshan Village, Yixian County, Anhui Province Participants: Jiang Pengyi, Zhang Kechun, José Manuel Ballester, Han Lei, Gabriele Battaglia + Claudia Pozzoli, Sun Yanchu, Tang Nanan, Liu Bo+Li Yu, another mountain man (Stanley Wong), Zhao Liang, Sun Jianchun, and Yao Jui-Chung Surrealism, often understood as a modern aesthetic concept, emerged in the artistic ferment in Europe at the beginning of the last century. In the beginning it was a visual expression of the transcending of the logic of realism (through illusions and dreams). For China, the last one hundred years has been the history of the encounter between “traditional society” and “modernity,” in which the relationship between the cities and the countryside changed rapidly from one of the dependence of the cities on the countryside to the urbanization’s engulfing of everything and the rapid decline of rural communities. The “hyper stable” social structures began to disintegrate, and these fast-paced social changes brought about a marked change in the urban and rural landscapes. In many places there was no one coherent logic. The landscapes of realism and surrealism, therefore, interwove together to form our visual experience. At the same time, social distribution was uneven and the relationship between cities and countryside became imbalanced, which led people to behave in special ways that exceeded our comprehension. Rather than show surrealism to be an “evolution” of reality, or a distortion of our feelings, these photographers demonstrate that it should better be called a part of our surroundings; but the problem is that when surrealism becomes a part of everyday reality, its aesthetic meaning disappears and surreality becomes reality. (by Zuo Jing) Intellectual’s Vision Time: November 2–8, 2012, 9:00–18:00 Venues: Sicheng House, Zhicheng House, Shuangcha House and Siji House, Luchun Village, Yixian County, Anhui Province Participants: Tang Guo, Hong Lei, Dong Wensheng, and Lu Yanpeng

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This chapter focuses on “localized” aesthetic experience and should probably be part of the section on “the continuity of rural society.” In the past, as Huizhou’s traders brought their wealth back to the countryside so with them they carried the refined culture of the wider Jiangnan region (the area south of the Yangtze). This is not merely reflected in the carvings on the outside of Huizhou’s old buildings but also in their internal design. Furthermore, since ancient times Huizhou has produced a considerable number of intellectuals, and a particular writing style associated with the region developed, with its particular focus on Confucian teachings having a profound influence on Huizhou’s aesthetic sensibility. Although the domestic design of today’s ordinary peasant family homes cannot be compared with those of the past, we can still experience the remnants of this rich intellectual culture in the homes of some country landowners. In this chapter, we present the artworks of intellectual photographers who integrate traditional and modern consciousnesses, alongside domestic interiors from the region. In the mounting and display we have respected tradition, the artworks sit very naturally alongside everyday people. We use this subtle method in order to reawaken the audience to that long-­ missing intellectual flavor, so that they may experience it anew. In fact, this intellectual flavor only disappeared from rural culture in the last one hundred years. (by Zuo Jing) Coal + Ice Time: November 2–8, 2012, 9:00–18:00 Venue: Guangyu Hall, Pingshan Village, Yixian County, Anhui Province Participants: Alfredo D’Amato, George Mallory, Robert Wallis, Bruce Davidson, Gleb Kosorukov, Song Chao, Builder Levy, Ian Teh, Stuart Franklin, Cameron Davidson, Jimmy Chin, Thomas Hoepker, Clifford Ross, Jonas Bendikson, Vittorio Sella, Daniel Shea, Lewis Hine, W. Eugene Smith, David Breashears, Major Edward O. Wheeler, Wang Mianli, David Hurn, Nadav Kander, Wu Qi, David Seymour, Niu Guozheng, Yang Junpo, Geng Yunsheng, and Robert Capa, Yu Haibo; Curators: Susan Meiselas and Jeroen de Vries; Executive Producer: Orville Schell, Asia Society

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Coal+Ice is a compelling exhibition that juxtaposes two seemingly unrelated visual landscapes: towering ice mountains and raging rivers versus steam-filled factories, pitch-black industrial underground worlds, and ghostlike coal miners. When walking through the thoughtfully constructed course of this exhibition, and actively experience it, you will find the interconnection between the segments and appreciate its ambitious grand narrative. Human society’s insatiable need for energy acts like a knife plunging deep into the flesh of our natural world, causing great illness and endangering its sustainability. Energy exploration and production not only cause inequality and the destruction of social fiber, but also lead nature to an impasse. An air of calamity is thinly veiled under the seemingly benevolent images. How can a layman be educated and compelled into action to combat the approaching environmental consequences? This exhibition uses the medium of photography—by curating historical and contemporary photos from different parts of the world and selecting entry points that touch ordinary people’s life experiences, it presents a survey on today’s most urgent issue, climate change, and expands the discussion both geographically and chronologically. Precisely because Coal + Ice so profoundly reveals the price of “modernization” and complements the issues to be discussed at 2012 Yixian International Photo Festival—the decline of agriculture, the rural deprivation in urbanization, and the disruption of agricultural tradition by global economic integration—we are honored to include it in this year’s festival as a special project. (by Ou Ning)

In the Field of Hope2 On October 30, 2012, Hurricane Sandy swept through New York, causing a large number of power cuts, water shortages, communication disruptions, fires, and traffic accidents. New York’s airports, buses, subway, and rail systems were all shut down, and Wall Street’s stock exchange was paralyzed. Photographer Iwan Baan sent me a photo, commissioned by New York Magazine for its cover, that he took by helicopter. It was dark

2  Completed in Chinese in Nanjing on November 22, 2012, in Nanjing and posted on Ou Ning’s Blog. It documented the situation when the 2012 Yixian International Photo Festival was canceled by Beijing before the opening on November 2, 2012, and vaguely expressed the attitude to this accident. The English version was translated by Matt Turner and Haiying Weng in 2019.

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across the downtown area. “New York has become the Third World!,” Iwan said in an e-mail. About twenty days ago he stayed in Yi County for four days to photograph local architecture and the daily life of the village. Before receiving his New York photos, I had been busy preparing for a grand party in Yi County. My home in Bishan Village, Biyang Town, was a mess. About ten members of our team had been living there for over a month, and everyone was hurrying around so much that they were dizzy. Documents, exhibition equipment, and promotional materials were all mixed together and filled every nook and cranny. It looked like a hurricane had been through. Soon I received more e-mails from American friends who were on their way to Yi County but, because of the hurricane, might have delayed flights or have to go to other cities to take a plane. I prayed for their success and hoped that the hurricane would not prevent them from coming. On November 2, Mary Kerr of the Robert Flaherty Film Seminar, along with two documentary directors, Ilisa Barbash and Laura Kissel, arrived on schedule—just in time for our dinner at Goodwill Guesthouse (Tailai Nongzhuang), in Bishan Village. After dinner, at around eight o’clock, approximately a hundred guests in groups walked slowly to Pig’s Inn No. 3. At night, Bishan is very dark. Deng Hai, a Taiwanese architect, had designed a simple light that was around 4 kilometers long, and used it as a tube lamp to encircle the whole village, giving the place a festive atmosphere. Back along the Zhang River, friends were laughing and talking, and the sound of running water and insects in the field intertwined into a low song. At 8:30, Taiwanese poet Chung Yung-feng and guest singer Lin Sheng-­ xiang began to sing melodious ballads on the small stage at the Pig’s Inn. Sheng-xiang is elegant and shy and sings songs like greetings from fellow countrymen, telling village stories and sighing about how people change. It was like a warm spring breeze, warming everyone’s heart. Yung-feng elaborated on the lyrics and read his poetry. His tone was deep and kind, his smile was peaceful and friendly—demonstrating the mind and mood of an intellectual who had worked for a long time in the countryside. At the end of their over an hour-long performance, Abigail Washburn miraculously appeared on the scene, dusty and carrying her banjo. Twenty hours earlier, she had set out from Washington, flew to Shanghai via Chicago, and rode in a car from Shanghai for nearly six hours. She conquered the hurricane and traveled across mountains and rivers. She arrived at a village

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that seemed to lay at the end of the world. She opened the door and entered a brightly lit house, appearing in front of everyone present. She greeted us, said hello to some friends from the Asia Society—such as Orville Schell, Jeroen de Vries, Leah Thompson, and Sun Yunfan, who had arrived a few days earlier—and started her performance without even a bite to eat. Abigail is a well-known banjo player in the United States, and she was even invited by the Queen of England to perform at the Diamond Jubilee Celebration for her sixtieth anniversary. The reason why she came to Bishan was that she had studied Chinese and loved China, especially rural China. She has come to China countless times. She sang without much preparation, and the leaping banjo music directly grafted the warm atmosphere of American country parties to the land of Bishan, and a strange musical charm blossomed in the silent night around her. She also taught us all how to sing a local ballad she had learned from a girl at the Wenchuan earthquake-stricken area. People were infected by her energy and sang with each other, singing under the historical slogans on the crossbeam above, and reverberating across the fields. The next day, friends were still arriving from afar. The three Pig’s Inns had prepared the pork feast that every household in the rural area of Huizhou has during the Spring Festival. They had set up more than ten tables for people to enjoy themselves. After dinner, several well-known actors from the Jiangsu Kunqu Opera Troupe performed “Peony Pavilion” and then welcomed a performance from the band Wu Tiao Ren, who had just finished touring Yunnan, having traveled from Shanghai to Bishan. Ren Ke and A Mao, two Haifeng youths, like Abigail, were exhausted after their long journey, but they still put everything into their performance. They performed at the Bishan Harvestival last year and wrote songs for Bishan. So whenever Bishan has something interesting going on, how can we not invite them? Ren Ke’s accordion, A Mao’s guitar, and their vigorous Haifeng dialect connected to their bodies’ energetic movements— which immediately set everyone’s nerves alight. Abigail was thrilled to be here and spent more than half an hour on stage with them, jamming freely. Even though it was the end of autumn and the beginning of winter, people hadn’t yet put on cold-weather clothes—but the courtyard was very warm indeed. I am a little sad that we were not able to invite all the villagers of Bishan to share the moment. Originally all those performances were to be held at a venue that could accommodate thousands of people, and people in Yi County who knew about it might have been looking forward to it. But

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Sheng-xiang changed his lyrics the night before—“Bishan, don’t cry, don’t cry.” Even a hurricane couldn’t stop people from getting there on time. Even though there were many difficulties, we were still together. You were born here, grew up here, and it is your home whether it’s rich or poor. If you want to live here, you have to accept everything about it. Even if something isn’t going well, what does it matter? Iwan recorded the disaster in New York, but he couldn’t come to share these unforgettable nights with us. We all believe that the city will recover quickly after the disaster. Life still has to roll forward; we still have to take root in our own soil and water. The music was loud in the house, and the fields were silent outside. After the autumn harvest, everything shrinks low, growing again in spring—I believe that this field is still a field of hope.

River Worship3 In 2010, near a cement factory in Lanzhou, Gansu Province, a tall chimney smoking far away, a retired amateur photographer was taking his friend’s photo by the river with a tripod; on an old hydrological station built in the river, two workers were painting its railings on a scaffold; while at a steel factory in Baotou, Inner Mongolia, under a huge cooling tower hidden in the heavy fog, stood sculptures of two deer and a goat. In 2011, a small village of Inner Mongolia became a sculpture workshop; in a coal field of Ningxia, a Muslim wearing a white hat was staring at a Buddha head discarded by a Buddhist mine owner, with a vague ridge of the Helan Mountains behind him; in Tengger Desert, a lonely worker was pumping; in Shandong, a rockery stood in a dry lake and a man was sitting in the pavilion on the rockery. In 2012, two persons in Shaanxi wearing rain gear were fishing near a leaning water tower; some swimmers in Henan were carrying a huge portrait of Mao Zedong across the river. These pictures captured by photographer Zhang Kechun have a common stage, the Yellow River. From 2010 to 2013, he traveled dozens of times upstream westward from Kenli County, Dongying City, Shandong where the estuary of the River was, through Henan, Shanxi, Shaanxi, Inner Mongolia, Ningxia, Gansu, and Sichuan, heading to the River’s 3  Completed in Chinese on May 14, 2014, in Bishan. The English version was translated by Huang Yating, published as  an  introduction in  Yanyou Di Yuan, ed., Zhang Kechun: The Yellow River (Hong Kong: Jiazazhi Limited, 2014). Zhang Kechun is an artist participating in the 2012 Yixian International Photo Festival with The Yellow River project.

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source near the Bayan Har Mountain in Qinghai, and the journeys became a photography project The Yellow River. It’s not a project with ordinary travel photographs or exploratory geological images. Avoiding clichés like “Mother River of Chinese Civilization,” he attempts to capture the ant-­ like people who are intimately entangled in the life of this river, which is sometimes strong, angry, and thunderous, and sometimes weak, calm, and quiet. These long-shot pictures were taken with a Linhof 4 × 5 camera. They were almost toned as pale or light yellow allowing a few strong colors occasionally. The persons appeared microscopic under the grand landscape and reality atmosphere of the Provinces along the Yellow River. The River is vast enough to include everything and strong enough to domineer all. Through the stillness of the pictures, the photographer shows his respect to the River and his sympathy for nature and human. Flowing from the depth of time, the River cultivated a civilization being proud of by us. Exacted by humans continuously, the River has also brought many disasters. Zhang captures a slice of time respectfully. In this quiet and light slice, Zhang puts his deep emotion as a silent worship to the Yellow River. In 2000, Cao Jinqing published the noted sociological report China Along the Yellow River.4 He followed the Yellow River through Henan Province and observed Chinese society at a transitional moment. The regions along the Yellow River are viewed as representative microcosms of Chinese society because they are full of history, but this also meant that the costs and pain of their transformation were greater and more intense than those in other regions. Zhang’s Yellow River project covers a greater geographical area than Cao’s book, and he does not conduct any kind of sociological survey. Instead, Zhang provides a panoramic vision of the Yellow River region through his photographs. From this project, people can see the major events of the Great Western Development Strategy5; they show the high-speed rail cutting deep into the Yellow River hinterland, the rise in tourism, and the environmental destruction wrought by 4  Cao Jinqing, China Along the Yellow River: Reflections on Rural Society (London: Routledge, 2005). 5  Great Western Development Strategy (or the Open Up the West Program, or China Western Development) is a policy adopted for the western regions in China. The policy covers six provinces (Gansu, Guizhou, Qinghai, Shaanxi, Sichuan, and Yunnan), five autonomous regions (Guangxi, Inner Mongolia, Ningxia, Tibet, and Xinjiang), and one municipality (Chongqing). This region contains 71.4% of mainland China’s area, but only 28.8% of its population, as of the end of 2002, and 19.9% of its total economic output, as of 2015.

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industrial construction and excessive urbanization. Zhang witnessed changes in the lives of the people along the river; he saw people’s confidence ups and downs, and changes in their beliefs. In the long history of the Yellow River, this is still but a moment. Initially, Zhang Kechun wanted to photograph the Yellow River, because he read Zhang Chengzhi’s novel Rivers in the North.6 In beginning this project, Zhang Kechun was also inspired by Sleeping by the Mississippi, a photography project by American photographer Alec Soth. Instead of enlarging the riverside people’s life like Alec Soth, he minified people in his viewfinder to show the River as a massive existence in both space and time. The struggling people near the River are just small elements in a circular ecosystem. When people are put in a lower and smaller position, the power of nature becomes even more obvious. As a tiny system, human society has to live together with awe-inspiring nature carefully and humbly. Zhang Kechun is cautious and quiet, waiting for the history itself drifting in front of his lens. The pictures he has taken are so calm that there’s no arrogant human or angry river. Everything goes to quietness, which is actually the power of patience.

6  A lyrical novel by Zhang Chengzhi in 1984, which focuses on the confluence of Loess Plateau, the Yellow River, and the Yongding River.

CHAPTER 7

Deep Plowing

The Heart’s Home1 The Ancestors Are Calling Han Yu and Zheng Xiaoguang moved to Yi County in 2004 and have lived there for nine years. They met because they wrote poems. They have never received professional training in architecture, but they rehabilitated and renovated three old houses there. The first was an old house in Xidi Village from the Ming Dynasty. They renovated it into an inn and named it Pig’s Inn. Because they started by changing the original pigpen into the bar, the term “Pig’s Inn” has been used ever since. Their second and third places are in Bishan Village, which are Pig’s Inn numbers two and three. Pig’s Inn is not only well known in Yi County and the Huangshan area but also included in Lonely Planet’s China Guide, and was introduced in the travel section of the New York Times. Interested people come from all over the world to visit, including French actress Juliette Binoche, as well as ordinary white-collar workers who work in metropolitan offices across China. To a large extent, the reputation of Pig’s Inn comes from its meticulous spatial design layout and its daily family life atmosphere, which provides 1  Completed in  Chinese on  December 9, 2013, in  Bishan, published in  Ou Ning, ed., V-ECO Mook #2, Autonomous Architecture (Beijing: China Youth Publishing Group, 2013). The English version was translated by Matt Turner and Haiying Weng in 2019.

© The Author(s) 2020 O. Ning, Utopia in Practice, Contemporary East Asian Visual Cultures, Societies and Politics, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-5791-0_7

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people with an unforgettable in-depth experience of rural living in Huizhou. The Mount Huangshan Scenic Area has beautiful scenery, but it is mainly a place people go only for sightseeing; the countless villages around it all have a never-ending daily life, sedimenting the various details of ancient Huizhou that no longer exist from an administrative perspective.2 It is a homeland that lives in the deep past, and it is the Peach Blossom Spring that people long for in their contemporary, busy urban lives. Turning people’s imaginations into real experiences that can be felt in the bones and embraced by the senses, and allowing those who escape to it a temporary stay, going back in time and touching their hearts and souls may be the secret of Pig’s Inn. When Han Yu and Zheng Xiaoguang first bought a house in Xidi Village, they just wanted to move houses and did not think about opening an inn. Later, more and more friends visited, and everyone wanted to stay—that’s when they made the decision to open the inn. So-called experiential tourism is not a concept they borrowed from other places, but was the simple idea of letting others experience what they do. They love old houses like theirs, and, according to their own preferences, and on the basis of respecting traditional Huizhou dwellings, they added facilities more suitable to the requirements of contemporary living. During the process of renovations, they not only were in awe of tradition, but also followed their hearts to create a free and comfortable dwelling for themselves. This kind of “heart’s home” is where the exhausted mind can rest and find comfort, and is the end result of the hard journey of life. People like it because it has “heart.” Pig’s Inn is hidden in the countryside, but its boundlessness calls to all. It not only influences the concept of tourism generally in the Huangshan area imperceptibly but also innovates a new mode of historical protection in rural areas. Huangshan’s rural tourism resources are very rich, but they have stayed at the level of sightseeing. Villages are fenced in as scenic spots and tickets are collected. Villagers’ daily lives fall into the falsity of “performances.” Visitors get a glimpse but lack in-depth experience. This superficial mode of tourism not only greatly discounts people’s imagination of the countryside, but also seriously endangers the protection of rural ecology and historical heritage. Han Yu and Zheng Xiaoguang buy 2  Huizhou is, historically, an administrative region. It was renamed from Shezhou in the third year of Xuanhe, Song Dynasty (1121), and has jurisdiction over Shexian, Yixian, Xiuning, Qimen, Jixi, and Wuyuan counties. In 1987, Huizhou was renamed Huangshan City.

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old houses that are on the verge of collapse and invest in repairing them. They not only retain the houses’ original appearance but also reactivate their use with new functional facilities—so that they can be opened to people who love to experience rural life, restoring their life’s breath, and providing more job opportunities for rural areas. This is the most effective way to protect and regenerate old dwellings. Their rural existence attracts more and more people to visit from outside, buy and repair old houses, or live on their own, or even open inns. This flow not only activates more historical relics physically but also promotes the revival of rural life. The inflow into the Huangshan area today is due to the attraction of its rural culture, especially its vernacular architecture. Thousands of miles away, people can still hear the powerful and far-reaching call of Huizhou’s ancestors. The magnificence they have created is astounding. Their call will surely find people who love this nurturing land, and want to continue this precious legacy and save history from collapse. After nine years and three times renovating Huizhou architecture, Han Yu and Zheng Xiaoguang became amateur architects and the conscious inheritors of Huizhou architecture. Their exploration based in tradition has also become a fruitful example of “contemporary vernacular architecture,” which inspires people to rethink folk architectural concepts and construction methods that have been forgotten by the modern construction industry, and how to bring new value to today’s ecological and residential environment. Pig’s Inn No. 1 Pig’s Inn No. 1 hides in a series of settlements in Xidi Village and is not noticeable at first sight. Its main house is a typical Huizhou “three-room corridor” (langbu sanjian, aka sanhe wu). Starting from the entry and going into the house is an interior courtyard with an open roof (tianjing, “sky well”), then the main hall (mingtang) with a screen wall (taishi bi) at its rear, with the two bedrooms on each side of the hall. The staircase leading to the second floor is not in the style of Hui-style houses (where it is usually hidden behind the screen wall), but next to the bedroom on the right side, and then by the right-side bedroom on the second floor up to the third floor. Generally, Hui-style dwellings only have two floors, but this house is a special-shaped one with a small attic for the third floor. The attic was originally used to store sundries, but Han Yu and Zheng Xiaoguang changed it into an open viewing platform. Looking out from

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the low and accessible eaves, canola blossoms spread all over the mountains in spring, cicadas ring out in summer, far forests turn fiery-red in autumn, the snow-covered village in winter, horse-head walls (matou qiang) and Goddess of Mercy walls (guanyin qiang), moonlit nights, silver light pouring across white walls and gray tiles to create interlaced shadows like a poem of images. There is only one wall between the other hall and the patio, one room and one hall on the first floor, and a large bedroom on the second floor. The kitchen is accessed by the right entry of the main house, and the solid wood staircase leads to the reading and audiovisual room on the second floor. The kitchen is connected to the original pigsty, which is now the bar. The bar is separated by glass and wood doors and can be opened to the yard. The kitchen and courtyard have small doors leading to the village streets. The whole Pig’s Inn No. 1 is small, quiet, and a delicate residence. There are six bedrooms, each with its own bathroom. All drainage pipes are connected to a specially excavated septic tank. This is the most important transformation of the old dwelling, making it more suitable for the needs of contemporary living habits. Usually, the bedroom scale of a Huizhou residence is very small, and the public space such as a hall is very large. In order to ensure the use of bedroom space, some rooms in No. 1 adopt Japanese sliding doors. The storage attic of the two bedrooms on the first floor of the main house was also demolished to extend the height of the rooms, so as to open up more space. Each room of Hui-style houses is separated by a diaphragm board and a brick wall. After wallpaper is pasted on it, the space becomes cleaner, more elegant, and full of intimacy. On the second floor of the main house, the homocentric-square-shaped “galloping horse corridor” (paoma lang) is equipped with rows of latticed partition windows, which can be opened to the courtyard in summer and kept warm when closed in winter. The house retains the original hollow brick wall, which can retain heat in winter and cold in summer. Traditionally, roofs are covered with nail boards and tiles on beams, and the transformation of Pig’s Inn No. 1 is to lay a heat insulation layer between the boards and the tiles. Most villages in Huizhou are house-to-house, with high density and narrow streets. Except for the courtyard, it is difficult to absorb the heat of sunshine in winter. Heating usually relies on barrels to burn charcoal in (huotong), which are used in the main hall. Because of the courtyard, however, there is no need to worry about carbon monoxide poisoning. Every room in No. 1 is equipped with air conditioning and heaters. Although it consumes a lot of energy, it is necessary for dealing

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with the cold winter in the Huangshan area. Usually, the interior of Huizhou dwellings is very cramped and dark, and few windows are opened on the outside walls. In order to increase light and reduce daytime power consumption, many sky windows with transparent glasses instead of tiles have been added to the roof. If the bathrooms need to be ventilated, one can open very small windows without affecting the appearance of the house. The main hall on the first floor is decorated according to the traditional rural customs of Huizhou. On the screen wall, there is a large ink painting with calligraphy couplets (zhongtang) hung on the top and a long narrow desk (huatiao) at the bottom. A chiming clock is in the middle of the desk, on the right side is a porcelain vase, and on the left side is a small mirror— meaning “calm in the East and quiet in the West” (dong ping xi jing). In front of the desk, an Eight Immortals Table has two Taishi armchairs on left and right sides for the seniors. There are three Taishi armchairs and two small tea tables on both the left and right sides of the main hall for the juniors or guests. The whole main hall has a long desk, an Eight Immortals Table, eight Taishi armchairs, and four tea tables—this is called “one hall’s furniture” (yi tang jia ju). In the Huizhou countryside, where the Confucian tradition is strong, the main hall is the heart of a family, the center of family life, and demonstrates the system of family etiquette. This sense of order is used to show the authority of parents and to declare the filial piety of descendants. For thousands of years, this setting has remained unchanged. In addition to this etiquette, one or two fire barrels are also placed in the main hall. The need for heating dilutes the solemnity of the etiquette space to a certain extent but adds a warm human touch. Apart from the main hall, the other spaces of Pig’s Inn No. 1 are all arranged according to the comfortable standards of contemporary life. Furniture is mostly constructed from waste—reconstructed from old furniture that farmers don’t want, in both Chinese and Western styles; sofas and bedding are mostly made of hand-made coarse cloth; lamps, utensils, and other daily necessities are almost all brought in from folk markets or thrift stores. These things are arranged randomly in different spaces, as if it were a small museum of folk life. Staying there, everywhere has traces of time and memory coming alive, from the exterior wall of the building itself, which has been eroded by the years, to the pillars and wooden components that have never been touched by chemical paint and have been rubbed smooth by hands over the years; the cable power switch with small ornaments; and an enameled teapot that disappeared as early as

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contemporary urban life began. All of them evoke earlier ways of living. There is nothing evoking the city, and everything is very rural, very downto-earth, very “native.” Just like its random name, there is a kind of longlost closeness, so that people can toss off all the shackles on the heart. They can’t help but regard it as their own home. Pig’s Inn No. 1, which was bought from the Hu family nine years ago, was idle for a long time and close to collapsing. The renovation took a year and a half, using local materials and local craftsmen to reduce logistics and conserve energy. After the house was repaired, Han Yu and Zheng Xiaoguang completely moved into Yi County to live the rural life of “doing housework by day and reading by night, having fewer children and raising more pigs,” which is the couplet they wrote for the Spring Festival of 2006. After checking in, visiting friends passed on the word about it, making more friends want to visit and stay there. In order to give the old house a self-sustaining future, they decided to operate as a business. “Pig’s Inn” was born in this manner; it does not list or publicize itself—yet more and more people come from word of mouth. Xidi Village is a ticket-­ collecting attraction, which does make frequent visitors feel inconvenienced. Hence, Han Yu and Zheng Xiaoguang began to look for a second old house in original villages that have not yet turned into attractions, ready to build Pig’s Inn No. 2. Pig’s Inn No. 2 In 2006, they located a large house by a river in Bishan Village in Yi County, which had not yet been developed into a scenic spot. The house is located by the Zhang River, which runs through the village, where it feeds into the Xin’an River. It covers an area of two mu. The main house is a large two-floor Hui-style building with two interior open-roof courtyards, two main halls, a side hall, a kitchen, and two exterior courtyards on the west and southeast sides of the main house. In the Huangshan area, traditional structures include sihe wu (an interior open-roof courtyard, front and rear halls, two floors with a total of eight bedrooms—the first floor with two entryways, and the second floor with a “galloping horse corridor”) and sanhe wu (the “three-room corridor”), plus a side hall, kitchen, and courtyard—only large families with wealth could afford twoor even three-jin house (including two or three units, each unit has an interior open-roof courtyard and its entrance), so they can be categorized as anomalies. The main house of the structure, which would become Pig’s

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Inn No. 2, is well preserved, magnificent, with a high ceiling on the first floor. The thick and strong pillars and wax gourd beams (donggua liang) support the structure of the two interior open-roof courtyards and two-­ level high halls. The carvings are exquisite. The main door of the house faces south and passes through the courtyard with persimmon trees planted in the southeast. Once outside the southeast exterior courtyard is an open field with an excellent geographical location. In the transformation of Pig’s Inn No. 1, because of its small size, each bedroom could only leave a very narrow space for an en suite bathroom, so that the original bedroom spaces became very small, and activities would be very limited. In order to improve this problem, Han Yu and Zheng Xiaoguang changed the jiaoxiang (corner compartment—the front room or waiting room of the bedroom, which had latticed partition doors) of the four bedrooms (two on either side of the front and rear halls) on the first floor into bathrooms, removing the latticed partition doors and replacing them with diaphragm boards. The original doors to the bedrooms became the doors to the bathrooms whereas the original bedroom hujing (front windows) were converted into the main doors of the bedrooms; the original front windows were moved to the bathrooms. That is to say, people should enter the bedrooms directly from the tuibu (a small corridor in front of the original bedroom window), rather than from the jiaoxiang, according to Huizhou tradition. The design of Huizhou jiaoxiang is intended to add a layer of privacy to the bedroom, so that female family members can either avoid or peep at strangers (what complex psychological needs!). But today, even in rural society, there is no need for this. Han Yu and Zheng Xiaoguang did not adhere to the traditional form. Instead, the appropriate changes brought about larger bedroom living spaces. The single staircase behind the screen wall in the rear hall of the first floor was retained this time, but it was narrow and steep, so was not practical—so Han Yu and Zheng Xiaoguang set up a large double staircase to the second floor in the eastern side hall of the main house. Similarly, because of the problem of adding separate bathrooms for bedrooms, the “galloping horse corridor” on the second floor above the first interior courtyard was blocked by two enlarged bedrooms (there are four bedrooms on the second floor). Unfortunately, they were unable to maintain the “galloping horse corridor” in this case (making a complete circle around the interior courtyard impossible). The reason why Han Yu and Zheng Xiaoguang did so was to change the two rooms together with the

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hall between them into a closed private suite for family residents with children or drivers. But the “galloping horse corridor” in the front hall is not a problem, it remains the same. Because of the lower roof of the second floor, there are no latticed partition windows installed in either of the galloping horse corridors, which are completely unobstructed around the interior open-roof courtyards. The north side of the front corridor has a long and broad couch set against railings, where one can play Go, play chess, drink, or lean on the railings to observe the interior courtyard—it is very enjoyable. On the west wall, local carpenters have constructed a row of storage cabinets to store clean bedding. On the floor of the two galloping horse corridors, four small mezzanine spaces can be reached by trapdoors. With small ladders laid down, the four spaces with ventilation windows can be accessed. Huizhou farmers usually use them for grain storage; they are damp-proof because they are high off the ground. The storage space of Hui-style residences is very rich. Except for the secondfloor mezzanine, the attic of the first-floor bedroom, and even the “dragon belly” under the stairs behind the screen wall, can be used for storage. For the same reason as Pig’s Inn No. 1, the attic of the bedroom on the first floor of No. 2 was demolished. The side hall is on the east side of the main house and has been converted into a large dining hall. On the east wall was added a large fireplace for heating. The south wall has been converted into several glass and wood panel doors. It opens onto a fish pond that was dug into the southeast courtyard. A peach blossom is planted beside the pond. It is surrounded by an outdoor corridor. In the corridor, there are railings with elegant curves suspended from the wood columns and tabula, from where one can sit and lean and view the garden. The railings look like the contours of beauty, so the local people call them meiren kao (railings for beautiful women leaning). The kitchen is at the end of the corridor. There is a big Hui-style pot stove in the kitchen. The wall is covered with hanging cured meats. In addition to peach trees, there are persimmon trees, orange trees, and jujube trees in the southeast courtyard, signifying “all is well,” “good luck and fortune,” and “may you bear noble children.” To the east of the side hall, there is a small study built by the former owner, with the word “villa” written on the lintel. It is probably meant to be a place where children study hard. Inside, there is a small hall and a bedroom. The bathroom is on the right side of the hall, and the bathtub window opens onto the outside field. The bedroom was skillfully designed by Han Yu and Zheng Xiaoguang as a loft with a bed at the foot. After ascending the

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narrow stairs, there is also a tatami bed, suitable for children’s play and rest. The second floor of the dining hall has been added, with a small living room and a south-facing viewing platform. The small living room has an old wooden ping-pong table taken from the village school, which can be used for social gatherings, watching movies, and listening to music. The roof of the second floor is also a viewing platform, but unfortunately, they had to use a steel structure. Han Yu and Zheng Xiaoguang built a flat-roofed house on the south side of the west courtyard for their own living quarters. Propaganda murals painted by farmers during the Great Leap Forward remain on the walls of the courtyard, and a small door opens onto the north side for the main entrance of Pig’s Inn No. 2. No grand doorway, it is very low key. This is the consistent style of Pig’s Inn. It makes the charm of the old house self-­ evident. It does not make a big deal over its design. The details are hidden, and people can experience them on their own. Pig’s Inn No. 2 allowed Han Yu and Zheng Xiaoguang to try a larger-scale and more multi-­ functional transformation, accumulating more experience in the restoration and innovation of old houses, the reorganization of space, and the exploration of materials. At the same time, they also involved a large number of skilled craftsmen familiar with the traditional construction methods of Huizhou architecture, all of which are good for their following, larger experiments. They were ready. Pig’s Inn No. 3 Pig’s Inn No. 3 is located in an open field at the northern end of Bishan Village, far from denser settlement, in a lonely existence at the base of the continuous mountains. The Zhang River also flows by it, and up the river is Jianxi Village, deep in the mountains. The inn was an old oil factory during the Cultural Revolution (with the giant words “Bishan Oil Factory” still on the front of the main house), where it produced canola oil and was later used as a woodworking studio. The original building was in a state of ruin. However, the bold red slogans of the Cultural Revolution are preserved on the beams of the main hall: “People’s Communes are Good,” “Learn from the People’s Liberation Army,” “Workers of the World, Unite!” The original main house had two floors, and the rooms were once used as workshops. There was a huge but shabby shed in the backyard and some dilapidated bungalows. Changing the factory into an inn gives it a completely different purpose. The transformation by Han Yu and Zheng

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Xiaoguang is basically equivalent to a reconstruction. Because it covers 10 mu, apart from what’s left of the original buildings, there is still a lot of open space, providing Han Yu and Zheng Xiaoguang with great space and flexibility for independent planning and design. The main house retains the original hollow brick walls, and the roof has been completely replaced by panels and tiles with a layer of heat insulation. The front hall was transformed into a high-ceilinged open lobby with a furnace purchased from Shangri-La Tibetan Area in Yunnan Province, with reception and public bathroom. The main hall became the heart of No. 3: the Cultural Revolution slogans on the crossbeam were retained, and a small stage was set under the slogans. A huge retractable projector screen was installed, two Shangri-La furnaces were installed with two bent stovepipes extending to the roof, and modified second-hand sofas, chairs, tea tables, and cabinets were scattered among them. It has a relaxed and casual atmosphere. The double stairs from the front hall and the single stairs from the main hall can go up to the second floor. The double stairs connect to a passageway on the second floor, overlooking the entire lobby. Then they are connected to a large balcony to the east, facing the fields. There is also a single room for one beside the balcony. The hall on the second floor is used for displaying all kinds of old utensils. A small cafe and two-wing balcony float out to the north. Here you can see the whole inner courtyard of No. 2, including an old bungalow that will be converted into an entertainment room. The original workshop beside the main hall has been transformed into a typical “three-room-corridor” with an interior open roof courtyard; the second floor has been opened up into a large bedroom, the bed raised on a large platform, a bit like the northern kang, but wooden, with a mattress on it; through the bathroom, there is also a small hidden balcony. The workshop next to the front hall was transformed into a separate suite, using the design of the villa at Pig’s Inn No. 2, with a small loft built in, and with a small door opening to a small balcony. The bathroom is hidden under the loft. This suite has an independent yard and a tatami teahouse beside it. The most ingenious thing was to design the open bathroom. The stainless-steel showerhead is directly embedded into the mossy old wall so that one can bathe under the stars and moon at night. Because of the large area, No. 3 has broken through the form of medium- and large-scale residences of the Hui-style houses, and is according to the scale of a development plan of a small settlement: along the occupied area, Han Yu and Zheng Xiaoguang have built a new row of

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two-story yellow mud houses on the east side (they especially like the yellow mud houses in the mountainous areas of Huizhou, but because of considering the load-bearing of the second floor, they have changed it— brick walls, then yellow mud and lime plastered walls, both inside and outside the same), in the north they have built a new row of two-story stone houses, these new houses and the original main house, bungalow, and shed together, enclose the land into the irregular layout of a complex. Because of its huge size and large number of rooms, for energy saving, No. 3 has adopted underfloor heating this time. It also uses water independently, directly from mountain water in the rear, after purification for reuse. As it is near the Zhang River, sewage discharge has been strengthened for environmental protection. Three filter tanks using sand, charcoal, and weeds have been dug alongside the septic tank. After three filtrations, the sewage can filter underground without affecting the water quality of the groundwater and Zhang River. The design of No. 3 is characterized by borrowing strength from nature and emphasizing the communication between man and nature: whether it is a yellow mud house or a stone house, the balcony or large glass windows are facing the outside fields, and the natural scenery of the countryside is apparent, with few obstacles; the shed has been transformed into a complex of exhibition space, bookstore, and bar, and it relies on a long corridor outside. At the end of the corridor, a two-story quadrangular enclosed pavilion is built. The pavilion building connects to the bar and can open windows from all sides. Whether sitting in the corridor, the pavilion building, or the bar, the beautiful scenery of the Zhang River flowing nearby can also be seen. The whole complex has three entrances: the gate is in the south, connecting with the front yard with three camphor trees over a hundred years old, and there is a side door as well as a door for vehicles to enter and exit in the east. There is a public exit (at the northern end of the shed), and an exit for two separate suites, to the Zhang River. The farmland beside the river is also part of No. 3, which is full of canola, corn, radishes, and green vegetables according to the season. There are also plans to build grass huts for cooling down and relaxing or barbecuing. A winding stone path has been built along the river, where you can walk, have a picnic, or go straight into the river to enjoy yourself. This section of the Zhang River retains its primitive ecology, which is rare. Here the water is clear and the grass is rich. Small fish, insects, and birds live there. Everything is as green as in paradise. Looking at No. 3 from the other side of the river, the gray roof

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is obscured by trees and crawls into the endless fields. It is so modest, as if it is a bashful woman looking down, not revealing her true beauty. If No. 1 and No. 2 are only renovations of existing historic buildings, No. 3 has also involved the spatial and functional organization of small settlements, the design and construction of new buildings, and the planning and layout of gardens and landscapes. Han Yu and Zheng Xiaoguang are self-taught folk architects who put their “heart” into practice. They are attracted by the great tradition of Huizhou architecture and then absorb its construction principles and philosophy. They can innovate on this basis. They have designed and built three Pig’s Inns with their own strength, leaving professional architects stunned. Their buildings grow naturally from the soil and water of Huizhou, and they are closely integrated with nature. They also have inherent ecological and environmental protection functions. They are neither pretentious nor showy, but instead are deeply connected with the cultural blood of the Chinese folk, which has been latent for a long time. This kind of architecture does not need the theoretical edifice of modern architecture and an industrialized way of operation. It is built with brick and tile by hand. It is maintained through self-reliance. It listens to the heart rather than binds it. It follows life rather than stipulates it. It is what I call “Autonomous Architecture.” Follow Your Heart Yi County is a small county with a population of only 90,000, but it contains many ancient villages and local buildings. It has 66 administrative areas and countless natural villages. There are all kinds of ancient dwellings and ancestral halls, of different shapes and sizes. Influenced by the Neo-­ Confucian Zhu Xi of the Song Dynasty, the clan culture here has a long history: “the grave of a thousand years has never been removed; the lineage of a thousand members has never been scattered; the pedigree of a thousand years has never been disordered.”3 The planning and construction of all its villages revolve around such living principles. However, after entering the modern era, the whole country has undergone baptism into various political systems and ideologies, and the way of life of clan living has been greatly impacted. In particular, the intense urbanization 3  Zhao Jishi, “Miscellaneous Records from a Native Elder,” Transmissions from the Abode of Ji Garden, Volume 11, 1695. Quoted from the reprint version (Hefei: Huangshan Publishing House, 2008).

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movement in contemporary society has made individualism grow comprehensively. Regional economic development has promoted the outward flow of the rural population. With the weakening of native concepts, the architectural functions of traditional villages have changed greatly, and old dwellings have been seriously “empty nested”; the old ancestral halls no longer bear ritual inheritance, and the decay of the countryside is increasing day by day. The emergence of the Pig’s Inn series has begun to attract people to return to the countryside. In 2007, I visited Pig’s Inn for the first time. Later, Zuo Jing and I decided to buy old houses in the area. In 2011, we jointly launched the Bishan Project to start the work of rural reconstruction there. Zuo Jing bought an old house from the late Qing Dynasty in Guanlu Village in 2010 and later named it “Guanlu Cottage.” The old house I bought in Bishan Village in 2011, built during the Republican period, was named “Buffalo Institute” (responding to the name “Pig’s Inn,” I also named it for a countryside animal, intending to build it into a rural research center). Both of these two buildings were renovated with the guidance of Han Yu and Zheng Xiaoguang. The main houses of “Guanlu Cottage” and the “Buffalo Institute” are typical Hui-style sihe wu houses with side halls, kitchens, and courtyards. According to our respective functional needs, Han Yu and Zheng Xiaoguang help us redesign the spaces and introduced local craftsmen to build for us. Later, our common friend Li Rong bought an old house from the Republican era, in Shiting Village, in 2012, and completely commissioned Han Yu for design. The sihe wu house was built by a hill and its broad yard became into a stunning home in Han Yu’s hands: the large area of glass windows was able to accommodate mountain scenery in all directions, and the style of the second-­floor corridor coincides with the houses of the southern countryside in the United States. The Bishan Project has held two annual Harvestivals since 2011. More than 300 artists, designers, architects, musicians, film directors, writers, journalists, scholars, and rural construction practitioners have been invited from all over the world to come to Yi County to learn about the local history, culture, and architecture—and respond to it. It has begun to influence more people to buy houses, including artists, architects, and vernacular architecture enthusiasts in China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan. In 2013, I ended my lease of an apartment in Beijing and moved to Bishan Village. When my family started living together here, I found that Hui-­ style dwellings were far warmer and better for family life than standard city

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dwellings. Old people can spend their time on the spacious first floors. The children can play and grow up in the yards and the fields. The years stretch like a long and peaceful stream. The Buffalo Institute is also open to villagers and sometimes organizes village gatherings. Neighbors see each other and help each other. Everyone knowing everyone else makes life easy. Han Yu and Zheng Xiaoguang began the trend of returning home through their Pig’s Inn series, which not only gave warmth to the rural areas abandoned on the edge of society but also allowed wanderers in the city to find their roots. With Anhui Province becoming a pilot of the new system of rural reconstruction land transference, homesteads could be traded on the market, and the transfer of property rights of Hui-style houses can be better protected by law. More and more people will come to buy houses here. Hopefully, this will not lead to a great reshuffling of rural land property rights. If rural land and real estate all fall into the hands of those big capitalists who just want to come to the countryside for “vacation” and turn the countryside into a service area of the city for profit making, it will be yet another disaster. Rural areas need more young people who want to counter urbanization and recognize the value of native areas to return to their homes—but at ordinary incomes, it is difficult for them. If rural areas can create more jobs, it will be a lower and easier entrance for them to participate in rural reconstruction—the Bishan Project is working toward this goal.

The Unwillingness4 Bishan Bookstore was initially an idea in the Bishan Project, which appeared in my 2010 notes Bishan Commune: How to Start Your Own Utopia. I considered it then as a part of Bishan Commune’s communications system for cultural production and promotion, along with the radio station, the newsletter Bishan Communications, the documentary and film group, and the social media (Facebook, Twitter, etc.)—“archiving the village, publishing books on rural reconstruction and anarchism,” “running a rural publishing house and a bookstore like Liang Shuming did in 1930s.” On August 13, 2011, I organized the launching event for Chutzpah! literary bimonthly’s third issue, “Mapping Poetry,” at Nanjing’s Librairie 4  Completed in  Chinese on  June 15, 2014, in  Bishan, published in  City Magazine 454 (July 2014). The English version was translated by Isabella Yang in 2019.

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Avant-Garde to have a public talk on the “1980s’ spiritual legacy” with the poet Han Dong. The bookstore’s founder who I hadn’t seen for a while, Qian Xiaohua, asked how I was and I told him that I was planning with Zuo Jing for Bishan’s Harvestival, which would be held from the 26th to the 28th in the same month. I expressed my thoughts of moving to Bishan and settling down there to start the Bishan Project and invited him to go over some time to see if he could perhaps open a bookstore there. That November, Qian Xiaohua really came to Bishan. He was very fond of the place and had lively chats with the village officials as well as locals due to his past experience in grassroots government. In my home, he, Zuo Jing and I were already discussing how to create Bishan Bookstore. He found the Qitai Ancestral Hall to be a good site; the Village Secretary Zhu Xiandong had already approved of his bookstore proposal, then we helped persuade the Biyang Town Secretary Yu Qiang, and finally, with the approval of Yi County’s Cultural Relics Management Department, he was able to start Bishan Bookstore without paying the rent. After two years of preparation, on April 16, 2014, Bishan Bookstore was transformed through Qian Xiaohua’s efforts from a sketch plan to reality. I got to know Qian in 1997, when he first asked me to design the logo of his new bookstore in Nanjing. I gave the bookstore the French name Librairie Avant-Garde and designed its logo in accordance with the name. He gave me three fiberboard standing bookshelves as a thank-you gift, all of which I still am using in my Bishan home today. I was new to graphic design back then, and that logo seems to me today no more than amateur work, but Qian unexpectedly has used it all the way up to today. The bookstore, on the other hand, remained its firm spot in the wave of physical bookstores shutting down and even expanded itself. The Nanjing flagship store was ranked as China’s most beautiful bookstore by CNN in 2013 and as one of the world’s ten greatest bookstores by BBC in 2013. As a Christian, Qian attributes all of this to God’s assistance. People often ask: how do you make a profit out of a countryside bookstore? Qian Xiaohua’s response was that he “works not for money but for God.” Over the past two years of incessant travels back and forth to Bishan, he has made close connections with us and strongly resonates with our development goals, especially the loving Christian ideas of our forebear James Yen, an early advocate of rural reconstruction in China. Qian sees Bishan Bookstore as a part of the Bishan Project from the bottom of his heart, and we share the idea that everything we do at Bishan stems from our “not-willingness”: not willing to see the beauty of the

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countryside go unnoticed, not willing to see its rural community fall apart with outward migrations, not willing to see the urban-rural divide strand villagers in difficulties, and not willing to see the agricultural civilization that has been going on for thousands of years destroyed as soon as modernization draws close. But we yet share another idea in common: that rural reconstruction is not charity, and Bishan Bookstore does not wish to beget outside praise at the cost of monetary loss. It has to find a way to sustain itself, has to provide for its own. Qian Xiaohua views Bishan Bookstore as a part of the Librairie Avant-Garde series and explores how bookstores can transition. Recently he opened stores at tourist attractions in Nanjing, opens stores based on local governments’ requests, studies and develops new tourism-­ related creative products, opens cafes in bookstores, and holds all kinds of cultural activities, all of which reflected in the way he runs Bishan Bookstore. At Bishan, the bookstore attracts outside consumers from the Huangshan tourist region and provides villagers and local residents with readings spaces and even jobs; shop goods developed on the basis of the Anhui regional culture flow into the market while making locals resonate with their hometown; cultural events held once in a while both make the bookstore gain popularity and serves an educational function in the village. A good commercial model makes rural development sustainable. For the two months it has been open, villagers of Bishan often stop by and read books, and young people from the local town and even city have treated it as a weekend getaway; visitors from around the world also come all the time. On the wide patio of Qitai Hall, a place is made out of tens of thousands of books, immersed in the sun during the day and wraps around itself a starlit sky at night. When it rains, it becomes even more of a comfort as one reads surrounded by waterfalls of raindrops. There is also an old learned scholar in the village, Mr. Wang Shouchang, who answers all questions regarding local history. The ancient ancestral hall used to be filled with random objects and flying bats now has again come alive with the presence of people and books. We rescued “the yellow ears of rice being blown down in the mud”5 and got in return an ample and precious history. As a communal space to share the fruits of the mind, at least, it has already stood tall. As for the research, publishing and 5  Quoted from Su Shi’s poem “The Peasant Woman’s Lament” (Northern Song Dynasty): “She cries until her tears are dry, yet the rain does not end. It pains her to see the yellow ears of rice being blown down in the mud.”

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knowledge-­producing practices I have envisioned originally, we still need more days to plow this field further.

Reproducing the History of Local Life6 The research project “Handicraft in Yi County” originated with the Bishan Project initiated by Zuo Jing and me in 2011. At that time, although we chose Bishan Village as an experimental base for rural reconstruction, we hoped to extend the scope of our work to the entire county. In the process of entering local rural society, we urgently needed to understand local history and culture—especially the state of the traditional handicraft industry—so as to find a starting point for the artists, designers, architects, and musicians whom we were bringing in from outside. So, we launched this research project, “Handicraft in Yi County”. The main purpose was to conduct a comprehensive survey of all the existing or extinct non-­ governmental industries in all villages within Yi County. Through visits and photographic records, we aimed to establish a database of traditional handicraft in Yi County, one that would provide us with enough basic information that we could use it as an introduction for external forces, with the goal of stimulating local production. As Zuo Jing teaches in Anhui University, we decided to let him lead students in carrying out the project. On the one hand, we could mobilize research resources from the university, and on the other hand we could give the students the opportunity to go deep into the countryside and carry out fieldwork so that they could understand the historical and current situations of the countryside. Over the past three years, over ten students participated in seven surveys. These were put in the book, which collected a total of 89 items and classified them into different categories, with accompanying commentary, photographs, and archival materials. In the process of going around, the students not only knocked at doors and went into homes, communicating carefully with villagers and taking photographs, but at the same time also used their knowledge of anthropology, folklore, and Huizhou for their historical research, raking and combing through the origins of the various handicrafts. Their work finally presents us with an encyclopedic, panoramic image of the folk handicraft industry in Yi County, and also forms 6  Completed on  April 22, 2014, in  Bishan. This is the  postscript in  Zuo Jing, ed., Handicraft in Yi County (Beijing: Jincheng Publishing House, 2014). The English version was translated by Matt Turner and Haiying Weng in 2019.

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a valuable historical document of local life. History not only is the opening up of territories and the changing of dynasties but also includes the daily lives of normal people. Historical narration should see not only the heights of imperial temples but also the depths of real life. According to villagers’ oral reports, in 1982 there was a long line of villagers to submit grain (as agricultural tax) at the newly built Bishan Granaries, which was the Wang Ancestral Halls in Bishan Village. This movement through a small mountain village reflects the vitality inspired by the implementation of the “household responsibility system” in rural areas of the country. The full details of folk life, in fact, can help people get a feel for the times. Official historical anthologies usually record “master narratives,” but the daily lives of the common people are rarely seen. Yi County is the most ancient area of Huizhou and was founded in the twenty-sixth year of the first emperor of the Qin Dynasty (221 BCE). The existing local chronicles include, in the Qing Dynasty, The Records of Yi County, in the seventeenth year of Jiaqing (1812); The Continued Records of Yi County, in the sixth year of Daoguang (1826); and The Third Record of Yi County, in the tenth year of Tongzhi (1871). They also include The Fourth Record of Yi County, in the twelfth year of the Republic of China (1921); and the two editions of The Records of Yi County published in 1988 and 2012, from the People’s Republic of China. The first four records mostly begin with the history of the area’s evolution, and then divide into geographical records (borders, territories, mountains and rivers, administrative division, customs, goods, etc.); official appointment records (for county office, school office, military offices, famous officials, etc.); records of people (loyal people, Confucians, the righteous, the filial, virtuous women, recluses and hermits, etc.); political records (household, farmlands, tax, storage, conscription, defense, city walls, schools, sacrifices, ceremonies, housing construction, etc.); arts and culture records (including the poems and writings of local scholars and officials); and in the case of war, military affairs records (e.g., the multiple invasions by the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom, from the fourth year of Xianfeng to the second year of Tongzhi, during the Qing Dynasty). The county records compiled after the establishment of New China were mainly divided according to government department and described the performance of each department. If you try to locate details about the common people’s lives in these records, only limited information could be found under two headings, either “customs” (records of folk ritual) or “goods” (records of agricultural products).

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The publication Handicraft in Yi County is a very rich supplement to the official documents. It is divided into seven categories: food and drink; utensils; life; implements; ritual and customs; and houses and objects. It is a comprehensive study of people’s lives in Yi County, and each item gives a detailed account: the production process; craft details; historical origins; the craftsmen and artists; and their families. This record of fieldwork will be very valuable original material for us to use in the future, as it is helpful for us in discussing the history of rural life, and its economy and culture, when we introduce people from the outside to carry out cultural conservation and the activation and regeneration of the traditional handicraft industry. This book was a preliminary achievement for the Bishan Project, which makes us more determined to carry out long-term rural reconstruction in Yi County. Thanks to Zuo Jing and his students from Anhui University, I have the confidence to move forward after moving to Yi County.

CHAPTER 8

Controversies

Symbolic Boundaries, Distinction, and Othering1 Let me tell you what happened. Harvard doctoral student Zhou Yun (using the online name of Yi Yin Qing Xia) arrived at Bishan on July 2, 2014 as a participant of the International Summer School on China Studies, organized by the School of Social and Behavioral Sciences at Nanjing University. Lu Yuan, the leader of the group, had told me that there would be more than forty participants in this program, “Ph.D. students and young scholars from over thirty universities and research institutes across the world,” and that “apart from seven or eight foreigners, the others are Chinese overseas students and young scholars.” He hoped that I could share the Bishan Project with them and wanted to arrange this sharing on the second floor of the Bishan Bookstore, but I thought there wasn’t enough room for it. So I contacted Han Yu, of Pig’s Inn, and she agreed to provide the site and projector at Pig’s Inn No 3, as well as light refreshments. I asked Lu Yuan what language I should use, and he said that most of the summer school participants could speak Chinese. But I chose an English-language PowerPoint prepared for a New  York University seminar the previous 1  Completed in Chinese in Bishan and posted on Douban in response to Zhou Yun’s questioning on July 6, 2014. The English version was translated by Matt Turner and Haiying Weng in 2019; the title is newly added.

© The Author(s) 2020 O. Ning, Utopia in Practice, Contemporary East Asian Visual Cultures, Societies and Politics, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-5791-0_8

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month, because my Chinese PowerPoint about the Bishan Project hadn’t been updated in a long time, and I didn’t have time to prepare a new Chinese-language PowerPoint in only one day. For the first half of my presentation, I discussed the various ideological resources borrowed from the Bishan Project and my research on utopian practice and rural reconstruction in different parts of the world. Many of those examples were based on my personal interest, so I hoped to apply some of their ideas to the experiment of the Bishan Project. In the second half, I shared what we had done and accomplished in Bishan. I said that what the Bishan Project aimed to do could be summarized in three key words: rural reconstruction, cultural production, and social engineering. The first follows the rural construction practice of James Yen and Liang Shu-ming begun during the Republic of China. The second was about excelling at what we were already able to do. The third was to explore the possibility of the interaction between art and society. Then I talked about “utopia in practice.” I first shared my understanding of different political models (from the failure or crisis of party politics, civil society, and the public sphere to the possibility of an “informal life politics,” relying on people’s own wisdom and power). Then I introduced some historical utopian practitioners I had come across, especially in New Zealand, where I visited some hippie communes and ecological villages. These hippie communes and ecological villages were intentional communities that had cut themselves off from society, but their exploration of permaculture, co-­ housing, and consensus decision-making could be a great inspiration for today’s rural China. I also introduced the concept of “potlatch,” a gift-­ giving feast practiced by indigenous peoples of Canada and the United States, which the French Lettrists used to name their leading journal. One common feature of the gift economy in North American tribes and the tradition of mutual aid in rural China is that no currency is used. This relates to my idea of issuing Bishan Hours for labor exchange in the future. Then “Yi Yin Qing Xia” launched her “Questioning the Bishan Project” on Sina Weibo and Douban. If it was a critique based on respect for facts and in-depth investigation, I would really have liked to discuss it with her. But she deliberately twisted my original words so that they meant the opposite, picking out terms and insinuating them in order to graft her own sociological theory onto them, and in order to set the world on fire (as her alias can be translated, she believed she was “shaking the nation”). When some people want to see the stars in the dark night without the affecting light of street lamps which the villagers are eager to have, who doesn’t hate

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them? When someone shows off his luxury notebook, who doesn’t hate him? Why are you using an English PowerPoint in the countryside, are you trying to show off your elite status? The Pig’s Inn is too expensive! The Bishan Bookstore sells coffee! But weren’t these just vivid examples of the theory of “Distinction” taught by sociology teachers in universities? These “proofs” that zeroed in on provoking the most intense response are then wrapped in theoretical jargon about “Othering” and “Symbolic Boundary” and dumped on our heads like a pile of crap. Perhaps worried that “the target of criticism” would not be able to understand what “Othering” was, she recently forwarded another picture to make it clear. But Li Sipan, also a participant in the summer school, demonstrated what I meant by “street lamps versus looking at the stars”: As one of the participants, I am sure that when Ou Ning said ‘Look at the stars’, he simply was emphasizing the urgency and importance of villagers’ needs. He said that literati may feel that there are no street lamps just so they can see the stars, but it is in fact very inconvenient for the villagers to have no street lamps, as well as embarrassing for them. Ou regrets that he only has the ability to solve the problem of short-term lighting for the Bishan Harvestival, and does not have the funds to solve the problem of permanent street lights. I don’t know why there was such a serious misunderstanding. (00:44 on July 4, on Sina Weibo)

Now the recordings of that day have been recovered and published online (http://pan.baidu.com/s/1bndAENd), and anyone can listen. In over two hours of the talk, I only mentioned the word “Moleskine” once. Whether I mentioned the brand in a conspicuous tone or not, you can listen and judge for yourself. The reason for the notebook is that Moleskine invited me to participate in an exhibition in Shanghai in 2010, and gave me a Moleskine notebook to use. I could sketch freely in it and display it alongside other people’s notebooks. At that time, I was thinking about how to carry the Bishan Project forward, so I took some notes on my reading and research and sketched out my ideas in it. When I share the Bishan Project with people, I always mention the notebook as a blueprint—but the goal is to compare the original idea with what we’ve done, not to show off how expensive it was. As using an English-language PowerPoint at Bishan has become one of my major crimes, I am afraid I have come a little too close to the privilege of a Harvard doctoral student. Can’t an English PowerPoint be used in

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rural areas? Do you want Bishan Village to be a primitive society, just as you imagined? Or would you be satisfied only if I ask you what “Othering” means? The Pig’s Inns are so expensive that you’re upset. Do you know how much time, energy, and money they spent on fixing up those old houses? How many local jobs they created, and how much they paid in taxes? Is the Bishan Bookstore guilty of selling products from the culture and creative industries? Are a million yuan of books there just for show? Is it there to create distinction? Well, the villager named Fang you quoted said that it was much better than opening casinos and mahjong halls. But you parachute into Bishan for only a day, so of course you won’t see villagers coming to the bookstore to read books, children coming in to use the Internet, or villagers coming to my house to visit. First, because your time is so short, second, because the distinction in your heart is so great. In this day and age, why are you still using class struggle to mobilize hatred? Don’t think that only you understand the subject of the countryside, and that only those trained in sociology will be alert to distinctions—and that we’re just fools parading “middle class taste” and grasping at fame. I’ve talked about many of these issues that you brought up, to the point that I grew tired of it—so I wanted to do something about it. Doing something didn’t mean waiting around for praise. Living in the countryside did not automatically give me moral superiority. I just tried to do a good job. Maybe my aim is too high. Maybe my ability is limited, or the conditions aren’t good, but I tried my best. Failure is nothing to be ashamed of. Intellectuals are not a great force, and the people are not as bitter and hateful as you imagine they are—and everyone has shortcomings. And it wasn’t always easy to live in the same place together. I’ve talked too much about it already, yet I’m having to repeat myself here. To sum up, if you want to solve the dilemmas of your life caused by an elite education, unless it’s for deep self-examination, please don’t deliberately misinterpret what I said and don’t use others as targets in order to satisfy your selfishness.

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The Savior of the Countryside?2 Where Is Homeland? Now a lot of people know about the Bishan Project. What was the original idea behind it? First of all, it relates to my family background. I grew up in a small town in Suixi County, in Zhanjiang City, Guangdong Province. In the sixth grade, I was admitted to Suixi No. 1 Middle School and, step by step, I moved away from the countryside and into the city. I hated the countryside when I was a child, because the countryside in the west of Guangdong was backward. The local cadres were corrupt and the people were very aggressive. Even today, the social atmosphere is pretty bad. There are a lot of people who do cocaine. Every village has a casino, and the villages fight each other in the interests of the casinos. So, my hometown left me feeling very desperate. Even when I was young, I wanted to leave; so I studied hard to get into a university. By the time I found my place in the city, I was in my thirties and was starting to feel nostalgic. I frequently reminisced about the past, and I frequently returned to my hometown. In 2003, I began to make documentaries about cities. At the time, I was reading books by Rem Koolhaas and was interested in urban studies. I was interested in the high-density, low-income communities in the big cities that were formed by China’s rapid urbanization over the prior two decades. I chose San Yuan Li in Guangzhou and Dashilar in Beijing. From the beginning, San Yuan Li was a village. In the early 1980s, with the Reform and Opening, Guangzhou’s economy developed—but there was not enough land. Although Guangzhou expanded to the suburbs, and expropriated the rural land that was there for urban development, homesteads were nevertheless retained. As a result, the homesteads that farmers had built became an urban village. In fact, San Yuan Li is related to this rural bankruptcy, so my interests went from the city to the countryside. I went to Beijing to shoot Dashilar. Many of the people who could not make a living in the countryside had gone to the capital, and after seeing Tiananmen they noticed there was a bustling neighborhood next door to

2  This is an interview by Guo Yujie and Wu Xiaoyan in Bishan, completed in Chinese by Guo Yujie and  published in  Jiemian News on  November 15, 2014. The  English version was translated by Matt Turner and Haiying Weng in 2019.

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it, and they stayed. So, it also became a slum. I saw a lot of those people there, and I could see my fellow countrymen in their eyes. I am the eldest in my family. I have a younger sister and three younger brothers. When my younger sister was in junior high school, Hong Kong television became very popular in Guangdong, and she watched TV all day, not going to school very much. So, she did not qualify to sit for her exams. One younger brother went to high school but read all of Jin Yong’s novels, so he did not go to college either. I was like a parent in my home, and was responsible for helping my younger brothers and my sister. Well, those two became very difficult. Especially my sister—after she graduated from junior high school, she got into a vocational school. Our family had always believed that girls did not need to attend school, and should stay home to help around the house. But she was angry and rebelled, and one day when a bus came to our hometown to recruit workers, she jumped on it, to go work in a toy factory in Bao’an, Shenzhen. When I was in college, my sister’s monthly salary was only 450 yuan, and of it she would give me 250 yuan. After I graduated and got a job, I bought her a place to live because I thought she helped me out a lot. But I found that even if she had a place to live and a good job, she still felt inferior and was not able to integrate into the mainstream of society in Shenzhen. I find that the problem was really—these two younger siblings were a pain in the neck. There are many rural girls like my sister, who dedicated their youth to the production line. But my sister was probably better off; she is married and lives in the place I bought her. But her rural roots could not be integrated into the city. And so I felt that, even in order to solve my family’s problems, I had to do something to help them build their confidence and solve this urban–rural gap. In addition, when I read Liang Shu-ming’s and James Yen’s books at the time, I thought that what they laid out was really very important for China—so I began. Moreover, I am not afraid to say that my intellectual self-consciousness is still very strong. I grew up in the 1980s—I remember that in 1987, when I first visited Shanghai from Zhanjiang and listened to the bell on the Customs House from the Bund, I wept. I felt that I was standing by the Huangpu River and connecting with the city’s intellectuals from the 1930s and 1940s. I do not know why I felt that way, but it is a bit like the aftermath of the 1980s, including my interest in association and history. Why, before I undertake my projects, do I try to understand the people of the Republic of China, and why do I look to the historical experiences of

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Liang Shu-ming and James Yen? Because of my experiences as an intellectual growing up in the 1980s. Then why did not you go back to your hometown, but chose instead Bishan? Because I am still very disappointed in the countryside of Zhanjiang. Over the past 2 years, I have been going back frequently. It has not changed. The local government is basically rotten. Under those conditions, the Bishan Project would be gone in a flash. In addition, the folk customs of my hometown are very rude—the western part of Guangdong, like Shaoguan, is one of the few places in Guangdong that has not developed, so the rural population is still fighting for living space. If you want to fight for living space, you have to be very rude, so the folk customs are not as gentle as in Bishan. In fact, I retain a sense of hometown identity here, too. My “nostalgia” is not specific to a geography, as I also have hometown identity in Taiwan. Hometown identity is not just something in the past. So, you ended up here by chance? It was no accident. I started looking around in 2005. I looked at Lashihai in Yunnan Province. At that time, there was an American named Jay Brown who founded the Lijiang Studio and lived there. I went to the countryside of Sichuan Province, and Jiangsu Province, and also to Lankao County in Henan Province, Ding County in Hebei Province, and Fujian Province, and many other places. I had always wanted to go to the countryside of southern Anhui, but had not found the time. In 2007, after I finished the exhibition Get it Louder, I wanted to rest and take a look around. As it turns out, I liked it very much at first sight. I kept coming back here until I found a house. Does this “liking” refers to the folk customs you just mentioned? The folk customs are very simple here. In addition, there are not many places that can compare with the historical resources of the rural areas of Huizhou. The accumulation of the countryside here is very deep, and there are many things that remain to be excavated. I am also interested in research. I think there is a lot to learn here. In fact, in a sense, it is not a typical rural area in China. It is a little richer, with good conditions all around. Tourism is okay, agriculture has not been completely ruined, and there are still people farming the land. After all, the influence of the Huizhou merchants’ culture in the Ming and Qing dynasties is very deep. This is my general impression. At last I signed an agreement with them to buy a house—the private sale of a rural homestead to an outsider is not

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allowed or protected by law,3 but I did not worry about people breaking the agreement. I just relied on my gut feeling. I did not rely on so-called “rationality.” Were the other places you went seriously damaged? I have been to Henan. The living environment in the northern countryside is really bad. First of all, the environment is windy and sandy, without much greenery. The roads are often dusty dirt roads, and sanitation is very bad. You can see that the Huizhou countryside is very clean. China’s rural areas are all different. My hometown in Zhanjiang is very dirty. After market days, there is a lot of garbage; it is very dirty. The Reality of Countryside How did you use the Bishan Project to cure your nostalgia? The Bishan Project was not a way to cure nostalgia. After reading the works of those in the Republic of China, like Liang Shu-ming, I actually thought about not only the problems of the countryside, but also the modernization of China as a whole. I think some of their ideas are quite right: China’s problem is the countryside. There are many reasons for the Bishan Project, and one is thinking about China’s future—this has gone on since the Republic of China, and includes thinkers like Wen Tiejun. The other reason is that I was very tired of the contemporary art system at the time. I think that although contemporary art tries out various ways of doing exhibitions, they are all customizing products according to the interests of collectors—which has nothing to do with reality. Moreover, after 2000, a large amount of capital entered the art market, and the critical quality of the art of the 1980s disappeared. Artists do not talk about art all night long when they meet, but about what car they bought, what exhibitions they participated in, and how much their work was auctioned for. It is meaningless—I wanted to do something against that, so I went to the countryside. From the art end of it, I visited Chiang Mai, Thailand, as I was making the Bishan plan. Two artists made The Land project there. They bought a piece of land in the rural outskirts of Chiang Mai, which could be used by 3  According the Chinese law, rural homesteads and houses can only be traded among people in the same village. As a result, villagers cannot sell their properties to outside people, outside capital cannot enter the rural property market, and some old houses cannot be revitalized. This has become a controversial topic in China.

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anyone. Many artists and architects were invited to make installations and build structures there, and it had a great influence on art circles. It was the equivalent of transferring a museum to the fields. It was quite creative from the perspective of being against “art institutionalism,” but from the perspective of rural reconstruction it had a weak connection to the local community. Basically, it felt like they were just there to enjoy themselves. I thought, this is not what I want to do. But the current situation in mainland China is different from that in Thailand, the Republic of China, and Taiwan. You knew that at that time, right? I know, I know. In fact, even though many forces are engaged in rural reconstruction today, their achievements do not exceed that of the period of the Republic of China, because there are limits on what they can do. In the Republican period, the national government supported them. Liang Shu-ming said that he did not depend on political power, but if there was no Han Fuju, the military governor of Shandong Province, to allow him to experiment with the county of Zouping, how would he have been able to do anything? The political environment at the time gave him a lot of room—something that would be impossible today. However, a good thing about contemporary rural reconstruction is that we have more ideological resources than before. To be honest, from an academic point of view, Liang Shu-ming’s understanding of the countryside was far removed from that of Wen Tiejun—because Wen Tiejun understands economics, he puts rural problems in the context of globalization. Today’s ideological resources and the convenience of the Internet can improve one’s vision and academic resources much more than before. The problem is that the political environment is worse than before. That is why you chose art as a method of rural reconstruction? This is imperative, because our knowledge, experience, and resources— they are only this. If I knew financial experts, ecological experts, or experts in rural health and education, I would not have done art. The process had to be done step by step. My original idea was to start with culture and art activities, slowly letting more people hear about what we were doing. Then, other professionals could join. But as soon as we took the first step, we were in a political bottleneck—so our intentions were not fully reflected in reality. What does “political bottleneck” mean? Looking at today’s practitioners of rural reconstruction, their ideas are antagonistic to the actual actions of the government. Rural reconstruction

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is basically left-wing—advocating social justice, opposing urbanization, and anti-capitalist, which seems to conform to the original ideology of the Communist Party—but it is contradictory to actual policy under the new economic conditions. What is more, the Communist Party comes from the countryside. They are very clear about what it means for an intellectual to go to the countryside and have contact with farmers. So, this topic is a little sensitive. Why did Wen Tiejun’s project in Ding County fail? The usual. They were not good with the local government. Moreover, the main undertaker of rural reconstruction (or “rural rejuvenation”) is government at all levels. Infrastructure, economy, agriculture, health care, culture, and education still depend on government at all levels. The spontaneous actions of intellectuals can only be a supplement. This New Year day, a group of middle school students from Wuxi came to me. It was very interesting. They were concerned about society and knew about the Bishan Project—so they launched and organized a group to come here for study and research. They raised an interesting question. They said, “If you really want to build Bishan Village, why don’t you run for Secretary of the Village Committee?” When I thought about it, I did not think I would be able to do the things that a Party Secretary does every day. First of all, I would have to do a lot of talking to the villagers. Second, road construction, street lighting, agricultural production, retirement funds, and the entertainment life of the people—these are things I would not be able to do well. Intellectuals and Farmers The so-called “commune” is a blueprint that you drew. Do others play a part? Yes. The commune is a vision and supplies a theoretical framework but, in fact, in rural areas, the main body of reconstruction is still villagers, and the government is also responsible. What intellectuals do is to catalyze and ignite. Have you changed your thinking on it in recent years? There has not been any change—in fact, it is the same as when I came here. The main body of rural reconstruction must be done by the villagers, and intellectuals should help from the side, or use their own resources to help catalyze it. The Bishan Commune, ideally, should be people from outside as well as people from inside, who together form a community of mutual interest. A community only focusing on theoretical ideas is impossible here.

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In the Republican period, even James Yen and Liang Shu-ming were faced with the problem of not being “down to earth.” In the beginning, some people in Ding County did not like Yen very much—he sought loans by himself to help farmers, affecting the business of over 200 small private banks across the county. Those banks worked together to drive Yen out of the county. Dingxian and Zouping held two rural reconstruction exchange conferences, but there was not a single farmer there; everyone was an intellectual. Liang Shu-ming was pained by this. Only the intellectuals cried out, while the farmers remained unmoved. Why were not they moved? Because Liang Shu-ming said that rural reconstruction should be carried out in a “depoliticized” way—but if farmers wanted land and wanted to reduce their rent, and you have no way to solve the problem politically, you cannot meet the basic needs of the farmers, you cannot scratch their itch. The Communist Party and Mao Zedong succeeded. Mao Zedong’s method was revolution; mere reform could not motivate the farmers. He said that the land could be redistributed, and so the farmers immediately followed the Communist Party. So, is there no real way for rural reconstruction to work? That is not the case, but the problem is that if intellectuals set their aim too high, they will fall into the same predicament. I think that if you want to do things in the countryside you have to start from a small place and set small goals. But we always keep talking rather than doing. We need actions to support and realize our theories, so we have Bishan Project. Today’s dilemma is a repetition of the Republic of China. In the countryside, as I said, farmers and intellectuals coexist in the rural environment—each with his own advantages and disadvantages. There is no high ground: intellectuals are not better than farmers, and farmers are not better than intellectuals. In fact, we are here, to some extent, to use the countryside to treat the disease of our elitism. I need the countryside, but do farmers need intellectuals? It depends on whether intellectuals can scratch their itches or not. I hate the so-called intellectuals who want to “save” the countryside as well as those who treat peasants as “pure” and beyond reproach. When a lot of intellectuals started going to the countryside, they deified the peasants, considering them very simple—but in fact they were not. Like us, they have their problems. When we were working there at the beginning, they often asked us for money. Even when we borrowed a bundle of wheat straw, they would charge us ten yuan. Of course, these requests were normal. What I want to say is that there are many

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differences among the villagers. There are very simple people, but there are also some very bad traits. Some are shrewd, profit-seeking, and deceptive, and every village has some people like that. Many people deify farmers. In the dispute over Bishan, there was a funny post with two sociologists competing over who worshipped farmers more. In fact, there are quite a lot of shortcomings in both peasants and intellectuals. It is good to have as a principle that we are all people without difference. Do you think it is easy to deal with farmers? I think it is easy if you have a clear purpose. My biggest feeling here is that the self-esteem of the farmers is very strong and they are very sensitive. Just like when I went to Xinjiang ten years ago, when the Sino-Uygur conflict was not as obvious, I felt very relaxed and did not worry about my behavior. But when I have gone back over the last couple of years, I have felt like I could not relax, and am always afraid of saying the wrong thing. It is the same in Bishan. The farmers are very sensitive. If you are writing an e-mail at home, and a farmer comes in to say hello, you have to look up and talk with him. If you delay, they will feel hurt. Sometimes when they visit you, you have to send them off and actually wait until they are in the distance. If they hear you shut the door behind them then they will feel very wounded, very wounded. Daily Life and Accidents Have you decided to settle down here? I have basically settled down. My wife and I have just got our residence permits, and our child is at the local kindergarten. I also take care of my brother’s child, who is in junior high school. I really like life here. This house is very comfortable and has a large open area. After moving my mother and children here, I really began to understand that Hui-style houses are designed for families. Life in the countryside is very good. Every day, I go into town to pick up mails and buy some groceries. I ride my electric motorbike there, and the wind blows, and there are rice fields on both sides, and in the distance you can see the clouds ringing the mountains, and then there is my own home, which is at the foot of the mountain—that feeling is very nice. But there are too many visitors and time is broken up. I have had more dinner parties here than I did in Beijing. In two months, it exceeds what I did in half a year in Beijing. Government officials, strangers, visitors, villagers, I cannot push them all

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away—everyone knows our home is here. In addition, transportation and the cost of daily life here are more expensive than in Beijing. But my mother does not like it here. It is the opposite of what I thought would be the case. I thought she would like it, since she lived and worked for most of her life in the countryside, but no. For example, she has nothing to do. I said, I will find you a plot of land, and we can grow vegetables together. She said no, I have been farming most of my life, and you still want me to do this? In addition, she speaks Cantonese, and here they speak the Yi County dialect, so there are problems in communication. It is not convenient to buy vegetables, and she is not used how the food tastes. She has lived by the sea since she was a child, and since this is a mountainous area she cannot get seafood. I told her to go dancing in the square. Go and have a good time. But she would not do that, either. She just stays at home after finishing housework. My mother is very interesting. She reads Southern Weekend—she learned to read in the “Mao Zedong Thought Study Group” in her hometown, so she can read some books. Once, we had several Dutch people here. One of the girls was Marie-Anne Souloumiac, the granddaughter of Robert van Gulik. My mother thought it was interesting, and so started reading the Chinese version of Judge Dee. After we opened the Bishan Bookstore, we were often criticized for selling books like Ch’ien Mu’s. But do farmers only deserve to read about “scientific farming techniques?” Is that all? There are often some old people who read serious academic books at the bookstore—right now there is an old lady reading Zhang Ning’s book Dusk of Land, which is a study of rural Chinese society,4 and another old lady reading Why Farmers Leave Their Land.5 What we imagine about farmers is too narrow. What about the political difficulties that the Bishan Project and rural reconstruction as a whole have to face? Is there anything that can be done? I have some complaints about politics, but that is what I had to go through when I came to Bishan. In 2012, our events were canceled—that kind of thing often happens in this country. That is reality. I cannot run away because of that. In fact, when I had two opportunities to go to the United States, I did not go. Even in Shenzhen and Guangzhou, everything I did was met with politics. Instead of complaining, I strengthened 4  Zhang Ning, Dusk of Land: Micropower Analysis of Rural Experience in China (Beijing: Oriental Publishing House, 2005). 5  Zhu Qizhen and Zhao Chenming, Why Farmers Leave Their Land (Beijing: People’s Daily Press, 2011).

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my determination not to leave China. I think cultural events should be done by the government, but they are not—so we did it at the grassroots level. It is very unreasonable for them to restrict us. The system really needs improvement, but I do not advocate confrontation. I think in China, the more confrontational you are, the smaller your space will be. So, I have never been confrontational; I just try to be constructive, and think, under existing policy, what can be done? So, we can understand what has happened at Bishan, including why the government canceled our events, because we were going to exhibit a large number of photos of the environmental damage caused by China’s excessive urbanization, which were, frankly, shocking. As far as criticism of us goes, I do not think the outside world has really seen the constraints we face in our work here, which are often political. Rural reconstruction is very comprehensive, and it is not limited to culture. Culture is not urgently needed in rural areas, so in recent years we have had to adjust and expand our minds. Sometimes our own principles restrained us, and we lacked the flexibility to respond to reality. For example, recently, someone bought 200 mu of land in Bishan Village. He liked what we did very much, and planned to pay us to continue to do large-­ scale events on it. The government wanted the investment as well, so they agreed. However, because we had our own principles, we were a little afraid to use the money, since the land was agricultural land. Although it was later converted into land for construction, we were still a little hesitant, since we did not know what the 200 mu was for. But think about it. This kind of thing is everywhere in rural China. Both the government and the villagers are eager to sell the land, they are very eager for big capital to come in. If you refuse one developer, there will be another developer— and the other developer might not talk with me; at least this investor would listen to our opinions. This is the reality of China. If we can adjust our principles and deal with this reality flexibly, the consequences may be better than with another investor showing up. Bishan is not static, it is a dynamic village. So, we are very cautious, and alert to becoming an ivory tower of sorts. My door is always open. If the central government had not canceled our events in 2012, and if the local government’s attitude toward our open activities was not unclear, then there would have been a large number of interactive activities with the villagers over the past two years. But the local government’s attitude is not clear, so we dare not act rashly. If you do not know how to handle the

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relationship with governments well, you might not even be able to live here. Silent Education Returning to your relationship with the villagers: With the concept of rural reconstruction, is it possible to act and have an impact when you are subject to so many restrictions? I do not think so-called “integration” into local culture can be achieved with words alone—I personally have never spoken about big theories with the villagers. On the one hand, many do not understand them, and they are not interested in them. If you want to do something in the countryside, make a sample first. When the villagers see it and experience it, if they think it is good, they will imitate it and try to follow the trend. So, if you want to work in the countryside and have an impact, it is necessary to do and demonstrate more. Just like with the old houses—the villagers do not like them. They like living in new buildings. When we came, we did not preach and tell them that they should do historical preservation. We just repaired some houses and invited them to visit. When they saw them, they were amazed that the houses, which had been messy and dirty, had been fixed up. If they see people from the city treating old houses so well, their ideas will change a little. But they cannot do the same because they do not have the capital. They just want to sell their old houses for higher prices. But since we have been here, our ideas about old houses have had an impact. In addition, the influence of the bookstore here has also been subtle and gradual. The bookstore gave villagers the chance to interact with culture, which is of great significance. As for the extent to which the influence can be deepened, that does not happen over a short time; it is a long-term process. Do you think you are more “down to earth” now? Not enough, so this year I started to think about farming. But there is also the aspect of lifestyle and schedule—I would have to get up earlier. When I first came here, I brought my habits from Beijing. I worked at night and got up late the next day. But that is looked down on in the countryside. I also needed to learn the local dialect as quickly as possible. We know that the most terrible thing is for intellectuals to go to the countryside and to turn the place into their own ivory tower. I am actually alert

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to that kind of thing, but whether it can be done or not is no simple task. It is going to take a long time. Anyway, after we came, we did not ruin the village. The villagers let us stay, which was a little difficult for them. You see in Lijiang and in many other places, especially in communities of artists, people go to the countryside to build studios. When they go there, they do not want to deal with having relationships with the locals. I just went to Sanbao Ceramic Art Village, in Jingdezhen. The artist Jackson Li built a kiln, a studio, and an institute and lives there, but there are not any local residents in that village. The reality he faces is very simple: he only needs to make his own art. The Bishan Project from the beginning has said that we need to have a relationship with more than 2900 villagers. Farming may be the key. It is what farmers know. Then, farmers will really treat you as one of their own. True. The Bishan Project is well known now. Is it possible for it to have an effect on city people that are nostalgic for village life, and think that village life is good? The effect has been very widespread, but that is also what we are worried about. You can see how many things we are worried about. Do not I always use the word “gentrification?” Villagers do not like old houses, people from elsewhere like them. The villagers want to move out, and outsiders want to move in. Finally, the reshuffling of the population is a kind of “gentrification,” and transforms the village in a massive way. I am very alert to it from an academic perspective, so I am afraid that it might be said that I am doing the gentrifying. But “gentrification” is actually driven by the market. Villagers in particular welcome outsiders to buy houses for high prices, so that they can buy apartments in county-level cities, or build new houses in their villages. One is willing to sell and the other is willing to buy. This is the reality of the market. Therefore, gentrification and urbanization are realities that affect the whole country. Not only the countryside, but also in the historical hutong districts of Beijing. The people from there have to queue up outside to go to the toilet in the winter. Seven or eight people are crowded into a small house. If there is a fire, the fire trucks are not even able to drive in. These people desperately want to leave. But people from elsewhere want to buy the old houses in the hutongs, so it is reciprocal. All the so-called “city regeneration” projects are some kind of gentrification, and art is often the accomplice and forerunner of gentrification, like at 798. In the transformation of an old

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area, it is always artists who go there first, and then exhibitions are put on, and then capital comes, and then the population gets reshuffled. I am very clear-eyed about that. The new generation has different ideas from the older generation about living environments and how to be comfortable. So, to preserve is not to preserve just an old house, but to change the whole environment. Not a Savior, But a Stimulator Do you have any plans for your next steps? I will have to find another job. At present I am editing literary journal Chutzpah! for Modern Media Group, so I have a fixed salary and do not have to go to an office. This has been very important. To move back to the countryside, the price threshold is still very high—so if your job is not flexible, and if you have to go in to work, you cannot move back. We are mobilizing young people “back to the land,” but what are they going to be doing there? They do not have jobs. Even for myself, I have to find something to do, because my savings will soon run out. What is the next step for Bishan? To do some more activities—daily activities that mobilize the villagers. For example, in July we did a reading group for villagers, which I think went very well. I invited Wang Jiyu, a talented young man born after 1990, and a graduate from Central Academy of Fine Arts, to lead a reading of Virtuous Discussions in White Tiger Hall with villagers, and organize discussion on traditional village archery contest ceremonies (xiangsheli). In the Republican period, Liang Shu-ming used to ask the villagers in Zouping to practice this rite. Wang Jiyu’s interpretation of the classics is exceptional. My next step will be to invite the village’s scholars, its retired teachers, to do reading clubs—daily, small-scale. And then teach villagers to go online and sell things on Taobao. The Elderly Association in the village is very good, and is very active. The square dances in the village are all organized by them. It is all retired civil servants and teachers, and they have something to do with the Civil Affairs Bureau. They applied for a little money from the Civil Affairs Bureau and bought a stereo. Now the square has very active dancing until 10 p.m. every night. There are other things that have happened, too, which are quite interesting. For example, an old gentleman became the protagonist of a piece of gossip—you could write a novel about it. Life in the village really is dramatic! I believe that the old gentleman all of a

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sudden became romantic and brave, and that had something to do with us being here. After we arrived, he wore a suit every day and set up a studio. Seeing that he was interested in culture, the Secretary of the Town Committee bought him a digital camera to take pictures of Bishan Village. Afterwards, he got to know a woman, and he often took pictures of her as she went up the mountain to pick tea. It was a hot gossip, and the whole village was talking about it. The Elderly Association is easy to deal with; they are rural gentries in the contemporary sense, and they are enthusiastic about village affairs and are not trying to promote interests. The Village Committee is not the same. It is all about interests. They need to build streetlamps, and so asked for pledges from Zuo Jing and me. In an interview with the media, they said that Bishan was going to build streetlamps, and they hoped that Zuo Jing and Ou Ning would be responsible for the electricity fees on one road each—and they have not stopped lobbying me to buy an abandoned public house in the village. The flow of Chinese officialdom also has some influence on the rural areas of China. At present, many college graduates cannot find jobs in the city. When they come to the countryside, the bottom experience as a so-­ called “college student village official” is more a matter of survival. In fact, it is not easy to become a “college student village official.” Some students competed for this position desperately, just for developing their own careers in a roundabout way, and not because they really like rural work. But some of them are really good—and we have met some of them, too. One student official is working in Nanping Village, but because she was a volunteer for our events in 2011 and 2012, she was inspired and started her own business, setting up a Young Village Official Vegetable Garden online and helping farmers sell agricultural products; she did a good job. Also, through the Biyang Town government, she transferred 18 mu of land in Bishan, and now she is organizing an organic farm. She is from Tunxi, can speak the local dialect, and can communicate with the villagers very well. They trust her. It would be nice for her to become the Secretary of the Village Committee, but that is impossible because it is decided by administrative fiat. How did your quarrel with Zhou Yun affect you? The effect on me was that there were so many people coming. Zhou Yun’s questions were because she did not understand me. If she had read my articles about the countryside, she would have known that I am aware of the problems she pointed out. What I cannot stand is that she distorted

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my words and turned them into the opposite in order to support her attack. I cannot stand that. Especially about the streetlamps and watching the stars—I pay much more attention to the streetlamps. She gives the impression that I just want to stargaze. But this controversy has led to media attention, which is good. Later, it became a larger discussion about rural reconstruction, and it went beyond our little debate. I think that is particularly good. In fact, there are not many people who pay attention to rural reconstruction. Although it is quite hot right now, there are not enough people who really pay attention to it. It seems that rural reconstruction has its own circles. I have read some articles about rural reconstruction, and I think they have been well written and persuasive. For the outside world, however, reaching society at large, it is like another world. In rural reconstruction circles, the internal discussions are very academic, and public outreach is minimal. But the topic of rural reconstruction is very important. As long as it involves the topic, everyone wants to compete for the moral high ground. Why the moral high ground? People care about the countryside, imagine the countryside needs to be saved, and believe it is the epitome of social conscience—hence that joke I mentioned about sociologists arguing who worships farmers more. In fact, rural reconstruction has different groups—what is important is to combine these powers. People in different professions—ecology, finance, culture, and education—we should combine our strengths. As for us, we have advantages in art, but we also have our disadvantages. I think the Bishan Project is definitely rural reconstruction, and all the ideological resources I borrowed at the beginning go toward it.

CHAPTER 9

Introspection

The Organic Intellectuals1 During World War I, the leader of China’s mass education and rural reconstruction movements, James Yen, was a student at Yale University majoring in political science and economics. In 1917, the Beiyang government (a series of military regimes that ruled from Beijing from 1912 to 1928) joined the Allies of World War I, declaring war on Germany and the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and nearly 200,000 Chinese laborers entered the battlefields of Europe.2 After graduating from Yale in 1918, Yen joined 1  Completed in Chinese on March 18, 2013, in Beijing. Commissioned by the “Europe(to the power of) n” project, the English version was translated by Chih Wei Chang, first published in  ARTCO Magazine (April 2013), Taiwan; later published in  Gerfried Stocker, Christine Schöpf and  Hannes Leopoldseder, eds., Post City: Habitats for  the  21st Century (Berlin: Hatje Cantz Verlag, 2015), the  publication of  Ars Electronica 2015 and  Janet Marstine and Oscar Ho, eds., Curating Art (London: Routledge, 2020). Revised and added footnotes in 2019. 2  The contribution of the Chinese Labour Corps (CLC) to the Allies in the First World War was not only taken seriously in the First World War Centenary ceremonies in Europe from 2014 to 2018, but also played an important role in the formation of China’s nation-state. By sending CLC to Britain and France, China was able to join the Allies and participate in the Paris Peace Conference, in which the Treaty of Versailles triggered the May 4th Movement, which became the first chapter of the historical narrative of the modern nationalism in China. CLC is also the starting point of James Yen’s mass education and rural construction movement that lasted for more than half a century. See Mark O’Neill, The Chinese Labour Corps:

© The Author(s) 2020 O. Ning, Utopia in Practice, Contemporary East Asian Visual Cultures, Societies and Politics, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-5791-0_9

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the YMCA team and volunteered his services in France to members of the Chinese Labour Corps, mostly writing letters for illiterate workers wanting to communicate with their families back home. It was here on the battlefields of Europe that Yen first had the idea of teaching laborers how to read and write, and also where he established the first ever Chinese-­ language labor publication, zhonghua laogong zhoubao (China Workers’ Weekly).3 Moved by Yen’s teaching and assistance, one member of the labor corps sent Yen the wages he received for three years of service in Europe, which amounted to 365 French Francs.4 From this experience, Yen realized the potential for learning among the common people and was inspired to return to China and start the mass education and rural reconstruction movements that ultimately gave shape to his lifelong dedication to developing the strength and knowledge of the people. After enduring the slaughter of two world wars and the hardships posed by the Cold War, the countries of Europe sought to make real a European Union. Notions of mass education and rural reconstruction forged in the conflagration of Europe’s battlefields swept mainland China during its Republican Era, but were not enough to dislodge entrenched political and social realities, and even today, more than a century later, China’s leaders continue to seek improvements along these lines. During the Republican Era, the chaos and power struggles of warlordism gave rise to frequent changes in political power, as well as the proliferation of countless ideologies and social movements. Quests for industrialization and urbanization repeatedly washed over the country, but agrarianism was too deeply rooted in society, and the vast population of uneducated, closely knit residents was unable to adapt to these changes touted as modernization. And even today, despite the rhetoric of a rising China, chronic backwardness plagues the nation. At first, China’s leaders introduced communist political solutions from Europe, and more recently neoliberal economic ones from the United States, but both have resulted in endless problems. These modes of political administration and economic development have merely established a stage for party struggles or benefited society’s upper strata, but never The Forgotten Chinese Labourers of the First World War (Melbourne: Penguin Books, 2014), 5–9, 65–66. 3  See Wu Hsiang-hsiang, James Yen and His Sixty Years of Struggle with Rural Reconstruction for the Peasant People of the World (Taipei: China Times Publishing Company, 1981), 25–39. 4  James Yen, “China’s New Citizens” (1929), in Song Enrong, ed., Complete Works of James Yen, Volume 1 (Tianjin: Tianjin Education Press, 2013), 132.

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enabled the poor and working classes to guide history. Nonetheless, developing the strength and knowledge of the people is still an important talking point in today’s China. After the turn of the new millennium, pressure on rural areas, agricultural industries, and farmers to industrialize and urbanize has steadily increased, prompting some intellectuals to rethink the direction of China’s development. Returning to the mass education and rural reconstruction movements of the Republican Era for ideas, they have launched new rural reconstruction campaigns in various parts of the country with the political, economic, and cultural practices in rural areas, and in doing so, have rejected globalization and excessive urbanization in favor of local issues. The Bishan Project is one such project resulting from the history outlined above. In 2011, Zuo Jing and I chose Bishan Village in Anhui Province’s Yixian County as the site for Bishan Commune, which is our experiment in new rural reconstruction and living. In the first year, we invited artists, architects, designers, musicians, film directors, writers, and student volunteers from around China to visit the Bishan area and survey local society. Based on this foundation, we started planning for the first Bishan Harvestival in cooperation with the villagers. Festival activities centered on the presentation of village history, protection and revitalization of housing, design of traditional crafts, staging of traditional regional opera and music performances, production and screening of documentaries about the villages, and conducting forums where rural reconstructionists who advocate different schools of thought and practice in various areas can share their experiences. For our second festival, held in 2012, the Yixian County government entrusted us with the curatorship of the seventh Yixian International Photo Festival, which included participants from Asia, Europe, and North America, and focused on themes of environmental protection, community supported agriculture, rural economic cooperatives, and community colleges. Another practitioner of new rural reconstruction, Wen Tiejun uses the School of Agricultural Economics and Rural Development in Renmin University of China as his knowledge base. His approach differs from Bishan’s emphasis on art and culture as entry points into village life, in that he directly applies political and economic strategies to develop community organizing, operate community colleges, further agricultural technology training, help farmers establish economic cooperatives, and promote Community Supported Agriculture (CSA). Fundraising for the Bishan Project relies solely on large-scale art events, such as my decision to

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incorporate my work as curator for the International Design Exhibition at the Chengdu Biennale into the Bishan Project in order to share the budget. Furthermore, our networks and working experiences lie mostly in the art world, and because Bishan is located in the Huizhou region, celebrated for its rich cultural heritage and humanities, we have chosen to use artistic production as our primary starting point for reconstruction practice. Art production in the Bishan Project is rooted in rural area and has arisen from reflection on the contemporary art institutions and practices. Art in China today is an extremely lively and flourishing field of endeavor, yet has been increasingly stifled by the public authorities and commercialism. Institutional mechanisms such as biennales, galleries, auctions, and art fairs, which are outgrowths of European and North American museum systems, while vast in their global reach, have already become the branding promotion for cities and countries, or even carnivalesque games for commercial trading and financial investment. Art production has been relegated to the assembly line to meet the needs of supply and demand, while the power of creativity and social critique are further diluted on a daily basis. Art production and circulation are concentrated in urban areas associated with economic development and high population densities, leading to production values that by no means favor border regions or rural areas and ultimately the injustice of regional imbalance. Cities possess a surfeit of cultural resources and opportunities, while cultural famine ravages border regions and rural areas, which is a pattern duplicated on a macro scale by the globalized political economy. Before and after starting the Bishan Project, we researched rural experiments by artists and intellectuals in different parts of Asia, including Rirkrit Tiravanija and Kamin Lertchaiprasert’s The Land project in Chiang Mai, Thailand; the Echigo-Tsumari Art Triennale founded by Fram Kitagawa and held in the mountain villages of Niigata Prefecture, Japan; and Indian author Arundhati Roy’s opposition to the Narmada dam project and support for Maoist farmers. Focusing on collisions between globalization and local politics, economies, culture or traditional lifestyles, these practices explore alternative art systems and culture-based interventional politics to promote social movements and the revitalization of overlooked agricultural regions of Asia where rice is grown for food as a traditional lifestyle but is now facing the impact of the economic globalization. We have sought inspiration from like-minded artists and intellectuals such as these when designing the programming of the Bishan Project.

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The Bishan Project is not just art programming, however. We started out from wanting to address those imbalances between cities and the countryside that have manifested grim realities such as the deterioration of agricultural production, rural society, and villager empowerment, and are the direct result of excessive urbanization. The project relies on the accumulated experience of the rural reconstruction movement led by Chinese intellectuals since the Republican Era, as well as the cultural practices of various rural regions in Asia. Adopting the intellectual resources of China’s traditional agriculturalism and rural philosophies, as well as leftist or even anarchist ideas, Bishan aims to combat the encroachments of globalization and neoliberalism, and by using art and culture as our first point of entry, we ultimately hope to influence politics and economics with our work in rural areas. Our interests lie in exploring the villager-based economics of rural life, establishing mutual nurturing relationships between the city and the countryside, promoting labor practices based on mutual aid and labor exchange, establishing a social structure based on horizontal power, adopting consensus decision-making, applying direct action, reviving the tradition of autonomy in China’s rural areas, and transforming utopian ideals into realpolitik. Most people in China imagine Europe and the United States as successful representatives of a certain kind of modernity, which has led to countless waves of wild-eyed advocates over the last hundred  years. But unfortunately westernization has left China in the awkward position of being neither here nor there. An obvious example would be the lure of individualism, which has undermined China’s traditional lineage society and threatened the once-stable mutual nurturing relationship between the city and the countryside. Before the so-called modernization, China’s countryside provided the cities with children who would grow into the next generation of elites, and form associations in the cities with others from the same hometowns. Longing for their hometowns, these city dwellers would often send money back to the countryside and thus supported rural areas with the construction of ancestral halls and schools, or aid for the poor and orphans. Today, however, along with the popularity of individualism, the loving feelings for rural hometowns have faded, the values of family are disintegrated, and the elderly people are discarded, leading to grave consequences. Those from the countryside who move to cities for work or school are proud to have gotten away and do not send money back home, and the urban-rural relationship has become antagonistic.

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Reasons for these problems also lie in deeper levels of social institutions. Historically, the land system and the household registration system have shaped the urban-rural dual structure in China, but cultural misunderstandings are also a significant factor. As the pioneering researcher of sociology and anthropology Fei Xiaotong (Fei Hsiao-Tung) has said, “Chinese society is fundamentally rural. I say that it is fundamentally rural because its foundation is rural. Several variations have arisen from this foundation, but even so, these variations retain their rural character.”5 Fei goes on to claim, with respect to familial relationships, social organization in China followed a “differential mode of association” (chaxugeju)6 and, with respect to politics, started at the top with politically centralized power and moved down to power at the county level. From the county level down, social organization relied on the autonomy of landed gentry in small villages and historically maintained a long-term stable society.7 Since the May Fourth Movement in 1919, the constant transformation and destruction of this structure has led to China’s chronic disorder. Since the end of the Cold War, China has actively embraced globalization and, guided by GDP and the urbanization movement, redistributed social resources even more radically than a revolution that caused massive social conflicts. The majority of rural land resources have been reallocated to 5  Fei Xiaotong, From the Soil, the Foundations of Chinese Society, trans. Gary G. Hamilton and Wang Zheng (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), 37. 6  This is a typical Chinese social order named by Fei Xiaotong: The social circle in real society is kind of social network formed under this order. Each person is in a central position and forms different circles with different people who are in contact with him. Under different circumstances, people will use different circles for their own use. 7  Qin Hui once questioned Fei Xiaotong’s theories about “autonomy of landed gentry,” “imperial power extended down only to the county level,” “dual-track politics under the monarchy,” “clan system of the traditional rural society,” and so on by studying wujian (Books of the Wu Kingdom) and other archaeological discoveries in Zoumalou, Changsha. The administrative documents of Wu Kingdom show that the native villagers were mixed by different surnames at that time, and there was no big clan with the same surnames. The establishment of the positions for village-level officials was elaborate, and the governance of the villages was very strong, which showed that the imperial authority was actually sunk down to the very bottom of the Chinese society, and the landed gentry only played an auxiliary role in rural area, far from the modern sense of “political participation.” If “autonomy” is defined by “civil rights,” then “autonomy of landed gentry” is indeed not a historical reality, but a wishful imagination of Confucian ideals in the late Qing dynasty when the monarchy was overthrown and the Western political thoughts and practices spread to the East. See Qin Hui, Ten Expositions on Tradition: System, Culture and Its Change of Chinese Society (Shanghai: Fudan University Press, 2003), 1–44.

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urban commercial development, which has resulted in continual reduction of acreage under tillage. Agricultural businesses move closer to bankruptcy on a daily basis and the population is increasingly reliant on imports for food and energy, which has in turn reduced the country’s ability to resist global disasters. Traditional rural society in China has always had the ability to resist outside forces based on its economic self-sufficiency and political autonomy. Re-evaluation here is not intended as a reactionary call for a return to the past, as all countries today are compelled to form some relationship with globalization. The “small state, few people” that Lao Tzu claimed were ideally suited to good governance cannot possibly exist in today’s world, much less in a country as vast as China with its overflowing population. Revisiting rural society means preserving those features which still hold advantages under new historical conditions, and to pursue with open minds new paths that emphasize the unique offerings of China that are different from those pursued by other Asian countries or by Europe and the United States thus far. The Bishan Project, as an experiment conducted in a rural area of China, has purposely chosen this kind of path, and hopes to retain a broad vision and open mind, yet a practice focused on a specific village. Antonio Gramsci once said in his Prison Notebooks, “The mode of being of the new intellectual can no longer consist in eloquence, which is an exterior and momentary mover of feelings and passions, but in active participation in practical life, as constructor, organizer, ‘permanent persuader’ and not just a simple orator (but superior at the same time to the abstract mathematical spirit); from technique-as-work one proceeds to technique-­ as-­science and to the humanistic conception of history, without which one remains ‘specialized’ and does not become ‘directive’ (specialized and political).”8 This is what he called “organic intellectuals.” The pioneers of rural construction in the Publican Era, such as James Yen and Liang Shuming, and the contemporary rural reconstructionists, such as Wen Tiejun, are all exemplary “organic intellectuals” in China. They shoulder a kind of conscious responsibility, “give it homogeneity and an awareness of its own function not only in the economic but also in

8  Quinton Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith trans., Selections from the Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci (London: Elec Book, 1999), transcribed from the edition published by Lawrence & Wishart, London, 1971, 141–142.

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the social and political fields”;9 they inherit the spirit of redemption from the Christian tradition or the manifest destiny of “If we do not take action, what about the people?”10 in the Confucian tradition, “represent an historical continuity uninterrupted even by the most complicated and radical changes in political and social forms.”11 They go deep into the people and take root in the earth. In the wind and rain of history and reality, they are like tenacious living species, “organically” growing out of the soil, continuously repairing and activating the heavily destroyed ecology of human society. When talking about “organic intellectuals,” Gramsci pointed out the situation in the rural society: “the mass of the peasantry, although it performs an essential function in the world of production, does not elaborate its own ‘organic’ intellectuals, nor does it ‘assimilate’ any stratum of ‘traditional’ intellectuals, although it is from the peasantry that other social groups draw many of their intellectuals and a high proportion of traditional intellectuals are of peasant origin.”12 It is precisely because of this kind of extraction of rural elites that the rural intellectual stratum is deserted. It is not that there are no intellectuals in the countryside, but that their weight in rural society is not as high as that of urban intellectuals, and their performance is not as active as that of urban intellectuals. Gramsci’s definition of intellectuals is very democratic and broad, “All men are intellectuals, one could therefore say: but not all men have in society the function of intellectuals. Thus, because it can happen that everyone at some time fries a couple of eggs or sews up a tear in a jacket, we do not necessarily say that everyone is a cook or a tailor.”13 Technique, knowledge, and mental labor are carried on by all men. The criteria for judging intellectuals and non-intellectuals should be determined by whether a person’s activities “have their place within the general complex of social relations.”14 In fact, in the daily life and work of Bishan Village, we met many “peasant intellectuals.” They have received basic education, can read and write, have rich agricultural experience, and are very enthusiastic about the reconstruction of their native village. However, under the realistic  Ibid., p. 135.  The title of an article published by Liang Shuming in 1917. 11  Selections from the Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci, 137. 12  Ibid., 136. 13  Ibid., 140. 14  Ibid., 139. 9

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environment that the Party-led governmental authority has completely replaced the “autonomy of landed gentry” (if it ever existed), they are difficult to obtain the opportunity to speak in public affairs, let alone becoming “directive.” When we move to the countryside from the city, we are facing this rural society where the political space is shrinking and the subjectivity of villagers is weakening. What we can do is to interact with these “peasant intellectuals” more, learn from them more, and turn ourselves into “intellectual peasants” as soon as possible. The mixture of the two forces may eventually give birth to our own “organic intellectuals” in Bishan Village.

Informal Life Politics15 What Is Community? The English name of the Bishan Commune is taken from the Paris Commune of 1871. This also includes references to the hippies’ experimental communes as part of the Back-to-the-land Movements beginning in the 1960s. The autonomous principles of the former represent the dream of another kind of politics; the ecological protection thinking of the latter should be greatly advocated in present-day China. The People’s Commune movement lasting from 1958 to 1984 proved to be a serious destruction of the Chinese countryside. The Chinese term gongshe (commune) represents a bitter memory of the Chinese countryside, therefore the Bishan Commune is not called “Bishan Gongshe” in Chinese, but the “Bishan Gongtongti” (Bishan Community). “Gongtong” is a reference to 15  From August 22 to September 14, 2014, the Bishan Project participated in an exhibition in Denmark titled “Inquiries in Earth and Art” (Forespørgsler i Jord og Kunst). The questions in  this piece were asked by the  curators Mathias Kokholm, Rasmus Graff, and  Mai Corlin, who invited each of the participating artists Lea Porsager, Ferdinand Ahm Krag, Ou Ning, and  Lasse Krogh Møller to  answer the  questions independently. Mai Corlin was  at  the  time researching the  Bishan Project. She provided the  questions for  Ou Ning in English and Chinese. Ou Ning completed the answers in Chinese on August 5, 2014, in Bishan; Mai Corlin translated the answers into Danish and published the text as “Questions and answers between Ou Ning and the Sønderholm Collective” (Spørgsmål og svar mellem Ou Ning og Sønderholm kollektivet) in Mai Corlin, Rasmus Graff, and Mathias Kokholm eds., Inquiries in  Earth and  Art (Forespørgsler i  Jord og Kunst, exhibition catalogue, Aarhus: Antipyrine and OVO Press, 2014). The Chinese version was published in New Architecture 158 (January 2015). The English version was translated by Mai Corlin in 2019; the title is newly added.

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the common and to the transgression of traditional property rights through realization of actual actions. To facilitate genuine commonness and sharing is not only about Lawrence Lessig’s “Creative Commons,” but even more about Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s “Commonwealth,” which is concerned with the sharing of neighborhoods, historical heritage, communal spaces, and so forth. To work in the countryside for a long period, one must have a goal. Even though I can predict the difficulties I will be facing, I am still not ashamed of voicing my own dream scenario here. The word “community” is usually translated as shequ (the neighborhood) in Chinese. However, in the era of planned economy, China did not use the concept of shequ, but rather jiedao (street), juminqu (residential area), danwei sushe (work unit housing), dayuan (compounds, occupied by the military or administrative cadres), and so forth to describe a defined residential area within the city. They used xiang (township) to describe natural cun (village) aggregations in the rural areas and zhen (town) to describe the administrative unit of several xiangs. Above zhen is xian (county). During the People’s Commune period, in order to advance the agricultural production, the means of production and the workforce were concentrated in the countryside. At the same time, a semi-militarized administration was implemented, and “town” was changed to “commune,” “township” to “production brigade,” and “village” to “production team.” It was not until the era of the market economy and commercial housing districts appeared in the cities that the residents were no longer constituted by administrative structures, but were freely allocated by the market. First then people began calling it xiaoqu (small neighborhood) or shequ. After 1984, the administrative organization of “village,” “township,” and “town” was revived in the rural areas.16 The original meaning of community in English refers to a specific group of people and their homes, a unit that is greater than that of the family. From this point of 16  Article 30 of the Constitution of the People’s Republic of China, adopted at the Fifth Session of the Fifth National People’s Congress on December 4, 1982, stipulates: “The administrative division of the People’s Republic of China is as follows: (1) The country is divided into provinces, autonomous regions and municipalities directly under the Central Government; (2) Provinces and autonomous regions are divided into autonomous prefectures, counties, autonomous counties, and cities; (3) Counties and autonomous counties are divided into townships, nationality townships, and towns.” This provision was implemented nationwide in 1984 and the organizational system of People’s Commune was thus completely ended.

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view, in the Chinese context, we can call the danwei sushe and the dayuan that are still in use, and the neighborhood in the cities, and the villages in the rural areas “communities.” “Community” is a concept that lays particular emphasis on describing the relationship between people. It refers to a group of people with unanimous interests, standpoints, and so forth. If people’s interests are unanimous, they can form a community of interests, if their standpoints are unanimous, they can form a community of ideas. In a country, if there is an alignment between the top and the bottom when it comes to interests, then it is a community. The same applies to a neighborhood. But community is not limited to a specific geographic or administrative area; people can form communities across borders and nationalities. In this sense, even though the people of a country live on the same piece of land, if popular sentiments are scattered and contradictions are growing, then they cannot become a community. Even if the people of a neighborhood live next to each other, if they cannot make concerted efforts, keep watch, and help each other out, they cannot become a community. To translate community as gongtongti can only reflect a specific ideal. The Chinese name for the Bishan Commune takes vantage in idealism. It expresses how newcomers and local people live together on the same piece of land, how they team up, and how they wish to be able to depend on each other. How Does the Surrounding World Affect Your Work? I live among around 3000 villagers with sensitive self-respect in Bishan. Every day, I must meet people with a smile, be overcautious in my words and deeds, even with what I wear, when I work and when I rest, I have to make an effort to align with them. With my work, I have never tried to explain the greater reasons that seem difficult for them to understand. I have been hiding my own thoughts and have only explored the theories within my own “community of ideas.” If I want to achieve the recognition of the villagers, then it is more effective to set an example through actions, one deed at a time, than to use whatever words to spread the message. In the past, the villagers did not cherish the old houses they have lived in for generations and let them decay and collapse. If they had the chance, they would build a new house according to their idea of the modern. To live in a house inherited from your ancestor were looked down upon as a symbol of failure. I bought a house in the village that had

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already been empty for a long time and spent one year to renovate it. Afterwards, I moved down here from Beijing. Every day, the front gate was left open for the villagers to pass by and see the result of my renovations any time. They would naturally see how well a newcomer from the city treats their ancestral inheritance and because of that the value they bestow the old houses changed. But the change in perception of the old houses will not make them set out to begin renovations themselves. The majority of the villagers don’t have much capital; they can only hope to sell their old house at an even higher price to outsiders. There is a great possibility that this will lead to the phenomenon of gentrification which I have warned against. There are more and more outsiders that buy houses in Bishan; this is something the villagers welcome. Because of the discrepancy in the idea of life between the villagers and the outsiders, it has created a market reality. Urbanites are moving to live in the rural areas due to environmental pollution and worsening air quality, but the people from the rural areas are longing to go to the city in search for job opportunities and for the so-called idea of the modern. This cross-flow of desires has determined the always growing differentiation of the rural-urban relationship in China. Even though it is beneficial for the historic preservation in the rural areas when urbanites purchase old houses in the villages, if they only buy the house for the occasional holiday and do not stay long term and devote themselves to working in the countryside, then the countryside will become the backyard of the urbanites and that is all. That is of little help in the revival of the economy and culture of the countryside. Furthermore, no matter where in China you live and work, you have to cope with the restrains of the system. No matter how many people in present-day China devote themselves to rural reconstruction, we have to admit that in reality the main undertakers of rural reconstruction are different levels of government. The countryside’s economic development, infrastructure, health services, cultural education, environmental protection, social security system, and many other social services are all controlled by the government. Civilian forces can only from the side remedy inadequate government work. Even though the government’s idea of governance occasionally is subject to criticism, it does not allow for a transgression of its functions. Except for the systemic environment, public opinion also has a great significance for the work in the rural areas. The Chinese media, whether it is the traditional paper media or the online media including self-media, all rely on attracting attention. Regarding the

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issue of rural reconstruction, a topic that affects popular feelings, everyone is eager to seize the moral high ground in the name of inspection and seldom has the patience for in-depth investigation and analysis. Practitioners are often morally kidnapped by public opinion and the work in the rural areas becomes even more difficult. How Do You Use History? The reason why I decided to work in the countryside was originally because I was inspired by the feelings of the intellectuals who engaged in the rural reconstruction movement in the Republic of China and agreed with their thoughts. Therefore, the study of the history of rural reconstruction became a long-term compulsory homework for me. I consult and learn from the thoughts and actions of pioneering rural reconstructionists like James Yen and Liang Shuming. But because the times are different and because of limitations in personal abilities, I often find that I cannot reach their heights. In their most active years, their work included all aspects of work in the rural areas. In comparison, even though they also faced harsh criticism, the strength of the support of the Republican government, political power figures, intellectuals, and even various foreign powers at that time was still quite strong. Their ambitions have also been fulfilled to a considerable extent, and they have certainly contributed to the progress of China’s rural society. Although such efforts were interrupted by the Japanese invasion of China, when rural problems re-emerge in contemporary China, their historical experience is a valuable legacy for rural work today. I have also previously studied the Back-to-the-land Movement that began in North America in the 1960s and spread to the Pacific region, and did the field research in the eastern part of the United States and New Zealand. In New Zealand, I visited hippie communes on the South and North Islands that still exist to this day. This movement was characterized by a strong sense of seclusion, which is completely different from the situation the Chinese rural reconstruction movement arose from. However, their exploration of environmental protection, permaculture, co-housing, self-reliance, and even the autonomous methods such as consensus decision-­making is still relevant for the work in rural China today. Although I regard the historical experience of Chinese intellectuals such as James Yen and Liang Shuming as an “orthodoxy,” I believe that today’s rural construction must still be innovative. We need to take in the inherited

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wisdom from other countries and regions, even more so we need to draw lessons from their contemporary practice. This is also the reason why I had to go to the Echigo-Tsumari Art Field in Japan, to the countryside around Chiang Mai in Thailand, and to various places in Taiwan to conduct fieldwork investigations. In the process of moving to Bishan and trying to integrate into local society, studying local history, and conducting extensive and in-depth fieldwork investigations have also become an important and sustained long-term work. One aspect is that we unceasingly interview local peasant intellectuals and collect historical materials from their oral recounts and written texts, and at the same time we also read official local gazetteers from different time periods and collect historical photographs of Bishan from the local culture museum. Then we compare these to the unofficial history among the people. In the process of inquiring about the history of the village, we discovered the achievements of the historical sage Wang Dazhi, who was from the village. In his early years, he followed Tao Xingzhi at Nanjing Xiaozhuang Normal College; subsequently, he took up the post as headmaster of Xin’an Primary School and organized Xin’an Traveling Group. He was one of the Republican Era’s practitioners of alternative education. We donated a statue of Mr. Wang to Bishan and erected it by the village entrance. On the one side, it displayed our reverence of the ambitions of a village scholar, and on the other side, we also wished to use this opportunity to let more villagers know about the historical sages of their village. The “Handicraft in Yi County,” an already three-year-long research project, directed by Zuo Jing, is a general survey of the traditional handicrafts of Yi County, where Bishan is located. It has brought us a step further in the construction of a local life history, invited designers and artists to collaborate with local craftsmen; it has reactivated the work of traditional craftsmanship, collecting a great amount of original source material. All these historical materials and source materials on craftsmanship will become the content of the village history museum I intend to build and be put on permanent display. What Do You Associate with the Countryside? The biggest challenge that the intelligentsia coming from outside will face when going rural is in mobilizing and connecting with the villagers. The rural reconstructionists of the Republican Era also faced the same challenge. In Liang Shuming’s 1935 speech “Our Two Major Difficulties,” he

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gave examples of their two biggest problems: “speaking highly of social transformation while relying on authorities” and “claiming to be a rural movement while not moving the rural.”17 These two difficulties are interconnected: the intelligentsia wish for a kind of depoliticized social movement in order to ameliorate the rural areas, but if they do not obtain the permissions and support of the political power, they will not be able to move an inch; the peasants want their taxes reduced and get a share of the land, but the intelligentsia does not have the power to make “political solutions,” so they can never get hold of the sufferings of the peasants, let alone win their hearts. The peasants are very passive and always avoid trouble whenever possible, just “let the sleeping dog lie”; the intelligentsia is very active and eager to achieve, so Liang Shuming laments: “Character wise, we naturally have aspects where we cannot become identical with the rural people, this is the most painful problem!”18 We simply have no way to even out the difference between intellectuals and peasants in various aspects of their thoughts and living habits, so it will be beset with difficulties when working together. During the time when the rural reconstruction movement of the Republican Era had the greatest influence, two national seminars were convened in Zouping, Shandong, and Dingxian, Hebei. At the seminars, only intellectuals were seen, no peasants. Mao Zedong, who at the same time was paying attention to the peasants, chose the path of “political solutions,” the peasants followed him in the revolution and eventually won the political power of China. The reason why the amelioration movement of the rural reconstructionists in the Republican Era fraction failed, beside the impact of the second Sino-Japanese war, was primarily that they had not sorted out their relationship with the political system. The current rural reconstruction movement in China must in the same manner sort out this relationship. When considering what the political conditions allow, the most effective method currently seems to be through the introduction of the intelligentsia to take vantage in the interests of the peasants and help them set up rural communities and thus stimulate peasant enthusiasm. The reason the experiments in Haotang Village, Xinyang, Henan Province, have been commended is because Li Changping and Sun Jun set up the independent, legal China New Rural Planning and Design Institute. Through 17  Liang Shuming, Rural Reconstruction Theories (Shanghai: Shanghai Century Publishing Group, 2006), 368. 18  Ibid., 378.

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their help and guidance, the peasants set up a financial co-operative and used an “internal financial system” as lever to pry open the village economy, basic construction, environmental management, cultural education, and old people’s insurance and similar enterprises developed according to the wishes and aesthetic interests of the peasants. Thus “making the rural areas look more rural” and making the rural subjectivity more visible. Through providing rural planning and construction services, the institute obtains a profit, thus creating a win-win situation with the village, making them able to handle their own problems without having to rely on external capital. At the same time, they can provide services for other villages, thus spreading their work methods. Compared with the rural reconstruction movement in the Republican Era, this can be considered an innovation within the contemporary circumstances and it is a successful case of intellectuals coming from outside forming a community with the villages. Our work in Bishan began with the restoration of public life of the village. We wished through the organization of an annual large-scale culture event, rural reconstruction exchange activities, and rural market fairs to invite artists, designers, architects, filmmakers, musicians, writers, academics, and rural reconstruction activists from all over the world to Bishan. On the basis of fieldwork investigations, we unfolded creative work, discussions, performances, and exhibitions related to village history and reality; at the same time, we encouraged the villagers to sell their agricultural produce and handicraft products at the market fair, thereby creating social influence and further attracting comprehensive resources to participate in our long-term work to build up the countryside. The activities were successful in mobilizing a large number of peasants to participate; however, the peasants basically go where the crowds are and after the event, they quickly returned to their own daily lives. Due to the unstable source of funds and the fact that our own knowledge structure and professional resources are too unilateral, we are unable to bring actual benefits to the villagers, so the peasants’ recognition of the project is not strong. Soon afterwards, we attracted the Nanjing bookstore Librairie Avant-Garde to transform an old ancestral hall into Bishan Bookstore. It attracted a lot of outsiders to come and see and consume, and the villagers had gotten a common space where they could relax and read books. Although the villagers feel the village has become livelier, the bookstore has nevertheless only brought two employment opportunities with it and hasn’t brought more real benefits.

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In relations to forming a community of interests with the villagers, we have been utterly powerless. On a spiritual level, although it is difficult for us to completely change the reality of our differences with the villagers, we have not deliberately magnified the “distinction” in our thoughts and aesthetic tastes. We are very alert and very cautious when it comes to this. My family and I live in the village and we have eagerly tried to become one of the villagers and we have done our best to engage in the natural exchanges of daily lives. Only when it comes to my work with mobilizing and connecting with the peasants, then I have found out that I fall deep into the difficulties that Liang Shuming mentioned. We have in the same manner not sorted out our relationship with the political system. But luckily, we are not some kind of organization, we don’t provide for the daily salaries of a team, and we are furthermore not engaged in any kind of business activity in the rural areas. That is why we will not become like the rural reconstructionists in the Republican Era as Chen Xujing critiqued in order to maintain the work of the organization’s staff; they were continuously asking and looking for resources; waving the banner of rural construction is to save themselves.19 What Does Earth Mean to Your Work? China’s land system stipulates that rural land is collectively owned. This system is designed based on a premise to guarantee public ownership provided by the state in honor of the commitment made to the peasants during the revolutionary era. If you want to sell or buy agricultural land in the rural areas, you first have to go through national expropriation and then get the approval of all the villagers; after that, the land can be converted into construction land and enter the market. The homestead can only be 19  “There are a lot of people and groups who have never paid any attention to the rural problems, but when they heard that the rural reconstruction is a new movement, they immediately changed their ways and titles to engage in rural work and promote it. However, in fact, not only do they not have a good understanding or full sincerity for rural reconstruction, which has led no good results, but do they have also put their own past work behind them, which was completely abolished. What’s more, they saw that their original career could not last long and would fail, leaving them with no way to run, so they waved the banner of rural reconstruction to make a blind…The purpose of the rural reconstruction movement is to help the villages and the peasants. However, many organizations advocating the movement today, as I have already said, are almost to the point of working exclusively to maintain the staffs and organs.” Chen Xujing, Rural Reconstruction Movement (Shanghai: Dadong Book Company, 1947), 54–55.

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traded within the village with other rural hukou holders;20 it cannot be sold to outsiders with an urban hukou. The old house I bought in Bishan was traded in private with the peasant, so the property rights did not legally change hands, meaning I do not enjoy any legal protection. However, recently, because more and more old houses are traded in private, the local government, in order to support this kind of trade that also promotes historical preservation, is preparing to put forward a new policy that allows for trade between different hukou groups. I named my house in Bishan “Buffalo Institute” and made it my home and my work base. Sometimes I also use it as common space for villagers and visitors to discuss, study, and convene meetings. The introduction of this new policy can protect the property rights of the house and it can also guarantee my long-term and stable life and work in Bishan. Recently, the village committee suggested that I buy a former grain station; in the future, I intend to build it into the village history museum—then it will also be protected by the new policy. There have all along been fierce disputes when it comes to the entry of rural agricultural land into the market. Proponents think that the fierce urbanization movement of the recent years and the emerging phenomenon of tudi caizheng (“land financing”)21 are plundering the peasant’s land ownership. The government is using administrative measures as well as low compensation schemes to expropriate agricultural land from village collectives. When agricultural land is converted into construction land, they can sell it at a higher price to business developers; they even let the developers pay the compensation costs. This leads to rising real estate prices that the peasants have very little share in. If agricultural land can enter the market directly, the peasants can freely negotiate a price, and buy and sell. The market forces can automatically adjust what was previously intervened in administratively, and which created social injustice. The opponents, on the other side, think that the phenomenon of declining arable land in China is already seriously affecting China’s agricultural produce and food safety. If we allow for the direct introduction of agricultural land into the market, this crisis will be further aggravated. Furthermore, 20  People registered as residents of rural area according to the Household Registration Ordinance (hukou dengji tiaoli). 21  “Land financing” has been a term widely used in China, generally to refer to a practice whereby a local government leases the land it owns/controls to an economic agent in need of the land for a fee, which the government then uses to help finance its various activities, including the provision of various public services and investment in various local infrastructures, just as it uses any other part of its revenue.

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peasants are leaving their land to go to the city to work. As soon as the factories in the city are impacted by an international financial crisis or similar influences and their orders go down, these peasants lose their work in the factory. The unemployed workers in the city can return to their village because they still have land to farm. If not, they would remain in the city and become an “unstable population group.” Maintaining the present land policy can give China the strength to battle the negative consequences of globalization and ensure that China doesn’t collapse due to the impact of international financial turmoil and the like. From my observations over the last couple of years, from living and working in the rural areas, I am relatively inclined toward the opposing faction. To take Bishan as an example, agricultural depression is very obvious. Although there are still peasants that pick tea, raise silkworms, and grow rice and canola flowers, their income is nevertheless next to nothing. Everybody places their hope on village tourism like in the neighboring villages of Xidi and Hongcun. Precisely because it is a place that lacks development, Bishan is especially welcoming of foreign investments. At present, it has sold a large piece of agricultural land to a business developer, who will use it to develop tourism real estate and a luxury holiday resort. This kind of large capital-led reshuffling of the land will much faster lead to the gentrification of Bishan compared to the scattered purchase of old houses. If the agricultural land market is completely opened, the consequences will be a hundred times what they are now. I am not against rural development, but I look forward to seeing them develop into “looking more like the rural areas,” and not becoming more and more urbanized. I am also not opposed to rural tourism, but I hope it can become a win-win situation and not a plundering. Consequently, when an investor came to Bishan and proposed an investment that would allow us to continue our large-scale cultural activities, we were very cautious and not until after ensuring that the investment plan didn’t include farming land, we began to discuss and collaborate. Land and agriculture are the backbones of the countryside; unfortunately, the peasants of today do not cherish the land in the same way as their ancestors did. So, I’m very happy when Zhang Yu, from a new generation of college student village officials, shows her ambitions to restore soil that has been polluted by pesticides and to deploy organic means to farm the land. When the “Young Village Official Vegetable Garden” was established on farmland in Bishan, I was very happy. I introduced Zhang to visit a farm in Beijing that uses Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) as a method

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for operation and to participate in a national meeting in Shanghai on CSA; I even helped on her farm. For our work on the land, besides agriculture, we also have to study the approach of Echigo-Tsumari Art Field in Japan and invite artists to Bishan Village to develop site-­specific land art projects. Most importantly, we want to promote the environment protection concepts from “The Whole Earth,” just like the work Stewart Brand did in the 1960s and incorporate the land of Bishan Village into the idea of a global land community. What Does Place Mean to Your Work? According to Marc Augé, “place” refers to the physical space and social environment which people have settled in for generations, where social relations are forged and where you can engage in deep conversations. Alongside, it condenses the memory of the people and establishes foundational recognition. For example, a lot of historic neighborhoods and villages have this function. Conversely, “non-place” is just a channel for people and objects; here people only have nodding acquaintances and are unable to establish deep relations, for example, airports, stations, docks, pedestrian bridges, shopping malls, and so forth. They are only a solution to the flow of people and things through a space and there is no possibility to forge social relationships. The Chinese countryside is a “place” in the classical sense. People have lived and worked there for generations. They meet early and late, they connect and form associations on the basis of blood ties, they organize the social life based on the “differential mode of association” (chaxu geju), they rely on ancestral worshipping in the construction of memory and write the history on the basis of the clan genealogy book. People use this set of patriarchal clan principles to govern society, design rites to restrain popular sentiments, plan production according to the weather and they rely on the country gentry to achieve self-discipline, therefore rural society can continue for thousands of years. At this kind of a “place”—although it has already changed a lot during the last 100 years’ unceasing tides of modernization—the roots remain and the underlying tone is still there. A part of today’s rural reconstruction work is the need to rebuild a rural society whose appearance has already been eroded by modernization. In Bishan, we keep a close relationship with the Elderly Association. This is currently the only peasant organization in the village. It is composed of retired government officials, retired educators, and old village

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intellectuals. To a certain degree, they make up the contemporary village gentry. They organize various activities for the elderly; they propagate respect for elderly people; they are the advisors behind the public projects of the village committee; they attract funds, and in the large meeting hall in Bishan, they initiated dancing activities for women. Nowadays, this is the liveliest collective activity in the village. We often invite these elderly village people to participate in our meetings. We even organize reading groups to read classical Chinese texts together to explore things like “village drinking ceremonies,” “village archery contest ceremonies,” and other long-forgotten traditional ceremonies. In 2011, we also worked with the local cultural museum staff to mobilize the villagers to rehearse an ancient harvest ceremony in the Wang Ancestral Hall. I really enjoy living and working as a newcomer in Bishan, this tiny closely knit society. When I went to the police station in the county seat to register my residence, I discovered that the police officer in charge of registration originally is from Bishan. When I went with a cultural NGO to Biyang Primary School to talk about a rural youth art education project, I discovered that the principal was also from Bishan. When I went to the post office in the county seat to send large packages, I met a mid-level cadre from Bishan. When they heard I was from Bishan, all matters were easily handled. This is why people call Chinese villages an “acquaintance society.” In the village, we went from a situation where the villagers looked down when they saw us to where we began to greet each other, and then we slowly became more familiar. Afterwards, they sometimes invite me to participate in their banquets; at the feast, they pour me alcohol till I get dead drunk, so much so that I drove the electric scooter into the fields one time. When I moved from Beijing to Bishan, around ten villagers helped me carry my more than 200 boxes from the container truck and to the second floor of my house. Every time, I organize documentary film screenings or reading groups in the village, we invite the retired teacher Mr. Yao Lilan to write the notice with a brush; he joyfully consents to this. When Wang Chenglong, a son of Bishan doing business in Beijing, heard about the Bishan Project, he returned to the village to engage in compulsory education work. When he heard we were lacking funds, he actively provided assistance. Living as their neighbor has by far been the best way to be part of the “place” that is Bishan.

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How Do You Imagine Money? Money is a neutral thing, but in the circulation process, it is bestowed with moral connotations. When money is used as capital and invested in production in the search for even more profit, it reveals its exploitative nature. Therefore, Marx said: “If money comes into the world with a congenital blood-stain on one cheek, then capital comes dripping from head to toe, from every pore, with blood and dirt.” But money can also be used for lofty purposes. For example, philanthropic undertakings, to relieve people’s livelihood, balance social distribution, and so forth. The intelligentsia despises money because it has become the standard that dominates all value, it is attached to too many people’s greedy pursue for material gain. But in fact, money is innocent. What is evil are the ways of the world and popular sentiment. Money is just a convenient tool for people to engage in the exchange of value and that is it. The rural reconstruction movement initiated by intellectuals was marked as non-profit, but non-profit does not mean that you do not need money. As a matter of fact, what rural reconstruction needs the most is money. If there is no money, everyone can only talk about ideals, but cannot do anything at all. In Bishan, we often worry about money. In 2011, when we decided to organize a large-scale event Bishan Harvestival, I had just been appointed as curator of the Chengdu Biennale’s international design exhibition. I had an 8 million RMB exhibition budget, so I placed the Bishan Project as a participating unit and transferred 200,000 yuan to spend on the event in Bishan. But this wasn’t even enough, so we also got 100,000 yuan from the Yi County branch of the Rural Commercial Bank in support. From two friends, we got a contribution of 200,000 in total and then we could successfully conduct that year’s activities. The second year, when we were without a clue as to where to get the funding for the event, the Yi County government entrusted us to take over the six-year-old Yixian International Photo Festival and gave us a budget of 1.5 million. From that we took out 500,000 to conduct the second Bishan Harvestival alongside the photo festival. They did not oppose this, but they did not clearly approve of it either. It was a pity that we had to prepare the two events at the same time, because the photo exhibition we organized had too much critical content. The opening date was also too close to the date of the transfer of power to take place at the 18th National Congress of the Communist Party of China. Under the pressure of higher levels of government, the Yi County government had to temporarily cancel the 7th Photo Festival, and the

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second Bishan Harvestival was also affected and could not be conducted. Since then, the local government’s attitude toward the Bishan Project has been unclear to an extent that we do not dare to act recklessly, and our work has fallen into stagnation. At the operational level, money is a difficult point and political constraints are another. But this does not prevent us from “imagining” what we can do in Bishan. For example, when it comes to money, I have imagined introducing “Bishan Hours” as a replacement for money in Bishan. Because of this, I went to Philadelphia to visit Paul Glover, the founder of the most successful community currency in the United States in the 1990s, “Ithaca Hours,” to understand how it really worked. I also went to Hong Kong to see C.O.M.E., or Community Oriented Mutual Economy, initiated by St. James’ Settlement, where they distributed time money in the Wanchai neighborhood. Time money was first invented by American anarchist Josiah Warren in the nineteenth century. In contemporary times, it has been used as an experiment to activate a small-scale community economy. In some underdeveloped communities, people with outdated work skills are unable to find work and therefore they are unable to earn their living in the mainstream consumer system. But this workforce can be organized to utilize second-hand goods to produce improved products that can be circulated and exchanged in the community. They will be paid in time money according to the work hours they spent, the time money can then be exchanged for food or other necessities in the stores in the same community. The spirit behind time money is based on mutual aid and collaboration; it is “Hometown Money” full of human interest and with the ability to activate the exchange of labor and goods in a community. We designed four notes (60 minutes, 30 minutes, 15 minutes, and 10 minutes) of “Bishan Hours” and put them in circulation during the more than three months when the Bishan Project was exhibited at the Taipei Fine Arts Museum. We encouraged visitors and museum volunteers to engage in the exchange of labor and goods. Whether it can be implemented in Bishan afterwards, still awaits our effort. How Do You Acquire Knowledge? Reading is the most important way to acquire knowledge. In the light of the practice in Bishan, the scope of my reading includes anthropological theory, sociology theory, political science theory, cultural studies theory, economic theory, agricultural theory, anarchist studies, studies of practical

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utopias, globalization studies, urbanization studies, studies of rural China, the history of the Chinese rural reconstruction movement, the history of vernacular architecture, the history of folk craftsmanship, the history of folk customs, local gazetteers, rural literature, socially engaged art, documentary films, and so forth. Books and the Internet are my two most common media for reading, with the proportion of books being higher than that of the Internet. Travel and field research are other ways to learn and to acquire knowledge. Field research validates what you read and often corrects the misunderstandings I have acquired while reading. At the same time, through direct experience, you can discover answers to questions that were not covered in the reading. I often use the opportunity to travel to different places to conduct field trips into topics of interest to me. Before I began the Bishan Project, I went to visit the countryside of Ding County in Hebei, Lankao in Henan, and Anxi in Fujian to understand the work of rural reconstructionists in those places and I studied the new rural reconstruction movement under Wen Tiejun’s leadership in-depth. I went to Yilan, Changhua, Meinung, Tainan, and Nantou in Taiwan to study their experiments with CSA, Integrated Community Development, and rural social movements. I went to Sanpatong district outside of Chiang Mai in Thailand to look into The Land project, managed by the two artists Kamin Lertchaiprasert and Rirkrit Tiravanija. During the development of the Bishan Project, I have been to the rural district of Niigata Prefecture in Japan to study Echigo-Tsumari Art Field, and I have visited Paul Glover and St. James’ Settlement in Hong Kong to study the practical measures of time money. Of the four most famous countries in the world in relation to intentional communities, I have already visited some communities in the United States and New Zealand. March next year, I will visit several communities in Australia, and if I have the opportunity, I will go to Israel after that. Of anarchist communities, I have visited the Metelkova Autonomous Cultural Centre (AKC) in Ljubljana in Slovenia and this time in Denmark, I will visit Freetown Christiania, and after that I would like to visit Tiqqun’s base in Tarnac in France. My practice in Bishan is also a good opportunity to learn more. We invited the designers Xiao Ma and Chengzi to, as part of the research project “ Handicraft in Yi County,” redesign the locally produced Yuding Cake’s molds and packaging. This cake is made with carefully selected locally produced sesame, rice, corn, peanuts, sweet osmanthus, malt sugar, and so forth and has to go through more than ten processing steps before

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it is finished. The wooden cake molds have more than one hundred years of history. Normally they use the auspicious patterns of the wood carvings of the Hui-style architecture as model. The patterns contain jade crafts, cornucopias, Chinese mythical creatures, auspicious lions, the twelve Chinese zodiacs, the symbols for happiness, wealth and longevity, and so forth. We wanted to make some improvements with contemporary characteristics to these traditional cake molds, but the new cake molds we designed had two flaws: one was that the pattern was too fine and complicated. When the cakes were taken out of the mold, the thin lines of the pattern were all blurry. The other was that the inner edge of the mold was vertically cut down, meaning that the cakes were very difficult to get out of the mold. We had not paid attention to the fact that traditional Yuding Cake molds have rather rough and simple outlines, so that the pattern on the cake is easy to reproduce. Furthermore, the inner edges of the cakes are made so that they slant slightly in order for them to come out of the molds easily. What comes out is a cake that is small on the top and wide at the bottom. This failure allowed us to learn the subtleties of traditional craftsmanship. Similarly, I had to fully understand the principles of construction of the Hui-style architecture when I renovated the old house I had bought. Communication with people is also a way to learn. I have gained a lot of understanding about the mental characteristics of peasants from the working methods of many rural grassroots cadres. When I organized the market fair in Bishan, I discovered that the university student volunteers’ ability to mobilize the peasants was very weak. I went to the village cadre to ask for advice. They analyzed the peasants’ mentality for me and said that peasants have to fight for every inch and do not like to fall behind others and prefer to follow the crowd. If you can only make them think that there are only a few of the market fair booths left and that it is a rare opportunity to earn profits, they will most certainly strive to get one. The cadres used administrative measures to help us spread the word that the market fair was an opportunity in high demand and the result was that all the booths were filled immediately.

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Do You Have Any Problems to the Future? Tessa Morris Suzuki coined the term “informal life politics”22 to understand the local farmers’ reconstruction after the Fukushima earthquake in Japan and to understand the co-operation between doctors and the black medicine market after the collapse of the national hospital system in North Korea. The people in these two places did not rely on the government, any NGO, or the media but used their own strength to shape the “informal life” to cope with natural disasters and totalitarian politics. She includes the Bishan Project within this East Asian study framework because of our viewpoints. In the same manner, we rely on the peasant’s own capacities to engage in rural reconstruction. In the increasingly serious condition, full of political constrains, failure of tradition, and with pressing urbanization, if the revival of the countryside relies on the wisdom and strength of the people, then it would be the ideal situation. When a peasant’s own home is built by the peasant’s own hands, the peasant becomes the actual subject of the countryside. Assuming that the wisdom and strength of the people is a latent energy, then the intelligentsia coming from outside is only the spark that ignites the flame, the catalyst for eruption. As for the peasants, people have always had a very polarized notion about this group. Either they think the peasants are hopelessly stupid, or they think they are crafty and cunning. This has led to two very different attitudes, where either the peasants are considered a bunch of ants or they become the object of fetishization. In my point of view, they are the same as the intelligentsia, as they both have weaknesses and strengths. The intelligentsia wants to go to the countryside to cure their own spiritual diseases and realize their ideals and ambitions. The peasants want to board the express train of modernization and become rich from their land and ancestral property. Each has their own demand, and only through equality and mutual aid can they live together on the same piece of land. Therefore, there is no such thing as the intelligentsia saving the peasants, in the same 22  “Informal Life Politics is the way that people engage in self-help, non-governmental forms of political action in the face of threats to their life, livelihood or cultural survival. The actions of these groups are ‘political’, but political in an unfamiliar way: they are ‘living politics’. They involve people in activities that are outside the limits of their everyday social roles. Often, quietly, they shake up the social order by impelling people to speak up and to take on tasks that they would not normally be expected to perform. Here, people take politics into their own hands.” Quoted from the welcome page of the official website of the ARC Laureate Project Informal Life Politics, The Australian National University. https://survivalpolitics.org.

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way as there is no such thing as peasants relying on the intelligentsia. Even to reach a situation where there is no conflict of interest in the future and the two sides refrain from exposing and harming each other is a hard-won result. If the two sides can form a community and create a friendly “informal life” of mutual aid, it will be better. Ever since the local government canceled our event in 2012, their attitude toward the Bishan Project has not been clear and furthermore we lost out communication channel into the government. The following year or so, we basically did not dare to do anything, and my state of mind was gloomy. The political bottleneck, the difficult funding situations, the problem with villager participation, and in addition, the constraint of our own principles made the Bishan Project almost come to a halt. We had actually thought about these difficulties already before we started the projects. All along I have said that going to the countryside is not a way to avoid the world. It is not a carefree and leisurely spending of one’s days; rather it is a welcoming of a reality more ruthless than the urban. The so-­ called utopia is by no means an escape to a serene village to live an unrestrained life; rather it is to make the impossible possible, turn imagination into practice, and realize the ideal. We must turn the difficulties we encounter in reality into a driving force that allows us to constantly reflect on ourselves, adjust our thinking, and improve our actions. As for the relationship to the government, we will continue to look for opportunities for dialogue. As for raising funds, we will explore some new methods that do not exclude the establishment of a non-profit organization as an independent legal entity, as well as attracting businesses that we believe are constructive in nature and that will benefit both sides. As for villager participation, we will listen to their demands in depth and find more focal points for their mobilization. We also have to adjust our own ideas, and destroy the shackles of diehard principles, set our thinking and actions free, and be flexible in our response to the rural reality. The media and the public are accustomed to judging the Bishan Project in the light of success and failure; you have to become immune to this. The future is definitely not a smooth road; only if we recognize our own values and spare no efforts, then we will have a clear conscience in the end.

CHAPTER 10

The School of Tillers

Song of the Earth1 Seeding in the Spring After the first snowfall in 2015, Bishan entered a cold winter. Everything was dormant in the small village. But we didn’t enjoy time off from agricultural work like the villagers do; instead, we mobilized our strength and worked hard for the opening of the School of Tillers in the coming spring. We were chasing the motions of heaven and earth to catch the rainy spring and plant our seedlings. The renovation of the venue was in full swing, the application for a business license, the preparation of exhibitions, getting books for the curated library, course planning for the learning center, the recruitment for researchers’ residencies, organizing the grocery supply, and the preparation of the coffee shop and tea room were also gradually unfolding—and the visual design of the School of Tillers, which Xiaoma and Chengzi were put in charge of, was just completed and is now entering the production stage.

1  This article is compiled out of  various writings and  announcements before and  after the opening of the School of Tillers, in 2015. All writings and announcements were collected from the public WeChat account of the Buffalo Institute and the Bishan guidebook for volunteers and visitors launched by the School of Tillers. The English version was translated by Matt Turner and Haiying Weng in 2019.

© The Author(s) 2020 O. Ning, Utopia in Practice, Contemporary East Asian Visual Cultures, Societies and Politics, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-5791-0_10

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It was a struggle to take this step. I never thought I would open a coffee shop or grocery store, especially in the countryside. It was business! In the 1990s, I tried to start a company, but I found that I didn’t have the temperament or ability to do it at all. The villagers in Bishan educated me. If I said “Bishan Project,” they didn’t know what I was talking about, but if I said “doing business”—then they would understand immediately. In the process of preparing for the School of Tillers, our volunteers put forward the idea of a “lattice shop”2 for villagers to help them sell their agricultural products. They went to tell the villagers, and the villagers responded enthusiastically, so the interaction happened naturally. When the villagers came to the School of Tillers to deliver goods, or we went to their houses to receive goods, the communication between the villagers and us went beyond the scope of “doing business.” After dinner, they would visit the School of Tillers to tell us which of the old pictures on the wall were them when they were young, bringing their grandchildren to the exhibition hall to play, and wearing 3D glasses to see the three-­ dimensional photography we had exhibited. Before the opening of the School of Tillers, it had already happened: we all stepped across the threshold of “distinction” and entered into each other’s worlds. The decision to engage in the business of the School of Tillers was inspired by Bishan Bookstore. More than a year after opening, many villagers still went there to read. People who came home for the New Year holiday heard that there was a bookstore in the village, and they went to visit one after another. Hu Jianxin, a teacher in the village, also held his daughter’s wedding ceremony in the bookstore—it was an ancestral hall before it was the bookstore—to show their family’s recognition of the bookstore. The bookstore is open every day, and the guests come and go. The villagers can see it and feel it. Compared to the annual Bishan Harvestival, the villagers feel that we contribute more to Bishan through the bookstore. Therefore, when villagers of the Taiqian group offered to sell their grain station to me, I thought for a long time and finally decided to open shop there. 2  The “lattice shop” (guriddo shoppu) originated from Japan. It is a standard-sized “lattice cabinet” placed in shops in prosperous areas of the city. Anyone can rent a lattice to consign his own goods for sale with a small monthly fee. The “lattice shop” is characterized by a wide range of applicable groups and low cost of opening a shop. The lattice shop in the School of Tillers is free for the villagers. We provide designed packaging for their products to sell, without any intermediate fee, and settle with them once every month.

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The power of business was not unknown to me. I often say that “business intellectuals”3 are the most lacking in China—those are engaged in business, but who also have a sense of social responsibility. Their good business practices are the cornerstone of social progress. Businesses can benefit people and also be educational. Keeping your promises and being honest and fair are values that businesses can give back to society. It’s just that I didn’t think I had a talent for business, so I hesitated to act. The coffee shop and the market are small attempts. They are the commercial part of the School of Tillers, providing leisurely consumption, selling healthy agricultural products and handicrafts from the village and elsewhere, as well as all kinds of creative products developed according to Bishan and agricultural themes. In addition, there are a gallery for holding free exhibitions on agriculture, local culture, and traditional handicraft. The learning center is used to provide a platform for villagers and visitors to learn from each other. The curated library provides free reading resources for all people, with a rotating selection. In addition, the School of Tillers operates researchers’ residences. Well, after half a year’s preparation, it is ready to open. I’m the proprietor. You are welcome to come to the School of Tillers. Use your feet to touch down in Bishan! What Is the School of Tillers? The School of Tillers covers an area of 260 square meters. It was originally called Qiyuan Hall and was originally the Wang family ancestral hall in Bishan Village, Biyang Town, Yi County, Huangshan City, Anhui Province. After 1949, it was changed into a grain station for the Taiqian villager group. In recent years, it’s been vacant and on the verge of collapse. On June 16, 2014, the villager group collectively decided to sell it to me. After the purchase, it was transferred on November 12, 2014. I began to clean up the mess, weeds and rotten soil, carried out maintenance and renamed it the School of Tillers. It is a new space dedicated to publicizing contemporary agrarianism with commercial functions. Its plan has a

3  In my opinion, business intellectuals include not only influential thinkers and writers on business management topics but also entrepreneurs with responsibility and capability to promote social progress.

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gallery, a learning center, a curated library, a tearoom, a cafe, a zakka store,4 and researchers’ residences. The Chinese name of the School of Tillers is Li Nong Guan in traditional characters, having the dual meanings of “understanding agriculture” and “managing agriculture.” The English name, abbreviated as SoT, is an English translation of Nongjia, a philosophical school among the hundred schools of the pre-Qin era that advised to “sow hundreds kind of grains, promote agriculture and sericulture,” and that “a sage should cultivate and eat together with the people.” The English term, literally, has the dual meanings of “the tilling school of thought” and “school for those who till.” The Chinese characters are also a Japanese word with the pronunciation of rinoukan, which was used by a center at the School of Agricultural Sciences at Nagoya University. The logo and visuals of the School of Tillers were designed by Xiaoma and Chengzi. Xu Xing, the historical originator of Nongjia, worshipped Shennong,5 so the School of Tillers also uses the image of Shennong (recreated by artist Chen Duxi and based on the portrait drawn by Li Eng Bing for Outline of Chinese History, 1914) among its visuals in order to show respect to the founder of Chinese agriculture. The gallery at the School of Tillers is planned to hold approximately six free exhibitions about agriculture, local culture, and traditional handicraft in a year; the learning center will be mainly used to organize workshops (in the form of apprenticeships) for traditional handicraft and to hold various free lectures on agriculture, the environment, and community development for villagers; the library provides free reading resources that are changed regularly, according to the curated theme; the tearoom and the cafe are leisure consumption spaces; the zakka store will sell organic agricultural products, traditional hand-made daily necessities, and designer 4  The Japanese term zakka originally means “miscellaneous things” and now refers to everything and anything that improves one’s home, life, and appearance. It is often based on household items, which can be a classical design or contemporary handicraft. The zakka stores have spread from Japan throughout Asia and become a fashion and design phenomenon. 5  Shennong—literally means “Divine Farmer” or “Agriculture God,” also known as Yandi (Flame Emperor), Wuguwang (King of Five Grains), or Yaowang (King of Medicine)—is a mythological deity in Chinese folk religion and is venerated as a mythical sage ruler of prehistoric China. Shennong has been thought to have taught the ancient Chinese not only their practices of agriculture, but also the use of herbal drugs. Shennong was credited with various inventions: these include the hoe, plow, axe, digging wells, irrigation, preserving stored seeds, flame cultivation (that is why he is called Yandi), farmers market, twenty-four solar terms, and harvest thanksgiving ceremonies.

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and artist products from all over the country, as well as various cultural and creative products developed and produced by the School of Tillers, including food, utensils, furniture, clothing, accessories, tools, and books and periodicals; researchers’ residences will be integrated into the housing resources of Bishan Village and the neighboring villages. Researchers and writers, artists, designers, musicians, filmmakers, and organic farm volunteers (WWOOFers)6 will be provided with lodging and consulting for field research. The School of Tillers officially opened on May 1, 2015. The normal business hours will be from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m., and from 10 a.m. to 10 p.m. on Fridays, Saturdays, and holidays. The Volunteers of the School of Tillers Feng Si’te, an architecture major, was the first volunteer at the School of Tillers to arrive in Bishan. He organized and measured the space, and participated in the design and construction of it. The executive ability of this scientific and engineering man was obvious. Gao Nan, who has a master’s degree in linguistics and who likes writing non-fiction, spent a massive amount of time looking for the suppliers who would  produce the various products developed and designed by the School of Tillers, and also contributed the idea of the “lattice shop” for villagers. Gu Xuechen, a former editor at a Shanghai fashion magazine, transferred the local enthusiasm of Chongming Island to Bishan, which has become her second hometown, and worked with Li Xuemei of Eaton Kidd to make my long-­ standing concept of “Agritopia Dress for Bishan Commune” come true— and also acted as the heroine in the fictional photo story Back to the Land. Chen Yicheng, a graduate of King’s College, London, used her strong command of photography and text to manage the Chinese and English social media for the School of Tillers, recording our preparation along with Bishan’s daily life and increasing the number of fans of the School of Tillers in a short period of time. Zhao Kunfang, who traveled around Europe and the United States as a student, has resisted the harassment of Bishan’s various insects, with years of experience in Ming Dynasty furniture and a strong ability in research, and arranged nearly all the decorations and objects for the School of Tillers. In the meantime, she was also 6  WWOOFers refer to Willing Workers on Organic Farms, or the people who join in World Wide Opportunities on Organic Farms, a loose network of international organizations that facilitate homestays on organic farms.

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taking care of exhibition affairs and taking care of overseas communication. There is also Zhang Xiaoguang, who also studied in the United Kingdom and is the leader of the volunteer team. He is called big brother by everyone and has many years of experience in managing large companies and serving as an investigator for international media. He is mainly responsible for team building at the School of Tillers. He also serves as the Airbnb affairs manager of the School of Tillers and has the job of drinking with people at village banquets. Jiang Du, who has just joined the volunteer team, is a Japanese archery enthusiast. In addition to various projects at the School of Tillers, his unique contribution is to set up a Bishan archery study group. Every day, he either manages daily business at the School of Tillers or practices archery at the Bishan Culture Square. The last volunteer, Zhang Liaoran, a Cooper Union’s architecture student, surveyed the terrain for the “Happiness Pavilion” that the School of Tillers would build with the villager Qian Shi’an, and drew beautiful design plans. Although he had to return to school and could not participate in the construction process, he provided valuable design suggestions for the project. All volunteers got a guidebook from the School of Tillers when they arrived in Bishan. They live in the house of the Buffalo Institute, which was built around the late Qing Dynasty and the early Republican Era; everyone is assigned a single room. A local lady, Wang Juxin, cooks all meals for us. Members of the volunteer team are also welcomed to cook their favorite home cuisine and share it with others. We have a regular learning and sharing session every weekend; all villagers and guests are welcomed to participate. At each session, there will be one or two voluntary speakers to give a talk on any subject, followed by a discussion; it could be new insights from a book, new discovery about a special drink, or a new IT tool, or it could also be personal travel stories, among others. This is to boost a new way of interacting and socializing with each other in the village and enhancing mutual learning in our communal life. We also organize hiking trips. There are many trekking trails in and outside Yi County that are perfect for us to not only enjoy the local scenery but also learn about local geographical features, natural resources, and folk culture. These activities are very enjoyable and educational. The Bishan Project has influenced and mobilized a group of young people to come to Yi County and work in different villages, including the newly recruited volunteers for the School of Tillers. A WeChat group is set up for staying connected and we frequently organize parties and gatherings, such as playing music,

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basketball game, swimming in the valley, or going to the county center for a latest movie. From time to time, more visitors come and stay in the village; there are more opportunities for sharing and socializing. Agricultural Classics Souvenirs In order to mark the opening of the School of Tillers, we produced a series of souvenirs with the themes of agriculture and Bishan, including all kinds of tools and apparel. Quotations from ancient Chinese agricultural classics and poetry have been compiled by me, and a specific font software for the School of Tillers, named “Chi Ku Sung Li Nong Guan,” in Unicode code and OTF format, has been designed by Ying Yonghui. Xiaoma and Chengzi have collected ancient illustrations from Song Yingxing’s Exploitation of the Works of Nature and redesigned them with the new font software. We have cooperated with the suppliers, selecting different products and printing the newly designed graphics on them. The finished products were launched and sold at the School of Tillers: Rain boots with “Sow hundreds of kind of grains, promote agriculture and sericulture” Quoted from the introduction to the historical Nongjia, in a volume “Treatise on Literature” in the Book of Han (Eastern Han Dynasty): “The first Nongjia may have been agriculture officials, who grew different kinds of grain and encouraged people to till land and plant mulberry trees to produce enough food and clothing. Food is so important that it ranks first among the eight major areas of a state’s policy, followed by property. The merit of early Nongjia was their emphasis on food production, which Confucius said should be a priority for any ruler. However, their vulgar successors, who believe that a saint-king in the Confucian sense would be useless, attempt to disrupt the social hierarchy by calling on rulers to plough alongside their people.” Rain boots with “They can not understand God’s will, but only blame the wind and rain in vain” Quoted from Yuan Jie’s “Agriculture Officials Complaints” (Tang Dynasty): “Why do the agriculture officials complain? They want the king to hear their hardships. They can not understand God’s will, but only blame the wind and rain in vain.” Flip-flops with “Man cannot live long without grain, yet the five grains require man’s cultivation”

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Quoted from the “The Growing of Grains” chapter in Exploitation of the Works of Nature (Ming Dynasty). “Songzi said: Whether or not Shennong existed, one cannot be sure. But the truth of his name exists down to the present day. Man cannot live long without grain, yet the five grains require man’s cultivation.” Messenger bag with “Transplanting the rice sprouts from your hands, you immediately see them growing greener in the field” Quoted from Yu Siliang’s poem “Early Spring in Hengxi Hall” (Southern Song Dynasty): “Transplanting the rice sprouts from your hands, you immediately see them growing greener in the field. The east wind blows endless mist and rain, dyeing the fields until no place for egrets to stop.” Messenger bag with “Not willing to see the yellow ears of rice being blown down in the mud” Quoted from Su Shi’s “The Peasant Woman’s Lament” (Northern Song Dynasty): “She cries until her tears are dry, yet the rain does not end. It pains her to see the yellow ears of rice being blown down in the mud. She stays a month in her straw hut, for once it clears she will cart them home.” Hanging pot with “Though early, I weed with dawn, and take my hoe home when the moon’s up” Quoted from Tao Yuanming’s “Returning to Nature” (Eastern Jin Dynasty): “Sow beans at the foot of the southern hill, bean shoots are lost where the weeds grow. Though early, I weed with dawn, and go home with my moonlit hoe.” Hanging pot with “Befriend one another at home and abroad, look out for one another” Quoted from “Duke Wen of Teng” in Mencius (Warring States Period): “In the burial of the dead or in moving one’s home, people should not be permitted to go beyond their home village. If those who together till a well field’s land befriend one another at home and abroad, look out for one another, and support one another in illness, the people will live in close comradeship.”7 Thermos with “When days are long and ploughing work is little, I only regret not having brought my books”

7  Translated by Robert Eno in his course Early Chinese Thought in Indiana University, Fall 2010.

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Quoted from Qian Qi’s “Spring Ploughing at South Brook” (Tang Dynasty): “Who says it’s tiring to plough in spring—the scene brings its own enjoyment. When days are long and work is little, I only regret not having brought my books.” Thermos with “You ask me why I dwell in the green mountain, I smile and make no reply for my heart is free of care” Quoted from Li Bai’s “Questions and Answers in the Mountain” (Tang Dynasty): “You ask me why I dwell in the green mountain, I smile and make no reply for my heart is free of care. As the peach-blossom flows down the stream and is gone into the unknown, I have a world apart that is not among people.” Cup with “Wear new clothes made of silk in summer, eat new white rice in autumn” Quoted from Xie Genzhai’s poem, “Encourage Farming” (Southern Song Dynasty): “Wear new clothes made of silk in summer, ear new white rice in autumn. Be oblivious to the price of gold, only hear when the crops are cheap.” Cup with “A Sage should cultivate and eat together with the people” Quoted from “Duke Wen of Teng” in Mencius (Warring States Period), when Chen Xiang went to see Mencius to tell him about Xu Xing (the founder of the Nongjia)’s teachings: “The lord of Teng is certainly a worthy ruler. Still, he has yet to hear the Dao (true doctrine). A true worthy tills the soil beside his people and cooks his own meals; it is thus that his state is brought into order. Now, Teng has granary stores and treasure vaults; this shows that the Duke treats his people with harshness in order to nurture his own person. How could this be worthy?”8 Lunch box with “While laying down and not finishing reading Tao Yuanming’s books, I turned to hoe the melon field in the drizzle instead” Quoted from Lu You’s poem, “Small Garden” (Southern Song Dynasty): “The grass in the mist slants towards the neighbor’s home, and the footpath is full of mulberries. While laying down and not finishing reading Tao Yuanming’s books, I turned to hoe the melon field in the drizzle instead.” Hand towel with “Hard work can overcome poverty” Quoted from Jia Sixie’s preface to Essential Skills for the Common People (Northern Wei Dynasty): “It is said: ‘Hard work can overcome poverty, 8

 Ibid.

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and caution can overcome misfortune.’ This means that while persistence can help us to not be poor, discretion can help us avoid misfortune.” Motorcycle helmet with “Dig a well to drink, plough a field to eat” Quoted from the ancient “Song of the Earth”(pre-Qin Dynasty), first included in the “Literary Exaggerations” chapter of Wang Chong’s Balanced Discourses (Eastern Han Dynasty): “Start working at sunrise, and stops at sunset. Dig a well to drink, plough a field to eat. What does the emperor’s power have to do with me?” The Agritopia Dress for Bishan Commune The “Agritopia Dress for Bishan Commune” was conceived by me in 2010, designed and produced by Gu Xuechen and Li Xuemei of Eaton Kidd in 2015, and launched by the School of Tillers. The first batch included ten designs, such as “Rice Sprout Song” (T-shirt with the quote “Transplanting the rice sprouts from your hands, you immediately see them growing greener in the field”); “Village Wine” (overalls); “Inclusiveness” (wrapping cloth); “New Ragged” (patchwork shirt); “Gentry” (men’s long gown or cheongsam); “Hermit” (headwrap); “Sun Warmth” (jacket); “Early Summer” (jacket); “Late Grain” (cotton pants); and “South-facing Field” (gloves). Thanks to Mr. Chen Zhong at Eaton Kidd for his friendship and support and Mr. Yi Hongbo for providing the Summer Wood grass cloth from Liuyang, Hunan Province. At the same time, the School of Tillers also launched a fictional photo story Back to the Land about the “Agritopia Dress for Bishan Commune,” which was produced by me as creative director, Xiao Quan as photographer, Sonam Nyima and Gu Xuechen as models, and Xu Xiaoshu as stylist. Thanks to Pig’s Inn, Mr. Qian Shi’an’s house, Bishan Bookstore, Bishan Craft Cooperative and Yi County Photo Studio for providing their venues. This photo story, together with the ten designs of the “Agritopia Dress for Bishan Commune,” is part of the retrospective exhibition of Bishan Project organized by POLIMODA Fashion Institute, at the Florence National Library. It is divided into two sections, “working,” and “living.” The purpose is not to reflect reality, let alone promote fashion, but to try to understand the relationship between the body, dress, land, and utopia. It was influenced by the five following books I quoted from in the booklet Back to the Land.

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Mencius, 372–289 BC Mencius said, “Does Xu Xing only eat what he himself has planted?” “Yes.” “Does he only wear clothes that he himself has sewn?” “No,” said Chen Xiang. “He wears hemp.” “Does he wear a cap?” “Yes.” “What kind?” “It is of plain silk.” “He wove it himself?” “No, he traded some grain as barter for it.” “Why doesn’t Xu Xing weave it himself?” “It would interfere with his farm work.” “Does he cook with pots and steamers and work his land with an iron ploughshare?” “Yes.” “Does he make these himself?” “No, he trades grain to get such things.”9 Thomas More, The Utopia, 1516 Let agriculture be set up again, and the manufacture of the wool be regulated, … As to their clothes, observe how little work is spent in them; while they are at labour they are clothed with leather and skins, cut carelessly about them, which will last seven years, and when they appear in public they put on an upper garment which hides the other; and these are all of one colour, and that is the natural colour of the wool. As they need less woolen cloth than is used anywhere else, so that which they make use of is much less costly; they use linen cloth more, but that is prepared with less labour, and they value cloth only by the whiteness of the linen or the cleanness of the wool, without much regard to the fineness of the thread. While in other places four or five upper garments of woolen cloth of different colours, and as many vests of silk, will scarce serve one man, and while those that are nicer think ten too few, every man there is content with one, which very often serves him two years; nor is there anything that can tempt a man to desire more, for if he had them he would neither be the, warmer nor would he make one jot the better appearance for it.10 Henry David Thoreau, Walden or, Life in the Woods, 1854 As for Clothing, to come at once to the practical part of the question, perhaps we are led oftener by the love of novelty, and a regard for the opinions of men, in procuring it, than by a true utility. Let him who has work to do recollect that the object of clothing is, first, to retain the vital heat, and secondly, in this state of society, to cover nakedness, and he may judge how much of any necessary or important work may be accomplished without adding to his wardrobe. Kings and queens who wear a suit but once, though made by some tailor or dress-maker to their majesties, cannot know the comfort of wearing a suit that fits. They are no better than wooden horses to hang the clean clothes on. Every day our garments 9

 Ibid.  Sir Thomas More, Utopia (Mineola: Dover Publication, Inc., 1997), 10, 36–37.

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become more assimilated to ourselves, receiving the impress of the wearer’s character, until we hesitate to lay them aside, without such delay and medical appliances and some such solemnity even as our bodies.11 William Morris, News from Nowhere, 1891 There were houses about, some on the road, some amongst the fields with pleasant lanes leading down to them, and each surrounded by a teeming garden. They were all pretty in design, and as solid as might be, but countryfied in appearance, like yeomen’s dwellings; some of them of red brick like those by the river, but more of timber and plaster, which were by the necessity of their construction so like mediæval houses of the same materials that I fairly felt as if I were alive in the fourteenth century; a sensation helped out by the costume of the people that we met or passed, in whose dress there was nothing “modern.” Almost everybody was gaily dressed, but especially the women, who were so well-looking, or even so handsome, that I could scarcely refrain my tongue from calling my companion’s attention to the fact. Some faces I saw that were thoughtful, and in these I noticed great nobility of expression, but none that had a glimmer of unhappiness, and the greater part (we came upon a good many people) were frankly and openly joyous.12 Burrhus Frederic Skinner, Walden Two, 1948 “A great many women can be quite attractive, each in her own way. Here we are not so much at the mercy of commercial designers, and many of our women manage to appear quite beautiful simply because they are not required to dress within strict limits.”… “Going out of style isn’t a natural process, but a manipulated change which destroys the beauty of last year’s dress in order to make it worthless. We opposed this by broadening our tastes.”… “By intuition, then, we want to avoid the waste which is imposed by changing styles, but we don’t want to be wholly out of fashion. So we simply change styles more slowly, just slowly enough so we needn’t throw away clothing which is still in good condition.”… “You are thinking of a world in which a fine suit is a mark of wealth, as well as a means to wealth. A shabby suit is a sign of poverty or a protest against the whole confounded system. Either is unthinkable here.”13 11  Henry David Thoreau, Walden or, Life in the Woods (New York: T.  Y. Crowell & Company, 1899), 20–21. 12  William Morris, News from Nowhere (London: Reeves & Turner, 1891), 24. 13  B.  F. Skinner, Walden Two (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, Inc., 2005), 28–30, 32.

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Researchers’ Residences at the School of Tillers The Researchers in Residence Program (RIRP) at the School of Tillers is a project to provide services for resident researchers. As a hosting platform, it will integrate the vacant houses in Bishan Village and surrounding areas, and receive researchers to come for resident research. In addition to providing residences, the School of Tillers will also provide local research consultants and academic support services. The School of Tillers may jointly develop topics, cooperate with researchers, and jointly produce research results. It is open to all scholars, writers, artists, musicians, filmmakers, and other professionals who are engaged in rural research. Applicants are required to submit research plans or proposals, expected dates of stay, personal resumes, and the approved researchers are required to pay room and board, or compensate by voluntary labor. As of 2016, the residential houses include select villagers’ houses and the subsidiary structures at the School of Tillers. Besides researchers, it is also open to ordinary tourists. People can search “Yi County” in Airbnb travel destinations to find the following houses: Hillside Garden Qian Shi’an residence, Bishan Village, Biyang Town, Yi County Goodseeds Cottage Hu Xiaogang and Yang Yan residence, Bishan Village, Biyang Town, Yi County Bamboo House Zha Shuhua residence, Bishan Village, Biyang Town, Yi County Buffalo Institute Ou Ning residence, Bishan Village, Biyang Town, Yi County Brilliant Cottage Li Rong residence, Shi’ting Village, Biyang Town, Yi County Where is Bishan? Bishan Village is located in the northwest of Yi County, Huangshan City, Anhui Province, five kilometers away from the county seat Biyang Town. The ring road around Yi County bypasses Bishan Village, so cars can directly drive into the village. The nearest transportation hub is Huangshan City. From Tunxi airport, bus station, or railway station, you can take a taxi or bus to Yi County and then change to Bishan, about an hour’s ride. There are direct flights from Huangshan Tunxi Airport to Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, and other provincial capitals. Currently,

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international direct flights include Taipei and Seoul. After the opening of the Beijing-Fuzhou high-speed railway in June 2015, there are thirty-four trains passing through Huangshan every day. Anhui Province has developed high-speed highways. From Shanghai, Hangzhou, Nanjing, and other surrounding cities, one can reach Bishan by road. Bishan is in the subtropical humid monsoon climate zone, with a warm climate, less severe cold in winter and low heat in summer; abundant rainfall and suitable humidity; accumulated warmth and no long frost period. The annual average temperature is 15.5–16.4 degrees, the annual average precipitation is 1500–1800 mm, the relative humidity in the air is about 80%, and the frost-free period is about 255 days. It is suitable for living, visiting and traveling in all seasons, and the annual travel time is more than 330  days. After January 6, 2015, the temperature of Bishan has been about 6–10 degrees in the daytime and 3–4 degrees below zero at night. Because the population is less than that of the city, the heat accumulation is not strong. In addition, the heat preservation effect of Hui-style houses made up of traditional brick and wood structures is not comprehensive. Compared with the city, it is relatively cold. The local villagers mostly use smoke-free charcoal braziers and pots for heating. Bishan is a natural settlement with a history of 1000 years, belonging to Biyang Town of Yi County. In 2008, Bishan was formed by the merger of the original two villages of Bidong (east) and Bixi (west). There are 21 village groups and 2900 villagers in the area. At present, Bishan has not been developed as an official tourist attraction, so no admission fee is required to enter the village. The village stretches for several miles along the foot of the Bishan Mountain in the shape of a dragon. The terrain in front of the village is flat and open. The Zhang River and the Ji River (the Jiyuan River) encircle the east and west of the village. The north canal of Dongfanghong Reservoir also passes through the village. The natural environment is superior, and the landscape and water are pleasant. Although the settlements and ancient residences of the Hui style are not as complete as those in the adjacent Xidi and Hongcun, they still maintain the traditional style of the Southern Anhui rural area. In 2007, the second Pig’s Inn, founded by Zheng Xiaoguang and Han Yu, opened in Bishan, attracting Ou Ning and Zuo Jing to launch the long-term Bishan Project of rural reconstruction there in 2011, thus pushing the influence of Bishan at home and abroad. At present, the plan is still in the implementation phase. The cultural characteristics and public life created by the Bishan

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Project promote the reverse urbanization and back-to-the-land activities that have been popular in China in recent years. Tips for Visiting Rural Villages 1. Smiles and Greetings: When you meet local villagers and tourists, please smile at them and give them friendly greetings. If you want to enter their houses and take photos, you must ask the consent of the owner. Your humility will make your trip better. 2. Dress and Schedule: Don’t wear high-heeled shoes (mainly inconvenient for walking in the countryside), don’t wear too strange or exposing clothes, try to get up early in the morning (the villagers usually start work at 7 a.m.), don’t make noises in the village or the residential area after 10  p.m., and it’s better to go to bed before 12 a.m. Getting up early and going to bed early will earn the respect of the local people. 3. Safety: Bishan is relatively safe, but when walking in the village, you must pay attention to the traffic, especially motorcycles and electric bikes, and be careful to avoid them. If you drive by yourself, you should drive slowly in the village. On the narrow village roads, you should make way for the farmers and their children. When you park, do not use the farm roads. At night, you must use low beams instead of high beams. 4. Fire Prevention: Most of the villages in Yi County are composed of wooden houses. We should pay attention to fire prevention—not only in residential areas, but also when visiting villagers’ houses. The cigarette butts of smokers must be disposed of properly. 5. Ecological-Mindedness: In order to protect rural ecology, please be an ecologically minded visitor. Take good care of the environment, water sources, farmland, crops, trees, animals, and small insects, dispose of garbage at fixed collection points, pay attention to energy conservation, and do not disturb others with loud noises.

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Timekeepers14 It was a gorgeous, sunny day in the spring of 2014. The sky is blue and the air is clear—a perfect day for photography. Thirty-two-year-old Matjaž Tančič and his luscious hipster moustache roll up on an electric motorbike, carrying a young girl from Shanghai on the back. He’s wearing a blue and red sweatsuit with white stripes. Across it are written two Chinese characters: zhongguo (Middle Kingdom). This is his second trip to Yi County. On his first trip here in 2012, he took 3D photography portraits of over twenty villagers in their homes. In 2013, Matjaž was awarded the “Best 3D Photographer of the Year” by World Photography Organization for one of these portraits. This time he came back to continue and to deepen the series. The Shanghai girl was his translator. Matjaž doesn’t fit the stereotype of a young Western man who falls in love with China. He’s an ambitious young European who has come to China to strive. His homeland of Slovenia used to belong to Yugoslavia, a country that long mirrored China in its social structure. Matjaž studied photography at the London College of Fashion, and he now splits time between Ljubljana and Beijing. That choice to come to Beijing emerged from his keen sense that right now this is a place full of opportunities for the taking. He is not like a partisan in Emir Kusturica’s movie Underground who doesn’t know the sea change of the time after he climbed out of the underground world. He long ago became a world citizen, one who follows the action to the most interesting places on earth, seeking out opportunities that will let him blossom. As the capital of China, Beijing is already one of the most happening cities in the world, with colossal construction projects attracting star architects eager to turn their dreams into reality. The thriving art scene and boundless business opportunities exert a pull on new wealth from around the globe. The fast-growing local fashion industry keeps expanding just to keep up with the demand from an expanding 14  Completed in  Chinese on  February 20, 2015, in  Bishan. It is the  curatorial essay for Matjaž Tančič’s exhibition Timekeepers at School of Tillers from May 1 to June 15, 2015. The  Chinese version was  first published on  iPress, March 5, 2015. The  iPress (Tengxun Dajia) was  an  online journal founded by Tencent in  2012 and  was  completely closed on  February 19, 2020, due  to  the  self-censorship by Tencent during the  outbreak of  COVID-19 in  China. The  English version was  translated by Huang Yating and  Matt Sheehan, published in  Yanyou Di Yuan ed., Matjaž Tančič: Timekeepers (Hong Kong: Jiazazhi Limited, 2015).

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middle class. Photographers here don’t just draw material from the social change that surrounds them; they find entirely new platforms to showcase their skills. Matjaž even used Beijing’s geography to his advantage, cooperating with a British company on a 3D photography expedition into North Korea. I met Matjaž at CCD Photo Spring 2012 in Caochangdi, Beijing. I was one of the guests on a portfolio review at the event, and upon seeing his 3D photo series, I immediately invited him to attend that year’s Yixian International Photo Festival. Out of this came the Timekeepers series. When visiting Yi County in 2012, he passed out 3D glasses to villagers and local officials so they could view his work. It looked like a scene straight out of science fiction when the crowds all gathered around his laptop wearing their 3D glasses. A girl from Hefei who had returned from England acted as his translator. Whether it was just the idle chatter over dinner or the villagers’ jokes, Matjaž demanded that she translate each word for him. He brought her to each corner of every village and tried to understand everything. Other than what he could draw from his own intuition and sensitivity, the vast majority of his understanding of Yi County came straight from the parched mouth of his translator. I sympathized with the translator each time I saw them driving off into the distance. This difficult journey helped Tančič decide on his shooting objective. The old rural houses in Yi County mostly kept the traditional style of Huizhou architecture. The houses come in four kinds: the tongzhuanwu with two halls, four rooms, and two side-rooms; the xiaosanjian with one hall, two rooms, and two side-rooms; the banbianqiao with one hall and one room; and the dujianting with only one hall but no room. Whether rich or poor, each family has sky wells (open roofs) and halls. A rich family will even have two sky wells and three halls. The sky well is an open space connecting to “heaven’s way.” The water from four sides of the sky well has to be guided in the house. Water is connected with wealth in traditional Chinese culture, so “four waters converging in a bright hall” bodes well for the family finances. The hall is the center of family life and is also an important space in social rituals. The typical tongzhuanwu has two halls: the upper hall is tall and wide, and the lower hall is small and narrow. The shape of the two halls resembles the character for “昌” (chang, meaning prosperity). The interior decoration is almost the same in every house. A wall facing south is in the center, on which paintings and couplets are hanged. In front of the wall is a narrow desk, then a square table with chairs on two sides. At

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the two wings of the hall, three chairs and two tea tables are placed. Taken together, they are called “one hall’s furniture.” Tančič’s main focus is on the furnishings on the narrow desk. A vase is in the east, a mercury mirror is in the west, and a chime clock is in the middle. There are a couple of porcelain cap tubes near the clock. The furnishings are chosen because when the object’s names are spoken in succession in Chinese, they form a homophone for “Life is smooth and peaceful through its end” (zhong sheng ping jing).15 This custom is believed to have been created by Huizhou merchants during China’s Republican Era in the early-mid-twentieth century. The eastern vase and the western mirror (dong ping xi jing) are designed according the theory of the Book of Changes (I Ching). The east is the position of the green dragon, which correlates to objects with “Yang” characteristics, like a vase. The west is the position of the white tiger, which correlates to objects with “Yin” characteristics, like a mirror. The cap tube reflects a certain gentleman’s style Huizhou merchants learned from the outside world. A skullcap or a western topper hanging on the tube hints that there is a businessman in this family. When it comes to showing off, attention focuses on the chime clock. Originally given as tribute to the Wanli Emperor of the Ming Dynasty by Matteo Ricci in 1601, the western time instrument had always been a royal plaything until the Qing Dynasty. Emperors Kangxi and Qianlong were loyal fans of timepieces but by the Republican Era, clocks were used by normal people. Huizhou merchants traveled around with ample finances and open eyes. Exotic objects and tastes became popular after being introduced by the merchants. Despite the change of regimes and the passage of time, the custom is still miraculously rooted in rural society till today. The introduction of the chime clock changed thoroughly the view about time in this agricultural society. Missionaries like Ricci knew well the tactics of cultural transmission. As a tribute to the emperor, the clock would project influence from the top down. Beijing’s bell and drum had always maintained the traditional methods of timekeeping. The night begins from two and a half “Ke” (ancient timing unit, 14  minutes and 24 seconds) after sunset, and ends two and a half Ke before sunrise. One night has five “Geng” (two hour intervals), and each of the five Geng have five “Chou” (24 minutes). However, western timekeeping methods began to be applied during the reign of the Guangxu Emperor. By the time of  See more detailed explains in “The Heart’s Home,” Chap. 7.

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the Republic of China, the sketchy cyclical traditional concept of time that tracked natural changes, the flow of seasons, and life cycles had been totally replaced by the precise linear Western concept of time. For the new Republican government, Western timing methods measured by mechanical scales could raise administrative efficiency and could be used to implement modern industrial time management. But in China’s vast and slow-moving rural areas, chime clocks are still a means to show off, a rootless symbol of modernity. Even the connected roads, television, and Internet coverage today have done little to change its meaning. Though each family in Yi County has a clock on their desk, it’s just there to carry on the custom. The villagers still arrange their life and farming by a traditional view of time. In local dialect, they call breakfast “eating daylight” and call supper “eating dusk.” Besides the principles of four seasons (spring for plowing, summer for weeding, autumn for harvesting, winter for storing) and twenty-four solar terms, the villagers there have created some local proverbs that act as a guide for farming. For example, “In long August, a kilo of radishes for a kilo of glutinous rice; in short August, cabbages and radishes are useless.” (In the lunar calendar, a long August means the winter is short and radish harvest little, so radishes are as precious as glutinous rice.) “Tea before the Beginning of Summer, and grass after the Beginning of Summer.” (Tea picked up before the beginning of summer is expensive, otherwise is cheap as grass.) “After drinking the wine at the Dragon Boat Festival, you have to work through the night.” (After the Dragon Boat Festival, the busy season begins.) In 2007 when I first went to Xidi Village, I heard the sound of beating night watches, but thought it may just have been brought back to life to attract visitors. The “Timekeepers” captured by Tančič, when translated into Chinese should refer to night watchmen (gengfu or shouyeren) in the agricultural society. The watchman not only tells time, but warns villagers to prevent fire or burglary, assuring the safety of the whole village. So in 2012, when he exhibited the first series of pictures, I translated “Timekeepers” as “Timewatchers” (shijian kanshouzhe). The villagers in rural China guard not only the existence of slow time but also a culture on the verge of disappearing. Coming from Beijing to Yi County, you must come across two kinds of time. In Beijing, time is money. People strive for every second, resenting the waste of time while waiting for a taxi or taking the subway across the city. In Yi County, the villagers work at sunrise and rest at sunset. Time is pressing or relaxing according to the weather and cycles of harvest. Rest is

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based on the cyclical energy of the body. During traditional festival days, even the promise of big payouts won’t make people work. Tančič captures the discrepancy of the two concepts of time, and also sees how the big country is tangled up in its rapid modernization: city versus village, economic development versus historical protection, participating in globalization versus preserving local traditions… the two contradictory powers are tearing at the heart of the country. The chime clock in the Huizhou house can be seen as a refraction of the tearing: it used to be a symbol of modernization, but placed in the center of a traditional living space; the decorations of the hall are strictly prescribed by both Confucianism and traditional rituals, the wall in the center is used for hanging ancestors’ pictures. When younger generations pray before the pictures, they feel a strong and solemn sense of purpose; regardless of the span of generations, those living today can commune with ancestors in the space created by ritual, forming a cyclical chain of birth and death that follows time without end. The modern linear time represented by the chime clock has been hollowed out from the traditional cyclical time. Though the televisions and DVDs appear as new symbols of modern life, the clocks are still kept there, and the positive associations of old superstition carried on them never changed: “Life is smooth and peaceful through its end.” You can only identify time’s struggles through the physical space in which it passes. This is why Tančič took two pictures in each villager’s home: one of the clock on the desk and another of people sitting or standing in the hall. A clock is a mechanical timing instrument. A human being is made of flesh, blood, and soul. The spaces in which people live are rich in social information. These three elements—the clock, the human being, and the space in which they live—reveal time’s true face. On Tančič’s second visit in 2014, he took also many photographs in modern houses. Huizhou merchants disappeared during the period of the socialist planned economy. Not long after, China’s reform and opening-up spurred a new generation of Huizhou citizens to leave the area. They went to the coastal developed cities to work and brought their knowledge and experience back to the villages. The capable ones started to pull down the old-style houses, building new modern houses on the same old land and on new land. The houses expressed their understanding of “modernization.” The incapable ones couldn’t build new houses, but practical needs forced them to remodel the old houses, leaving the traditional forms and principles behind. The city’s sense of worth and aesthetics sank into rural

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society. The simple outhouses were replaced by modern toilets. Supply and marketing cooperatives and corner stores were replaced by supermarkets. Televisions and DVDs appeared in halls. Computers may appear soon after. The desire for “development,” and with its linear time, is becoming stronger and stronger. The Chinese translation of “Timekeepers” may seem a little old-­ fashioned now. After several years of living in Yi County, I deeply feel that the normal life of villagers cannot remain “traditional” simply because of the nostalgia of the intelligentsia. It is inhuman to exclude the countryside from modernity, to try and preserve a paradise in which people can’t feel time passing, just so elites from the cities can enjoy it on their vacation. The village’s layout, the ancient buildings, the lifestyle, and the agricultural ecology—all of these should be properly protected, but a better livelihood of the villagers should be the premise. Those diehard history protectionists thunder away in pursuit of “political correctness” and “moral superiority,” regardless of the living standard of the residents in the historical area and their demands for self-development. Knowing nothing of the deep social reasons for historical destruction, these people have no constructive words or actions for using the historical resources to improve residents’ living standards. They are the same as another extreme, the absolute development advocates, who go forward at the cost of sacrificing the historical memories. Neither can untangle the mental knots of modernization. As a cold-headed and objective spectator, Tančič records and reveals our entanglement in his lens. As “others,” coming from the outside world, many foreign photographers see more clearly than us our reality and historical limits. Canadian photographer Edward Burtynsky has been to Fujian’s factories and rural dumps of industrial refuse, Sichuan’s Three Gorges Dam, Tianjin’s coal mining base, the homes of Shanghai’s nouveau riche, and the impoverished back alleys. He recorded our most unforgettable memories, that is, the large environmental and emotional price we paid for seeking development in this country with a vast territory and an overloaded population. Different from Burtynsky, who focuses on full-shot grand historical scenes, Tančič walked into around sixty family homes in Yi County’s villages. In the residents’ private living spaces, he shot their furnishings and let them face the lens in their own halls. These faces ravaged by farm work or changed by travels, together with their houses and used goods, help Tančič to change abstract time into images you can see, smells you can breathe, and surfaces you can feel with your hand.

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When I gaze at their portraits, I always have a feeling of “my country, my people.” They are bodies grounded under the wheels of modernization. Though living in remote villages, they do have connections with the crowded cities. The cereals they grow, the labor they provide, and their homes that may be demolished and become part of a city one day—this is what drives this country’s development. They are often neglected subjects, but they are revealed in Tančič’s photographs.

Memoir in Southern Anhui16 Liu Chuanhong visited Yi County for the first time in 2012. He did not let me know nor stayed even in a hostel. He brought a tent and a sleeping bag, camped in town, and even made up to Mount Huangshan. He hid among the visitors and the 90,000 residents of the small county—nobody knew where he was—like a chivalrous errand who practices invisibility, with a pair of alert eyes shimmering beneath a cap. Liu Chuanhong came here for fieldwork and history investigation upon my invitation for him to attend the second Bishan Harvestival. Unfortunately, that year’s event failed to happen. But what he witnessed here in Yi County urged and inspired him to produce; after more than two years’ preparation, it finally gave birth to a huge and intricate art project, Memoir in Southern Anhui. Memoir in Southern Anhui first came to life in 2014 at A Thousand Plateaus Art Space. Through fourteen sets of works that consisted of thirty-eight pieces of a scene and still oil paintings, and a hundred of freehand textual sketches including traveling diaries, military maps, attacking plans, arms diagrams, Kung Fu charts, and local social research records, Liu Chuanhong creates a story where a “bandit leader” character named “Mr. Liu” journeyed around the Japanese-occupied Southern Anhui area between 1940 and 1942. He commanded combats, robbing the rich to save the poor; or conducted businesses, rolling up fortunes and power; or hid away into mountains, read, and meditated. Such a grandiose and sensitive visual narrative is truly rare to Chinese contemporary art. Although the works are fictional, Liu Chuanghong has been strictly scrutinizing the credibility of its historical details. In the libraries in 16  Completed in Chinese on July 27, 2015, in Bishan. This is the curatorial essay for Liu Chuanhong’s exhibition Memoir in  Southern Anhui at  School of  Tillers from  August 8 to  November 8, 2015. The  Chinese version was  published on  iPress, July 30, 2015. The English version was translated by Zhang Liaoran in 2015.

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Changchun and Chongqing, at the street vendors in Yi County, from the Kongfz vintage book site, he collected enormous amount of resources and materials that are dated back to the Republican period. He selected and trimmed the historical fragments found in local annals and matched them into the narrative textual fabric. For every single paragraph, he sewed together the detailing through imitating the writing style of the Republican period. For the natural and social sceneries recorded during his investigation, he turned them into a visual materiality that is seemingly worn out in the bath of time. He altered the charts of Kung Fu methods from the Republican period and fitted them into the martial style of “Mr. Liu,” a lower-class intellectual. And based on the handmade tactic books of People’s Liberation Army through wax paper engraving and printing from post-1949, he fabricated the civilian forces’ unprofessional tactics. Memoir in Southern Anhui revolutionizes the ideology and methods for contemporary paintings: it shares the same blood with a literary writing, but through the means of painting. If published as a book, it would be a “graphic novel”; if filmed as a movie, it would be an “auteur film.” It’s a literary fictional narrative developed and created out of fieldwork and historical investigation, and intertwined through a progressively developed structure and a composition of multiple drawings. Yet the drawings stand apart from each other, and do not emphasize on the continuation between scenes and stories as that of a comic strip or of a movie montage. Besides sceneries and characters, a number of charts, diagrams, documentations, and books compose a major part of the paintings. These “paintings,” however, are not merely mimicries of “historical relics.” They are also the results of the artist’s personal reflection and social imagination based on the factual situation. This so-called “Mr. Liu” is actually an avatar of Liu Chuanhong. Since 2002, he has secluded himself, woodworking, farming, and painting daily at Taohuadong Villiage in the Taihang Mountains area of Ling County, Henan Province. His early works, Journals and Illustrations of Villagers, Mountain and Forest Sketchbook, Journey to the West, and Xu Wenqiang: My Friend, among others, have already demonstrated the prototype of this self-referencing based on historical settings, which later is found in Memoir in Southern Anhui. Before “Mr. Liu,” a “Mr. Liu San” has already existed in his works. And they are both Liu Chuanhong’s autobiographic figures created in  different phrases. Whatever living seclusively in the

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mountains for hiding away, nor immersing in the river of history for self-­ imagination, they both imply the artist’s attitude about real life. In real life, Liu Chuanhong was born in an intellectual family in Changchun, Jiling Province. When he was little, he disliked going to school and always hid at home to read his father’s books. He went studying at Changchun School of Arts and at the art and craft department of Hebei Normal University, but ended up in quitting both. He favors the rural lifestyle: besides living in Taohuadong Village, he has also been farming, plumbing, and reading at Shifang Zen Garden away in Mount Tianping of Henan, and has also been frescoing for villagers in Lashi Lake’s village in Yunnan. Yet he never rejects the urban: in his later-written additional journals for Memoir in Southern Anhui, “Mr. Liu” also has a journey widely around the cosmopolitan cities like Shanghai and Nanjing. Liu Chuanhong likes to dream in places where reality meets a dead end and dreams about an ancient version of him wandering on the edge of reality. In “Mr. Liu” one can find the shadow of an ancient Chinese “Chivalrous Confucian” (xiaru). “Chivalrous Confucian” are those intellectuals who are both chivalrous and knowledgeable. In the long tradition of Chivalrous Confucian’s spirit, Warring States Period’s assassinators,17 Western Han Dynasty’s rangers (youxia),18 and Eastern Han Dynasty’s Danggu Confucian Scholars19—a group of Confucian scholars were framed as an opposition political party—all have contributed to its development. In Sima Qian’s writings, Jing Ke, the assassinator, “loved to read books and 17  See Sima Qian, “Biographies of Assassins,” Records of the Grand Historian (Beijing: Zhonghua Book Company, 2006). 18  See Tao Hsi-sheng, Eloquent Speaker and Wandering Hero (Shanghai: The Commercial Press, 1931). 19  “It is widely known that political developments in the latter half of the Eastern Han were interwoven with conflicts between eunuchs and officials. During the reign of Emperor Huan (ca.147–167), the confrontations reached a climax, as thousands of students of the Imperial Academy (Taixue) joined the side of Confucian officials. As a result, many officials and imperial students were punished in 166 C.E. and 168 C.E. The punishment was called danggu, and the officials who were so punished were forever prohibited from re-entering officialdom. These protests, first against the eunuch groups and finally against the failed monarchy, proved to be a collective action and involved social networks of local officials. At the same time, by sharing the common experience of being persecuted and facing common enemies, local Confucian elites developed a sense of a collective identity, the so-called the ‘spirit of the literati.’” Ching-I Tu, ed., Interpretation and Intellectual Change: Chinese Hermeneutics in Historical Perspective (Piscataway: Transaction Publishers, 2005), 83–84.

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practice swordsmanship;” “spent his time with drunkards, he was a man of depth and learning. Whatever feudal state he travelled to, he always became close friends with the most worthy and influential men.”20 And for this “Mr. Liu” and his adventurous life in Southern Anhui, one can find in his journal: “February the seventeenth. Inside news: Four Japanese arms trucks filled with military supplies between Nanling and Xuancheng, will pass Hanting in seventeen days. Starting from last night the weather has been windy, clear, and cold. All day windy and sandy, continued until around six p.m. when the winds stopped. Camped and been reading for the whole day.” Liu Chuanhong intentionally sets the stories of “Mr. Liu” in the Republican period. It was a period of turmoil from both inside and outside: the Japanese invaded the country; the central government broke up; bandits ganged up with the lack of governance. The intellectuals had ambitions yet failed to have a decent living space, and therefore they could only walk on the edge and became “bandits.” While wandering through mountains and jungles, in between life and death, they never forget searching for a peaceful space to settle their spiritual life. “Mr. Liu” read while marching, listened to the radio habitually, and paid close attention to the state’s affairs. He had been missing his old favors back in the big cities, and the Confucian ideal in the peacetime: self-cultivation, regulating the family, country, and the world. Just as what Liu Chuanhong says about Memoir in Southern Anhui, “there is only a single line between this kind of traveling bandit and a revolutionist.” This art project has been deepening and developing up until now. This year Liu Chuanhong further produced 30,000-word journal for “Mr. Liu.” And based on his impression on Mount Huangshan in 2012, he created the Retreat to White Goose Ridge document series. At the same time, the “Mr. Liu San” on the other hand has finished shooting for a fictional movie with Na Yingyu, where Liu Chuanhong himself acted as the protagonist. “Mr. Liu San” and “Mr. Liu” share overlapping identities, as they are both characters that have come out of Liu Chuanhong’s fantasy. He has been to Yi County twice, and each time he would confront his own fantasy. “What’s loaded in real life needs imaginations,” Liu Chuanghong says, “I would like to stay alone, and give myself a chance to be adventurous. I am gentle, but I am obsessed with the Heroism.” 20  Records of the Historian: Chapters from the Shih Chi of Ssu-ma Ch’ien, translated by Burton Watson (New York: Columbia University Press, 1969), 45.

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Cultural Production and Local Construction21 Preparatory Work The Bishan Project has gone on for five years. Over that time, many local government officials from Zhejiang Province have visited Bishan, including at the provincial, city, district, and county levels. I also went to Jinyun, Luqiao, and Tonglu—all counties in Zhejiang—to share the Bishan Project with local officials. Today, I am honored to come to Liandu to share more about my work in Bishan Village over recent years. Bishan Village is located in Yi County, at the foot of Mount Huangshan. In the 1980s, the economy was growing well, so many villagers demolished their old houses and built new ones. The Xidi and Hongcun villages, next to Bishan, didn’t grow much during that time. The villagers there were very poor and, therefore, didn’t build new houses. Unexpectedly, today, Xidi and Hongcun have turned around. The old houses became cultural heritage sites, and brought them wealth. Today, compared with Xidi and Hongcun, Bishan has a very big difference in economic income, and there is also a psychological gap among the villagers. It has not yet become a scenic spot and remains a natural settlement, but it also has the resource of traditional Hui-style houses, though the old houses are not as many as in Xidi and Hongcun and the village is not preserved as completely as Xidi and Hongcun. I went to the village on my own initiative. Before that, I worked in Beijing for around seven years. I left because, on the one hand, everyone knows that the pollution in Beijing is very serious, and on the other hand, my personal interests began changing around 2005, from studying China’s urban problems to its rural problems. After learning about the historical experience of rural construction in the Republican Era and about contemporary rural reconstruction projects by professor Wen Tiejun around 2003, I also wanted to find a place to try to do that kind of work. So I went to many villages and came to Bishan for the first time in 2007. The reason is that I had two poet friends from when I was in middle school who bought a Ming Dynasty residence in Xidi and changed it into an inn, 21  This is a record of a talk at the study program “Economics of Nostalgia” for the cadres of  Liandu District, Lishui City, Zhejiang Province, on  January 8, 2016. It was  recorded and edited by Xu Lisha, and was excerpted on the public WeChat account of “Economics of  Nostalgia.” The  English version was  translated by Matt Turner and  Haiying Weng in 2019.

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around ten years ago. That was the first location of Pig’s Inn, which was a relatively early B&B for China. Later, because the guests entering Xidi had to buy tickets, it became troublesome—so they found Bishan Village to build the second inn. I fell in love with the village on my first visit. As we all know, the Huizhou countryside is a place where the Chinese traditional culture runs deep. At present, the genealogy collections in many museums in China are collected from the Huizhou area. Its architecture is also famous. Bishan is one of many Huizhou villages; I like it most because the villagers here are very simple and friendly, and the folk customs are very good. So I first began visiting over and over and doing some historical research. I found a lot of old photos at the Cultural Center of Yi County. In the 1970s, Bishan was a quiet mountain village. At that time, Cloud Gate Pagoda was a popular landmark. It was donated by the two Wang brothers during the Qianlong period in the Qing Dynasty. Bishan was also where Liu Xiaoqing and Joan Chen’s movie Little Flower was shot, and the Pagoda appeared at the beginning of the movie. The Zhang River, a river in the village, flows in front of the Pagoda. In one old photo, we can see a supply and marketing cooperative from the time. Today, it still uses old-fashioned glass cabinets, unlike the open shelves in the supermarket. It was rented by Zuo Jing, the co-founder of the Bishan Project, and a company in Shanghai, and together they planned to transform it into a new space. I’m also interested in the legacy of the socialist period. This year, I’m going to work with some young scholars to set up a new journal, Anabasis, which will focus on the study of Chinese traditional ritual civilization and modern socialism.22 Today, many scholars are re-evaluating the impact of the People’s Commune movement in the countryside, including the impact of water conservancy facilities on agriculture at that time. Old photos of Bishan also show women voting, women’s militia training under the Cloud Gate Pagoda, and the Bishan’s women’s basketball team. This shows that the Communist Party greatly improved the status of women in rural areas. All rural areas in China used to have very frequent public activities, but at that time, the participation of the common people was mainly for political mobilization, and it was not spontaneous. By the 1980s, after the “household responsibility system” arrived, the rural production mode returned to the family unit, the collectives began to disintegrate slowly,

 Due to lack of funds, the magazine was then only published online.

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and public life became more and more desolate. We entered Bishan under such historical conditions. Before I started, and settled down in Bishan, I had to do a lot of brainstorming, because I like to consider all kinds of possibilities before I do anything. I often talk about “utopia,” am not shy at all about it, and am not afraid that others say it is too naive or idealistic. I don’t think society can stop thinking about utopia because it is necessary for broadening human visions of what life can be. People think utopia is very dangerous, and worry about it becoming “dystopia.” It is true that when utopia is extended to the scale of a country, its social and other costs can be very high, but if it is kept at the small scale of individuals or small groups, it is just a beneficial and harmless brainchild growing into a small experiment. I started to draw my utopian imaginations in a notebook, and, of course, I did a lot of research—that is, to see what kind of social innovations could be done and what kind of successful or failed experiences had been achieved on the same scale elsewhere around the world. In 2010, I drew the first plan. By 2015, the Bishan Project entered its fifth year. Because I think it’s necessary to summarize past practices and put forth further ideas and plans for the future, I drew in a second notebook. All ideas and plans were based on fieldwork, because I had visited alternative communities and rural reconstruction projects in many countries over the past five years. This was by no means a castle in the air, because in fact we had found a small piece of land, and we wanted to let the imagination take root in it and become a reality. I have always liked to convert the noun “utopia” to “utopianing,” a verb in the present progressive tense. It is an action of constant exploration and a process of slow realization, starting from a very small scale. In order to be more realistic, before the official start of the Bishan Project, I also invited many professionals to do fieldwork there—including architect Hsiaeh Ying-chun, graphic designers Xiaoma and Chengzi, fashion designer Ma Ke, furniture designers Zhang Lei, and Chen Feibo, musician Dadawa Zhu Zheqin and others. We also took a general survey of the historical heritage, folk culture, craftsmanship, and natural resources over the whole county. Through such investigations, we could understand better what could be done there.

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Large-scale Activities By 2011, we finally decided to launch the Bishan Project. I found an empty house in the village. Its former owner was Xia Youlong, a blacksmith from Zhejiang Province who moved to Bishan in the 1960s and bought the house, which was from the late Qing Dynasty or the early Republic of China. Later, because of the economic development in his hometown, he went back. His children moved to the seat of Yi County, so the house was empty for many years. At that time, I felt that if I only lived in Beijing and occasionally went back and forth to Bishan, I would be embarrassed to call my work “rural reconstruction.” I thought that only by moving to the village, taking root there, and becoming a neighbor to the villagers could I understand the reality of the countryside more thoroughly. So I decided to buy Mr. Xia’s old house and then changed it into the place where I live, and it also became our work base. I named it the Buffalo Institute. It’s not only the place where I live, but also a public space where I can hold activities. It can also be opened to different people to learn and have exchanges. Later, I gained a second space in the village, the School of Tillers, and the Buffalo Institute became solely a space for my family and volunteers to live in. I hoped to bring some people who were interested in rural areas together to live and work, but I didn’t want to call the Bishan Commune an organization. I like a loose and non-hierarchical way of doing things. The concept of the “commune” is very important—it is not an organization supported by interests, but a community formed by a spiritual identity. At present, many rural reconstruction projects emphasize starting at the economic level, and standards of evaluation in society only focus on economic benefits—but I think economic activities involve a very complex distribution of interests, which can easily cause vicious competition. The Bishan Project chooses to come in from the cultural side, because we have cultural capital but no cash. Since we’re not big bosses, we should do non-­ profit things, finding a way to nourish people’s minds, and striving to build cultural confidence in the countryside. And because there is no conflict of economic interests, we can get along well with the villagers. In recent years, due to serious conflicts between native residents and newcomers in Lijiang, many people went to Bishan to see how we did it. My experience has been that to live in the village, to be a neighbor to the villagers, and to try to use your resources to work on behalf of the

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village—so that they can understand that you are together with them, not there to steal money—that is the meaning of a commune. We launched the Bishan Harvestival in 2011. It took the traditional harvest celebration of Bishan Village and turned it into a multicultural media activity. The largest existing ancestral hall in the village, Dunda Hall, had been vacant for a long time, and we used it as the main venue for the event. At the opening ceremony, there was a collective performance by villagers called “Chudifang Dance,” which was organized with the help of the Cultural Center of Yi County. The Cultural Center adapted the dance from the local historical customs, but organized villagers put on Hawaiian-­ style Hula skirts. This may not be too accurate in the sense of historical research, but I think it’s also interesting because it shows that even small mountain areas are influenced by global information. At the same time, we also organized literature classes for primary school students in Dunda Hall, where classical and modern poetry were taught. We went through the village’s historical records and put old photos on display at the Bishan Granaries. Most of the villagers hadn’t seen the photos before, so were very excited when they had the chance to see their young faces for the first time. There were also many art programs, including inviting local opera groups and the band Wu Tiao Ren of Haifeng, Guangdong, to perform on the same stage at the Yishan Theater. We also conducted an academic activity, inviting rural reconstructionists from Greater China to Yi County for exchange, including participants from Taiwan’s anti-reservoir movement and other agricultural movements, as well as practitioners of CSA farms. When I was editing the literary bimonthly Chutzpah!, I invited Liang Hong, a writer, to come along on a field trip to the various rural reconstruction bases under the leadership of Wen Tiejun—so I also met many of the pillars of rural reconstruction, and they were also invited. Rural reconstruction requires the participation of different intelligent forces; only by using “mass force” can it be pushed further. I tried my best and found a 35 mm copy of Little Flower in Shenzhen and a 35  mm film projector in Jiujiang, Jiangxi Province. I also invited collectors of old films and projectors to play films in the open air. It used to be very common for propaganda and entertainment in rural areas, but it became less so after the 1980s. As soon as Cloud Gate Pagoda appeared in Little Flower, everyone clapped and cheered. I also asked Liu Qingyuan, an artist from Guangzhou, to make a “Rural Reconstruction Calendar” for 2011, which was a woodcut representation of the working lives of

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visiting intellectuals as well as farmers in the fields by month and farming times. We gave this to all the villagers and guests who came to the event. The Bishan Harvestival was very successful. I remember that villagers from the surrounding She and Jixi counties came to participate. The local government was very satisfied with our ideas and execution, and so we were entrusted to take over the annual International Photo Festival of Yi County. We took that opportunity to transform the seventh edition of the photo festival into a truly international event. The theme of 2012 was “The Interactions,” the main purpose of which was to criticize excessive urbanization and promote rural reconstruction. We invited many international photographers, including Iwan Baan. He is one of the most famous architectural photographers in the world, but he often takes photos of single buildings, without ever taking photos of rural settlements, so I invited him to take photos of villages in Huizhou. At the same time, I invited Sze Tsung Leong from the United States to take part. In his early years, he was a student of Harvard’s Graduate School of Design and joined a research project focused on the Pearl River Delta in China led by Rem Koolhaas, and then he became the editor and contributor of the research publication Great Leap Forward. Later, he went to Beijing, Shanghai, Chongqing, and other cities to take photos of high-­ density residential buildings and the large-scale buildings emerging in the fierce process of urbanization. It was also his first time to turn his lens on the countryside. It’s more interesting that photographer Matjaž Tančič of Slovenia is a 3D photographer—so I invited him to take 3D photos of more than 20 villages and 70 families’ living rooms, along with their portraits, in Yi County. He focuses on the decoration called dong ping xi jing23 in traditional Hui-style houses. Because they are 3D photos, they are very interesting and novel when they are displayed in rural areas. We set the venues for the photo festival in the ancestral halls and public spaces of many ancient villages across Yi County. For me, it was the first time I put on an exhibition in the countryside. The challenge was huge. Because cars mostly can’t drive in, vehicles driven by animal power are often used to transport materials, or villagers help carry them. In addition, the strong contrast between contemporary artworks and the old ancestral halls was very unusual for curating. The festival also invited musicians. I invited Abigail Washburn, a famous banjo player and country musician from the United States. Before coming  See “The Heart’s Home,” Chap. 7.

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to Yi County, she was invited to perform for the Queen of England for the Diamond Jubilee celebration in 2012. She also went to Sichuan to volunteer for the Wenchuan earthquake in 2008 and learned a little Chinese there. She performed together in the photo festival with the band Wu Tiao Ren, who sings in the Haifeng dialect of Guangdong Province. In 2012, there were no street lamps in Bishan Village. At that time, we wanted to solve the problem of lighting, but it cost a lot of money to build street lamps. So during the photo festival, we asked Taiwanese architect Teng Hai to make a temporary lighting design, and use a string of LED lights which is about five kilometers long, to light up the village road. But because we needed to get electricity from the villagers’ houses, it was difficult to account for the electricity fees. It couldn’t be long term and only lasted for about a week. Normal Construction In addition to annual large-scale activities, we also did some normal construction. Because I was already living in the village, I had organized some small activities and participated in some infrastructure construction. When Zhou Yun, a doctoral student at Harvard, argued with me online in 2014, she said that I “only like to watch the stars, and I don’t like to see street lights in the countryside.” This was the biggest misunderstanding of me that could be made. In fact, two years before Zhou Yun came to Bishan, I had proposed to solve the street lamp problem. But what could I say? The main body of rural reconstruction is always the government. We can only do some auxiliary work at the most. We have no ability to undertake largescale infrastructure construction. When helping the local government install street lights for Wuli Village in Biyang Town, Teng Hai suggested using hand-made lampshades, which was much better than the city style of tourist spots like Xidi and Hongcun. Living in the village, I continued to dig into its history. The Huizhou countryside is a treasure and has so many historical resources that you can never dig them all out. We could see the physical heritage of the horse-­ head walls, but much intangible heritage is not so easy to find and requires much time to notice and sort out. We found a historical figure named Wang Dazhi, born in Bishan Village, who went to Nanjing Xiaozhuang Normal College to participate in the “life education” movement led by Tao Xingzhi in his 20s. Later, after Xiaozhuang Normal College was closed, Mr. Tao asked Wang to go to Huai’an to establish Xin’an Primary

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School. Under the influence of Mr. Tao’s “life is education” ideas, Mr. Wang conducted many interesting educational experiments, like letting Xin’an students go to Shanghai without the accompaniment of teachers, taking society as a classroom, visiting factories, doing social surveys on the streets, selling newspapers for funds, and developing the ability to organize themselves and lead independent lives. Later, the “Xin’an Traveling Group” continued to expand, and was developed by the Communist Party into a force to travel around the country to publicize the Anti-Japanese war. We regarded Mr. Wang Dazhi as an elderly rural sage, and his educational experiments from the Republic of China are worthy of study. So we collected photos of him and asked Prof. Jiao Xingtao of the Sichuan Academy of Fine Arts to build a statue of him. With Mr. Tao’s inscription for the colleagues of Xin’an Primary School, “To come with a heart and to leave without half a root of grass,” the statue stands at the entrance of the village and commemorates Mr. Wang’s life and deeds in classical Chinese. Many villagers don’t know about Wang Dazhi. The statue we set up is to allow more people to learn about the people and history of the village, and to spur our own work. My work in Bishan can be divided into several parts, one of which is historical preservation. I am very cautious about the use of that term, however, because in China, many people call for historical preservation just in order to have a sense of moral superiority. In fact, they don’t know how bad the situation for people living in historical communities is and how much they want to leave. Therefore, historical preservation must be discussed together with development in order to be reasonable. We renovated old houses in Bishan and changed the villagers’ attitudes toward them. The effect was remarkable. Earlier, villagers thought that it was a symbol of failure to live in old houses instead of new buildings. After we renovated some old houses and invited the villagers in, they changed their views. They realized that people from the city had come all this way to buy old houses and make them comfortable, so they gained a new way of thinking about the value of old houses and a sense of preservation as well. Historical preservation must be tempered by contemporary realities. It is necessary to consider the conveniences and needs of the common people first, rather than simply preserving everything. The “historical preservation” of die-hards only sees history, not reality. When we talk about the history of Huizhou, we all know that Huizhou merchants were very important. When we explore and display the historical resources of those merchants, we can’t just show the great houses they built to the future

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generations to prove how rich they used to be and how extravagant their houses were. What we should learn and take most from is the Huizhou merchants’ methods of managing human resources and using their wealth at the time. In the past, most of the boys in Huizhou were sent out into the world to study and do business. In big cities, they helped each other through fraternal hometown organizations. The money they earned in the city would be sent to their hometowns regularly out of a sense of filial piety. Therefore, Huizhou could gather so much wealth and build so many beautiful houses, while Huizhou business groups on the outside could obtain the human resources that their hometown continuously sent out. This is a kind of mutually nourishing relationship between the city and the countryside, but also a kind of economic wisdom about the continuity between wealth and talent. These days, most young people’s concept of their hometown and their respect for the elderly are much weaker. The money they earn is not necessarily sent back to their hometowns but is instead used to take care of their small families in the city. For another example, when we talk about China’s farming culture and China’s agricultural heritage, it is based in deep feelings for the land, paying attention to organic-intensive farming (not extensive or industry farming), and people who live together as a clan relying on their concentration of labor—which has the result of improving labor productivity per unit area of land. But what’s the point of setting up a farming museum and collecting some old farm tools for display? To protect the historical tradition, we should put it in a contemporary context. We can discuss whether there is any connection between ancient Chinese agricultural thought and “sustainable agriculture,” or “permaculture,” which is emerging in Europe and America today. If we study “permaculture” carefully, we will find that it has many similarities with our traditional small-scale farming methods. In fact, the co-housing movement promoted by utopian or alternative communities in Europe and the United States has many similarities with our ancient land-distribution methods jingtianzhi (the “well-field system”).24 So I say that historical preservation must be made contemporary and a balance must be found between development and preservation. My second job in Bishan is knowledge production. That is to say, how to turn rural topics into publications, discussions, and ideas that can be disseminated. This is very important. In 2010, my earliest notebook  See “Crises and Experiments of Commons,” Chap. 11.

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mentioned that Bishan should have a bookstore. This idea was first influenced by Liang Shuming, who ran the Rural Press in Zouping County. Liang Shuming was a productive theorist. He often gave lectures and published books. Therefore, Zouping County’s Rural Press became his publishing outfit, which was an important link to knowledge production in rural areas. So I’ve been trying to find a way to set up a press and a bookstore in Bishan. Qian Xiaohua, the founder of Nanjing’s chain bookstore Librairie Avant-Garde, is an old friend of mine. When his bookstore was founded 18 years ago, he was still very poor. He asked me to design the store logo, and I helped him for free. In addition, I gave the French name that they’ve used ever since. In 2011, I went to his Wutaishan flagship store to promote the literary bimonthly Chutzpah!. He asked me what I had been doing recently, and I said that I was working in Bishan Village—would he like to have a look and open a bookstore there? I didn’t expect that he would be interested. He soon arrived in Bishan and took a fancy to Qitai Hall. Qitai Hall is a small ancestral hall in the village, which had been vacant for a long time. It was full of grass, cow dung, and a nest of bats. Qian decided to use Qitai Hall to open a bookstore. The name was Bishan Bookstore, which was my idea. The property rights for Qitai Hall are owned by the villagers collectively. So we applied with the villagers, and the villagers thought it was a good idea. They reported it to the government of Biyang Town and the Bureau of Cultural Relics of Yi County. As a result, Qian was allowed to use Qitai Hall free of rent for 50  years to start Bishan Bookstore. This process was quite meaningful. When Qian Xiaohua, the villagers, and the government couldn’t solve the property rights problem due to restrictions in the system, the plan to buy or rent was jumped over. Everyone used the fastest way first in order to use the space. Of course, the decision of the government was the most important. In 2014, Bishan Bookstore opened successfully and Qitai Hall was activated. It’s very similar to when I bought the Buffalo Institute—Mr. Xia Youlong’s real estate certificate and land certificate could be given to me, but according to the established system, rural homesteads can’t be sold to residents of other areas, and so it couldn’t be changed to my name. That’s to say, we only had a private agreement, and it wasn’t protected by law. At that time, if I had thought that there was no security because the house could not be transferred to my name, and I wouldn’t have bought it—then we wouldn’t have the Bishan Project today.

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Bishan Bookstore has been very successful since its opening. In the past, when we were doing large-scale activities, the village was crowded and lively for only one week out of the year. Many people came to visit, but after they left, the village was calm again. Now, the bookstore is open every day. Children and old people in the village come to surf the Internet, read books, and talk with each other. It has become a part of our daily life. There are more tourists coming after hearing about it, and it has also become a place for people around Huangshan and further away to come for holiday and leisure. The villagers not only like Bishan Bookstore, but also feel proud of it. During the New Year’s holiday, many Bishan people working in Shanghai and Hangzhou take their friends to visit the bookstore. It hired two villagers as shop assistants. One of them, the old Mr. Wang Shouchang, who likes to hand-paint the landscapes of Bishan to document the new changes in the village, was paid with royalties for his drawings, which were printed as postcards for sale by the bookstore. After one year’s operation, Mr. Hu Jianxin, a retired old gentleman in the village, decided to use the bookstore for his daughter’s wedding. This was a great recognition of the bookstore. A Knowledge Production Base Inspired by this, I began to think that our large-scale activities may help Bishan improve its popularity, but it wasn’t enough to affect its day-to-day development—so we needed to introduce other businesses. In 2014, the Party Secretary of the village came to me and said that there was also a grain station that used to be an old ancestral hall and was about to collapse. He hoped I could buy it at a very low price. It was very dilapidated, and only four walls were left to support the tiled roof—which was used by villagers to store random stuff, and their coffins—and the patio was overgrown with weeds. I began to think, what could I use this for? It could be like Bishan Bookstore, which was open for business every day. It could help villagers sell their agricultural products and also do cultural activities. Those activities would not only be once a year, but every month or two. There could be daily activities and long-running cultural reconstruction. At that moment, I thought of a name for the space, the School of Tillers. After buying the space, I spent half a year renovating it. Because it would be a space to be used every day, I didn’t think it was necessary to stick to the structure of the historical building. I didn’t preserve the imperfections of the building due to their historical limitations, as well as the parts that were unable to meet practical needs. I kept the original

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height of one hall, made a partition for another hall, made many traditional latticed door panels, and enclosed the two halls—which were originally connected to the patio—into two indoor spaces. In addition to adding a screen wall, I went to research the Shennong portrait and found many versions of it. I asked Chen Duxi, an artist, to draw a brand-new Shennong portrait on the screen wall as a symbol for the School of Tillers. On the first floor of the School of Tillers, there is a gallery for free exhibitions and lectures, a coffee shop, and a zakka store. There is a “lattice shop” open to all villagers in the store. If they want to sell their rice, beans, or hand-made shoes, they can take them over. We provide packaging to help them sell the goods, without any intermediate fee, and settle with them once every month. The second floor is a curated library. The collection of books is rotated every three months according to different curated themes, providing free reading resources; it is also a learning center that can hold small gatherings. All cultural activities at the School of Tillers focused on the local culture and village community participation. The first exhibition was a 3D Photography exhibition, Timekeepers by Matjaž Tančič, featuring villagers from Yi County. The villagers who went to visit were invited to wear 3D glasses, and they were very excited to see that their huge photos were up. On the opening day, many villagers came to congratulate me. Celebratory firecrackers were also set off at the gate. On the platform of the School of Tillers, I put many products up for sale. They included blank notebooks for the Bishan Commune, sponsored by Moleskine of Italy, and I also picked out quotations from Chinese agricultural classics and agricultural poetry, and a designer from Zhejiang Province who specializes in fonts, Ying Yonghui, specially made a set of fonts for them according to the folk engravings of Zhejiang Province in the Ming Dynasty. The quotations were printed on slippers, kettles, and towels—all products used in rural life. For example, water bottles are used for drinking water while working, and towels are used to wipe sweat. These designs were dedicated to making intangible heritage into visible and usable objects. The English name, School of Tillers, is a translation of Nongjia, literally meaning people who till. It was one of the various schools of thought in pre-Qin times. One of my aims in Bishan has been to develop contemporary content along the lines of the Nongjia, which I call “contemporary agrarianism.” It has been a very important ideological resource for the Bishan Project and has a very famous saying, “a sage should cultivate and

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eat together with the people”—meaning that no matter whether you are a scholar or an emperor, you should work in the fields with ordinary people. I printed this sentence and the image of Shennong on cups sold at the School of Tillers. As “school” means a place to learn as well as a school of thought, the School of Tillers is also a school for tilling. I found that it was difficult for us to mobilize villagers into large-scale activities before, but after opening a shop to help them sell agricultural products and handicrafts, their attitudes were different because it benefited them. The villagers who came to the School of Tillers to apply to vend were very enthusiastic. Because they had products on sale there, the School of Tillers became a special space that they loved. We helped them pack dried bamboo shoots and high mountain tea, helped them sell hand-­ made bamboo hats and sieves, and made straw hats with the words “School of Tillers” for the villagers. The “Agritopia Dress for Bishan Commune” is an idea I had in 2010. At that time, I was reading a lot of utopian literature. Every utopian novel writes about the dress in Utopia, which reflects cleanliness, neatness, and politeness of residents. I think the Bishan Commune should also have its own special dress. In 2015, the Polimoda Fashion Institute of Italy invited the Bishan Project to the National Library of Florence for a retrospective exhibition, so I decided to work out the idea. However, the weaving tradition of Yi County is not very strong. There is no tradition of hand-made cloth, and only one village, Liyuan Village, weaves very coarse linen—that can only be made into rope or sacks, and not clothes. So we used traditional cloth from Chongming Island in Shanghai and the Summer Wood grass cloth of Liuyang in Hunan Province to make ten samples, and sent them to Florence for the exhibition. People who want them can customize them through the School of Tillers. These clothes were designed for those who are interested in living and working, going from the city to the countryside. They are used for mobilization. I hope they can attract those who are against the trend of urbanization and want to return to the land. I have given a name to every dress item. For example, “New Ragged” is a patchwork shirt made of Chongming Island cloth, “Hermit” is a headwrap for sun protection, and “South-­ facing Field” is a pair of gloves. I even specially designed the hangers at the School of Tillers and asked the carpenters in the village to make them. Photographer Xiao Quan was invited to take a group of photos of the items, making up and elaborating on a fictional visual story about how a

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pair of young people from the city go back to the countryside, settle down, and have children. Community Economy At the beginning of 2015, we registered the account number of the School of Tillers on Airbnb, sorted through the vacant houses of some villagers, and made them into the Researchers’ Residences of the School of Tillers. Mr. Qian Shi’an’s home is at the foot of the mountain, and we call it Hillside Garden in English. There are more than 100 kinds of plants on his property. It has a two-story house with “small bridge and flowing water.” It is very neat and comfortable. We priced it at 200 yuan per night on Airbnb, and the result was that it became very popular. Mr. Qian is talented and warm-hearted. He cooks for the guests and makes hand-­ made toys for children, so everyone who has been there has left good reviews. After it became popular, other villagers came to register. Later, we put three more Researchers’ Residences on Airbnb. I think these are the real homestays. They are villagers’ own houses. Because there are extra rooms, they can be shared. They aren’t decorated very much, and they are all self-­ check-­in. The guests will eat whatever the villagers eat, as there is no so-­ called service. For those who want to experience the lives of ordinary villagers, they are more real and affordable than the so-called homestays built with large capital investment. At the time, Airbnb had not yet entered China to set up operations and had not yet localized payments, so the School of Tillers collected money for the villagers through PayPal and volunteered to take on the work of early communication with guests, especially international guests, and the volunteers acted as translators. The Internet has brought great opportunities to the countryside. In the past, when starting a farmhouse inn, one would often get stuck in the process of applying for a license, usually at the stage of fire codes, but with Airbnb, you can just take a picture and put it online. Now, the Yi County government, facing this trend, does not seem to want to require that these ordinary people’s houses be licensed to receive guests. In order to manage international guests, the public security bureau only requires you to apply for computer software to register them. The previous management method couldn’t cope with this new phenomenon in the countryside. The villagers’ houses on Airbnb provide alternative accommodation options.

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Many people have stayed in high-end hotels before, but now they are interested in the very simple experience of staying in a villager’s home. After the opening of the School of Tillers, it seemed to become the “living room” or community center of Bishan. Once, I put some Japanese anime on the big screen—I thought the villagers would like it. I didn’t make any advertisements or inform them. I just wanted to test whether they would come in to watch it after dinner when they heard the sound of it. Some people did come, but they thought Japanese anime didn’t look very good, because it was troublesome to watch subtitles. So they began to “order” old films of Huangmei Opera, the old TV series Dream of the Red Chamber, and so on. Our volunteers went online to download them and play them on the big screen. Later, it became a habit that the villagers would come to the School of Tillers to watch movies or have a chat after dinner every night. In order to increase the friendly sense of the School of Tillers, we also organized the activity of “Talk & Buy”and sent invitions to  the villagers. We went door to door to see what unnecessary things occupied the villagers’ houses. We suggested that they take them out and put them at the School of Tillers. Then we took photos of the things, made them into a PPT, and put them on the big screen. Each “seller” had five minutes to introduce their “treasures” on the day of the activity, and then auction or exchange them in kind. The “buyer” could be a tourist or a villager. The villagers began to set up stalls, and a lot of people came. My idea comes from the Time Coupon Shop set up by the St. James’ Settlement in Wanchai, Hong Kong, to promote the circulation of second-­ hand goods in the community. Of course, it also conforms to my understanding of the concept of permaculture. Permaculture advocates maintaining an ecosystem of agricultural production with the least human and most natural resources. For example, the waste discharged by one species can become the nutrition of another species. In my opinion, such an agricultural concept can also be applied to human communities. In “Talk & Buy,” the second-hand goods exchange event we organized, useless things of one family could become useful things for another family through the platform. The second exhibition at the School of Tillers was the Memoir in Southern Anhui. Artist Liu Chuanhong made up a story about an intellectual “bandit leader” during the Republican Era, who was fighting against the Japanese with the guerrillas in the rural areas of southern Anhui Province and conducting a rural investigation at the same time. He made

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around 138 oil paintings, which were divided into 14 groups, each one depicting a county in Huizhou. The details of the paintings were very rich, and many of them were based on various old objects he had collected. There were also marching maps and tactical sketches. There were studies of rural geography, people’s livelihoods, and the food structures of local people. It was very interesting. He also made a film, which we arranged to premiere. We also do many reading activities. I have always believed that under the current situation, where various kinds of capital enter into the rural areas to develop them vigorously, it must be supplemented with cultural nourishment. If there is no culture to nourish and everyone goes there for profit, there will be many contradictions in the countryside, leading to rural work not being further expanded. Our reading clubs basically read Chinese classics. For the first session, we read the text about the village archery contest ceremony in Ban Gu’s Virtuous Discussions in White Tiger Hall. This year, we read Mencius’s “Duke Wen of Teng.” It discusses mutual aid in the countryside, the origin of the land distribution system jingtianzhi, and the agriculturalist theory of Xu Xing, which relates closely to moral education in the countryside. Through the process of working in the countryside, I think it has been very important that we have relied on “mass strength.” This includes the strength of volunteers. The School of Tillers in total has provided over ten young people with accommodation and work opportunities. I asked them to work in Bishan Village for no less than three months, because some volunteers may not be doing it for the right reasons. Many come to the countryside just to play around and then leave, or to accumulate academic credits. So we needed to find volunteers who were really interested in working in rural areas and provide them with opportunities to connect with the reality of rural areas. We often hold internal sharing meetings or organize hiking groups to activate the working atmosphere and stimulate intelligent energy. I once thought of experimenting with a time-based currency system among volunteers. I designed the “Bishan Hours,” but it was only used for local volunteers in a Bishan Project exhibition at the Taipei Fine Arts Museum and was not used in Bishan. The way the time-based currency works is to get one hour’s currency note according to working time, for example, one hour’s work. With the accumulation of time currency notes, you can go to the places that have agreed to take them, such as bookstores, restaurants, and accommodations—to exchange for books, meals,

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or overnight accommodation. You can also go to special second-hand goods centers for the exchange of daily necessities. This is a direct exchange of labor without the use of a common currency. In fact, in some decaying historical communities or agricultural settlements, because of the small and limited economies, there is much surplus labor. They cannot find jobs in the mainstream economic system with their outdated skills. But they can be organized as a working group based on labor exchange, so as to obtain their sustenance needs using the alternative time-based currency in the community. In the 1990s, in Ithaca, where Cornell University is located, the issuance of community currency was very successful, and it operated for almost ten years. It was very effective for maintaining a small community economy and activating surplus labor and second-hand goods. I once visited Paul Glover, the founder of the “Ithaca Hours,” in Philadelphia to learn about how it worked. The Intersubjectivity In the current institutional environment, for the main body of rural reconstruction, the most important factor is the government, because all the infrastructure and villagers’ social insurance must be borne by the government. In addition, I think other subjectivities should not be ignored. The countryside should be a field of multiple interactions and the coexistence of different subjectivity, so as to mobilize different forces of wisdom and social resources. The government’s subjectivity, the villagers’ subjectivity, and the intellectuals’ subjectivity are not problems of who is higher than who, but should coexist peacefully. I can’t sacrifice my subjectivity in order to meet the villagers’ subjectivity, nor can the villagers lose their subjectivity in order to meet the intellectuals’ subjectivity. In the past five years, we have tried to get along with the government and villagers in this way. If everyone can play to their own subjectivity, it will be the best situation. Yang Yan, a villager, now works at the School of Tillers. When I met her, she felt inferior and said she could not read or write and dare not work at the School of Tillers. I’m surprised that Bishan has illiterate women, but that doesn’t matter. We taught her how to make coffee and do simple bookkeeping. Now she is doing well, is more confident, and is very protective. For example, when someone had an issue with the coffee she made, she took responsibility, so that the reputation of the School of Tillers would not be damaged. I was very touched.

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When I first arrived at Bishan, there were two villagers who were the two keys for me to understand the place. They were Mr. Wang Shouchang and Mr. Yao Lilan. Mr. Wang used to be the head of the Village Committee. Because the Wang family was the original big family in Bishan, the proportion of the Wang family became smaller and smaller after arrivals from the Xin’an River reservoir brought many new surnames, making him very concerned about changes to the Wang family. So he spent lots of energy to sort out the Wang family tree, which led to his constant textual research on village history. Mr. Wang can be said to be a native historian for Bishan. He records every day what happened in Bishan, who sold house, who moved in, and what activities were held in the village, in which year and month. He remembers clearly, and his notebook is getting thicker and thicker. He even went to Nanjing to look up materials for verification. I’ve learned a lot from him. The relationship between Wang Dazhi and Bishan was also disclosed to us by him. Now Mr. Wang works at the Bishan Bookstore. Many study tours arrive in Bishan and he talks to them about village history. His drawing ability is also very strong—he sketched the “Eight Scenes of Bishan,” that no longer exist today, from memory. Bishan Bookstore made the sketches into postcards, which sold well and were reprinted three times. Then he drew a collection of new things in the village, such as the Pig’s Inn, the Bishan Bookstore, and the School of Tillers, and those were printed on postcards as well. He is so sentimental about Bishan that he inadvertently became the village scribe. His postcards have become best-selling items at the Bishan Bookstore, and his talent has been widely displayed. This is exactly what I call the blooming of a villager’s subjectivity. Mr. Yao Lilan is a retired primary school teacher who is also very keen on public affairs in the village. The cadres of Biyang Town sent him a camera. As a result, he began to take photos every day to record the farming scenery, daily life, and events in the village. A volunteer at the Pig’s Inn also held a photo exhibition for him in a small farmhouse. Mr. Yao also compiles dialect terms, proverbs, and ballads from Yi County, and often acts as a guide for study tours in the village. Mr. Wang Shouchang and Mr. Yao Lilan are two rural intellectuals. They are also like squires that we rely on very much. Mr. Qian Shi’an, another villager, is more like a farmer-artist. He has contracted 60 mu of forest land. Whenever he has time, he plants trees on the mountain behind his house. If he feels a place needs a tree, he will plant it on his own. It is entirely voluntary. He can do carpentry, bonsai, grafting, photography,

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and poetry. He often looks for pieces of strange-looking bamboo and then transforms them into a pipe or a toy for children. I asked him to teach me carpentry, and I would like to make an exhibition for him at the School of Tillers to display his wonderful life story, show his photography, gardening, carpentry, and all kinds of fun things he makes, and also prepare to experiment with him by building a bamboo pavilion by hand, as part of the “Bishan Schooling” program that the School of Tillers will start this year. We also plan to open a ten-person class led by him, where people can learn carpentry. Why does Mr. Qian live so happily? This is the question I want to answer with this exhibition-in-preparation. Most people think that the quality of life for farmers is very poor, but I find that farmers are very different. There are farmers who are very casual and do not care about order. There are also farmers who love to be tidy and keep their houses very nice. There are farmers who read Southern Weekend and those who read Chiung Yao’s novels. The “Bishan Schooling” program will emphasize “learning by doing,” letting outsiders and villagers “learn from each other” on the same platform, and stimulate the  “intersubjectivity” through “mutual learning.” On the issue of subjectivity, I often take Leo Tolstoy, a great writer and intellectual, as an example. He was an aristocrat who had the habit of dressing up as a Russian farmer, and no one could recognize him when he was walking down the street in those clothes. I call his hobby “class transvestitism,” which was a kind of performance that showed how “connected” he was. But, in fact, class differences cannot be erased, and the differences between intellectuals and farmers cannot be disguised. In the past, for the need of political mobilization, class consciousness was artificially cultivated and magnified. Now we should respect class differences— but it is better to give up class consciousness. Finally, I want to go back to the slogan of the “Economics of Nostalgia”: “If you want to preserve nostalgia you need to be a permanent resident, and if you want to discuss economics you need to be a practitioner.” This slogan fittingly summarizes my work in Bishan over these five years. Indeed, if you only live in Beijing, and occasionally go to Bishan for one or two months, do something there, and then return to Beijing, you and the village will always have this kind of back and forth relationship, as if you were never really together. My way may be different from that of many people. I am not a rural reconstructionist by profession, I have not been commissioned by anyone, and it was all spontaneous. Moreover, I

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moved my family to live in the countryside, including my mother, brother, nephew, wife, and children. I have spent several important events in my life at Bishan, and my family members celebrate the new year in Bishan every year. I not only had my wedding but also had a baby in Bishan. When you live here and become a neighbor, a new villager, what you do won’t be like the work done by college students to experience society in the past—which never went deeper than the surface. This place will have a deep relationship with your life, giving your emotions and motivations something to rely on. Such nostalgia is real. I also noticed that the countryside needs to be cultivated. We should not only carry out knowledge production and dissemination, but also do some economic work. Only cultivation can make it sustainable. This is an example of my own practice. Bishan’s experience doesn’t necessarily work in other places, because every village in China is so different, but I think it’s not bad to be able to do a good job only in one village.

CHAPTER 11

New Commons

Crises and Experiments of Commons1 When China joined the WTO in 2001, it became part of the global economy. The Chinese government has warmly embraced globalization, pushing the process of urbanization more radically forward. Urbanization is a kind of redistribution of social resources, including land and property; it is in some sense more radical than a revolution. China’s current land ownership system was established in 1949 when the Communist Party of China took power. Land in urban areas is owned by the state, while in rural areas, villagers own the land collectively. When local governments in rural areas need land, they change the land status, grabbing the land and selling it to developers; in the process, many villagers lose their farmland, and as a result farmland across China is shrinking. According to Reuters, China will become the world’s largest importer of agricultural products in 5–10 years.2 As China grows increasingly dependent on international trade, its food situation is becoming dangerous. It is only a matter of time 1  This is a  draft for  the  lecture at  YNKB, Copenhagen, organized by Crisis Mirror, September 16, 2014. Written in English at Freetown Christiania, Copenhagen, proofread by Mai Corlin and Austin Woerner, published on Crisis Mirror’s official website in 2014. 2  “China to become world’s top farm products importer,” from Reuters: http://www. reuters.com/ar ticle/2011/11/07/us-china-trade-agriculture-idUSTRE7A60O 120111107.

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before a global food crisis occurs, and then it will be a huge challenge to feed China’s population. Rural villagers constitute more than 60% of China’s population. During the latter half of the twentieth century, villagers exchanged their agricultural products for support from the Soviet Union in the industrialization process, contributing their land and labor to urbanization and the new economy but never sharing in its benefits. Since most young people have left the countryside for jobs in the city, China’s villages are almost empty, with only a few old people and children left behind. Fields lie fallow, and local governments take control of the farmland, giving little compensation to villagers. Over the course of the past thirty  years, there have been a great many protests concerning land issues, the biggest of which was the Wukan Protest in 2011–2012. At the same time, former villagers who now work in urban factories are in danger of becoming “precarious workers”3 should they lose their jobs in a global financial crisis. All of these factors place China in a very urgent political situation. When we look at the rural society in China today, we see that its social structure was severely damaged by the People’s Commune Movement (1958–1982) and that this damage has not yet been repaired. The CPC’s village committees replaced the self-rule system based on clan power and led by the rural gentry, but few villagers feel that the village committees really represent their interests. This is a typical crisis of representative politics in China today. After the Household Contract System was adopted in 1982, Chinese rural society became increasingly atomized and individualistic. The rural elites leave the villages, and they have no interest in taking care of their parents; the wealth they accumulate does not feed back into their hometowns, but remains in the cities, where their families are. Confucian values have evaporated, and the rural-urban relationship is becoming fraught. This is where the New Rural Reconstruction Movement (NRRM) comes in. Unlike the Rural Reconstruction Movement (RRM) in the Republican Era (1911–1949), the NRRM has to contend with a rural situation set against the backdrop of globalization and must grapple to a greater degree with issues of social and environmental justice. It has more intellectual resources at its disposal, but less government support. Most 3  “Precarious workers” is a term that critics of globalization use to describe the people who are doing temporary work or on-call work and the non-standard employment that is poorly paid, insecure, unprotected, and cannot support a household.

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Chinese intellectuals involved with the NRRM are New Leftists, sharing the same set of anti-globalization and anti-urbanization ideals, which are radically different from the government’s current policy. Some of their activities in rural areas are likely to be seen as “sensitive” by the government, so it is crucial for them to approach it as “construction” rather than “opposition,” in order to create more space to operate within the political system. It is imperative that the NRRM appear as a positive power in the government’s eyes, otherwise it will not be sustainable in a society so tightly controlled by the CPC. The NRRM was first shaped by Wen Tiejun, a researcher who coined the phrase “the Three Rural Issues” (agriculture, rural areas, and farmers), now dean of the School of Agricultural Economics and Rural Development at Renmin University of China in Beijing. In 2003, he founded the James Yen Rural Reconstruction Institute at Zhaicheng Village in Hebei Province, and he has sent many young intellectuals to the countryside to develop various programs and concepts, such as community colleges, community  supported agriculture, ecological villages, and “Workers’ Homes”4 in different villages and cities. In addition to Wen’s movement, there have been other spontaneous projects such as the ones run by He Xuefeng in Hubei Province, Li Changping in Henan Province, and Liao Xiaoyi in Sichuan Province. Currently, there are more than 200 projects that fall under the umbrella of the NRRM.5 These projects attune themselves to the peasants’ needs, giving them more education, trying to activate their subjectivity in the local economy, and helping them advocate for themselves; so far, they have shown significant effect. For a moment I would like to examine three current projects as case studies of how the NRRM works, especially regarding the new collective economy and the experiment of the commons, an alternative to economic liberalism. The first is Shi Yan’s Shared Harvest project, located in Mafang Village in suburban Beijing. It is a CSA farm with more than 170 acres of land. The local farmers and the consumers from Beijing are the shareholders of the farm. The farmers get funding in advance from the consumers, and then the farmers can farm in the traditional organic way. Risk is distributed between farmers and consumers, and the consumers receive healthy food from the farm in return. The concept of the CSA is  The programs target migrant workers living in cities.  To learn more about NRRM, please see Alexander F. Day, The Peasant in Postsocialist China: History, Politics, and Capitalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013). 4 5

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not original to China, but Shared Harvest is the most successful CSA project in the country now; it has proved a successful tool for balancing the rural-urban relationship. The second is the Haotang Project, located in Haotang Village in Henan Province and led by Li Changping and Sun Jun, the co-founders of China New Rural Planning and Design Institute (CNRPD). CNRPD helped set up a financial co-op in the village, pooling funding from the villagers (they also can join in with their land) and investing it in the village’s tourism business. Profits from the investment will be used to provide care for the elderly, found a kindergarten and school for children, and build a common house for the villagers. CNRPD provides professional planning and design services in an effort to make the village more like a village, not an urban community. It does not rely on funding from the government or capital from outside companies, is self-organized by the villagers with help from CNRPD, and is an innovative approach toward collective economy based on the village itself. The third is the Bishan Project, located in Bishan Village in Anhui Province and founded by Zuo Jing and me. We work primarily on historical preservation, cultural production, and public life in the village. We bought several old, empty houses in the village, restored them, and settled down there to live. In the beginning, we launched a two-year research project on local traditional handicraft, inviting designers and artists to work with local craftsmen to create new products in the old way. In 2011 and 2012, we organized three major festivals in the village, inviting international and domestic artists, designers, architects, musicians, filmmakers, writers, and activists to develop activities with the villagers, and published books and magazines based on our research about the village. This year, we transformed a deteriorating clan hall into a bookstore. The villagers own the building collectively; we do not have ownership of the property, and the villagers do not charge rent from us. It has become a successful public space both for villagers and for people from outside. To put the idea of the commons into practice, whether Lawrence Lessig’s Creative Commons or Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s Commonwealth, we need to go beyond the idea of property ownership inherent in economic liberalism, and find a new way of sharing. Three thousand years ago, China developed a land ownership system called jingtianzhi (the “well-field system,” or “nine squares system”): one large square piece of land was divided into nine small plots (like the Chinese character井, which means “well”), the eight outer ones allocated to people

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who had to cultivate the central plot as common land. This is similar to the notion of co-housing in some intentional communities in Western countries today. The jingtianzhi was a kind of practical utopia founded by our Chinese ancestors and has influenced generations of Chinese dreamers, including practitioners in rural areas. The NRRM has done some interesting experiments involving the idea of the commons both in economic and cultural spheres, seeking alternative methods for rural development, improving village life, and making Chinese society more resistant to crisis as a whole.

The Commons of Common Space6 Common Space is not the same as Public Space. Public Space first refers to a physical space with clear boundaries that can be enjoyed by the entire public. Its boundaries are usually defined by geographical location, property ownership, and usage functions. For example, the Forbidden City became a tourist attraction that one can buy tickets to visit after the imperial power was disintegrated by the republic. Private gardens in Suzhou, after being confiscated, have also become parks that everyone can visit. Libraries and museums are part of the public services provided by the government. Although the property rights of large shopping centers are owned by corporates, they welcome all people for shopping. The users of Public Space are “People” or “Citizens,” which are the concepts invented by the nation-state. The users of the Common Space are “Multitude,”7 which has no idea of the nation-state, and its scope is broader than “People” or “Citizens” and even includes people without citizenship. All the public places are limited to a certain range by the buildings on different sites, but only when they are truly in use by the public, belonging to what sociologist Jürgen Habermas called the “Public Sphere,” do I consider them as a “progressive” public space. This public sphere is not necessarily a physical space, it refers to the discourse space between the 6  Completed in Chinese in January 2016 in Bishan. The English version was translated by Breanna Chia. It was  published in  Chinese, English, and  German on  Goethe Institute China’s official website in 2016. 7  See Paolo Virno, A Grammar of the Multitude: For an Analysis of Contemporary Forms of Life, trans. Isabella Bertoletti, James Cascaito and Andrea Casson (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2004) and Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire (New York: Penguin Books, 2004).

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boundaries of the state and the society, where individuals or non-­ governmental organizations can voice their opinions about public issues and approach a discussion. In this way, the Internet—in case it is unrestricted—also belongs to this public sphere. Common space is not only the physical space used by the multitude, but also capable of the new languages, customs, cultures, and memories created and shared by the multitude through the space. These are what Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri designated a new notion of the “Commons,” which go beyond the conventions of traditional property rights, especially those of public ownership of land.8 The multitude who have created the new commons exist as more complete and more progressive people. In every Chinese city with the means for it, a plaza (guangchang) lies before the government buildings. The primary function of this plaza is to serve as a symbol of political authority, its use typically reserved for official ceremonies and other large-scale government events. Although a public space, it serves, primarily, the political function, its users primarily government. Unsanctioned gatherings are illegal, so these plazas are often empty and vacant. Often their names include the word “People,” but in reality, they are a space for power and authority, a declaration of political order to discipline the people. When public opinion is stifled, however, or when the entity of the nation begins to show cracks, the “People,” so to speak, may choose to “occupy” this political space for expressing their demands. In these cases, the single-function, state-controlled plazas unwittingly become “public spheres,” spaces in which, in the history of China, mass political action has frequently taken place. Interestingly enough, this word “plaza,” in the last three decades of the new economic movement, has been liberally appropriated by large shopping centers, becoming a term constantly used in commercial spaces. In Europe or the United States, a plaza is often surrounded by residential neighborhoods as well as commercial shops, with the multi-functionality of the space giving rise to a certain vibrancy. The appropriation of “plaza” by Chinese shopping centers, then, is a hope for this very atmosphere of vibrancy. They have hijacked the concept of public space with consumerism. 8  Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Commonwealth (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2009).

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In 2009, as chief curator of the Shenzhen and Hong Kong Bi-City Biennale of Urbanism\Architecture, I requested that the Shenzhen Municipal Government allow us to use the plaza in front of the government office building Civic Center as the biennale’s main exhibition area. It was an effort to “depoliticize” the plaza: through the site-specific and socially engaged exhibition projects, the people were mobilized to experience and use the plaza, to create a new culture by turning it into a common space for daily life and transforming themselves into the multitude. In 2011, in the spirit of Hardt and Negri’s idea of the “Commons,” a group of Italian intellectuals who were dubbed the “TQ generation” (TQ being an abbreviation of Trenta-Quaranta, meaning “thirty-forty,” all of its members being between thirty and forty years old) launched the “Teatro Valle Occupato” movement. An eighteenth-century theater next to the Pantheon, the Teatro Valle was left without public funding following the global financial crisis. The city government of Rome, unable to continue supporting Teatro Valle’s operations, decided to privatize the theater. TQ launched the movement to oppose the selling of the city’s historic theater and occupied the theater space. Using the strength of civilian volunteers, the group organized a large number of cultural and artistic events at the theater and, through crowdfunding, managed to sustain its operations, all the while keeping the theater open and free to the public. At Teatro Valle, the matter of property rights was set aside, and reinvigorated by all of the activity, the theater became a common space that contributed to the movement of the new “Commons.”9 In 2014, the Bishan Bookstore, part of the Bishan Project, opened at a vacant ancestral hall collectively owned by the villagers of Bishan Village in Yi County, Anhui Province. Similarly, the legal property rights of the historical building remained unchanged, but the villagers volunteered it to be used as a bookstore, free of charge. Today, it has also become a vibrant common space: with free access to the public, visitors and villagers come to read, purchase, or borrow books, use the Internet, relax, and participate in all types of book events and cultural activities. Sometimes the villagers also used it as a free wedding venue. The bookstore has created a new culture for Bishan Village. 9  I visited Teatro Valle and met Vincenzo Ostuni, the poet of the Trenta-Quaranta group for a private conversation in 2012. To learn more about “Teatro Valle Occupato,” please visit the official website: www.teatrovalleoccupato.it.

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To renovate and activate a historical building resulted in a newly founded rural bookstore that became a driving force for the public life of the village. It was reached through a process of multi-party consultation and negotiation between the villagers, the local government, the bookstore operator from Librairie Avant-Garde in Nanjing, and the founders of the Bishan Project. It has avoided the radical confrontation in “Teatro Valle Occupato” and invented a new mode of rural cultural construction, which is now being imitated by many village and township governments in China. With the gusts of success of the Bishan Bookstore in our sails, in 2015, I transformed an abandoned granary in Bishan into what is now known as the School of Tillers. With some simple modifications of its traditional Hui-style architectural structure, it became another multi-use village cultural center that includes a gallery, library, learning center, tearoom, café, zakka store, and facilities for researchers in residency. It aims at promoting the ideology of contemporary agrarianism and the idea of rural construction. The School of Tillers is the English translation of Nongjia in the “Hundred Schools of Thought” in the pre-Qin period of China. It advocates that “the sage should cultivate and eat together with people.” It is the representative of China’s oldest philosophy of emphasizing agriculture and equality. At the same time, the naming of the school also implies the educational function of this new space. The School of Tillers regularly holds art exhibitions, concerts, reading events, and workshops that are related to agriculture, rural areas, and farmers; arranges movie screenings according to the preferences of the villagers; organizes flea markets on holidays to activate the exchange and circulation of second-hand goods in the village; helps the villagers sell their agricultural products and handicrafts to foreign tourists, and places the surplus houses of the villagers on Airbnb to increase their income. It is also a common space that engages the local villagers and unifies the community, one that encourages participation and the expansion of a new kind of rural community living. The villagers enjoy coming to the School of Tillers after their evening meals for a chat or to participate in the organized activities that provide exposure to new ideas and cultural information. The space has even been used by villagers in resolving personal disputes. When it comes to the creation of common spaces, the traditional residences of the Huizhou countryside demonstrate a basic principle: typically arranged as an enclosed residence with an interconnected set of rooms, its

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bedrooms are distributed around a sky well, each typically quite small, with more space given to the spacious main halls, usually far larger than the bedrooms. The modest private spaces, in fact, encourage the members of the family to congregate in the main halls and engage in the communal life of the family. Similarly, in the “co-housing” model of communes or eco-villages in Denmark, New Zealand, Australia, and the United States, the individual living spaces are small and simply furnished, such that its members are prompted to actively participate in the community’s shared meals and public activities. But physical space alone, even arranging or designing it such that it encourages certain behaviors, is insufficient as an agent for creating common spaces that facilitate the progress of society. Many public spaces, toiled over by planners and architects, end up unused. The vacancy of public spaces in China’s city and countryside is unquestionably tied to the wilting spirit of collectivism and the corresponding trend toward individualism. Systematic political restrictions are also no help in expanding the possibilities of the public sphere. The rigid realm of property rights, too, can only impede the ideas and movement of the new “commons.” To create progressive common spaces, planners and architects are simply not enough. This movement must rely on the openness of a nation, the collaboration of an entire society, and the self-consciousness of the multitude.

CHAPTER 12

Handicraft, Design, and Art

The Handicraft Renaissance1 After more than thirty years of economic development and wealth accumulation, Chinese society has undergone a dramatic reversal. Big cities used to be competitive spaces that people would occupy no matter what. But now, because of the pollution, some of them have begun to plan their escapes. Unknown villages abandoned to the past have become attractive. Ancient things, artifacts of a rural society, have also become objects of attention. WeChat is full of beautiful videos, either of inns hidden in the mountains or of ancient crafts that are on the verge of being lost to time. Drones fly over lush mountains and rivers, and there are close-ups of wrinkled and calloused hands—and professional lighting techniques allow all these things to shine with a divine light. Yet this aesthetic vision selectively masks a cruel and ugly reality. Behind changes in lifestyle are transformations of the mode of production. Mankind could not feed more and more people through hunting and gathering, so it invented agriculture; the handicraft industry is a mode of production that accompanies agriculture, and in order to improve 1  Completed in Chinese on January 28, 2016, in Bishan, published on iPress, February 7, 2016. The English version was translated by Matt Turner and Haiying Weng in 2019.

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production efficiency, man invented industry to replace it; when industry brings pollution, humans collectively turned to so-called tertiary industries, such as tourism and the service industry, IT, and finance—which have become the contemporary mode of production. On an axis of linear development, each change in every mode of production is accompanied by an outbreak of specifically human nostalgia. But nostalgia is not, in essence, a reminiscence over a particular geography—it is the natural human feeling that accompanies retrospection. The longer the time, the more inaccessible the past, the stronger the nostalgia is. In a country as large as China, because of uneven regional development, various modes of production actually coexist—providing, to a certain extent, the objects of people’s nostalgia. The aesthetic appreciation of ancient things is based on three kinds of distance. The first is the distance of time: the Chinese people have always, since ancient times, enjoyed “the ancient.” They talk about the sages, and Yao and Shun regularly enter conversation; talk of the ideal world is guided by The Rites of Zhou; an addiction to the old has created collectors and connoisseurs in all dynasties. In a contemporary world that is changing fiercely, nostalgia about the ancient feels more profound. The second is spatial distance: what is close at hand and familiar is not as strange and mysterious as what is far away—this is evidence of human curiosity and is natural. Third, the distance of class: people in the upper reaches of society have compassion for the lower reaches, and emotional expressions across classes cultivate feelings of morality, reflecting the humans’ impulses toward doing good. “Distance produces beauty” is a vulgar saying, but it does often reveal some kind of truth. China’s current interest in the countryside, its traditions and people, stems from the aforementioned psychological reality. Whether it is “rural reconstruction” or “returning home” that has become a fashionable topic, whether “organic agriculture” or “handicraft renaissance” is trending, there are no exceptions. Such trends are fantastic, but the result is always that the rich live in rural houses, eat organic food, and use handicraft products; the poor live in urban buildings, eat cheap fast food, and use industrial products. In terms of population mobility and the geographic landscape, the phenomenon of “gentrification” has appeared: a high-­ income class pours into historical communities or traditional villages, the original inhabitants move out; the old houses are transformed into luxurious and comfortable houses, and property rights replacement accompanies the shuffling of the population, resulting in a market reality. Under

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cover of “profound feelings” and aesthetics, it is actually class stratification. The term “handicraft renaissance” originates with an enthusiasm for handicrafts. In the hearts of handicraft enthusiasts, hand-made creations are the most beautiful, because the hand is connected to the heart—the craft is mindful, while machines are not. Handicraft enthusiasm is naturally anti-capitalist. Whether it is the Arts and Crafts Movement led by William Morris in Britain or the Mingei Movement advocated by Yanagi Sō etsu in Japan, it is opposed to the alienation of human beings by machines and hopes to return to the era of the handicraft guild. The term mingei (folk crafts), as defined by Yanagi Sō etsu, is an inexpensive utility made by hand in batches by the nameless, and used in daily life. The Kizaemon Tea Bowl is regarded to be one of the national treasures of Japan, but it was a daily tea bowl for the people of Choson Dynasty Korea—and was a cheap, rough thing. It is far from the luxurious “handicrafts” worshipped in China at the moment. The kinds of crafts that were defined by Sō etsu as bigei (artistic crafts) were tailor-made for aristocrats by renowned designers. They had a strong sense of style, were signed, were expensive, and were few. As a philosopher of the Japanese folk crafts movement, people once compared Yanagi Sō etsu with Tea Saint Sen no Rikyū—but Sō etsu did not accept such praise. He disdained Sen no Rikyū’s personality, who through the chanoyu (Way of Tea) attached himself to such dignitaries as Toyotomi Hideyoshi; even his death poem was copied from Gan Lixiu, a monk in Chengdu, Sichuan Province, during the Three Kingdoms Period.2 Although Sō etsu 2  See Yanagi Sō etsu, Forty Years of Mingei, Chinese version, trans. Shi Jianzhong and Zhang Lu (Guilin: Guangxi Normal University Press, 2011). As ordered by Hideyoshi, Rikyū committed seppuku in Kyoto on April 21, 1591, and left a death poem: “I’m seventy years old, I tried my best to be clumsy. My sword, it used to kill patriarchs and buddhas. Now I’m given a broadsword, and only at this time do I throw my life to heaven.” Okakura Kakuzō had translated it as: “Welcome to thee, O sword of eternity! Through Buddha, and through Daruma alike, thou hast cleft thy way.” See Kakuzo Okakura, The Book of Tea (Toronto: Dover Publications, 1964), 64–65. In the original Japanese-language poem, the idea of “kill patriarchs and buddhas” comes from a famous saying by the Chinese Zen Master Lin-chi (Linji): “Whether you’re facing inward or facing outward, whatever you meet up with, just kill it! if you meet a buddha, kill the buddha. If you meet a patriarch, kill the patriarch. If you meet an arhat, kill the arhat. If you meet your parents, kill your parents. If you meet your kinfolk, kill your kinfolk. Then for the first time you will gain emancipation, will not be entangled with things, will pass freely anywhere you wish to go.” See The Zen Teachings of Master Lin-chi: A Translation of the Lin-chi Lu by Burton Watson (Boston &

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resisted the pull of Marxism, his thought was full of mass consciousness. In his view, objects served people, so should be unobtrusive and reliable— not personalities in themselves. Like Morris, he believed that the golden age of folk crafts was in the Middle Ages, before the Renaissance, and was not the domain of a few geniuses—instead, the collective wisdom and experience of countless ordinary craftsmen created a world of rich objects. The warmth of the world of objects is related to the heart. If the heart is not what it was, and if people are busy pursuing profit, the objects created and used by them will be ugly. Therefore, if we want to have beautiful handicrafts, society must be better. During the boom time of capitalism in the nineteenth century, some British intellectuals were afraid of the machine world that was engulfing humans, and began to conceive of various social alternatives. The Fabian Society advocated practical social construction, social services with mutual aid and love, gradually coming to promote the principles of democratic socialism through reformist effort, rather than by violent revolution; Morris wrote a novel, News From Nowhere, that described his ideal society; A.J. Penty wrote The Restoration of the Guild System to propose guild socialism. These efforts were against the tide and were aimed at building a utopia amidst an ugly reality. The handicraft movement focused not only on the production of objects, but also on the related social reality. We should not be trapped by the name of “handicrafts.” We should have a sense of equilibrium, instead of deifying it being endowed with “profound feelings.” The emergence and disappearance of a thing have a historical logic. Don’t exaggerate the efforts and merits of salvation. A magnificent ancestral hall in the countryside is vacant and decaying because of the transformation of social structures and organizational modes, the rural population going out to work, clan relations becoming indifferent, its original function having been lost, and people having no intention of safeguarding it. Using ancient methods can restore the craftsmanship, but rejuvenating the community is the crucial issue. In a less affluent and more pragmatic society, the production of less time-consuming, low-cost, and practical industrial products is indeed more popular than the production of slow and more time-consuming handicrafts. Fast food is indeed more in line with the needs of low-income people than slow food. To enable them to consume the luxury of time, it may be necessary to increase their income. London: Shambhala, 1993), 52. Sō etsu’s reference to the Chinese monk Gan Lixiu seems to have no record in the Chinese literature.

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Marx wrote in his Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844: “It is true that labor produces for the rich wonderful things—but for the worker it produces privation. It produces palaces—but for the worker, hovels. It produces beauty—but for the worker, deformity. It replaces labor by machines, but it throws one section of the workers back into barbarous types of labor and it turns the other section into a machine. It produces intelligence—but for the worker, stupidity, cretinism.”3 Since capitalism arrived in the world, whether it is Morris or Sō etsu, or the handicraft renaissance efforts in China today, we have to face such problems. A basket weaver who knits beautiful baskets can only send one to a museum, never to be used; a worker who makes an iPhone at a Foxconn plant can’t afford it and may jump from a building because of their harsh working conditions. If the objects produced by laborers cannot be used by laborers, if labor is not the emancipation of the mind, then the objects produced by such labor may appear beautiful—but, in essence, are ugly. At present, most of the handicraft enthusiasts in China come from a well-clothed and well-fed strata of society. They focus their attention on ordinary people’s craft production because they are “enthusiastic,” “curious,” and “moral.” Some are greedy and do not hide their antique dealerlike enthusiasm for collecting possessions and buying everything they see; others do a little better and use their cultural resources and ability to discourse to act as agents for craftsmen, but as yet no one has seen a union formed with craftsmen where both sides play to their own strengths. Present examples would include designers who search for handicrafts in order to solve their own creative bottlenecks; architects who go to the countryside to practice building, borrowing the wisdom of vernacular architecture but in order to fulfill their own sense of self; and those who saw people open their surplus housing to share it with others and then stole the idea to invest in the concept of the homestay to build hotel chains. In this age of social media, all these actions are embellished with the label of “profound feelings.” In terms of the essence of handicrafts, what is lacking in the so-called renaissance promoted by the middle class today is the “peopleness.” In the early stages of building socialist China, under the ideological banner that “the alliance of workers and peasants is the main engine of state power,” a 3  Karl Marx, Economic & Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 (translated by Martin Milligan from the German text included in Die Marx-Engels-Gesamtausgabee, Abt. 1, Bd. 3, revised by Dirk J. Struik, marxists.org, 2000), 30.

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large number of artists and artisans were asked to go to the countryside to learn. The result of their work with ordinary people was supposed to emphasize collective creation and de-authorization. The “peopleness” appeared in various cultural products and was closely linked with the jurisprudential base of the socialist regime.4 After the Reform and Opening Up, with the growth of economic strength and the rise of individualism, individuality began to be flaunted, and the “peopleness” was gradually diminished; contemporary art without practical value was promoted, the material culture of handicrafts was ignored for a period of time before being picked up by some “connoisseurs”—and since then, there has been a new handicraft movement. The spontaneous descent of the emerging middle class to the people with goodwill and “profound feelings” is a good start, but if we can reduce our sense of self and release more “peopleness,” we will make great contributions.

The Whole Earth Community5 In 2014, Shangguan Zhe, a designer from Xiamen, released his guangchang (Square) series in London Collections: Men SS15, while Ma Ke, a designer based in Zhuhai, opened her fashion house WUYONG (meaning “useless”) in Beijing. This should give the public the polar opposite impression of Chinese designers from different generations: the young generation is keen to show their youthful energy on the stage of the international fashion industry, and to open up sales channels in different countries (the shop list displayed on the official website of Shangguan Zhe’s brand Sankuanz includes Tokyo, New York, Los Angeles, Moscow, Hong Kong, Beijing, 4  Articles 1 and 2 of the Constitution of the People’s Republic of China, adopted at the First Session of the First National People’s Congress on September 20, 1954, stipulate: “The People’s Republic of China is a people’s democratic state led by the working class and based on the alliance of workers and peasants.” “All power in the People’s Republic of China belongs to the people.” Although the Constitution was revised many times, “the alliance of workers and peasants” and “All power belongs to the people” have been kept unchanged. In 1975, “a people’s democratic state” was replaced by “a socialist state” for the first time. 5  Completed in Chinese on February 25, 2015 in Bishan, published in Economic Weekly 6 (2015) and  iPress on  April 15, 2015. The  English version was  translated by Matt Turner and  Haiying Weng in  2019. Ma Ke, the  designer mentioned in  the  article, participated in the field work in Bishan and the exhibition of the Bishan Project at the Chengdu Biennale in  2011. The  other designer mentioned, Shangguan Zhe, was  invited to  design the  new series of “Agritopia Dress for Bishan Commune,” but could not start as the Bishan Project was banned in 2016.

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Shanghai, Guangzhou, and other cities); but Ma Ke, one of the middle-­ age designers with international reputation, was tired of international exposure and even rebelled against the whole fashion industry, concealing herself in a second-tier city and rooting her design, production, and sales in China itself—to carry out subversive experiments from the extremes. Shangguan Zhe’s show in London was full of excitement and noise. The theme of the “Square” first reminds one of a space symbolizing power and control in iron curtain countries during the Cold War(e.g., Red Square, Tian’anmen Square…), and he uses the styles of the uniforms and tattoos of Russian prison inmates for printing patterns, echoing the image that “square” conjures up: the square is often set up in the name of “the people,” but it essentially shows political authority, 6while at the same time the uniform is used to discipline the body. Yes, the prison is the state apparatus for law enforcement, people who make trouble in the square will finally be bound by a prison.7 Tattoos are acts of resistance engraved into their bodies. Obviously, the shy designer Shangguan Zhe and his artist collaborator Chen Tianzhuo, who had a quick curtain call after the models left the stage, would never make so many political associations. They may just have seen the three volumes of the Russian Criminal Tattoo Encyclopaedia8 in the bookstores of the New Museum in New York or the Serpentine Gallery in London, and found their inspiration in it. In 2009, Deyan Sudjic, director of the London Design Museum, observed that “The tattoos moves from being the mark of the semi-criminal to the ankle of the spouse of the Conservative Party’s leader. Ultra-low-slung trousers move from prison wear, enforced when convicts have their belts removed, to mass-market youth cult..”9 Tattoos have become a fashion, the criminal connotation has been dispelled. Moreover, after entering the market economy in China, a large number of shopping malls in various cities are called 6  See Ou Ning, “Mass Media and Civil Society,” in H. Koon Wee, ed., The Social Imperative: Architecture and the City in China (Barcelona: Actar Publishers, 2017). 7  Ch’en Tu-hsiu (Chen Duxiu), the Chinese revolutionary socialist and co-founder of the Chinese Communist Party, had a famous statement about the youths and the prisons: “The two birthplaces of world’s civilization are science laboratory and prison. We youths should go to prison when we step out of labs, and back to labs when we leave prison. That is the most noble style of living.”—Chen Duxiu, “Laboratory and Prison,” The Weekly Review, Beijing, June 8, 1919. 8  Danzig Baldaev, Russian Criminal Tattoo Encyclopaedia (London: Murray & Sorrell FUEL, 2008). 9  Deyan Sudjic, The Language of Things (London: Penguin Books, 2008), 151.

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gouwu guangchang (“shopping plaza”). The times have changed and the meaning of the Chinese word guangchang has changed as well. So Shangguan and Chen put cartoon eye makeup on their models, put fluorescent dentures in their mouths, put colorful “giant hand” props on their hands, mix simplified Chinese characters into Russian tattoo patterns, and broadcast noisy Mandarin-speaking crowd recordings on the spot. That’s what they want to express. This is the hot Chinese youth subculture, which is enough to instantly kill the ugly old Chinese dragon in the minds of London viewers. For a long time now, what people have imagined about China has been lacking. However, Ma Ke’s WUYONG house in Beijing is a dark and quiet place that people revere. She restored an industrial site to a living environment from the time of the handicraft. The exposed bricks, mottled walls, and weak lighting create an atmosphere of material poverty and spiritual wanting, which is totally contrary to the bright, high-profile propaganda and desire stimulation of modern stores. The clothes, furniture, and miscellaneous things arranged and displayed there are all designed by her and made by hand slowly. Their quality enables them to be used over a long period of time. Time, which becomes a powerful protagonist there, is solidified in all the materials of the space, making people involuntarily put away mobile phones, iPads, and other mobile electronic devices; slow down, soften their voices; and even produce the desire to stop language altogether. Ma Ke has already abandoned the identity of “fashion designer.” Her thinking points to the ultimate questions: What is life? What is time? How should the mind situate itself? Where does history flow to? The WUYONG house is a system involving all aspects of life. It demonstrates her ideas through the combination of space, atmosphere, and objects. This does not mean that she has changed from a fashion designer to an “all-around designer.” Out of her belief in time and crafts, she wants to give the title “designer” back to both time and nature, because all the wonderful things in the world come from the chance meetings of heart, heaven, and earth. Ma Ke withdrew from the operation of EXCEPTION de Mixmind, a very mature fashion brand, largely because of her doubt and resistance to the concept and methods that support the whole fashion industry. She said goodbye to her past career with a resolute attitude. In the new experiment of WUYONG, she measures the cost of the time and wisdom of manual work with a surprisingly high price, and overturns the popular business model with a poverty-stricken space, an appointment system, and a way of refusing to quickly produce products. Such an

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experiment is unique anywhere in the world. It is a manifestation of a kind of independent and brave inner power, leaving most of the global design industry far behind. WUYONG is not, generally, commercial company. It is registered as a social enterprise. Its high prices do not consider the mass market at all, but allow artisans to obtain reasonable remuneration and dignity of labor. This displays Ma Ke’s simple idea of social equality. For those who are keen on luxury consumption, WUYONG will make them understand that time is the greatest luxury. From the above examples of Shangguan Zhe and Ma Ke, we can see that Chinese contemporary design is getting more and more attention. At present, not only are young Chinese fashion designers active in all the major international fashion weeks, but also Chinese architects often win in international architectural design competitions. After Ma Yansong won the bid for the residential skyscrapers in Canada with the design of the iconic “Marilyn Monroe” towers in 2006, he also won the design competition of the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art in Chicago in 2014 (now is confirmed to build in Los Angeles), and Wang Shu won the Pritzker Architecture Prize in 2012. In the field of graphic design, many Chinese graphic designers regularly win the Best Book Design from All Over the World award, held in Leipzig every year. In the field of industrial design, Chinese companies like LKK have also grown rapidly in just over ten years, serving customers all over the world and opening branches in London. Getting international attention is now a common thing, so common it’s not worth talking about. The reason why Chinese contemporary design is spreading widely in different parts of the world is partly due to the influence of rising national strength. An old empire that has risen again economically and politically attracts the curious eyes of the world—people want to understand why it has risen again. In addition to economic and political analysis, people also want to look for cultural answers. What kind of value system is it using to deal with the contemporary world? How has the appearance of citizens and daily life changed? How does its material and visual culture shape the national character? Strong curiosity, coupled with the enthusiasm of introducing a brand-new China to people still sleepwalking through the old world (the design shop opened in Beijing by the celebrity Hong Huang is called Brand New China, but its Chinese name is Mint, Sticky Rice & Scallion), let Chinese contemporary design (including contemporary art) get unprecedented exposure. On the other hand, the rise of national strength also enables Chinese people to travel further, even sending a new generation to study abroad.

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Wider and deeper contact with the outside world broadens vision, while the popularity of the Internet provides more opportunities for learning by oneself—greatly improving the knowledge and creative ability of Chinese designers. The most interesting thing is that in this era where the whole country actively participates in global economic integration and with increasing frequency cross borders to travel and study privately, the national consciousness of the Chinese people has not weakened but strengthened. Looking back at the Internet debates about Chinese diplomacy over the past decade, you can see that most of the radical “patriots” came from young overseas student groups. But the enhancement of national consciousness directly affects consumer psychology. In recent years, those young people who once pursued international brands have begun to look for the products of China’s designers. If Chinese designers want to compete in the international market, they should try to pour “Chineseness” into their works and play the “China card.” In the past, few Chinese designers were involved in the design and production of objects. And even if they were industrial designers, what we could see was only the design proposals on their computers that rarely became products. Today, products manufactured from design proposals are emerging in an endless stream through many sales ends have been set up, you can learn more about the Chinese industrial design at different stores. This shows that Chinese designers have begun to focus on searching a native material culture system, especially searching a new Chinese or Eastern style of contemporary aesthetics. So they turn to Chinese folk crafts and traditional culture to look for innovative inspiration or learn from Japan, nearby. That’s why the contemporary Chinese design you can see today has the subtle influence of Japanese style. The economic and political rise of a country is often accompanied by cultural anxiety. In the 1920s, the American writers known as the “lost generation” were dissatisfied with the lack of history and culture in the United States. At their most energetic age, they bought tickets to go to Europe for pilgrimage, but in Europe found that people admired America.10 Japan also experienced similar anxieties. The reason why Yanagi Sō etsu wanted to explore Japanese folk crafts (mingei) was to deal with the powerful “Western gaze.” He took Martin Heidegger’s appreciation of D. T. Suzuki’s Zen as an example and appealed to people to pay attention 10  Malcolm Cowley, Exile’s Return: A Literary Odyssey of the 1920s (New York: Viking Press, 1965), has a wonderful description of this. Its Chinese version was first published by Shanghai Foreign Language Education Press in 1986.

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to the “Japanese gaze”: “Do the Japanese have to live lives of imitation? I don’t think it’s necessary at all. It has been nearly a century since the Meiji Restoration, and people have gradually rid themselves of worship of the West. Now it is the East that has begun to send its gifts to the West.” 11 Before the Meiji Restoration, Japan tried to rid itself of the cultural influence of China and Korea, and after entering modernization, it tried to get rid of the influence of the West. In Yanagi Soetsu’s view, the “Japanese gaze” and the “Western gaze” are different in their pursuit of sense. What Japanese stress is “incomplete beauty,” that is, a beauty of sukiro (odd number), which connotes a lack for perfectly pairing as even number. Japanese tea masters are called sukisha (“odd masters”)—meaning that they can taste the pleasure of understanding the nature in the face of something missing, and they create the aesthetics of wabi-sabi, a worldview centered on the acceptance of impermanence and imperfection. In the cultural arena, the late-developing countries always assume that advanced countries are their rivals. China wants to develop soft power because after its economic and political rise, it is trying to export culture and values to compete with a powerful “West.” For a long time, Chinese designers have been eager to find international recognition. That anxiety implies a complex national psychology, which painfully struggles to overcome cultural inferiority and build national confidence. However, in today’s view, dividing the world into the East and the West, and then assuming that they are competitors, is residual Cold War thinking.12 If design means always carrying around a national psychology, it will become a heavy burden on designers. In young designers like Shangguan Zhe and Ma Yansong, you can see a relaxed attitude that transcends national divides. Even if they use Chinese characters or the theoretical framework of shanshui, they are not so much showing Chinese DNA in their designs as they are capturing the international tide or solving the ubiquitous problems of the living environment in the world today. You also can’t classify Ma Ke, who advocates “useless use,” as a designer of “Eastern style,” because her thinking points to the common living conditions of all human beings. Ma Ke’s experiments aim to turn popular consumer-oriented design around the world into a design oriented around 11  Yanagi Sō etsu, Forty Years of Mingei, Chinese version, trans. Shi Jianzhong and Zhang Lu (Guilin: Guangxi Normal University Press, 2011). 12  See Ou Ning, “Rewriting Asia: The Global Identity of Contemporary Asian Art,” in Michelle Nicol, ed., Art & Entrepreneurship (Zurich: Credit Suisse, 2008).

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social responsibility—WUYONG is not a charity, but a guide to “ethical consumption” that works towards social equality, rather than ostentatious luxury consumption. People always think that design is making things and living spaces more beautiful and fashionable, but as early as 1970 French philosopher Jean Baudrillard criticized people’s carelessness about the political nature and social meaning of design, at the International Design Conference held in Aspen, Colorado: “Problems of design and environment only look like objective ones. In fact, they are ideological problems.”13 If Chinese design can lead to more ethical consumers who also incorporate environmental ethics, social justice, and fair trade into their consumption behavior, then that is when it is actually powerful. In this era of economic globalization, contemporary consumerism has invented more fascinating marketing techniques. They constantly exert the magic of culture and design over endlessly and rapidly updated products, luring and stimulating people’s endless desires, and making people further enslaved to commodity fetishes. All consumer goods become rapidly outdated, their life cycles as short as meteor flashes, and obsolete old things are piled up like mountains to become waste and garbage. All of this is just to make capital explode and promote profit blowouts. This ever-increasing consumerism is devouring the natural resources shared by human beings, destroying the living environment, squeezing out labor, and gradually exhausting social energy. In the mid-1960s, Buckminster Fuller, an American architect and futurist, called for design not to be an accomplice of consumerism.14 Under his influence, a large-scale Back-to-­ the-land Movement broke out in North America. Half a century later, consumerism is also advancing with the times in the struggle against its opponents. It even uses the idea of environmental protection, originating with the Back-to-the-land Movement, as a marketing tool. Now, “environmental protection” has become a consumer product for sale at a price, to be constantly pursued as fashionable. When products enter the market with the label of “environmental protection,” the production process behind them is actually less environmentally friendly. While the production process of capital investment is polluting the environment, 13  Jean Aubert and Jean Baudrillard, “The Environmental Witch-Hunt: Statement by the French Group, 1970,” in Reyner Banham, ed., The Aspen Papers: Twenty Years of Design Theory from the International Design Conference in Aspen (New York: Praeger 1974), 208–210. 14  Nigel Whiteley, Design for Society (London: Reaktion Books, 1993).

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“environmental protection” has become a slogan for peddling, to be included in the cost. In the end, consumers will still pay. The crisis caused by today’s consumerism is not only in a certain country, but is a global phenomenon. If Chinese designers really want their own designs to be “cosmopolitan,” they should actively join the “whole earth community” and take responsibility for protecting it, rather than still clinging to their narrow national identity. Only by providing solutions to the universal problems of the whole earth can design truly demonstrate its power.

The Subject of Public Art15 What Is Public Art? Before the concept of public art came into being, most of the art in the public streets or spaces of Chinese cities was “city sculpture” or “environmental art.” But since the concept of “public art” has emerged, it is inclusive of both “city sculpture” and “environmental art”—along with other forms. Today, what we call “public art” also includes “site-specific art,” which refers to artistic projects deliberately created for the space and historical context of a specific site. It also includes “socially engaged art,” “participatory art,” “community art,” and “dialogical art”—all emphasizing interactive dialogue with community and people through art projects, mobilizing their participation. “Public art” can also be associated with the following terms: “artivism,” which is the combination of art and activism; “festivals,” referring to large-scale outdoor or indoor art activities; “arts districts,” like art communities such as 798; “social centers,” which include social support and social workstations; “community media,” “community radio,” and “citizen media.” Community media began to appear in the 1960s, when many hippies set up their own radio stations; after the advent of the Internet, community media became more convenient and many individuals did it themselves to participate in commentary on social issues. It also includes non-profit arts organizations (NPAO) and “art/media”— meaning that many artists regard art itself as a medium rather than an art 15  This paper is a record of the speech delivered at the Shenzhen Public Art Center on April 24, 2016, which was edited from the transcript by the Public Art Center and published on its public WeChat account. The author made further amendments to the paper based on the syllabus for “Curatorial Practices and Placemaking,” a course offered in the Spring 2017 semester at the Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation. The English version was translated by Matt Turner and Haiying Weng in 2019.

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magazine or newspaper. Some things that emerged from social movements can also be applied to the field of art—so they can also be included within the scope of public art. From a global perspective, these all appeared very early on, so I set the time beginning at 1989 for my topic. We often say that “contemporary art” and “the contemporary” can be defined very differently in the history of art. For example, in the 1960s and 1970s, contemporary art could refer to art after the end of World War II; but today when we talk about contemporary art, we may need to move the time forward. Many art historians regard 1989 as a very important historical moment, because it was the year the Internet came into being, beginning to enter the civilian field after military usage. At the same time, the Eastern European bloc collapsed. Then the Cold War ended and globalization began. The neoliberal economy broke through the barriers of many Iron Curtain countries and allowed transnational corporations to enter into some less-developed countries; financial capital became stronger and stronger, and the power of the government has begun to shrink, turning the situation into one of “small government, big market.” The beginning of the post-Cold War era is an important dividing line for the times, giving art a totally different appearance. The concept of public art began in the 1960s, around when the civil rights movement began to gain steam in the United States and the May 1968 student uprising broke out in France. At that time, Michel Foucault said, “What strikes me is the fact that in our society, art has become something which is related only to objects and not to individuals, or to life. That art is something which is specialized or which is done by experts who are artists. But couldn’t everyone’s life become a work or art? Why should the lamp or houses be an object, but not our life?”16 This idea reflects the view of intellectuals on art in the 1960s. Art should not be controlled only by educated professionals—it should be that everyone’s life can become art. The spiritual heritage of the 1960s gave birth to the concept of public art, which is closely related to the rise of the concept of civil rights. May 1968 was also influenced by Guy Debord’s thought in The Society of the Spectacle. Debord was a prophet, his theory having profound insight into the horrible future of capitalism. Today’s capitalism has been renewed and replaced, and the consumerism spectacle it produces in the society has 16  Quoted in Nato Thompson, Living as Form: Socially Engaged Art from 1991-2011 (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2012), 17.

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become more severe than in the 1960s. This spectacle has become one of mind control that engulfs all of our lives. The strategies of the dérive and détournement invented by Debord and his fellows of the Situationist International are still in effect today and have been adopted by many social activists and artists committed to social criticism. Dérive is a sort of humorous and playful approach and psychological feeling beyond the usual definition of things, while détournement is a process of recreating popular things through inversion, irony, and lampooning. These two methods have been developed into “culture jamming” by many radical street artists, among which the most well-known was the Billboard Liberation Front, founded in San Francisco in 1977. The group is best known for subverting the original commercial meaning of large billboards in urban spaces by secretly altering their words and patterns and transforming them into outdoor media for political expression, as mentioned in Naomi Klein’s 1999 book No Logo. Klein also discusses the Canadian anti-consumer magazine Adbusters, the graffiti artist Banksy, and others. In the following remarks I will give more examples to illustrate the creative uses of these two strategies by artists. In the upgrade and evolution from traditional capitalism to neoliberalism, “gentrification” has been a very common phenomenon. It appears not only in cities but also in rural areas. Gentrification refers to population shuffles across historical communities or underdeveloped areas and is caused by those with education and high income who want to move in just as some of the original residents want to leave. Old and dilapidated urban districts have been gentrified, and it has been prevalent in some of the big cities in Europe and the United States since the 1960s. Today, it has begun to spread to rural areas. Villagers want to move to cities because they lack opportunities for development, while the urban middle class wants to move in because they yearn for country air and a healthy natural environment. In general, the old historical or rural communities have poor infrastructures, so the original residents don’t enjoy living there very much; the middle class or people with more resources prefer to settle in old communities in the countryside or urban center because of their “nostalgia.” Such a population shuffle is a reality caused by the so-called free market. Gentrification as such describes the contrast of social class and changes of power during social transformations. It is very common in today’s Chinese society, part of the reality of urbanization, and also an important issue for contemporary public art to face.

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The large-scale emergence of public art has much to do with the change of political model from the 1960s to today. The most popular political model in the world is party politics, where a party represents an interest group. In fact, the public affairs of society are the mode of consultation between different interest groups through political agents such as parties. There are many problems with party politics today—in fact, you find that just as you choose an incompetent lawyer, your political representative sometimes does not represent you very well. Patchwork concepts emerge to fill in the gaps, such as “civil society,” referring to the so-called third way, which is a supplement to the social construction of the government and the free market. Its practice mainly relies on non-governmental organizations (NGOs), with special emphasis on helping to soften social conflicts and foster a supervisory “society” outside the government and the free market. But in recent years, NGOs have had the same problems as governments or corporations, and even administrative hierarchy and bureaucracy have arisen in them. Then there is Jürgen Habermas’ theory of the “public sphere,” which is slightly different from that of the “public space.” His vision is to promote social change by creating a sphere of public opinion, which may be tangible or intangible, but refers more to the spiritual space where one can discuss public issues. In fact, it is not very effective, because it fails to accurately find the forces driving people to participate in public discussion, and the social mobilization needed to promote the public sphere is also difficult. Tessa Morris-Suzuki, a scholar at Australia National University, found that in recent years some grassroots political models of self-reliance had emerged in Northeast Asia—such as Japan, North Korea, Mongolia, and China. This model is the evolution and variation of civil rights thought of the 1960s in the new reality and can be called “informal life politics.” For example, after the Fukushima nuclear leak in Japan, many Japanese farmers relied neither on the government nor on NGOs, nor on the news media and journalists, and nor on foreign capital. They relied on themselves to buy equipment to measure whether their cattle and crops were polluted by radiation, and to rebuild their communities through self-­ reliance. Another example is the black market for drugs in North Korea, which is a coping strategy of the people toward their living conditions under totalitarian politics. Of course, the cunning wisdom of the French saying, “à bon chat, bon rat,” in Chinese urban villages is also a kind of “informal life politics.” In such a kind of model, the spontaneous

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self-­building of the common people actually provides a vivid and visible sample for the subjectivity of contemporary public art. Empowerment All these changes provide a political basis for the emergence of new public art. There are several important concepts in today’s public art practice: first, “empowerment,” that is, artists hoping to give ordinary people rights through art activities. Empowerment is based on the assumption that people live in a state of disempowerment, and as such, later on some artists felt that the concept of empowerment was problematic because it still could not be separated from the traditional pattern of power distribution, from the top to the bottom. Therefore, they put forward the idea of “rights activation,” or “animation,” which means that the original rights should be animated, that is, activating the innate rights of the common people. Jurisprudentially, these rights have always existed, but have never been used. Behind the efforts of rights activation is the idea of equal rights. Artists have changed their concepts of “being empowered or authorized” and “bringing rights” to the lower class from the upper class, but instead they see themselves as a neutral medium, equals with the common people. Through artistic activities, they can help people recover or activate their rights. This idea affects the self-definition of artists in public art or community art. They will reduce their status as artists and define themselves as “facilitators.” The definition of “facilitator” is not emphasizing an elite education or professional artistic background. Nor does it emphasize that they can bring the rights of the people from the top to the bottom. They are not representatives, agents, or spokesmen of the people, but their role is like that of a bridge, connecting many resources through artistic practice or activities that activate the rights of the people. This concept was developed out of the Occupy Wall Street movement, and I use the concept of social movement to talk about public art here because the political content of public art is big. In discussing public art, it is very important to discuss its public nature, which means that we need all of us together to participate in public affairs. And the essence of handling everyone’s affairs is politics. It’s easy to think of public art as a kind of charity, such as when American-Chinese artist, Lily Yeh, who calls herself a “barefoot artist,” goes to Africa to build houses for poor communities using artistic means,

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or improves schools for migrant children in Beijing. But these are all projects borne out of love, so it is limiting to understand it as a charity. Charity is a concept from capitalism. Charity is when you want to buy social influence after you have money. Many good deeds aimed toward the poor are really aiming at those who do the deeds—not to mention empowerment or rights activation—which cannot cultivate the subjectivity of the poor. But look at Indonesia’s Cemeti Art House, an art project that has lasted for many years. It mobilizes indigenous people to restore the traditional rituals and artistic activities of their communities. The artists are the organizers and moderators. Its founders, Mella Jaarsma and Ninditiyo Adipurnomo, have a saying that’s very good: “If you want to change, start with yourself; you can no longer blame the government for everything.”17 I think this sentence accurately tells the essence of informal life politics and the direction of public art or community art after the Cold War, that is, to establish the subjectivity of ordinary people through artistic activities. In 1994, artist Susanne Lacy invited 220 high school students to sit in different cars and talk about family, sex, drugs, culture, education, and the future on the roof parking lot of a building in Oakland, California. She also invited around 1000 ordinary citizens and journalists, who walked between cars to listen. The event was made into an hour-long documentary, and the students’ chats were completely scriptless and unedited, broadcast on local television and CNN. This project, titled The Roof Is on Fire, was a public activity participated in by the public and young people, initiated by the artist after a long period of investigation, preparation, education, and training in schools, and was a classic of participatory art or public art in the early 1990s. In fact, it established a special channel for young people’s voices and thoughts to be heard by society. The art group Mammalian Diving Reflex (MDR), in Toronto, has also done a great job in stimulating, highlighting, and respecting the subjectivity of adolescents and children. In 2006, they launched an interesting project, Haircuts by Children, where a group of children from a neighborhood trained in hairdressing, then giving their services to adults. The aesthetic characteristics of the hairstyles were determined by the children. In 2005, when Hurricane Katrina hit the city of New Orleans, Paul Chan, a Hong Kong-born American artist, was shocked by the ruins of the city. In the first Prospect New Orleans Triennial in 2007, he invited a professional theater troupe from New  York to perform Samuel Beckett’s  Ibid., 122.

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Waiting for Godot on the streets of New Orleans, to be staged in the ruins, and raised the public concern for post-Katrina reconstruction. To prepare for the project, Paul Chan went to teach in two local universities for three months. On the one hand, he volunteered to fill the shortage of teachers after the disaster. On the other hand, through encountering local students, he contacted local families and mobilized communities. The syllabi he wrote for his courses also became part of the Waiting for Godot in New Orleans project. Paul Chan is an artist who often focuses on international political issues with his works of art. He went to Baghdad to shoot a documentary during the Iraq War in 2002. And later, the publishing house he founded, Badlands Unlimited, published Saddam Hussein’s works, reflecting on democracy from a negative perspective. Concerns about political turmoil or war zones have become the subject of many artists’ works, but most of them present tragic or bitter realities. British artist Phil Collins (not the well-known singer), who focused on Palestine in the Israeli-­ Palestinian conflict during 2004, however, made a two-screen video titled They Shoot Horses, where young Palestinians were asked to dance marathon-­ style for seven hours in front of a pink backdrop at a community center. He recorded the perseverance and optimism of these young people in real time. Superflex is an active group of Danish artists. They do many anti-­ capitalist and anti-consumerist art projects, including opening a shop for counterfeit goods—the T-shirts, sneakers, beer, and cola sold to customers were all satirical imitations of major brands. This is similar to the supermarket opened by Chinese artist Xu Zhen, which sold only packages but no real products. This is the artists’ creative inheritance and application of Debord’s strategies of dérive and détournement. At the 2003 Venice Biennale, Superflex also opened a beverage store, which did not look like an artwork at all. It sold “Guarana Power,” a beverage that was made with the cooperation of Brazilian farmers. Because some large multinational companies had monopolized the agricultural market in Brazil, the price of guarana was depressed. The buying price was lowered, but it was still sold at a high price, resulting in many farmers who grow guarana having low income and difficult situations. So, the artists helped them turn guarana into soft drinks and then opened a shop to sell it at the Venice Biennale, thus developing an alternative economic path to bypass the exploitation of large companies. Through the self-organized production and sales, the farmers have gained more subjectivity.

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Participation In the works mentioned earlier, we can see how artists have diluted their professional identities. They borrowed the engagement techniques of social movements and combined them with their own cultural and artistic resources so that ordinary people become the protagonists of various projects and events. This approach has also been widely used in non-­mainstream film production, such as the documentary La Commune (Paris, 1871) produced by British director Peter Watkins in 2000, which mobilized many members of European NGOs to reenact the historical scene of the 1871 Paris Commune. The director abandoned his superior position in the mainstream film industry and, after drawing up a general framework, the “actors” improvised their acting, adopting a democratic method of film production. When these social workers reproduced the debate within the Paris Commune at that time, they “dérived” from the historical situation to contemporary social issues and improvised many “détournements,” so that if you saw the people dressed in nineteenth-century clothes discussing current politics, you would feel like you were going back and forth in time. I organized a screening of this documentary at the Ullens Center for Contemporary Art in Beijing in 2009 as a supplementary program for the seminar “Social Space for the Post-1980 Generation,” which invited some social activists who were born in the 1980s, including Eddie Chu Hoi Dick and Tang Siu Wa from Hong Kong, to participate. The film was provided by the Hong Kong Social Movement Film Festival. At the time, Beijing was able to host such an event. Now, it would probably be impossible. The British artist Jeremy Deller also makes films using historical reenactment. In 2001, he produced the film The Battle of Orgreave, a reenactment of the 1984 strike in a British Steel Corporation (BSC) coking plant at Orgreave, Rotherham, South Yorkshire, England. It was one of the bloodiest protests in the history of the British workers’ movement, in which more than 10,000 workers and police participated in violent clashes. The artist invited a local historical reenactment group to plan, coordinate, and execute the performance, and among them were some who were participants in the original conflict, and who spoke with the local accent. Jeremy Deller once said, “I went from being an artist who makes things, to being an artist who makes things happen.”18 Art is no longer just  Ibid., 17.

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objects; public art is no longer just “city sculpture.” Art involves social mobilization and organization. It can also stimulate events, make people reflect on history, and make real society change. In Japan, the documentary master Ogawa Shinsuke filmed Magino Village: A Tale in the same way in 1987, mobilizing around 200 villagers to reenact their village history. This practice of mobilizing ordinary people to participate, and transferring so-called professional power to them, has also been tried in my own documentary practice. When I was concerned about the urban demolition and relocation struggles before the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games, I handed a digital camera to Zhang Jinli, who was the proprietor of a nail house. The final film, Meishi Street, used both his and my own footage. In music, artists have made similar attempts. A couple of artists in Finland, Tellervo Kalleinen and Oliver Kochta-Kalleinen, have organized numerous Complaint Choir in major cities across the world since 2005. The specific way they do it is first to visit many city residents, collecting the opinions of everyone who is not satisfied—the information is very scattered and in pieces, and includes everything, like being too fat, or that their grandmother is a racist, or beer is too expensive, and so on. He lets professional composers recount the complaints of these people, and then lets them form a choir, sing in public spaces and make videos for the Internet. This is how it came about: when Finland took part in a Nordic singing competition, it always lost to Sweden, but the Finns were not convinced. So they worked hard to practice their singing skills, finally defeating Sweden. The artists were inspired by it. They organized the first Complaint Choir in Helsinki, and then it spread on the Internet. Other cities continued to join, and eventually it became a border crossing, self-­ developed, and self-sustained public activity. Now there are more than twenty versions of the Complaint Choir in different parts of the world, including, for the Asian region, the Tokyo version, the Singaporean version, and the Hong Kong version, providing interesting outlets for dissatisfaction. In architectural practice, Taiwanese architect Hsieh Ying-chun invented a light steel structure that can be built quickly, mobilizing people in earthquake-­stricken areas for “collaborative construction.” They can choose their own style of house, and help each other in the process of construction, so that the victims themselves also constitute the main body of labor, reuniting the spirit of village community. Celine Condorelli, an architect and artist, is one of the participants in the 2010 Get It Louder and has designed a series of Support Structure since 2003. These structures are placed in

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galleries or in public spaces, and the audience or users can reassemble them according to their own ideas and needs. The term “support” accurately defines the identity of architects in these projects. They mobilize the masses with their professional abilities and resources, giving people more choices and stimulating people’s subjective initiative. However, architects are not the main body of the project, just a “support” force. Mobilizing the masses is a very important means for socially engaged art, but we should be vigilant that the mobilized masses should not be turned into tools for artists to achieve their goals. Instrumentalization is common in the ecology of party politics, and the silent masses have often been “represented”—as the passive tools of political parties. Especially in the propaganda art of totalitarian regimes, they are nameless and faceless, grains of sand in an ocean of people. Claire Bishop, in her book Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship, mentioned two large propaganda art projects in the early Soviet Union, one of which was The Storming of the Winter Palace directed by Nikolai Evreinov, a 1920s dramatist, to commemorate the third anniversary of the October Revolution. It was a large-scale performance, a huge “movement of people,” with more than 8000 ballet dancers, circus performers, supernumeraries, and students, as well as tanks and armored vehicles participating in the performance. They reenacted the revolutionary scene in front of 100,000 spectators, forming a “mass spectacle.” The other example is the Symphony of Sirens, directed by the composer Arseny Avraamov in 1922 to commemorate the fifth anniversary of the October Revolution, which was implemented successively in Baku and Moscow, where the urban space itself participated in the performance. The sounds of bell towers, alarm sirens, warship sirens, bus horns, factory steam engines, and artillery combined together into this grand symphony. In that bracing spectacle, the machines in the second project were the same as the masses of people in the first project. They were props to constitute the spectacles. These two projects can be said to be the originators of the large-scale celebration art that later influenced Nazi Germany and socialist countries such as China and North Korea. The Nazi Nuremberg Congress, or the National Day celebrations of China and North Korea, belongs to this kind of mobilization and regulation that requires totalitarian power. In the massive machine of totalitarian power, the masses are only the gears of passive participation. Regrettably, in Chinese contemporary art during the late 1990s and the beginning of this century, there have been many artworks that lured migrant workers with a paltry sum of payment to be part

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of the artworks. In fact, the “participation” is not real; it is equivalent to taking “the masses” as “work materials.” Ai Weiwei invited 1001 Chinese citizens to participate in the Fairytale project in Documenta 12, Kassel, in 2007, which also had the air of “instrumentalization,” because with the masses that crowd the streets of Kassel, dragging suitcases behind them in a unified configuration, you cannot see any sort of subjectivity of these people. Public Space The aforementioned examples are mostly about socially engaged art, which focuses on the subjectivity of the public, that is, the relationship between the public and the public art. Let me talk about another key element of public art, public space. As street-art like graffiti and “culture jamming” has revealed, the street is one of the most important public spaces. As early as 1968, Vienna artist Valie Export (in order not to use her father’s or husband’s surname, she coined Export as her “surname”) used the street as a space to express her feminist views. She hung a box in front of her chest, welcoming everyone on the street to reach in and touch her, provocatively publicizing private behavior. From 1981 to 1982, Taiwan-­ born artist Tehching Hsieh lived outdoors and limited his activities to the street in New York City, without entering any indoor spaces, this ascetic art influencing many later performance artists. In 1983, David Hammons, a black American artist, made a performance Bliz-aard Ball Sale, selling snowballs at Cooper Square, New York. He felt that artists who dealt with galleries and collectors were a joke, and he kept always hung a suit or uniform behind the snowball stall (which may be an institutional symbol). “I decided a long time ago that the less I do the more of an artist I am. Most of the time, I hang out on the streets. I walk.”19 For him, those who signed their names and sold their works in the art market were not artists; real artists did not exhibit, “that’s why I like doing stuff better on the street, because the art becomes just one of the objects that’s in the path of your everyday existence. It’s what you move through, and it doesn’t have any seniority over anything else.”20 In this sense, Hong Kong’s Tsang Tsou-choi’s scribbling on the streets is also an art. As to whether he should 19  Peter Schjeldahl, “The Walker: Rediscovering New York with David Hammons,” New Yorker (December 23 & 30, 2002). 20  Interview with David Hammons by Kellie Jones, Real Life, no. 16 (Autumn 1986): 2.

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be regarded as an artist, I have written an article to discuss the “subalternness” of his graffiti.21 In 2006, I visited the 4th Berlin Biennale co-curated by Massimiliano Gioni, Ali Subotnick, and Maurizio Cattelan. It was one of the most impressive biennials I’ve seen, located along the street Auguststraße, in Berlin-Mitte. With a church on this street, an abandoned ballroom, an old post office, a Jewish girl’s school, and many private apartments, even the cemetery was equipped with exhibits, turning the street into a scene of art. The relationship between art and street in New York’s Storefront for Art and Architecture also made for a very good interpretation. Architect Steven Holl designed doors and windows that can be opened or closed by rotating up and down, or left and right, to transform a street shop into an exhibition space for art and architecture. When it opens, the interior and exterior boundaries disappear, the inner space and street space are completely integrated. Beijing’s Arrow Factory Space also transformed from a street shop and may be regarded as the smallest art space in China. It is rooted in the hutongs near the Imperial Academy. The art projects there emphasize the integration of street and community life. I have also written an article about them.22 Of course, streets are also places where artists can observe society and get inspiration. Japanese architects such as Genpei Akasegawa, Terunobu Fujimori, and Shinbo Minami established the Roadway Observation Society, using the method of “modernology” that is used to research Japanese folklore and history, to study the relationship between urban design, architectural history, and folk wisdom through street visits. The street is also a very important political space. Large-scale street protests such as Occupy Wall Street need not be mentioned. Zhang Jinli, the nail householder I filmed, creatively transformed Meishi Street in front of his restaurant into a personal protest space full of his complaints when facing demolition.23 Chto Delat, an art group in St. Petersburg, worked with two social movement groups in 2006 to organize a performance, 21  See Ou Ning, “A Hong Kong History of Madness,” in David Spalding, ed., The King of Kowloon: The Art of Tsang Tsou Choi (Bologna: Damiani, 2013). 22  See Ou Ning, “An Arrow,” in Rania Ho, Wang Wei and Pauline J.  Yao, eds, 3 Years Arrow Factory: 2008-2011 (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2011). 23  See Ou Ning, “The Story of Zhang Jinli.” Volume 8: Ubiquitous China (Amsterdam: Stichting Archis, 2006) and “Street Life in Dashilar,” in Jonathan Harris and Richard J. Williams, eds., Regenerating Culture and Society: Architecture, Art and Urban Style within the Global Politics of City-Branding (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2011).

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Angry Sandwich People, or In Praise of Dialectics, on Stachek Square. They hung text from Bertolt Brecht’s poem “In Praise of Dialectics” on their bodies, reminding people of the drying up of the revolutionary thinking, the necessity of a new protest movement, and the possibility of social transformation. Another group, Voina, was more radical. In 2010, they graffitied a huge penis onto the Liteyny Bridge in St. Petersburg. When the bridge was lifted to let ships pass, the 65-meter-high image was “erected” directly against the headquarters of the Federal Security Service (FSB) in St. Petersburg, formerly known as the KGB.  This work, known as Dick Captured by KGB, is an undisguised provocation to political authority and taboos. In 2002, artists Jennifer Allora and Guillermo Calzadilla, living in San Juan, Puerto Rico, placed giant pieces of chalk, the size of real people, on the square in the center of Lima, Peru’s capital city. Citizens and tourists could break off pieces of chalk to write their complaints and ideas about politics, public issues, and everyday life onto the ground. The chalk as used was a catalyst for the public space to stimulate public expression and was later implemented in many cities around the world. Ordinary people and artists can not only transform original urban space such as streets and squares into new spaces for confrontational politics, but also give new functions to some spaces that have become useless, abandoned because of improper design or left unused for various reasons. In 1997, Spanish artist Lara Almarcegui saw an abandoned railway station in Zaragoza. She told the local railway company that she wanted to make art there. As a result, she secretly turned it into a temporary free hotel, named Hotel Fuentes de Ebro, to receive visitors and local residents for accommodation and meals for one week. I invited her to the Shenzhen and Hong Kong Bi-City Biennale of Urbanism/Architecture in 2009, and she found an unused land near the Shenzhen-Hong Kong borderline and also offered a potential solution proposal for the exhibition. When I was living in Guangzhou, I saw many spaces under overpasses in Panyu occupied by common people to open vending stalls or play billiards, where they created lively entertainment and leisure quarters. Also in Spain, the artist collective Basurama, born in the Madrid School of Architecture in 2001, turned “dead corner” space under an elevated bridge into a creative park and playground in Lima in 2010. All the materials they used came from their collection of urban solid waste, including plastic products and automotive tires and parts, which were used to make chic swings and children’s climbing devices. This waste utilization was not an Italian Arte Povera-like studio art, but outdoor environmental design. Although the project is not

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so well known, it acts as a lubricant to social contradictions, like the High Line Park in New York designed by Diller Scofidio+Renfro. Unlike turning them into spaces of confrontational politics, parks and recreational facilities like these provide more space for low-income people to rest and enjoy themselves, repairing the social tearing caused by the polarization of the rich and the poor and gentrification, and have a certain degree of therapeutic effect on the poor and vulnerable. Social Engagement The same therapeutic effect also includes projects that attempt to activate small-scale community economies. For example, Colectivo Cambalache in Bogota, Colombia, launched the Museo de la Calle project between 1999 and 2002, which mobilized community residents to take out their unused goods and participate in barter fairs on the streets, which was conducive to activating second-hand goods in the community. Circulation helped community residents who cannot participate in market consumption in the outside world. I have organized similar activities in Bishan Village, naming it “Talk & Buy,” where villagers could auction their old and useless things. If we could issue community currency in exchange for working hours, then the small system of the community economy would be more complete. For historic communities or villages threatened by gentrification, this kind of barter exchange and labor exchange can develop a mutually beneficial relationship. Those who cannot keep up with market needs because of outdated labor skills can be reorganized to do some work that can meet the needs of the community, and within the community, and obtain everyday commodities through this internal exchange system. In 2014, I went to Philadelphia to visit Paul Glover, who was the mayor of Ithaca in the 1990s, and the inventor of the community currency Ithaca Hours, which encouraged an economy of mutual aid in Ithaca to evade the influence of large-scale commodity consumption. The St. James’ Settlement in Wanchai, Hong Kong, has also adopted a system of community mutual aid. In the art world, Julieta Aranda and Anton Vidokle, founders of e-flux, founded a “time bank” in Frankfurt, and they also printed time-based currency to circulate in the art world. But when it comes to the most therapeutic art project, I think that Waste Not, by Chinese artist Song Dong, would be the one. In 2005, he arranged, categorized, and exhibited the waste that his mother had refused to abandon for years in order to help her leave behind the grief caused by her

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husband’s death, and also to overcome the discomfort brought by the drastic changes in Chinese cities’ consumer lives.24 In addition to the radical revolutionary plan of confrontation, we should seek therapy for social trauma or explore gradual social reforms. One of the necessary paths is education. Whether it’s a utopian community experiment in the West or a rural reconstruction movement in China, education has always been one of the necessary options, and artists have long been interested in education. In Paul Chan’s Waiting for Godot in New Orleans, the most important thing was probably not the theatrical performance, but the long-term preparatory process in schools. It was not a top-down indoctrination of knowledge, but a thorough dialogue, a comprehensive and in-depth way of social communication. On his syllabi was a lecture on Theodor Adorno’s theory of “art as art itself.” He explained that people can’t expect much help from art in the reconstruction of New Orleans after the disaster. Because art has its own purity, it can’t become “disaster tourism.” What the disaster area needs is more practical help. His educational activities were aimed at forming social empathy for the disaster situation in New Orleans, and bringing strength to the art by means of activism, rather than simply using art to bring social aid. The open-air performance Waiting for Godot was just a trigger. Greater efforts are reflected in the impact of educational activities on the community and the final results of concern-raising. In Berlin, artist Hannah Hurtzig launched a project called The Mobile Academy in 2005. She often organizes “The Black Market for Useful Knowledge and Non-Knowledge” activities with changing collaborators in large public spaces such as theaters or auditoriums, inviting experts—for example, scientists, philosophers, scholars, artists, craftsmen, and skilled citizens—and pairing them up with people who are interested in learning. Each pair occupies a table for one-to-one questions or dialogue for about thirty  minutes. Usually these activities will have at least 12 tables, at most 120 tables. In addition, people can watch, as if it were a grand exhibition or performance of knowledge sharing. This temporary “academy” has become more and more popular in artists’ practice. Even the Shenzhen and Hong Kong Bi-City Biennale has had its own “temporary academy” since 2013.

24  See Ou Ning, “The Experience of Family and Social Change: Song Dong’s Home and Art,” in Betti-Sue Hertz, ed., Song Dong: Dad and Mom, Don’t Worry About Us, We Are All Well (San Francisco: Yerba Buena Center for Arts, 2011).

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Although many art practices have spilled over from the traditional museum space, the museum is still an art site worth many artists’ efforts— because art museums are still so-called statutory art venues, where people converge.25 As a spatial symbol of the art system, they are very suitable for artists to explore the boundaries of art and politics. In 2008, Cuban artist Tania Bruguera implemented her fifth performance in the Tatlin’s Whispers series at London’s Tate Modern: two uniformed policemen rode a white horse and a black horse into the main hall of the gallery to patrol. There were at least six crowd control methods they commonly used for large street gatherings, sometimes separating the audience, sometimes forcing them into a group, and the police’s performances were often evidence of English humor. The artist is like someone collecting a street specimen and putting it into the safe white cube space of the gallery, vividly showing how power and order work, and revealing the relationship between political authority and the crowd. The gallery is a more suitable space for dissecting group control technique than for street observation. As for research-oriented projects, the art gallery is also an ideal place for display. In recent years, the Forensic Architecture team led by Eyal Weizman has developed a new method of war crime identification through the analysis of modeling techniques for destroyed buildings, which has greatly enhanced the role of architecture in the study of human conflicts—and their visual interpretation and graphic analyses are also very suitable for exhibition in gallery spaces. Mexican artist Pedro Reyes produced spades for an exhibition in a gallery in 2008. At first glance, there seemed to be nothing special about it. It was easy to mistake for ready-made works of art. But when you understand the process behind the production, you will feel impressed and feel that only in a gallery exhibition can highlight this power. It turned out that the political and social conflicts were very serious in Mexico in the 1990s. Almost every family had guns. There were violent incidents frequently, and many deaths and injuries. The artist mobilized the Mexican people to take the guns out of their homes, rolling over them with a steam roller and putting them in a furnace and making them into spades. In addition to exhibiting it in art galleries, they were also used in daily life, for shoveling earth and planting trees. The Pistols into Spades project was very 25  Concerned the museumification in China, see Ou, Ning. “Shrine of Knowledge, Palace of Aesthetics, or Theater of History: Museum Design in China.” In Melissa Chiu, ed., Making a Museum in the 21st Century (New York: Asia Society, 2014).

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similar to one of Chen Zhen’s works that I implemented and exhibited at the Shenzhen and Hong Kong Bi-City Biennale in 2009. Chen Zhen died in 2000, and his wife showed me a book of his, full of artistic projects that he had not been able to realize. I selected one of them, the Danser La Musique project, and made it in Shenzhen. It was a trampoline for children. There were many musical bells hanging under it, made from melted bullet shells collected from war zones. When children jumped on it, bell-­ like sounds could be heard. Because interacting with children is not suitable for static display in art galleries, I installed it at the entrance square of a shopping mall with a large flow of people. The art system represented by museums and galleries, including the collection system and art market associated with it, is one of the incentives for the extension of the concept of “public art.” In the 1960s, in order to resist the commercialization of art, artists invented new forms of non-­ material “conceptual art” as well as “land art,” which could not be collected because they were far away from art galleries or huge in volume—in addition to “site-specific art” that needed specific sites for their realization. By the 1970s, artist Gordon Matta-Clark had begun his “cutting” series in uninhabited buildings, where sometimes he cut a house in half, and sometimes cut various shapes out from walls or interior partitions, and which he called “anarchitecture.” To pay tribute to him, Tercerunquinto, an art group from Mexico, built a wall and hollowed out the fourteen characters of “anarchitecture” from the wall during the 2009 Shenzhen and Hong Kong Bi-City Biennale. In 1981, Richard Serra, an American artist famous for his massive minimalist steel sculptures, installed his 3.5-meter-high Tilted Arc at New York’s Federal Plaza, which caused controversy because it prevented office workers from crossing the plaza directly. The artist’s aesthetic standpoint conflicted with public opinion, and a hearing held in 1985 ruled that it must be relocated—but the artist insisted that it was a site-specific artwork, and relocating it was tantamount to the death of the work. The artist refused to move it, and it was demolished and turned into scrap iron to be disposed of by the government in 1989. After this controversial event, city sculpture or environmental art, which originally had only a single aesthetic function, began to turn into the “public art” that emphasized social connection and public opinion. In 1993, Rachel Whiteread, a British artist, cast concrete into the internal space of an old house to be demolished in East London. When the original external brick-built structure was removed, the house-shaped concrete came to light as a solid monument to public memory. It was demolished

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by the local government several months later, causing much controversy. Whose art is public art? Who is its subject? Who can represent the public? Regarding these questions, the art community has been debating endlessly, and different political positions give different answers. Such a question is the same as the controversy over the Bishan Project in 2014: whose Bishan was it? Whose community was the Bishan Commune? There was no doubt that many of the things that the Bishan Project did fell into the category of public art. There were many similarities between the Bishan Project and The Land project in Chiang Mai, Thailand, and the Echigo-Tsumari Art Field in Japan. They all occurred in rural areas and involved public art. We have to face the local society and think about who is the main subject. In remote areas, whether rural or in small cities, regular art festivals or large-scale exhibitions (biennials, triennials) have become more and more popular in recent years to attract people and revitalize the local economy and culture. I call this trend “festivalism” because many of them pay too much attention to tourists, neglecting the local population, so deserve criticism. Initially, the Bishan Project could not be exempted from this kind of vulgarity. It planned the Bishan Harvestival and the Yixian International Photo Festival, but there were different methods for how to operate it. “Burning Man” is a utopian gathering in the harsh desert wilderness, organized in the form of partition camping and using large installations for visual attraction. The French city of Nantes also hosts “The Machines of the Isle Nantes,” which is produced by using the stage equipment of traditional European theaters. Ten people divide labor to control giant mechanical animals (elephants, horses, spiders, birds, fish, etc.) and robotic dolls, which can take part in situational performances on the streets. The Echigo-Tsumari Art Field invites artists from all over the world to create a large number of site-­ specific installation in many villages of Niigata Prefecture, and The Land project also invites local and international artists to participate, designing miniature buildings among ponds and paddy fields. The resources and conditions of Bishan are limited. We hoped to pay more attention to local culture, mainly focusing on Hui-style architecture, folk crafts, photography, and painting. Although artists from different parts of the world had been invited to create works, compared with the numerous cases of public art and the socially engaged art mentioned here, the extent and breadth of our realization were still relatively limited. To realize artistic creation with villagers as the main subject, we needed not only time but also space, especially political space.

CHAPTER 13

Food, Ecology, and Education

The Politics of Eating1 What people eat and what they don’t eat today is no longer a matter of filling their stomachs. Ever since man invented agriculture and extracted even more food from nature to feed the growing population, food has been branded by culture. There are many kinds of human statements about food, some of which rise to political heights: food sovereignty, land justice, animal ethics, and the Slow Food movement, among others. Human beings are omnivorous animals with high intelligence, and their choice of food is controlled not only by nutriology and biology but also by the political ethics they themselves invented. This is what Michael Pollan called “the omnivore’s dilemma.” The Omnivore’s Dilemma was published in 2006. Although the title of the book is somewhat obscure and difficult to understand, it is interesting, and even convincing, with its cocoon-stripping style of writing from the perspective of the personal experiences of a consumer (or eater). Pollan traveled across different parts of the United States, conducting field surveys like a detective, tracing the origins and development of three different food chains, and ending with the fast-food chain McDonald’s. Where did 1  Completed in Chinese on November 15, 2015, in Bishan. The Chinese version was published on iPress, November 28, 2015. The English version was translated by Matt Turner and Haiying Weng in 2019.

© The Author(s) 2020 O. Ning, Utopia in Practice, Contemporary East Asian Visual Cultures, Societies and Politics, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-5791-0_13

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the McDonald’s food chain start? Pollan went to a farm in Iowa, one of the most important corn-producing areas in the United States, and interviewed a farmer named George Naylor—but his real story began with the origin of the corn species. Corn: A Base of Politicized Food Chain Corn originated in Central America and was discovered by Europeans during the Age of Exploration; Columbus first described the plant found in the New World at the court of Queen Isabella I of Castile in 1493. The species, despised by the colonists as the “the Indians’ commissary,” is very resilient. Its photosynthesis is very efficient. It can produce one more carbon atom than ordinary plants (it is a four-carbon plant, whereas usually plants can produce only three), so it can store more energy. In the process of natural evolution, it was not defeated by cattle, pigs, apples, or the wheat introduced by Europeans. Instead, it became the staple food of the colonists and assisted in the primitive accumulation stage of capitalism, as corn could also be used for direct exchange of African slaves. But Pollan did not fall into a bitter political complaint like his journalist colleague Eduardo Galeano and was careful not to turn his corn story into a blood-­ and-­tears history like Las Venas Abiertas de America Latina. When you are in the wilderness and see the beautiful mountains and valleys, you often think that you have avoided the disturbances of the political world, but that’s just being romantic. If Zhongnan Mountain is a place for recluses, then the ownership of land rights and interests has already long been delimited: “Under the heavens, everything belongs to the sovereign.” You think you have escaped into another world, but the law is always at hand. Politics has a long history and affects everything, one of its main purposes being to possess and distribute natural resources— and food is very closely linked to politics. Food safety is a matter of not only human health but also a political concept. Whether arable land is enough or not, and whether food is stored adequately, all affect national security—because hunger will lead to social unrest. In eras of geographic discovery, colonists used force to open up territories; but in today’s era of increasingly scarce natural resources, even carbon emissions, a natural element, have become politically contested, not to mention outer space. If there are no political solution, reverting to war becomes possible. So it’s not surprising to read about the politicization of corn.

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Because corn is easy to grow, energy-rich, and widely used, under the principle of maximizing benefit, the United States began to carry out large-scale single plantings and tried to increase the yield per unit area. Another historical moment in the evolution of corn was when American breeders developed genetically modified (GM) corn seeds, which could be planted densely and grown neatly to facilitate mechanical harvesting, thus greatly improving yield and efficiency. Another way to increase yield was to increase the nitrogen content of the land to promote corn growth. Pollan disclosed that after World War II, the US government found that there was still a considerable amount of ammonium nitrate left from making explosives, which happened to be the nitrogen source also needed by plants—so many military enterprises began to turn to fertilizer production. Environmentalist Vandana Shiva has said, “We’re still eating the leftovers of World War II.”2 With the help of genetically modified and fertilizer technologies and the support of the US government, corn cultivation has broken away from the slow natural process of transforming into human food by absorbing the heat of sunlight, and embarked on the fast path of industrialization that relies on fossil fuels. Shiva is famous for her book Stolen Harvest, which criticizes Monsanto. Monsanto was originally a chemical company in the United States that manufactured the chemical weapon “agent orange” for the Vietnam War. During a development of over a hundred years, through continuous mergers and acquisitions, Monsanto transformed into a transnational agricultural biotechnology company with monopoly over DNA property and the sale of seeds as its main profit model. In 2013, a rally against Monsanto and its genetically modified organisms broke out in fifty-two countries. Critics pointed to Monsanto’s instrumental relationship with the US government to pursue benefit it at the expense of consumer safety. The executive of one company it acquired was Donald Rumsfeld, former Defense Secretary under Gerald R. Ford and George H. W. Bush. In China, Lang Xianping (Larry Hsien Ping Lang) once referred to Monsanto’s embezzlement of soybean seeds from northeast China for GM experiments, saying they launched a financial war with Wall Street and the US government to promote GM corn on a large scale in Guangxi Province, in order to defeat China’s agricultural production system and manipulate China’s food and oil prices. This argument is very much in line with what Chinese 2  Cited in Michael Pollan, The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals (New York: Penguin Books, 2006), 41.

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nationalists imagine: food has become a weapon for the United States to attack China.3 Pollan’s book is not quite so alarmist, and Monsanto appears only once; that is, Farmer Naylor complained that one year’s hard work was just “laundering money for Monsanto.”4 The book also hardly touches on China, the only relevant paragraph referring to Nixon’s visit to China in 1972, the establishment of diplomatic relations between China and the United States, and China purchasing thirteen fertilizer factories from the United States to help increase grain production in order to survive the famine.5 He carefully combed the US government’s agricultural policy and pointed out the driving forces behind the food chain, from industrial corn cultivation to McDonald’s fast food. In 1933, the price of corn in the United States dropped to zero as the Great Depression went on, but production continued. In order to avoid hurting farmers, Roosevelt’s New Deal adopted the strategy of “Ever-­ Normal Granary”: when the government buys corn at planting cost, farmers could decide to either sell it to the government or go to market themselves. If the market price was lower than the purchase price, farmers could apply for loans from the government with corn as collateral, and then sell it at market when the price rose again. When the market sold it, the proceeds from the sale were enough to pay off the loan; in the case that market price continued to be depressed, farmers could also choose to pay off the loan with corn. At that time, industrialized planting was not prevalent, and the number of farmers in the United States was enough to constitute a political force that influenced votes, so the government was willing to “nurture” farmers; but when industrialized planting became prevalent, the United States needed only a small number of farmers to support the whole country, and the farm population decreased and rural communities began to disintegrate. As the political status of farmers began to decline, Wall Street, which embraces free markets, began to resent the government’s subsidies to farmers. 3  Lang Xianping, New Imperialism in China (Beijing: Oriental Press, 2010). A brief account of Lang’s views can be seen in Charles W. Freeman III and Wen Jin Yuan, “Conspiracy Theory and the Rising Economic Nationalism in China after the Financial Crisis,” China’s New Leftists and the China Model Debate after the Financial Crisis: A Report of the CSIS Freeman Chair in China Studies (Washington, DC: Center for Strategic and International Studies, 2011), 8–9. 4  The Omnivore’s Dilemma, 36. 5  Ibid., 43.

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But in 1972, the Soviet Union bought 30 million tons of grain from the United States after years of poor harvest, leading to a decline in the stock of agricultural products in the United States, and a sharp rise in prices, where even the middle class could not afford to eat. Housewives took to the streets to protest, so the US government decided to continue subsidizing agriculture, stimulating and increasing production in order to maintain the low price of agricultural products during the crisis. The Agriculture and Consumer Protection Act promulgated in 1973 abolished the “Ever-Normal Granary” and paid the farmers directly to compensate for price differentials. This motivated farmers to grow more and more corn, but the greater the production the lower the price. At the same time, the food-processing industry continued to research and invent new uses for this surplus of cheap corn: feed made from corn could be “converted” into beef, pork, and chicken for McDonald’s, as per Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations (CAFOs). This growing cycle was shorter and cheaper than traditional grazing cycles. Synthetic high fructose corn syrup could also replace cane sugar as a cheaper raw material for Coca-Cola and Pepsi-­ Cola. Thus fast-food chains were formed. The starting point for a food chain is hybrid corn. According to the way they use fertilizers, pesticides, and mechanical farming, Pollan calculated that 1.3 liters of oil is consumed for every 25 kilograms of corn; that is, about 470 liters of oil are consumed per hectare of corn. In other words, the production of a calorie of food requires more than a calorie of fossil fuels. In contrast, non-industrialized, traditional planting can get two calories of food energy by every calorie of energy invested. Pollan lamented, “Instead of eating exclusively from the sun, humanity now began to sip petroleum.”6 After the corn farm in Iowa, he also visited mills that decompose corn kernels, as well as researched labs at food-processing companies. He surveyed CAFOs in Kansas and went to the end of the food chain. He ended at McDonald’s with his family and ordered a meal, where he did the following calculation: the meal, according to the contents, had three kilograms worth of corn; in terms of energy, it is 4510 calories; to grow and produce that energy, it requires about 5 liters of oil. This does not mean that they eat so much oil directly. However, according to the industrial chain of reasoning, if human beings could drink oil directly, it would cut out many intermediate links and would be more in line with calculated efficiency. At present, Chinese consumers are only 6

 Ibid., 45.

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concerned about whether the food they put in their bodies is expired or toxic, and not about whether food production is “environmentally friendly” or “politically correct.” China’s agricultural operators envy the US government’s agricultural subsidies. Lang Xianping cited data from 1998 to 2008, when US corn subsidies were $29 billion: “How many missiles could we build with $29 billion? How many aircraft carriers could be built?”7 Pollan’s figure is $5 billion per year, which is even more. But most of the money flowing from the US. Treasury to corn is used to benefit big companies that buy corn as a raw material, and farmers receive only half of their net farm income. Farmers can’t earn money by planting a lot of corn, but they still keep planting. Why? According to the Iowan farmer Naylor, “The free market has never worked in agriculture and it never will. The economics of family farms are very different than a firm’s: When prices fall, the firm can lay off people, idle factories, and make fewer widgets. Eventually the market finds a new balance between supply and demand. But the demand for food isn’t elastic; people don’t eat more just because food is cheap. And laying off farmers doesn’t help to reduce supply. You can fire me, but you can’t fire my land, because some other farmer who needs more cash flow or think he’s more efficient than I am will come in and farm it. Even if I go out of business this land will keep producing corn.”8 So agriculture must depend on the government, but agricultural capitalism in the United States is a kind of national capitalism. The government and Wall Street cooperate, and food and oil are two political chips that the US government cannot let go of. There is no doubt about the economic struggle between countries, but if someone says that the United States “uses food as a weapon to kill the people of the third world,” this person is certainly engaging in fantasy, just like on the Utopia website.9

7  Lang Xianping, “Decrypt Monsanto’s Genetically Modified Empire,” CCTV Finance Channel, April 19, 2010. http://finance.cctv.com/special/iron2010/20100419/ 105409_5.shtml. 8  The Omnivore’s Dilemma, 54. 9  Utopia (wuyouzhixiang) is a Chinese Internet forum noted for its extreme left-wing Chinese nationalism, Maoist and Communist ideology. It was founded in Beijing 2003. The website (www.wyzxsx.com) was shut down twice by the Chinese authorities in 2012 and 2013, now resumed operations on a new website (www.wyzxwk.com).

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Organic Agriculture: A New Spiritual Worship The rise of the environmental movement in the United States depended on the emergence of works such as Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring. From Pollan’s study of the food chain of industrialized corn, it is easy to realize that such production and consumption patterns are depleting the energy of the earth, destroying land and ecologies, violating animal ethics, and affecting people’s health. Although fossil fuels also, in prehistoric times, came from the energy of the sun, they were non-renewable; the use of chemical fertilizers broke the inherent ecological cycle of nature, polluting land, rivers, and oceans; the large-scale industrial feeding of animals is contrary to the nature of animals and as such they are prone to disease, then in order to prevent disease, animals have to be given antibiotics. All kinds of food processing and development are aimed at increasing the variety of food available, and expanding the space of human stomach—so these developments lead to people eating a lot of useless food. This understanding gradually formed around when Silent Spring was published in the early 1960s, and the concept of “organic agriculture” appeared. However, the monster of capitalism did not stop growing because of the rising awareness of environmental protection. It also kept pace with the times, updating and developing stronger absorptive capacity, turning its opponent’s body into its own nourishment. Pollan’s second food chain focuses on the evolution and dilemma of organic agriculture. He follows two other American farmers on their farms to experience their production processes. The first is Gene Kahn, a former hippie influenced by the environmental concerns of the late 1960s. (In 1969, “DDT was in the news, an oil spill off Santa Barbara had blackened California’s coastline, and Cleveland’s Cuyahoga River had caught fire. Overnight, it seemed, ‘ecology’ was on everybody’s lips, and ‘organic’ close behind.”10) He began organic farming near Seattle in 1971 and started with “the idea of growing food for the collective of environmentally minded hippie he had hooked up with.”11 Unexpectedly, it was very popular. Over several decades, as his business grew, his food began to move out of the local co-op and into the Whole Foods chain supermarket in the United States. This made him a member of “Big Organic,” or the production and consumption chain of the “organic industry.”  The Omnivore’s Dilemma, 141–142.  Ibid., 144.

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Such stories show that radical ideas, when they are widespread, can also produce a large market. Smell-sensitive capital quickly catches up, starts to set up sales channels and starts its advertising machine, turning decay into magic, and capturing consumers’ insecurities and fragile souls in urgent need of moral compensation. The picturesque label of the Whole Foods supermarket can be said to have invented a new style of pastoral poetry, which tells you that the farm from where goods come is picturesque and the animals living there are extremely happy. In 1990, the “Alar Scare” in the United States further stimulated the organic food craze of the middle class, opening a larger market and accelerating the “organic industry.” Alar, a plant growth regulator, had been listed as a carcinogen by the US Environmental Protection Agency. It was exposed by the TV news program Sixty Minutes, which showed that it had been widely used in apple cultivation. Social panic is a hotbed that not only produces strongman politics but also breeds faith, providing spiritual comfort and a moral sense. As Haruki Murakami wrote in his 1Q84 about the utopia “Sakigake” in the deep mountains, it was originally a small left-wing commune, but relying on the organic farming business it not only accumulated a large amount of funds but also absorbed a large number of members, eventually growing into a mysterious religious group. Modern Farmer, launched in the United States in 2013, has become a popular fashion magazine because it promotes “organic” farming and taps into people’s psychologies. People eat “organic” food not only with peace of mind but also with a sense of moral superiority; “organic” has become a form of worship. How can such products be missed by capitalist raiders? Kahn’s early idealism was quickly absorbed by big companies, and his farms and companies became subsidiaries of General Mills. It went like this: he found that once agricultural products were processed, profits increased greatly, and to purchase products from other farms would make more money than producing them himself. He began to accept the industrial model, using food-processing technology and supplying logistics for national sales terminals. Although his products are grown with “organic” certified industrial chicken manure, and his processing method meets the “organic” standard, as this process will use fossil fuels, can it still be considered organic? Another farmer interviewed by Pollan was Joel Salatin. In contrast to the “Big Organic” that Kahn is engaged in, Saladin can be said to represent “small organic.” He runs a family farm in Virginia. Perhaps he’s tired

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of the word “organic,” because he never calls himself that—preferring to say “beyond organic.” Like “environmental protection,” “organic” has become a label for creating added value and an upgraded version of capitalism’s ideology of self-aggrandizement. However, its production and marketing process does not save more energy than in the past and is less environmental friendly for all its “environmental protection” and less organic for all its “organic.” As a third-generation farmer who inherited his family farm, Saladin has always adhered to ancient agricultural ethics and operated his farm traditionally. He believes that his farm products do not need the so-called organic label. Saladin’s grandfather was a farmer in Indiana. His parents tried natural farming in Venezuela after World War II and then returned to the United States because of political turmoil to buy barren land in Virginia that had lost all fertility due to overfarming. Starting from restoring its ecosystem, they slowly managed to make the farm into what it is now. Adhering to his father’s objections to the use of any oil, Saladin did not ask for government support, planting grass and legumes on the farm, making compost, and maintaining soil fertility with microorganisms and nitrogen from the plants themselves. He also invented a flexible fence to accurately control times for the alternate grazing of cattle. They are followed by chickens, which feed on organic matter in the grass and cow dung; cow and chicken dung together become the nutrients of the grassland at the same time, thus maintaining a natural production system based on the energy of the sun, which is maintained and transformed by animals and plants. His cattle, chickens, and pigs are never sent to industrial slaughterhouses or food-­ processing plants; all of them are slaughtered on the farm. The process is very transparent. All his agricultural products supply only residents and restaurants around the community, ensuring freshness with a shorter food distance. When Pollan first contacted him, he wanted Saladin to send a piece of beef by FedEx for a taste, but he refused: “No, I don’t think you understand. I don’t believe it’s sustainable or ‘organic,’ if you will—to FedEx meat all around the country. I’m sorry, but I can’t do it.”12 Saladin did not envy how people in cities lived. He even resisted it, and spent considerable time only reluctantly accepting Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) so that consumers in cities near the farm could pre-­ order his produce. Their family lives in an eighteenth-century colonial farmhouse, and his mother said that if his son could just make toilet paper  Ibid., 133.

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from the trees on the farm, they would never have to go to the supermarket. Saladin’s farm products are relatively expensive, but nevertheless attract many of their neighbors and consumers from the surrounding area. People support them for the reasons of life, health, and land justice, and their mode of production builds mutual trust—producing a powerful community cohesion. Compared with the rural communities in Iowa’s industrialized corn-producing areas, which have become ghost towns due to population decline, the vigor that has sprung up there is called “what all that nostalgia pointed to, the real McCoy” by Pollan.13 Saladin did not pursue expansion like Kahn did. He insisted on the size of the family workshop and maintained them at a high price. This often left him open to attack by those who would advocate industrialization. As food prices indeed reflect the class of consumers, one moral reason for the “organic industry” is that “organic” food cannot be used exclusively for the middle class and yuppies. The large-scale industrialized production of “organic” food can reduce cost and make it affordable for low-income people to eat. Industrialized agricultural products are cheap at sale, but their pricing does not take into account state subsidies, environmental costs, or health costs. The term “food sovereignty” is meant to liberate “the people” so that they are free to choose food under the capitalist mode of production and consumption and establish their obligations to the land and the environment. However, because of the constraints of income, the rationality of “the people” (especially low-income people) often chooses cheap fast food, and they are unable to take part in things like the Slow Food movement, which they think has too high a threshold—unless they choose a self-sufficient life like Saladin. From the point of view of the human history, capitalism was the product of humans’ greedy nature. In order to feed more and more people, human beings invented agriculture. In the process of obtaining food from nature, human beings relied on self-sacrifice or worship to express gratitude and further their moral salvation. However, when the science of serving human desires was developed, sacrifice and worship were degraded to “superstition.” When capitalism developed consumerism to further stimulate human desires and intensified the plunder of nature, concepts such as “environmental protection” and “organic” became substitutes for worship (or even religions). Anti-capitalism has also become an ideological expression to calm one’s moral anxieties. But who can resist the dazzling  Ibid., 203.

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temptation of a new iPhone? Old products pile up because people’s desires have sharpened to express their efficiency and self-identification with the latest consumer goods. People put blame on capitalism, but they rarely check their own greed. In the speech market, the elite fiercely oppose capitalism and demonstrate their moral superiority. But they live in tall buildings and big houses, wear beautiful clothes, enjoy healthy food with a high price they can nevertheless afford, and are critical about it. How many people can really live like Saladin? Even though Saladin calls himself a “farmer,” his class is not at the bottom of American society. Talking about the credibility of his agricultural products, he said, “You know what the best kind of organic certification would be? Make an unannounced visit to a farm and take a good long look at the farmer’s bookshelf. Because what you’re feeding your emotions and thoughts is what this is really all about. The way I produce a chicken is an extension of my worldview. You can learn about that by seeing what’s sitting on my bookshelf than having me fill out a whole bunch of forms.”14 His bookshelves have J. I. Rodale’s Organic Gardening and Farming, Sir Albert Howard’s An Agricultural Testament, and Aldo Leopold’s A Sand County Almanac. He says what he conducts on the farm is also a “knowledge economy,” that is to say, he is an intellectual farmer with cultural capital. Saladin learned agriculture and natural farming from books from a long tradition beginning with the ancient Roman poet Virgil’s Georgics. This tradition runs through the egalitarianism of the Diggers in the seventeenth century in Britain, to the small-scale farming economical thought of Thomas Jefferson, and the agrarian manifesto of the Twelve Southerners in 1930 in the United States. Most of the books on his shelves became popular in the United States in the 1960s under the recommendation of The Whole Earth Catalog, which educated countless hippie farmers in the Back-to-the-land Movement. The books introduced by The Whole Earth Catalog also include Masanobu Fukuoka’s One-Straw Revolution, F. H. King’s Farmers of Forty Centuries, and others. All these books have deepened the tradition since Virgil, shaped the agricultural ethics of American family farmers like Saladin today, and guided their farm practices. Kahn was once also baptized by this tradition, but he failed to keep it up and went industrial.

 Ibid., 131–132.

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Animal Rights: Meat Eaters’ Moral Dilemma Pollan cooked his own meals with Kahn’s and Saladin’s produce, of course raving about the latter’s ingredients. Then he went to investigate the third and shortest food chain: hunting wild boars, collecting fungi, and eating a meal. This was the most primitive way to get food before the invention of agriculture. Pollan recorded his first fascinating experience as a hunter and forager in vivid notes, but the process was accompanied by painful speculation about the relationship between humans as carnivores and animal rights. First, he had to defend why he was not a vegetarian. Because there are more and more vegetarians now, the animal rights movement has increasingly become the mainstream of “politically correct” society, and meat eaters have been encircled and criticized as poor “moral losers.” Pollan read the book Animal Liberation, by Peter Singer, a moral philosopher, and even wrote to the author, but he was not convinced. There were many contradictions in Singer’s theory of animal rights. Its main appeal was to elevate human morality to a higher level by empowering animals. But in the final analysis, it was also looking for a kind of moral redemption after human beings had plundered nature for such a long time. Its logical starting point was that if human beings were animals, then animals and human beings should enjoy equal rights—but the real purpose was to prove that people have moral consciousnesses and are higher than animals. Why do dogs get Christmas gifts from people in the United States, but pigs do not? The ideology of animal rights activists is based on the emotional care of individual animals, ignoring the natural dispositions of animals as species in ecosystems. From this one can deduce that animal rights activists actually deny the existence of animals as animals—that is, they oppose the operation of nature. If you say that chickens are raised and slaughtered by humans, it is not crueler than when they are eaten by wolves in the wild. Instead, because of human needs, chickens can continue to breed. Animal rights activists may then cry foul and say that if chickens did not exist, they would not suffer misfortune. There are many laughable points in animal rights doctrines. Humans have eaten meat for tens of thousands of years, and the moral dilemma has been solved. Before slaughtering sheep, the Kazakh people in Xinjiang always say, “You die not because of sin, I survive because you save

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me from hunger.”15 This is to show gratitude to animals for providing meat for human beings. The rise of animal rights doctrines in modern time can only demonstrate that human beings are no longer threatened by hunger, but urgently need moral treatment, as anxiety about morality has become so serious that it cannot be avoided. If someone wanted to empower plants, would human beings not live? After overcoming the meat confusion, Pollan had to defend his choice of California wild boar as a hunting target. So he wanted to understand the evolution of the wild boar: Columbus brought pigs to America in 1493; it was not a native species. To be specific, the wild boar in California actually came from the domestic pigs brought by Spanish colonists in the sixteenth century, which were then bred with Eurasian boars introduced by hunting enthusiasts in the nineteenth century. In the wild, because there were no suitable predators in the biological chain, their numbers increased dramatically, and they began to invade farmlands, vineyards, and forests. They are regarded as pests and are not protected wildlife. In addition, Pollan received good news: The National Park Service and the Conservation Society of the United States are hunting wild boars on an island off the southern coast of California. This provided him with an even better reason: a large number of wild boars had destroyed the island’s ecological balance, loosening the soil; as a result, a large number of alien species have flourished, eating acorns and resulting in the original oak trees not being able to reproduce; young wild boars attract golden eagles, which then grab onto the island’s endangered animal, the gray fox. Isn’t this more convincing than the cheap tears and hypocritical morality of animal rights activists? Finally, Pollan was able to enjoy a meal of Paleolithic human delicacies: hunted wild boar; chanterelle and mushrooms foraged from a forest after a fire; and abalone and mineral salt from the bay. It was a meal gathered for the purpose of writing a book, and a painstaking meal for experiencing the origins of human greed.

15  The Kazakh writer Yerkesy Hulmanbiek told me this when I interviewed her in Urumqi in 2013. See Ou Ning, “Underneath the Sky of Xinjiang: A Journey in the World of Reality and Literature,” in Ou Ning and Hou Hanru, eds., Liu Xiaodong’s Hotan Project and Xinjiang Research (Beijing: China CITIC Press, 2013).

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Children’s Sense of Reality16 When it comes to children’s books, people often think of fairy tales, and fantastic worlds isolated from reality—as they are believed to foster children’s imagination and preserve their innocence. Children and adults are divided by a clear line: on one side are the innocent virgins, and on the other side is a complex and dangerous society. Parents regard it as their duty to protect their children’s childhood, carefully filtering any information and surroundings that may affect their children’s growth. Good fairy tales are naturally the safest choices. A big difference between humans and lower animals is that human babies need longer periods of rearing than pups. In commenting on the theory of “prolonged infancy,” John Dewey once gave an example: “A chick, … pecks accurately at a bit of food in a few hours after hatching. … An infant requires about six months to be able to gauge with approximate accuracy the action in reaching which will coordinate with his visual activities.”17 It is precisely because of the need to constantly take care of children that human beings transformed “temporary cohabitations” into “permanent unions”—in marriages and families.18 In A Brief History of Humankind, Yuval Noah Harari also said, “humans are born prematurely, when many of their vital systems are still under-developed.”19 Besides the ability of language communication, this human reproductive characteristic also leads to the formation of family and society. Children need to be cared for, but if they only grow up in hothouses, their social abilities will be delayed. Education, in essence, is a process of socialization. Children need to participate in social life, while adults live in social networks throughout their lives. People are accustomed to making the distinction between children and adults, but a fallacy lies in understanding childhood as a time of lack of ability, adulthood as a cessation of growth, and education as merely supplying and supplementing children for their lack of experience and ability. In response to this fallacy, Ralph Waldo Emerson said, “Respect the

16  Completed in  Chinese on  August 21, 2018, in  Jingzhou, and  posted to  Douban. The English version was translated by Matt Turner and Haiying Weng in 2019. 17  John Dewey, Democracy and Education (Mineola: Dover Publications, Inc. 2004), 43. 18  Ibid., 44. 19  Yuval Noah Harari, “The Cost of Thinking,” Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind (New York: Harper Books, 2015), 10.

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child. Be not too much his parent”20; Dewey said that one needs to recognize the “capacity” and “potentiality” of children21 and that education should be aimless (don’t always think of cultivating your child as a scientist or something like that, the process of education is the aim of education), and education is life itself (learning throughout one’s social life)—education is learning from doing (true knowledge comes from practice). Dewey’s idea of “progressive education” influenced Tao Xingzhi, who was studying at Columbia University’s Teachers College at the time that Dewey was there. Tao Xingzhi founded Xiaozhuang Normal College in Nanjing after returning to China to practice Dewey’s theories. In 1929, at the invitation of fellow Huizhou residents, he founded Xin’an Primary School in Huai’an, Jiangsu Province. The following year, Tao Xingzhi was suppressed by Chiang Kai-shek’s government and Xiaozhuang Normal College was closed down. He appointed Xiaozhuang student Wang Dazhi as the principal of Xin’an Primary School, who in 1933 initiated the “Xin’an Primary School Children Traveling Group” to travel to Shanghai for nearly two months. The students took care of themselves without an accompanying teacher. They visited factories and shanty towns and made speeches in universities, causing a stir in the educational circles of the time. In 1935, the Xin’an Traveling Group began to set foot across the whole country, later developing into a famous anti-Japanese propaganda troupe during Japan’s invasion of China. Wang Dazhi’s innovation provided a successful case study for Dewey and Tao Xingzhi’s educational ideas in China. Compared with the prevailing atmosphere of student study traveling in China today, the Xin’an Traveling Group can be said to be the pioneers. Under the auspices of Tao Xingzhi, Wang Dazhi published his personal book, The Book of Life,22 Sun Mingxun wrote a large-scale special report, Ancient Temple, Living Bodhisattva,23 for Xin’an Primary School, and Xin’an Primary School Children Traveling Group also published Our Travel Notes.24 Wang Dazhi’s birthplace and hometown are Bishan Village, Yi County, Anhui Province. It is exactly where I am engaged in the Bishan Project.  Quoted in John Dewey, Democracy and Education, 50.  Ibid., 40. 22  Wang Dazhi, The Book of Life (Shanghai: Children Book Company, 1924). 23  Sun Mingxun, Ancient Temple, Living Bodhisattva (Shanghai: Children Book Company, 1934). 24  Xin’an Primary School Children Traveling Group, Our Travel Notes (Shanghai: Children Book Company, 1935). 20 21

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In 2015, my child Ou Hanzhi was born. A month before his birth, I went to Boston and happened to see a retrospective exhibition on the Black Mountain College, another fruit of Dewey’s theory of progressive education outside the American public school system. Back in Bishan, and after reading Tao Xingzhi’s “Fundamental Reforms of Rural Education in China” that he wrote in 1926, I was deeply shocked at what I read: “Rural Education in China has gone wrong! It teaches people to leave the countryside and run to the city. It teaches people to eat without knowing how to plant rice, dress without growing cotton, and make houses without knowing how to cultivate the forest. It teaches people to envy luxury and despise farming. It teaches people to divide profits without making profits. It teaches farmers and their children to become bookworms. It teaches the rich to become poor, and the poor to become extremely poor. It teaches the strong to become weak, and the weak to become extremely weak.”25 Then I tried to do something about education in Bishan. At that time, I thought that we could organize parent-child study tours in Bishan and publish some children’s picture books based on the village’s history, folklore, customs, geography, and actual life—as supplementary books. Then I began to search for picture book writers and illustrators all over the country, and I found Liu Xun, in Nanjing. Coincidentally, when I first got in touch with her, she had just finished a field trip in Xiaoshan Village, in southern Anhui Province. Later, a series of my plans did not work out, and in 2016, she published a picture book, The Riddles, based on Xiaoshan Village. Liu Xun’s picture book is not a fairy tale. Her pictures are all realistic impressions as captured by children’s eyes. Her maiden work, Tooth, Tooth, Throw It on the Roof,26 delicately depicts street life in the old city of Nanjing, which is narrow and decaying but popular. A little girl wakes up from her midsummer nap and finds that her front teeth have fallen out. She goes out to look for her grandfather, who had told her, “If your front teeth fall out, throw them on the roof, so that you will grow tall in the future.”27 She leaves her home, where there are watermelons and leftovers covered to keep out the flies, passes through her yard hung with Grandpa’s birdcages, and passes by an old neighbor cooling off and reading a  Tao Xingzhi, Reforms of Education in China (Beijing: Oriental Press, 1996), 84.  Liu Xun, Tooth, Tooth, Throw It on the Roof (Shanghai: China Welfare Institute Publishing House, 2014). 27  Ibid., 4. 25 26

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­ ewspaper at the entrance of the alley. She sees an old wall with its covern ings peeling off it in the shape of a tiger. A group of boys are playing with colored glass marbles around the corner. A father is shaving the head of a naughty little boy with a razor, and deep in the alley clothes are hanging out to dry, fluttering in the wind. Someone is emptying a spittoon, a motorcycle carrying small pets weaves right and left, and mothers holding babies are gossiping. She tells the big news about her teeth to an auntie at a tailor shop, to a knife sharpener, and to the uncle who was giving his dog a bath with a garden hose; after passing a goldfish seller and a popcorn stall, she arrives at the barber’s, where she sees Grandpa in a group of old men playing chess beside an old well. The greatest pleasure in reading this book with children is in letting them recognize these details. In front of us is a warm and moving picture of the city, where “the alley is a big family.”28 People living there know each other. They form a community with a sense of belonging, to which they can entrust daily trifles and group resources. From the pictures we can guess about the time-period, and say that this was the home and childhood memory of a generation celebrated by the author, so adult readers are more easily touched than child readers. But China is large. Different levels of development and lifestyles can coexist in the country at the same time. Something that in a big city has become history may still be the reality of a small city. Even in the same big city, because of the different development levels, of different zones and different family situations, this kind of old neighborhood could also exist and become the reality surrounding young readers born in recent years. What they encounter today could grow into their future childhood memories. Anyway, at the end of the book, Grandpa and the little girl pass a corner with a bicycle repair shop, a duck-oil pancake stand, and a man selling balloons; avoid a car driving through the narrow alley; and return home to throw her teeth on the roof. Liu Xun’s pictures also simulate the motion of a camera lens thrown through the air to record the teeth going up, showing old houses with black tiles, large construction cranes, and high-­ rise buildings looming over it all. Like the Chinese character chai (demolish) brushed on the old walls in previous scenes, it means that the old streets and alleys will disappear and another kind of life will take their place—which will be very familiar to readers of different ages today. It is not only old bricks and tiles that have disappeared, but also customs passed  Ibid., 16.

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down from generation to generation. Where do you throw your teeth when you live in a tall building? At the thought of this, the cruelty of reality reveals a shape more terrible than tigers. This is exactly what I expect a picture book to look like: it does not lead children into the escape through their personal fantasies, but tries to expose them to reality; it does not show them reality nakedly, but makes appropriate aesthetic filtering; it helps children discover a beauty in daily life that is worth cherishing, but does not hide that reality has truths which are disappointing. With the vivid visual presentation of the old urban community, this book inadvertently demonstrates the true meaning of “life is the best teacher”: people’s values, experience and knowledge, emotional ties, and the social environment created after years of living side by side, can unconsciously and without any aim play the role of education and cultivation. This kind of education and cultivation can invigorate a community, allowing society to renew itself and continue making progress. When such an organic elderly community is uprooted, people are scattered to the gridded, non-communicative living spaces of high-rise buildings, and the only so-called education they can rely on remains school education. When the city erases the memory of the old days with its drastic changes, people naturally come to see the countryside as a place full of nostalgia. But what about the reality of the countryside? With a narrative being set during tomb sweeping during the Qingming Festival, The Riddles29 brings a city little girl back to the small village where she spent her early years. The journey home is a magical experience of reunion with her ancestors. Grandma, who has just passed away, returns from the netherworld in a glowing white mist and plays a puzzle game with the little girl. They gather in Hui-style houses, with steaming firewood stoves, hams and bacon drying on racks on the ground, canola blooming in the fields, slate roads, small wooden bridges over bubbling water, the ancestral house uninhabited yet still with its red couplets, the village surrounded by remote mountains echoing the dialogue between two generations. The scenery of the village has not changed much, and the world is still silent in the circulation of time, but the picture shows the loneliness and desolation of a sparse human population. This is what Tao Xingzhi said about the bitter fruit of using education to leave the countryside: successful life can only appear in the city’s arena,  Liu Xun, The Riddles (Shanghai: China Welfare Institute Publishing House, 2016).

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and in the rush to modernization, people forget their agricultural roots. The city concentrates most of its resources, not only emptying the countryside of its labor force, but also competing for the future elite, extracting from the countryside through the education system. The hollowing out of the rural population is the result of their dedication, leaving the countryside a land of inferiority complexes. Despite the good mountains and rivers, no one farms the land, leaving the old residences in ruins, leaving only the elderly people to spend their remaining years there, as well as the children who cannot attend school in the city. In poetic and childlike pictures, Liu Xun also gives hints about the current situation of the countryside. In Tooth, Tooth, Throw It on the Roof, we see the disappearing old urban communities that once nourished our lives. In The Riddles, the rural community once described by Mencius is no longer there: “befriend one another at home and abroad, look out for one another, and support one another in illness.”30 The only thing of this that remains in this picture book is the “local knowledge” handed down from generation to generation in rural communities, a series of “riddles” spoken by Grandma about nature, species, agriculture, and customs. The hidden answer to the riddle is the smoke of chimneys, canola flowers, earthworms, bamboo shoots, snails, kites, and sunshine. This kind of oral knowledge cannot be seen in textbooks in the classroom. It comes from life experience and is taught in the fields. It is both practical and interesting. It is this “local knowledge” that has nurtured new generations of rural community members for thousands of years, guiding rural life and production. This so-called “life education” actually has a long history. It is not the originality of Dewey or Tao Xingzhi—they just remind people of their forgetfulness. By the time the new book A Boy Named Yi31 was published, Liu Xun’s realistic style of picture books could be said to have reached its acme. She records a day’s life of a family of three who run an eatery. The protagonist is a boy named Yi, who was born in the mountains of Sichuan Province. He went to Nanjing when he was in primary school and lives with his parents who worked there. Liu Xun studied painting in Beijing in her early years, and lived in a basement with the “floating population” of people from everywhere. This experience of working hard while “floating,” and 30  “Duke Wen of Teng,” Mencius, translated by Robert Eno in his course Early Chinese Thought in Indiana University, Fall 2010. 31  Liu Xun, A Boy Named Yi (Jinan: Tomorrow Publishing House, 2017).

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her experience growing up doing chores for her family, together with the coincidences of her daughter and Yi being same age and being students of the same class, made her feel empathy for a family who owned an eatery at the entrance to her neighborhood. The survival of human beings is like a battalion of ants: to fight for a better future, to withstand tremendous pressure. Fortunately, people can have families, a home, emotional support, and goals that can be achieved, and not live merely to survive. “The train of life drives by us in the air.”32 People want to have a home to return to. A Boy Named Yi expresses this sense of destiny. The story begins in the early morning of winter Sunday. Yi and his parents get up early and go to the eatery to start the day’s business. Because it is too cold, he and his mother take a bus for a while, then join his father on a motorcycle the rest of the way. As he passes the Nanjing Yangtze River Bridge, he sees a train as his father is driving his motorcycle in the cold wind. When he arrives at the eatery, he helps move the gas tank for his mother to fire the stove, chats with a customer who came to the shop while he was eating breakfast, and then goes to the market with his father to buy some black carp. When business is not very busy in the morning, he does his homework at the eatery. During the lunch rush, he helps to clean up the dishes. He can’t go on food delivery with his father because he hasn’t finished his homework yet. So in the afternoon he finishes his homework, eats a chicken leg that his mother awards him, and then goes to the market to find a friend of his to play with. During the dinner rush, he has to vacate his table for guests; he forgets where his homework is because he is trying to sneak drinks. After a busy day, they can finally go back to their newly bought home north of the bridge. At the beginning of the book is a large double-page close-up of the desktop where Yi does homework: Chinese exercise book, Xinhua Dictionary, stationery box, dinosaur toys, his mother’s account notes, bottle opener, peeled garlic, rags, snacks for guests, chili sauce, toothpicks; at the end of the book is also a big close-up of the same scene, but what’s different is Yi’s finished “My Home” composition in his Chinese exercise book, and the chili sauce has been consumed, leaving only empty bottles. Time can change the arrangement and combination of things, and also shape different stages of human beings. Yi grows up day by day like this. This book opens up onto a cross section of the life of a mobile and 32  Ibid., 35. This is the title of an essay written by Liu Xun to talk about the making of A Boy Named Yi.

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inconsequential family. It carefully depicts real scenes and the emotional power behind them, which is moving. Little readers may sharpen their sense of reality, and at the same time see beyond class barriers: although there are thousands of different lives in the world, after eliminating attachments to origin, wealth and status, children’s commonalities in age and stage of life may enable them to understand Yi’s life, and have empathy for him. Going from A Boy Named Yi, I begin to think of the left-wing children’s literature that our generation read as children, and a book I came across a few years ago, Tales for Little Rebels.33 These left-wing children’s stories are mostly about the children of the lower class, but they are all deduced from ideology, aiming at molding the “successors to the revolution.” Children’s sense of reality is necessary, but it is terrible to instill political ideas into children too early. Fortunately, today our children are no longer polluted by such ideological books; children’s books are increasingly diversified, and you can choose hothouse fairy tales, but you can also choose such realistic picture books as Liu Xun’s.

33  Julia L. Mickenberg and Philip Nel, eds., Tales for Little Rebels: A Collection of Radical Children’s Literature (New York: NYU Press, 2010).

CHAPTER 14

City and Countryside

After the Failure of Cities1 The topic of this dialogue is “After the Failure of Cities.” Detroit, which filed for bankruptcy this year, is probably a typical example of city failure. Five or six years ago, the German Federal Cultural Foundation supported a research project called “Shrinking Cities,” which studied cities in North America and Europe with shrinking populations and economies in mainly industrial cities, such as Detroit, the United Kingdom’s Manchester and Liverpool, Germany’s Halle and Leipzig, and Russia’s Ivanovo.2 Detroit was originally an automobile city, and the Fordist mode of production was first invented in Detroit, but it was later impacted by the Japanese automobile industry. After the 1980s, especially after the end of the Cold War, many large companies in the United States began to leave R&D departments at home and open factories in underdeveloped areas. In such 1  This is a  record of  an  open dialogue between Ou Ning and  Chung Yung-feng, the  Taiwanese poet and  lyricist, during the  Co-China Forum, at  the  bookstore of the Commercial Press in the Chinese University of Hong Kong and held on August 1, 2013. It was recorded and edited by the Co-China team and was excerpted on the Co-China website. Only Ou Ning’s talk was translated into English, by Matt Turner and Haiying Weng in 2019 and printed here. 2  See the publications of this project: Philipp Oswalt, ed., Shrinking Cities, Volume 1: International Research; Volume 2: Interventions (Berlin: Hatje Cantz Verlag, 2006).

© The Author(s) 2020 O. Ning, Utopia in Practice, Contemporary East Asian Visual Cultures, Societies and Politics, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-5791-0_14

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a process of globalization, the entire industrial structure was restructured. This has led to an increase in unemployment among local workers in the United States, coupled with changes in logistics conditions that have allowed production to move from the city center to the suburbs—hollowing Detroit’s inner city. Cities in the United States and Europe are shrinking, but cities in Asia are expanding, and that’s probably how things on the Earth rise and fall. I mentioned that, in recent years, some big companies in Europe and the United States have left their R&D departments at home, but put their production bases in areas where labor is cheaper. Therefore, the Asian region, especially China, has relied on cheap labor to accumulate initial capital for development to gradually grow into a powerful economy. These economic activities mainly occur in cities where there are concentrated resources and jobs, leading to a vigorous urbanization movement in China. But what is this urbanization movement? I want to illustrate it with two examples. China’s new economic movement began in southern cities such as Shenzhen and Guangzhou. At the end of the 1970s, when the Cultural Revolution ended and the whole country had hit rock bottom, the central government decided to develop its economy. But after the Cultural Revolution, no foreign investment dared to come to China. The central government had to attract investment through ethnic connections and non-governmental relationships in Hong Kong. Manuel Castells has called this early development model of southern China “guanxi capitalism.”3 The central government set up a special economic zone in Shenzhen to attract people from Hong Kong to invest, including those Shenzhen farmers who fled to Hong Kong in their early years, and gradually developed a small fishing village featuring fishing and agricultural production 3  “Investment in China was risky, but could yield very high profits in a largely untapped market, with negligible labor costs, on the condition of knowing how to operate in a complex environment. Chinese investors from Hong Kong and Taiwan used the opening to decentralize their production, particularly in the Pearl River Delta… To minimize risks, they used their guanxi (relationship) networks, particularly looking for people who were from the same place of origin (tong-xiang), their relatives or friends, or for dialect-group acquaintances… Once the investment networks from Hong Kong and Taiwan were established, by the late 1980s, capital flowed from all over the globe, much of it from overseas Chinese, from Singapore, Bangkok, Penang, Kuala Lumpur, Jakarta, California, New  York, Canada, and Australia.” Manuel Castells, The Information Age: Economy, Society, and Culture, Volume III: End of Millennium (West Sussex: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010), 320.

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into a large city with a population of over 10 million today. This is the most typical urbanization process in China. But Shenzhen’s growth is unprecedented the world over. Its population has expanded to 10 million over the past thirty  years, which means changing the landscape of the countryside. Shenzhen used to be dominated by agriculture and fisheries; later, in order to develop the “three-plus-one” trading-­mix,4 farmland was changed into factory buildings, which changed its geographical landscape. With factory buildings, Hong Kong’s incoming materials were processed through cheap labor in Shenzhen and then returned to the international market, prompting Shenzhen to establish the corresponding logistics conditions. So, in the mid- and late 1980s, the spatial characteristics of Shenzhen and the Pearl River Delta were mainly factory space and logistics space. By 1992, after Deng Xiaoping’s Southern Tour, Chinese society had changed from a political society to a thoroughly commercial society, followed by the development of real estate and service industries. Guangzhou’s economic activities have been active since the late 1970s. Because of its active economic activities, urban space has become more and more inadequate, and the city has begun to expand to the suburbs and countryside. China’s urban and rural land systems are different. During the revolutionary period, the Communist Party offered attractive conditions to attract peasants to participate in the revolution: if you come to participate in the revolution, I will give you land. After the founding of the People’s Republic of China, in order to fulfill this promise, the Communist Party divided the national land into two kinds in the design of the land system: urban land is state-owned; rural land is collectively owned. Since individual ownership of land is contrary to the statist nature of socialist public ownership, the government has designed a system of collective ownership of rural land, stipulating that farming land is owned jointly by all villagers, and any sales must be approved by all villagers. In the early 1980s, the Guangzhou Municipal Government expropriated suburban farmland, such as Sanyuanli, for urban development. When villagers’ farmland was expropriated, the government did not provide them with jobs, nor did it convert their rural household registrations into urban household registrations. When the surrounding farmland was built on with high-rise buildings, land prices began to become more expensive, and farmers had to build houses on the original 4  “Three” refers to custom manufacturing with materials, designs, or samples supplied by foreign companies, and “one” refers to compensation trade.

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homesteads for rent to make a living, thus forming the typical “urban village” phenomenon in Guangzhou.5 The “urban village” is neither the city nor the countryside, and its administrative boundaries are very vague, which leads to the management of the village in the city is very lax. For example, many migrants can live in urban villages without temporary residence permits, coupled with low rent, which makes the population composition of urban villages very complex, and the public security is very bad. In the end, the phenomenon of “urban villages,” which is called a “tumor” by the government, had come into being. The annexation of rural land for urbanization was a form of early urbanization, during the late 1970s and early 1980s. Another type of urbanization is the transformation of old cities. The rapid development of urbanization makes the land reserve bottom out quickly, so urban land resources are very valuable. Most of the old towns with low and old houses located in the city center have “shadow prices”— the land price is expected to be very high, but in fact what is covering the land are some low and dilapidated houses with no profit margin at all. The government and developers all want to replace these spaces through “urban renovation” and then use the spaces to invest in the real estate market. Today’s urbanization movement is for redistributing land resources through the transformation of farmland into cities, and remodeling and removing old cities. This redistribution of land and social resources has led to many social conflicts and contradictions, such as the demolition protests in cities and mass incidents in rural areas that we have often seen in recent years. Most of these are connected to land rights. Therefore, urbanization, especially excessive urbanization, will bring very serious consequences. Continuous annexation of farmland bankrupted agriculture, and farmers could not make a living, so they had to work as migrant workers in cities. When they arrived in the city, the barriers of the household registration system made it impossible for them to enjoy the public resources of the city. Their income was low, and they could only live in high-density and low-cost places in the city. Therefore, slums and urban villages have appeared, bringing many social problems.

5  See Ou Ning, “Floating Water and Splitting Land: The Social Flux and Spatial Politics of the Pearl River Watershed,” in Binghui Huangfu, ed., The River Project (Campbelltown, NSW: Campbelltown Arts Centre, 2010).

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In addition, excessive urban development is at the expense of the environment. This is why many environmental movements have taken place in China in recent years, such as the NIMBY or Not in My Back Yard and the anti-PX (p-Xylene) incidents in various cities. These movements are often spontaneous because environmental pollution has affected the rights and interests of citizens living in cities. This is very similar to the crisis of the Kuomintang’s (KMT’s) authoritarian rule in Taiwan in the 1980s, when the KMT began to consolidate its ruling authority through economic development, such as the implementation of the “Ten Major Construction Projects.” This kind of development made Taiwan become one of the “Four Asian Tigers” very quickly; however, in the process of development, it was also at the cost of destroying the environment. The spontaneous environmental movement of the common people combined with non-­ KMT organized movements, later shaking Taiwan’s political structure and promoting its transformation. What China is facing is similar to Taiwan at that time. Sometimes changes in the whole society are likely to start from something very small.6 In recent years, there has been an anti-urbanization trend in greater China. People feel uncomfortable staying in the city, with its bad air, congestion, traffic jams, and fierce job competition. So many people want to leave the city that it has created a very real trend. But it’s difficult to leave the city because most of the jobs are concentrated there, and most people can’t afford to leave their jobs. If we want to achieve a real return to the countryside, we must create jobs in the countryside. Otherwise, there will be a very high threshold for entry. In 2009, I crossed the island of Taiwan studying the phenomenon of Taiwanese intellectuals who had returned to the countryside. The situation in Taiwan is somewhat different from that in mainland China because Taiwan’s geographical scale is small. You are in Meinung, and if after dinner you motorcycle to Kaohsiung to sing KTV, you can return that night. In contrast, the physical distance between mainland cities and the countryside is very far. To go to the countryside, you need to use multiple modes of transportation, and there are great differences in the economy and culture. 6  I made a study on the urban protests in Chongqing, Hong Kong, and Taipei before 2008. See Ou Ning, “City Regeneration and Its Opposition,” in Jeroen de Kloet and Lena Scheen, eds., Spectacle and the City: Chinese Urbanities in Art and Popular Culture (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2013).

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At the same time, the contradiction between urban and rural areas in Chinese society is becoming more and more fierce. Because of access to the Internet, farmers’ awareness of rights has gradually increased over the years, and many resistance movements have emerged. In fact, farmers have been neglected and deprived for too long. In the revolutionary era, many peasants took part in the revolution at the risk of their lives. Some died and some survived to share the land. In the period of the People’s Commune after that, the state concentrated land and the labor force through administrative means in order to increase agricultural output and then trade exports for industrial resources. Under the banners of increasing iron and steel production and “Surpass Britain and Catch up with America,” in order to support China’s industrialization, farmers handed over all agricultural surplus to the central government, namely jiaogongliang (to submit public grain). Anhui farmers first began to contract production to households at the end of the 1970s, breaking through the daguofan (communal feeding) system of the People’s Commune from bottom to top, so that the right of land use was returned to the hands of farmers. In the early days of the “three-plus-one” trading-mix, farmers contributed cheap labor to factories in Shenzhen and the Pearl River Delta. In the era of urbanization, they devoted land to urbanization, while farmers received very little compensation for land transfer. Farmers, as a group, have devoted themselves at different historical stages, but they have not been able to enjoy the achievements of national development. They have been exploited and excluded from the main body of the country. With the improvement of their awareness of rights, they have begun to protest against this inequality in recent years, and the group incidents in rural areas all over the country have pushed social conflicts to a dangerous edge. We don’t want this country to fall into chaos, so we should find some ways of solving the problem. This requires considering how farmers can enjoy the benefits of the Reform and Opening Up more, how to integrate them truly into the main body of Chinese history, and how to further implement their rights. The rural reconstruction movement should be on a deeper level than anti-­urbanization alone and should be more profound. That is, it should critique excessive urbanization. There are many theoretical tools for critiquing excessive urbanization. There is a school of thought that China’s small-scale peasant society is very good. It has a natural structure for crisis avoidance and is self-sufficient. Whenever there is a surplus in China’s rural society, grain will be kept in

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the yicang (a local public welfare granary) and can be used to help single elderly and orphans, children who are unable to go to school, or to support children to go outside for further study. It is a welfare system. Because of the yicang, some of the more affluent rural areas have the ability to cope with food collection by armies and avoid violent looting by disbanded soldiers in the event of war. At the same time, because China has less farmland than people, it is necessary to improve the productivity of land per unit area, so the production mode of small-scale farmers needs to be very precise. Farmers continue to cross-cultivate, and they also need to concentrate the labor force of clan settlements, to carry out intensive labor, and to improve land productivity. The historical wai chyun (walled villages) and wai uk (defensive houses) you see in New Territories, Hong Kong, today are an enclosed architectural design form of clan settlement, which was determined by the way small-scale farmers produced and their defensive needs. This characteristic of small-scale farming society not only can be used as a theoretical tool to critique urbanization but also is significant in the context of China’s participation in globalization and so deserves our deep consideration. Two years ago, the Reuters news agency said that China will become the world’s largest importer of agricultural products in ten years, that is to say, China’s agriculture is no longer self-sufficient, and it will rely on imports in the future. On the energy side, if it wasn’t because of Xinjiang’s supply of rare metals and oil, China’s energy and food would need to be met through international trade. This approach is extremely fragile. In the event of a financial crisis or an incident like an oil pipeline cut off by Somali pirates, the whole country will be greatly affected. The main historical experience and ideological resources we have used in rural reconstruction and rural research in the mainland are the rural reconstruction campaigns carried out by intellectuals of the Republic of China: from Mi Jiansan and Mi Digang, father and son, who in 1902 founded the “village government” model in Zhaicheng Village, Ding County, Hebei Province, to North China’s Village Government Group, to the Dingxian Experiment led by James Yen, to the Zouping Experiment led by Liang Shuming, to Xiaozhuang Normal College by Tao Xingzhi, and so on. In addition, we have also borrowed the experiences of Asian countries, such as The Land project in Chiang Mai, Thailand, and the Echigo-Tsumari Art Field in Japan. I recently went to New Zealand to do research on hippie communes and kept studying the North American Back-to-the-land Movement of the 1960s and 1970s. These resources will

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be incorporated into the practice of the Bishan Project. I know that Taiwan’s historical resources are very different from those of the mainland. Although everyone is interested in rural issues and rural movements, I seldom hear about James Yen and Liang Shuming among Taiwan’s intellectuals working in the countryside. Yung-feng has said that after the arrival of the KMT in Taiwan in 1949, its agricultural policy and its continuance were influenced by the United States. What about the Communist Party? Mao Zedong was influenced by the Japanese White Birch Group writers of his youth. At that time, Saneatsu Mushanokō ji kicked off the “New Village Movement” through their journal White Birch. They went to the mountains of Miyazaki Prefecture and tried to set up a community without oppression, class division, or leadership, to work in the fields and publish and write together. This movement first influenced Zhou Zuoren, and young Mao Zedong learned about the concept from him. The thought has been latent in young Mao Zedong’s mind for a long time, but he chose the road of violent revolution after he wrote the Report on an Investigation of the Peasant Movement in Hunan, temporarily abandoning the utopia of “New Village” and the road of gradually reform. After he took control of the Chinese regime, the utopian dream came out again and eventually evolved into the People’s Commune. This failed utopia was devastating to the Chinese countryside. First, he disrupted the social structure of the countryside through the gradual forms of primary and senior cooperatives. It centralized all means of production, all land resources, and destroyed the family structure, which was tied by blood and a patriarchal clan system, in the form of cooperatives—thus reversing Chinese rural society. By the end of the 1970s, Anhui farmers from the bottom to the top issued a request to take back their land and re-cultivate it, and farmers began to contract production to households. In this process, the enthusiasm of farmers to work has increased, but because everyone began to take care of themselves, the cohesion has become weaker and weaker. This is especially true in stages of urbanization, unless a whole piece of land in a village is sold to a developer, and it relates the deprived share of each villager, there is no possibility for them to unite as group struggle. In fact, work in the countryside is facing great difficulty under the situation that people in the countryside have more or less dispersed physically and spiritually. Yung-feng said that there are some organizations in Taiwan’s countryside, as well as some social and religious groups doing work. It is relatively easy to carry out work under the organizational

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strength of those social groups. But we have found that in the rural areas of mainland China there are basically no organizations besides village committees, so it is really difficult to accomplish much. The current regime design in China is that every village is managed by village committees. Historically, imperial power extended down only to the county level in China, but the rule of the Communist Party is not like this. There are Party branches in the village, and the Party’s organizations permeate the village. But it is very difficult for the Party organizational structure to combine with what we want to do. What we can use to open up the local social resources are some grassroots cadres who we think are better. Personally, they know the current situation in the countryside very well and have certain connections. The most important thing is that they have much experience and can share it with us. We can enter rural society quickly with the help of such people. What we do in Bishan Village is different from how things are done in Taiwan—before we started this rural project, we all made exhibitions or cultural publications, so there are more resources in this area, and the way we entered the countryside was mainly through art and culture. We organized the first Bishan Harvestival in 2011 and the Yixian International Photo Festival in 2012, bringing 150–200 artists, architects, designers, musicians, writers, and film directors from around the world to work with farmers every year. After the Cultural Revolution, public life in the countryside was depressed because of the “household contract system.” We hope to restore public life in the countryside through such activities first. Slowly, it is possible to further develop work related to economy and politics. We have a lot of ideas, but whether or not you can do it if you want to, it will take a long time to go deep, and it will take a little bit by little bit to be achieved. Under China’s institutional environment, work in the countryside inevitably encounters political bottlenecks, such as when the James Yen Rural Reconstruction Institute initiated by Wen Tiejun was called off. In addition to the institutional reasons, the complexity of rural society itself also makes it very difficult to do a lot of work. When James Yen saw cotton farmers exploited by usury in Ding County, he found some resources and set up cooperatives to help cotton farmers engage in cotton production. However, there were more than 200 banks in Ding County. Their loan business was affected and cut off—these 200 banks jointly wanted to drive James Yen out of Ding County. The whole process was dangerous and even violent. So rural society is very complicated, not about how kind the peasants are or how beautiful the rural scenery is in our imagination.

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Therefore, first of all, we need to understand who we are, and not let ourselves, having the superiority of intellectuals, think that we are there to “educate” farmers or “help” farmers. We can’t think like that. Farmers are sometimes much smarter than us. Second, we should not idealize farmers. We should not deify them. They are concerned about their immediate interests, gains, and losses. They also have shortcomings and faults. In short, the countryside is a very complex society. When we intervene in the countryside, we should understand who we are. We are the same as them. We should learn from each other and overcome each other’s shortcomings. The way we entered Bishan in the first year and began with dealing with the local and county governments can be said to be from the top down. Because we were going to organize the Bishan Harvestival in 2011, it would be a big event. At that time, more than 200 people came from different regions. If we did not cooperate with the local government, it would not be possible. But from the beginning, I felt that the villagers’ demands were very important. When I was working on the Dashilar Project and the documentary Meishi Street in Beijing, I found that people outside shouted loudly to protect this historical neighborhood. But, in fact, many did not take into account the strong desire of people living in slums to move away. The same is true in the countryside. When we went to Bishan in 2011, the villagers were very happy to see a tourist bus pulling a lot of people. They thought that we had come to invest in tourism. This expectation is very reasonable. In Xidi and Hongcun, villagers can get some money every year by selling tourist tickets, while in Bishan, the number of ancient dwellings is small, and tourism resources are not developed enough, villagers only can raise silkworms and grow rice, and their income has almost no surplus. I don’t think the Bishan villagers’ expectations are inappropriate, but they think we are big bosses—we didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. We were a non-profit; we just hoped to do our best to make the cultural and economic aspects of the village better. The most important rural resources in Huizhou are Hui-style architecture and ancient villages. As we all know, Huizhou merchants were very powerful commercial forces in the Ming and Qing dynasties. They used the money they earned from salt businesses in Yangzhou and Suzhou to repay their hometown, so the villagers were able to build many Hui-style houses, and each village was well planned. These things remained and became important resources for the villages, also determining that their current economic model must develop tourism. But we have to think about how to develop tourism. A few years ago, the government sold the

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whole of Hongcun to Beijing Zhongkun Investment Group. They bought the village and enclosed it. They established a very strict access control system. People had to buy tickets to enter the village, including to meet friends. One ticket now sells for 120 yuan. Most people who have visited Hongcun reflect that the ticket system has greatly reduced their impression of the place. This ticket-based tourism economy should not continue, so we recently communicated with the local County Tourism Committee in hopes of promoting a transformation of local tourism. Of course, the kind of tourism transformation we want will abolish tickets, but the contract with Zhongkun has not expired, so one possibility is that we will make Bishan into a prototype. It’s no use talking too much about things in the countryside. If you set up a model, you don’t have to say anything about it. There are some old housing resources in Bishan. Villagers can open small restaurants and inns by themselves. As an outside force, we help villagers and give them some advice. The most important thing is to make them into the main body of their economy. We recently persuaded Librairie Avant-Garde in Nanjing to open a Bishan Bookstore. A visit to Bishan is now an experience; you will experience the village and spend money there. Of course, some people criticize this way, thinking that we will affect farming life. But the villagers have very realistic needs, and they have to have economic income. If they don’t benefit from it, we can’t go on doing cultural work or any other work at all. If we can succeed, we can make the transition through this model. Second, we used to be busy with large-scale activities, dealing with the local government. Because large-scale activities involve public safety issues, we must cooperate with the government, so we have less communication with villagers. Since I moved to Bishan Village in April this year, social interaction with the villagers has been natural. It is no longer the kind of foreign communication that college students do, as with door-to-door surveys in the countryside, but daily communication. For example, when I moved from Beijing to the village, I needed my neighbors to help me move in. After they helped me, I invited them to have a meal at my house, and then I heard a lot of stories about them. In this natural way of communicating, I became familiar with all kinds of things in the village. On the basis of this natural interaction, we want to do some very detailed work, including teaching villagers with computers how to open online stores, or organizing discussions on topics related to the village. Third is the problem of getting along with local cadres. The Secretary of Biyang Town in Yi County has very different ideas from the local

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bureaucracy. He is really good. I learned a lot from him. Let me give you an example: for a while, they needed to promote insurance in the countryside. In the town, village officials were asked to collect insurance premiums one by one, but farmers did not pay them. He knew the farmers’ psychology, so he issued a notice saying that there were only 500 places left for insurance in the town. As soon as the announcement came out, farmers felt that insurance was a scarce resource and rushed to buy it. He could publicize what was supposed to be an administrative task as a “scarce resource” because he knew so much about the farmers’ mentality. For another example, the state gives assistance to the countryside. When the money arrives at the town, there needs to be a list of those guaranteed assistance because of status or income. In the past, the village committee held meetings where there would be several villager groups’ representatives. The committee would draw up a list according to the situation of the village and submit it to the town government. However, this secretary organized villagers in accordance with the villager groups as a unit, to organize all of them to hold respective group debates over who deserved assistance the most. After the evaluation lists of the village groups came out, each group sent a representative to the village government for the second debate. The lists generated by the debates were entered into the computer, becoming the data basis for subsequent assistance. Because it was debated publicly, it was impossible for anyone who wanted to go through the back door in the future. It’s a multi-phased way of democracy. It’s very interesting. It’s his own idea. In the transformation of tourism, he is in line with our ideas. We’re lucky. Maybe it won’t work in other countryside towns.

Countryside as Countryside7 Visibility I’ve been studying the Chinese countryside as a topic for a few years now, and the interesting thing is that only recently the topic is getting more noticed. Previously, not a lot of people were interested in it, but nowadays 7  This is an online interview by Daan Roggeveen and Song Xinlin on March 3, 2017. It was  recorded, edited, and  translated by Song Xinlin, published in  Daan Roggeveen, ed., Progress & Prosperity: The  Chinese City as  Global Urban Model (Rotterdam: NAI 010 Publishers, 2017).

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the countryside is hot. This is most visible during Chinese New Year, when people from all over China are going back to visit their hometowns. During this period, many urbanites who were born and raised in the countryside rediscover their roots—and start posting their homecoming experience on social media. The style of these long narrative essays about hometowns that are posted during the New Year holidays are called huanxiang ti (homecoming style), and they have ignited the debate about the countryside in the mainstream media. Urbanization China’s urbanization (chengshihua) has had a massive impact on the countryside, and not always a good one. The early stages of China’s rapid urban development started in the Pearl River Delta. When the urban economy started to increase, cities expanded. The first stage of urbanization happened on the fringes of the cities. The focus of my earlier work has been how this urban transformation “swallows” the rural land, and transformed farmers into urban citizens, with an urban lifestyle. The question was how farmers were getting involved in an urban consumer mechanism after being displaced from their farmland. This happened first in urban villages—villages turned into urban enclaves. The phenomenon not only started in Guangzhou and Shenzhen but also appeared in cities in western China when rapid urbanization took place there. These cities went through the same process as cities in the South. The key issue is: how do farmers get compensated for their demolished houses in urban villages? Infrastructure In the first stages of urbanization, a city takes over its nearby suburban areas. When the process of urbanization intensifies, it reaches deeper into China’s hinterland, into wider rural areas. One of the key features of Chinese urbanization is that it focuses on the construction of infrastructure. High-speed rail and developed road network connect people who are isolated from the “normal” world and links them to “modern” life. This obviously has an immense impact on the countryside. The construction of infrastructure powered the country’s economic development, and at the same time connected remote rural areas to the “civilized society.” The process brought people modernization, and simultaneously, cities could absorb labor force from rural areas: because of these transportation

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networks, it became easier for villagers to leave their hometowns for the city. Transportation networks improved accessibility of the country, so that overlooked places were now integrated into a larger mechanism. This connects commerce, logistics, and cultural exchange. Telecommunication infrastructure has also been improved: nowadays, even the remotest village has cable television and the Internet. Capital The downside of this infrastructural system is that it makes capital flow more easily into the countryside. When large capital investment opportunities in the city dry up, investors start searching for more land in the countryside to invest in. Consequently, large flows of hot money enter the countryside. Let me give you an example. In Bishan, the local government decided to re-collect the farmland in the village in 2015. They brought in a sizeable agricultural corporation to start large-scale farming like in the United States. To do that, they needed to concentrate the land. However, during this process of investment, individual farmers have little say in the negotiation process, because they are no longer united as a collective, so their leverage is small. The other reason is that the “household responsibility system,” which emerged in the 1980s, has also lost momentum in the countryside for a long time. Many scholars and intellectuals believe that to empower farmers, it is critical to recreate the cooperatives so farmers can have more negotiation power. These large flows of capital into the countryside are both positive and negative. It leads to the demolition of traditional culture. And it becomes easier for the city to captivate rural resources—like land, labor, and agricultural products. Therefore, infrastructure construction has created opportunities for the city to exploit the countryside. From an economic perspective the flows of capital have brought the so-called development to the countryside, but from the viewpoint of historical preservation and cultural impact, it has created numerous problems. Policy “Building a New Socialist Countryside” is a policy made by the central government. Beijing has always been aware of the fact that the countryside is an enormous and important issue, yet delicate at the same time. If it is not dealt with properly, it will present a risk to the stability of Chinese

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society and trigger political crises. The central government has keenly made policies to deal with this, including abolishing agricultural tax, and using the administrative means to strengthen the rural to avoid political risks. “Building a New Socialist Countryside” is a slogan that has been vigorously promoted in recent years. It reflects a further solution to rural issues. The making of these policies is good, but execution is problematic. One of the reasons is the lack of communication between China’s central and local governments. Particularly during the Hu (Jingtao)-Wen (Jiabao) leadership (2002–2012), local governments were not strictly following Beijing’s guidelines. Under the current “strongman politics” of Xi Jinping, there is a more rigorous links between central and local. The “Building a New Socialist Countryside” policy was an initiative in the Hu-Wen era, while “Rural Urbanization” (nongcun chengzhenhua) is another in the Xi (Jinping)-Li (Keqiang) era. One of the approaches of this new policy is the construction of small towns next to villages, intended to let farmers move there instead of having them move to big cities. However, research showed that this initiative was very costly for governments,8 at the same time the local governments could not offer alternative job opportunities for farmers who moved in these newly built towns. These farmers were living in apartment buildings but were unable to pay their bills. As a result, many people returned to their villages. So, the conclusion is that “Rural Urbanization” should be based on providing enough opportunities for employment. If this model is only based on land sales but not on job market development, there will be no future for farmers after the proceeds from their land sales have dried up.

8  “A report by the National Academy of Governance on the cost of urbanization said that in the eight years from 2013 to 2020, the annual additional financial cost for transforming farmers-turned-migrant-workers into registered urban residents will be 226.138 billion yuan. Statistics from the National Bureau of Statistics show that in 2012, the total number of farmers-turned-workers nationwide was 262.61 million, of whom 163.36 million were farmers-turned-migrant-workers. The report points out that if the 160 million migrant workers are turned into registered urban residents at one time, the minimum additional financial expenditure will reach more than 1.8 trillion yuan, which will bring greater pressure on China’s financial expenditure. “Du Tao and Xiao Wei, “Urbanization of Migrant Workers Takes 1.8 Billion Yuan,” The Economic Observer, May 11, 2013. http://finance.sina.com. cn/china/20130510/230115425368.shtml.

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Social Stability “Rural Urbanization” is the upgraded version of “Building a New Socialist Countryside.” In the past, the central government allocated big budgets to build standardized housing—developments that are all very similar and geometric—kind of terrifying. These projects were all built inside villages to let farmers move in after their homes and farmland were redistributed. Now the new towns are built outside villages. A potential danger would be that there was no planning for their livelihood, which created the risk of turning Chinese farmers into “instable population”—without having land and without a job providing as an alternative source of income. Previously, farmers would go to work in the factories in Dongguan and other cities. In case of a global financial crisis—like in 2008—they could always go back and pick up farming. But since they have now sold their farmland, they have nothing left for production. In the end, this is a threat to social stability. Countryside as City All these have a lot to do with the local authority’s understanding of the concept of the “New Countryside.” Local governments understand this as “make the countryside looks like a city.” Sun Jun, a painter and rural reconstructionist, who works in Haotang Village in Henan Province, takes an opposite stance. He said rural reconstruction should “make the countryside looks more like the countryside,” rather than trying to turn the rural into the urban. Yet, his success in Haotang could not stop the governments from practicing the “New Countryside” policies with the intent to use an urban approach to deal with rural development. As from the central government, there has never been a clear blueprint for the ideal countryside. Xi Jinping has stated several times that “Green mountains and clear water are mountains of gold and silver.” This was in a way some sort of tangible direction for rural development. It emphasized that natural resources are valuable. But there are of course different ways to interpret these words. One could say that it shows an awareness for environmental protection, or it can be seen as something very realistic. If you understand it as the natural resources that can be exchanged for money, then this direction can be scary. But when you can understand it as natural resource being valuable heritage that needs to be protected for future generations, then it’s different.

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National Identity Xi is very fond of traditional Chinese culture, and when he speaks, he refers often to classic poems and historic phrases. His motto, the “Chinese Dream,” links to Chinese cultural revival, yet stresses the ambition to be strong in global competition at the same time. The solution of rural problems and the revival of traditional culture could be a realistic way for China to achieve the global leadership to realize this “Chinese Dream.” As China is getting more and more confident, it realizes that its path of development should be different from that of other nations. Its modernization mode is unique and cannot mimic others. Xi’s view is that China’s development needs to spring from traditional culture, at the same time innovate it with contemporary elements, and put it in the backdrop of globalization. Through kicking off a reverse-globalization that is different from the United States, China wants to construct a new image of a big nation. Over the past thirty years—from Jiang Zemin to Xi Jinping—their desire for this kind of global identity has been very strong. When Donald Trump recently proclaimed that the United States is too involved internationally, and should instead focus on its internal issues, Xi appeared in Davos to tell the world that China could take a global leadership role. This ambition is very clear. Rural Image However, rural reconstruction has not been part of China’s global propaganda campaign. For the governments, the Chinese countryside is far too countrified and not fashionable. Official propaganda videos usually show international metropolises like Shanghai or Beijing, but rarely show the countryside. In the construct of the national image to the outside world, the rural is rarely shown. Three decades of urbanization have made China the second largest economy in the world, with its countryside not being presented as something the government is proud of. It’s more perceived as a burden, as some sort of “do not wash your dirty linen in public.” Propaganda materials may feature rural sceneries, or touristic destinations with beautiful views, but rarely will you see the real situation of rural people. Only the metropolis, infrastructure, and specimens of so-called “Chinese culture” are used as a global image—not the countryside. And what’s most interesting is that this cultural imagery doesn’t change over the years—it’s still acrobatics, Chinese dragon, and some very usual

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images. But to understand the essence of Chinese society, one has to look beyond the city. That’s the reason we work in the countryside—because China’s origins are rooted here. Diversity From a population perspective, it’s important to mobilize people to the countryside—for two reasons. First of all, it will release the pressure on the population in cities. Second, bringing people back to rural areas will resolve the shrinking population many villages are now facing. But how to mobilize people is still an issue. I moved to Bishan Village on a voluntary basis, but many people still don’t want to live in the countryside. Particularly people who were born and raised in a village, worked hard to move out, and finally live and work in the city. They never want to return. In a certain way, the concept of “building the countryside as a city” fits the idea of many people—including the rural population who moved to the city. Only if the countryside resembles the city would they consider moving back. My view is that we should allow for different developing models of the countryside, but the best is bringing back a way of life in terms of culture, rituals, and nature. My hope is to return to a traditional lifestyle, closer to nature, and live in a similar way as our ancestors. It is possible but yet challenging. Tourism Since farming is shrinking, labor is leaving the land, and locals lack a reliable source of income, developing tourism seems a realistic solution for those villages with historical and natural resources. I’m not opposed to tourism. However, if we want to stimulate the value of historical and natural resources, it is critical to bring real benefit to local people. Globally, most destinations are adopting a similar model in developing their tourism. It is important to decide what kind of tourism is friendly to the environment and lets people share the benefits. Again, there is no question of whether we should or should not develop tourism. The question is which kind. The general Chinese model for rural tourism is to build a wall around a site or village and sell entrance tickets. The government sells a whole village to a tourism company or sets up a state-owned company, to turn the village’s historical and natural resources into tourism income. When there’s a lack of such historical and natural resources, they invent them. They craft false stories and make up history—so people start fighting over

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the “real” location of the “Peach Blossom Spring”—a paradise in the famous fable by Tao Yuanming during Eastern Jin and Southern Song dynasties. Similarly, competing villages are claiming to be the original hometown of a certain historical figures—most of their arguments cannot withstand closer scrutiny. So, there are two main issues for rural Chinese tourism. First is the entrance ticket system. A village is walled up as a cash machine for tourist companies and governments, and its inhabitants are turned into “performers” of “rural life,” they can only earn their living through small business in front of their homes—the so-called spillover effect. This highly commercialized scenic spot has been ripping off tourists instead of good service and has greatly damaged the image of the village. Second is the false selling propositions. It is not necessary for a village without any historical resources to make up a fake historical site or craft false stories of historical figures. Nowadays, there is a trend of study tours in China. People are interested in experiencing rural life. In fact, the exploration of tourism resources in the countryside can be started from the general aspects of social customs, farming traditions, local delicacies, natural history, and so on. The most important thing is that tourists in countryside should have ecological awareness and not pollute or damage the local environment due to their arrival. Non-place However, many tourism sites in villages belong to tourism companies; tourist buses come in and park on a large parking lot newly built in front of the village. Local villagers have no intention to tell you their family story. They just want to sell you their products or souvenirs that they have no idea where these were produced. You can’t see interpersonal communication, nor can you walk into their life. Such village has become “non-­ place,” what you can see is just the flows of goods, money, and buses. This kind of non-place doesn’t create any relationship with locals. It turns people merely into consumers of the tourism industry. Airports, highways, and the like are all non-places—allowing for people and materials to flow faster—and now tourism destinations have become something similar. They try to facilitate a fast flow of people and materials and, through this process, generate income. The tourists take a quick look at a village and then hurry for the next one. This constant flow is the norm in a scenic spot. This is the new feature of capitalism—the so-called supermodernity—and it creates non-­ places—the spaces and environments that have nothing to do with

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collective memory or the meaning of a “place.” At present, there are so many non-places in China, which are not created intently by its top-down planning system, but are by-products of the fervent pursuit of “supermodernity”—the infrastructure built to speed up internal mobility is a symbol of “super modernity,” and the Chinese governments are deeply proud of it. However, in the process of urbanization driven by infrastructure construction, many places where interpersonal relationships and emotional memories were originally condensed were largely destroyed, and one by one they became non-places that made people feel alienated. Abroad In Japan, modernization was completed a long time ago, so there is no large gap between the urban and the rural in terms of income and development level. Taiwan is a small island, so the countryside is close to urban life: it takes just one or two hours to move between the countryside and nearby large cities. People can live in a village and drive to the city to work or do business. But China is large, and its development is different. You need to make long trips to travel between the city and rural areas. In the developed countries, living in the countryside could be a middle class’ choice, but in China only poor people live in a village. The middle class is starting to move to the countryside, following a small-scale anti-­ urbanization trend. But moving this forward requires time and effort to mobilize people. Moreover, as yet there are no job opportunities and no proper educational resources in the countryside. These are the biggest obstacles in encouraging people to return to rural China.

Topophilia and Placemaking9 Topophilia is the affective bond between people and place or setting. —Yi-Fu Tuan.10

9  Completed in Chinese on April 15, 2018, in Yantai. The English version was translated by Elaine W. Ho and published in Peng Yanhan, ed., Topophilia and Placemaking: Kwan-Yen Project (Yantai: Chuanyuan Culture and  Media, 2018). The  publication coincides with  “Across Chinese Cites  – The  Community,” a  collateral exhibition of  the  16th International Architecture Exhibition—La Biennale de Venezia. 10  Yi-Fu Tuan, Topophilia: A Study of Environmental Perception, Attitudes, and Values (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990), 4.

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Placemaking is about turning a neighborhood, town, or city from a place you can’t wait to get through into one you never want to leave. —Fred Kent.11

Henry Luce was born in 1898  in Tengchow (now known as Penglai), Shandong Province. Just two years later, during the chaos of the Boxer Rebellion in 1900, he was brought by his parents for the first time to Chefoo (now Zhifu) to board a ship to North Korea in the course of their escape. Luce’s foundational years as a young child were spent in Weihsien (now Weifang). When he reached the age of eight, the family returned to the United States and Luce attended public school there for two years before they moved again to China. Luce then attended the Chefoo School—organized under British education standards by the China Inland Mission (now OMF International) to be “the best school east of the Suez Canal”—until 1912 during the breakout of the Xinhai Revolution.12 His childhood years spent living on the Shandong Peninsula created sentiments for the country, and apart from the United States, China was always the place Luce loved most. The prefectural-level city known today as Yantai is the birthplace of Henry Luce, the land onto which he first opened his eyes in the world and the land by which he began to understand and grasp the mountains, the sea, the city, and the islands. Family and schooling enriched these understandings, and over the course of time, an accumulation of familiarities slowly turned an unfamiliar “space” into a deeply rooted “place.” The “topophilia” thus described by Yi-fu Tuan first germinated for Luce here, and this sense of place entwined with him his entire life. The relationships between a person and his or her birthplace and childhood home are never decided by oneself, but they are most deeply rooted in life. Luce and Yantai can be initially described as bound together by this “biographical relationship.”13 Because of his particular family background, 11  Fred Kent, “Transforming Cities through Creative Placemaking,” Mayor’s Innovation Project (New York: Project for Public Spaces, 21 January 2012), 2. https://www.mayorsinnovation.org/images/uploads/pdf/Kent.pdf. 12  Alan Brinkley, The Publisher: Henry Luce and His American Century (New York: Vintage, 2011). 13  The three relational concepts—biographical, spiritual, and narrative—used in this text are taken from Jennifer E. Cross, “What Is Sense of Place?”, 12th Headwaters Conference, Western State Colorado University, Gunnison, November 2-4, 2001. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/282980896_What_is_Sense_of_Place.

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Luce’s connection to Yantai can also be categorized as a “spiritual relation.” His father was a missionary representing the Presbyterian Church of the United States of America (PCUSA), and Luce’s own enrollment in the China Inland Mission School gave him firm belief that following the Lord would bring the Chinese people toward a happier and more ideal China. If we could use contemporary GPS surveillance technology to trace Luce’s life in the form of a map, then Yantai and China would certainly be pinned full as hotspots in his “topophiliac geography.” In 1932, after having already published Time magazine for nine years, Luce returned to Weihsien, Chefoo, and Tsingdao. In 1941, after having taken over Life magazine for five years, he met Chiang Kai-Shek and Soong Mei-Ling for the first time in Chongqing. In 1945 and 1946 during the aftermath of the transpacific battles of World War II, Luce met not only Chiang Kai-­ Shek and Soong Mei-Ling again but also Mao Zedong and Zhou Enlai. The Christian faith of Chiang and Soong gave Luce much hope for China’s future, and he spared no effort to help the Nationalist government, giving China innumerable cover features in his publications. Unfortunately though, his bets were misplaced. Luce’s unfortunately ill-judged efforts can be understood as the activist result of a topophiliac placemaking. His love of the place generated hopes of improving it, and he thereby used his own Christian spirituality and values to build his own interpretation of a “land of milk and honey.” But after the transition of power in China, Luce’s nostalgia could only migrate with Chiang and the exiled government to Taiwan. And so it became that in 1963, in honor of his father’s missionary work, Luce donated funds to Tunghai University for the construction of the Luce Memorial Chapel, collaboratively designed by Chinese-American architect I.  M. Pei and Taiwanese architect Chi-kuan Chen. After Henry Luce’s death in 1967, all of his assets went to the Henry Luce Foundation, which had also been founded to honor the Luce family’s missionary work and primarily supports research and education in China and the rest of Asia. It was the Henry Luce Foundation that supported the 2017 large-scale exhibition “Art and China After 1989: Theatre of the World” held at the Guggenheim Museum in New York. Yantai, formerly known as Chefoo, became a treaty port city in 1861 as a result of the British and Qing governments’ signing of the Treaty of Tientsin ending the Second Opium War. Robert Morrison, British consul general stationed in China, gave up on the originally agreed port of Tengchow and chose instead the harbor of Chefoo for its superior

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qualities. At the time, Chefoo was only a fishing village, but it had as early as the Ming dynasty already been regarded as an important coastal defense area. In 1398 during his thirty-one-year reign, the Ming dynasty Hongwu Emperor Zhu Yuanzhang had set up the Mount Qi Thousand Households Defense Garrison to defend against Japanese “dwarf pirates” in the area. The area now known as Suochengli thus bears over 600 years of history since Zhu Yuanzhang’s erection of the watchtowers on Mount Qi. In 1862, the Qing government renamed Chefoo to Yantai (literally “smoke towers”), though foreigners continued to use the former Wade-Giles romanization. The construction of what later became Kwan-Yen Road began in 1851, during the first year of the Qing dynasty Xianfeng Emperor’s reign and ten years before the opening up of Yantai to partial colonial rule. In 1891 on what was initially named East Boulevard by the British, magistrate Sheng Xuanhuai stationed at Yantai’s Deng-Lai-Qing Circuit created Kwan-Yen T’ang (abbreviated from Kwan-Shih-Yen-Cheng, or “applying a policy of benevolence”), the biggest charity organization on the Shandong Peninsula. It was at this time that the boulevard was renamed Kwan-Yen Road (now Guangren Road). Many examples of modern architecture are to be found scattered around Kwan-Yen Road and its neighboring areas of Yantai Port and Chefoo Bay. They are of average two-story western or Chinese-western fusion style buildings, including the former sites of the Mingsheng Lamp Company, French Medicinal Herbs Company, Xinlu Embroidery Company, the YMCA and the YMCA public library, Xinlu Trading Company, the Cantonese Association of Fellow Provincials in Yantai, Yangzheng Elementary School, East Asia Canned Goods Factory, Yantai Normal Adjunct Elementary School, the Ji family manor, and Changyu Wine Company as well as the many foreign consulates and commercial buildings of nearby Yantai Hill and Chaoyang Street (the latter also formerly named Gipperich and Zimmerman Streets at different points in time). These buildings gave Chefoo’s urban spaces their wealthy, colonial character early on, and most of them have now been designated as historic architecture. From here one can still catch a glimpse of the former missionary movement days when Henry Luce’s family lived on the Shandong Peninsula. As a treaty port with a mild climate, Yantai became the summer home for many missionary families active in the rural areas of northern China. In order to fulfill their children’s education needs, the missionaries created the Chefoo School, and this was the starting point for the lifelong links between Yantai and Henry Luce.

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While Luce was a Yantai-born foreigner, entrepreneur Tan Fang is a born and bred Yantai local. It was not until she was thirty that she first left her hometown to make a living in Shenzhen, and the depth of her experience and memories related to Yantai exceeds that of Luce. After returning home in 2014, Tan took charge of the urban revitalization and commercial reorganization project of the Kwan-Yen Road historical district, known as “Yantai Open Port First Avenue.” With today’s Chinese population highly mobile, the experience of returning to one’s hometown is simultaneously linked with estrangement; Tan was unable to grasp the old familiarities she had once had with the place. The reality was more like watching video images on fast forward: spaces turning over constantly, time ever condensed, old houses in decline disappearing in an instant, new cities built on wastelands overnight, and old camaraderie dispersing like sand between fingers. While new identity formations need time, people are continuously washed over by the fast-moving waves of the latest trends, as if one could live several lives in the span of one lifetime. And so it was a topophiliac tendency that also propelled Tan, like Luce, to rebuild her hometown. She calls it the Kwan-Yen Project. The hometown Tan Fang knows is entirely different from that of Luce’s time. During her youth, these foreign buildings were all expropriated by the State to become residences for ordinary civilians or the offices and production bases of state-owned work units (danwei). After 2000, the northern end of the Broadway grew into a landscape of high-rises not so dissimilar from Hong Kong’s Central business district, and the majority of Kwan-Yen Road’s residents were relocated to the newly built Hui’an residential block, later converted to become Marina Square. The proposed plan from the Tsinghua University Architecture and Design Institute considered this area as a symbolic gateway into Yantai as well as the city’s “living room.” Over forty historic buildings were preserved, and the dwellings that were demolished were cleared to become green areas and pedestrian walkways. Expensive restaurants, entertainment venues, and commercial shops moved in, and Yantai Hill and this historic area became a tourist destination. Neighboring Chaoyang Street spontaneously followed to become a restaurant and bar hub. Although Yantai is only viewed as a third-tier city in China, the intense transformations of space occurring here are comparable to that of large cities. But because of the complex conditions of property ownership in the area, revamping efforts in Suochengli have been put on delay, inadvertently preserving the place as the historic origin of Yantai and allowing the colorful, grassroots atmosphere—in dynamic contrast to the colonial style—to remain.

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The third-tier ranking of a city is the result of urban status divisions determined by administrative rank, population, quantity, and breadth of socioeconomic resources as well as GDP level. But the ranking does not hinder people’s feelings of identity for the homeland. In this era of intense urbanization, the smaller a place is, the stronger its ability to arouse feelings of nostalgia and homesickness. A moving history can even be excavated from the crevices of a small village. Under the large-scale, homogenous drive to modernize, the sense of place has become rare. It becomes more convenient and quick to travel and remain mobile, and on the contrary, stability and calm are sought after. From the bird’s eye view of a world map, Yantai is geographically only a tiny spot, and Kwan-Yen Road even smaller. Tan Fang’s hometown reconstruction project is exactly borne from this utterly tiny speck, but if Luce’s topophilia could spread from Chefoo to all of China, the Kwan-Yen project’s path can also grow to spread over the whole of Yantai and the Shandong Peninsula. Because of being an outsider invited by Tan Fang to participate in the Kwan-Yen Project, and additionally because of my wife’s family located here, I have come intermittently to Yantai, now living here for almost two years. The city was at first foreign to me, but as daily life affections have accumulated and my time here has led to greater understandings, I have also been imbued with a certain degree of “topophilia.” Differing from Luce and Tan, however, my bonds with Yantai can be described as more of a “narrative relationship” establishing ties between the sense of place and its corresponding context. These narrative relations are made via the following: historical records from archives, missionary families’ histories, memoirs from foreign tradesmen, local literature, the sharing from history buffs, oral histories learned while doing field research, observations of local daily customs, comparisons between documented research and the realities and transformations of the landscape, and so on. When linked together, these learning-oriented connections concatenate the time and space of a context together with the “sense of place” and provide a body of knowledge for my participation in the work of the Kwan-Yen Project. A hometown is often understood as a fixed geographical location, especially one in which one was born and raised. From a psychological perspective, however, hometown is not necessarily a geographical concept, and what is called homesickness is rather a state of mind brought about by recalling a past time and experience to which one cannot return. I have once had feelings of homesickness for a small town on the eastern coast of Taiwan, as well as for a village in the south of Anhui Province. Perhaps it

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was that the former reminded me of the subtropical climate and vegetation of my birthplace on the peninsula of Leizhou. Perhaps the latter recalled the from dawn-to-dusk farm work that I experienced during my youth, or perhaps it is that these two places are still rich in the conviviality that contemporary society elsewhere lacks. If I am a bit fascinated with Yantai, it is because in these two years I have gained a certain knowledge of the place, but if I have to trace this “hometown feeling,” then maybe it goes back to the seaside I lived along during my youth or even simply the fresh smell of seafood. In a fast-flowing, mobile era, the idea of home leaves the boundaries of geography to become something more difficult to grasp, as something simultaneously formed and washed away by time. As the saying goes, “Over the course of time, an alien land becomes homeland.” Along this line, it is now possible for people from all corners of the world to come together to “create home” or “make place.” The impetus for beginning the Kwan-Yen Project was exactly to bring people of different knowledge backgrounds from Beijing, Shenzhen, and Taipei together with Yantai locals, and in 2016 the Kwan-Yen Symposium was held in Yantai to share our experiences and spark our collective brainpower. Since then, we have embarked upon the historical validation and spatial maintenance of over forty old buildings on Kwan-Yen Road. Based on surveys of the commercial conditions in the area, we decided to introduce more cultural elements, and a new space group called “Kwan-Yen Panorama” was created. Because of recent developments in the publishing industry and the rise of large-scale or even franchise bookstores, bookstores have received both government support and widespread approval from the public. Many large-scale commercial enterprises have come to include bookstores as a standard part of development initiatives. Tan Fang’s idea to create a large-­ scale bookstore on the seaside was therefore met with everyone’s agreement. After the rise in popularity of the Internet and much of Chinese society’s increased wealth, there has been a return to the search for spiritual fulfillment. The proliferation of large-scale bookstores has catered not only to this need but also to the need for offline spaces for communication and exchange. After the temples, the chapels, and the shopping centers, bookstores are deemed a kind public space best able to bring people together, in China even surpassing the attractiveness of museums and art venues. Tan Fang then chose two existing, already connected buildings located approximately 200 meters from the sea and invited architect Dong

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Gong and his studio Vector Architects to begin renovation work. We named the building the Chefoo Institute & Library, and it will serve as the heart of the Kwan-Yen Road historic district. The Chefoo Institute & Library will be an innovative, Yantai born and bred bookstore brand. Its embeddedness in the place is not only be embodied by the old Chinese place name “Chefoo” but will also be reflected in the functioning of the space to include three garrets for invited researchers in residence. The results of these invited scholars’ local research will be included within Chefoo’s publishing activities. It is thus not only a bookstore but a library, research institute, and academy in one, devoted to producing and sharing knowledge. Knowledge sharing refers not only to the focus on “de-schooling” activities to take place at the institute, but also to the space as a coastal flagship aiming to open up a satellite-like network of small, non-commercial libraries connected to the Chefoo Institute in other communities. To enter the general public by way of a library can replenish Yantai’s cultural life and provide greater mainstream access to knowledge. Of course, this is an enormous and complex proposition, a process and preparation of which will be equally elaborate. We decided that simultaneous to discussing the operations and spatial design of the main store, we could begin by experimenting with a first community library in Suochengli. During my two semesters of teaching at Columbia University, it was always most difficult to pull me away from the various libraries on campus. The Butler, Avery and Gottesman Libraries at Columbia facilitate convenient research for people at the university, and this sparked my interest in libraries. The specific idea to propose a community library for Yantai was inspired by the Working Men’s Institute (WMI) in New Harmony, Indiana, USA. Established in 1838 by American geologist William Maclure in the utopian town founded by Robert Owen, the Working Men’s Institute aimed to disseminate useful knowledge to laborers who work with their hands. While expanding to a number of WMI libraries in various locations, all except the library in New Harmony were eventually absorbed by other public libraries in the United States. The crucial concept behind the WMI is that knowledge should not be monopolized by the few but shared by all. In the Internet era, knowledge sharing under Creative Commons licensing has already broken many traditional boundaries. But what if we could bring such ideas back to the physical world? Imagine creating knowledge sharing stations as plentiful as convenience stores!

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The Suochengli Neighborhood Library is located in the rear courtyard of the Zhang family ancestral hall, with renovations completed by Dong Gong and Vector Architects. It offers a physical space for the general public to read, study, and gather together, opening up possibilities for people to further knowledge of their own community and the history of the city, to strengthen community ties and belonging to the place. This community library, as well as its possible second, third, and future incarnations— including the Chefoo Institute & Library—all aim to explore the social and commons-making possibilities of the library and to liberate knowledge from the grips of the elite. We have collected and carefully selected numerous publications about Yantai and the Shandong Peninsula. Visual artist Zhang Xiao was invited to exhibit his participatory art project Suochengli Photo Shop for the opening of the library. Xie Huanxin, a local Yantai historian and researcher of folk culture, has taken on the role of library director and organized talks on local history customs, geography, and art nearly every month, including several open talks by Suochengli residents themselves. At the critical moment in 2017 when the Yantai municipal government finally launched its reconstruction projects in Suochengli, it was the Suochengli Neighborhood Library that took the lead in activating the historic area, providing an example of experimental practice from ground up. At the same time as building the Suochengli Neighborhood Library, we constructed an equally experimental Kwan-Yen People’s Station in the main area near the seaside. The space is an irregularly shaped three-story high construction able to host exhibitions, talks, screenings, readings, and so on, and was completed using a quick-to-set-up, prefabricated system designed by People’s Architecture Office. Additional mobile features of the space are called The People’s Canopy, the Pop-up Tricycle Shop, and the Tricycle Office, all of which instigate on the street communication and spontaneous exchange. Before the opening of the Chefoo Institute & Library, The Kwan-Yen People’s Station will serve as a cultural catalyst and the initial phase contribution to a public space for the Kwan-Yen Road historic district. For its first event, the Station hosted a retrospective exhibition to introduce the practice of People’s Architecture Office to Yantai residents. Entitled “Mass Interventions,” the exhibition included projects like the well-received Courtyard House Plugin and Plugin House, both hutong renovation design proposals created as part of Beijing’s 2016 Dashilar Project. Both projects, as well as the Kwan-Yen People’s Station itself,

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employ an inexpensive prefabricated system that can flexibly organize new spaces adaptable to residents’ needs. After the Kwan-Yen People’s Station is dismantled, its materials can be recycled and reused, making it extremely suitable for the renovations of Chaoyang Street and Suochengli’s historic district. The Kwan-Yen Project is at the present moment still only a beginning. The so-called creation of home or what may be called placemaking does not only entail the construction and renovation of material space; it also includes the future and gradual but consistent uncovering of historical memory, the cultivating of social relations and the fostering of shared identity (the three elements necessary to generate “place” according to French anthropologist Marc Augé).14 Most especially, placemaking must include the preservation and revitalization of place-based knowledge. Place-based or tacit knowledge was known in ancient Greece as metis, referring to the unique experiences of a place that cannot be translated universally—dialects, local systems of measurement, spontaneously formed and not yet regulated places, traditional handicrafts that rely upon corporeal skills and training, and so on.15 Metis is anonymous, collectively authored, and can be continuously adapted according to the needs of daily life. As earth and water are native cultivators in each particular geography, metis is uniquely cultivated to become the particular and recognizable customs and characteristics of a place, the DNA that prevents the homogenous development patterns of globalization. If you drive to Yantai from the G15 Shenyang-Haikou expressway, your body is violently molded by the stereotypically characterless spaces of contemporary transportation infrastructure. But as soon as you see the rooftops of seaweed bungalows still lining the coast, and as soon as you see the road signs displaying the 罘 (fú) character from Zhifu (Chefoo), or the 夼 (kuǎng) character from Dadongkuang, you will know that the old hometown feel of Yantai and the Shandong Peninsula still exist. To “rebuild” a sense of home does not mean constructing however many high-rises and 14  “If a place can be defined as relational, historical and concerned with identity, then a space which can not be defined as relational, or historical, or concerned with identity will be a non-place.” From Marc Augé, Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity (Brooklyn: Verso, 1995), 77. 15  “Metis is better understood as the kind of knowledge that can be acquired only by long practice at similar but rarely identical tasks, which requires constant adaptation to changing circumstances.” James C.  Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999), 193.

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modern facilities in one’s hometown; it is more about how much of the sense of place can be recovered, and for how many others we can inspire a hometown topophilia. On the long-distance road toward modernization that we’ve only just stepped upon, the goal of the Kwan-Yen Project can only be in Yantai. And we are searching for the small fork in the path toward home.

CHAPTER 15

Utopian Dreams

You’re Too Shy to Talk About Utopia1 Yes, people may say: this is too naive, too unrealistic. It is not a good time to talk about Utopia. But thanks to the IFFTI 2015 conference hosted by Polimoda,2 we could talk about it loudly. When reality is harsh and ugly, we need more utopian thinking to broaden our imagination. Moreover, we need to take action, to find the possibility in the real world, to build a utopia out of “nowhere” and locate it in “somewhere” which means a practical utopia. So, don’t be shy. I presented the Bishan Project at IFFTI 2015, with a retrospective exhibition at Florence National Library. I was surprised that Linda Loppa wanted to showcase this project: it is about rural reconstruction in a small village in China running for about five years. It seems that there is no connection with a fashion education conference, but I understood Linda’s

1  Completed in  English on  March 27, 2016, in  Bishan, published in  Linda Loppa, ed., Moments, (Milan: Skira Editore, 2016), the  publication of  IFFTI 2015, “Momenting the Memento.” 2  The International Foundation of Fashion Technology Institute (IFFTI) is a society of fashion education which found in 1999. Every year it has an annual conference hosted by one of its members in different countries. The IFFTI 2015 conference is the seventeenth edition, host by Polimoda in Florence.

© The Author(s) 2020 O. Ning, Utopia in Practice, Contemporary East Asian Visual Cultures, Societies and Politics, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-5791-0_15

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curatorial idea; she wanted to bring something different from the fashion industry. That’s why I was happy to share my utopian practices. Considering that Chinese rural society is collapsing faster and faster since the post-Cold War era of globalization and urbanization, a large number of Chinese intellectuals began to join in the New Rural Reconstruction Movement (NRRM). Based on the Rural Reconstruction Movement in the Republican Era, the NRRM continues searching for alternative solutions for China’s rural problems. Admiring what they’re doing, I also started my project in Bishan Village in Anhui Province. This project began on a Moleskine notebook. In 2010, Moleskine invited me to write something in this notebook for an exhibition in Shanghai, and then I decided to draw my blueprint for the Bishan Project. One year later, I moved out of Beijing and into the village with friends. I settled down there and engaged the villagers and local government in the organization of the public events, the Bishan Harvestival and the Yixian International Photo Festival. We purchased or rented old, broken houses and converted them into public spaces: Buffalo Institute, Bishan Bookstore, and School of Tillers, among others. The Bishan Village became a base for knowledge and culture productions. We curated exhibitions and conferences, organized workshops and expeditionary learning events, carried out research on local handicraft and vernacular architecture, published the books Bishan and V-ECO, and wrote essays to promote our new idea on rural reconstruction. At the same time, I spent a lot of time visiting different intentional communities in the United States, Denmark, Australia, and New Zealand to learn about their experiences in permaculture, co-housing, and consensus-decision-making systems. My hope was for the village to finally become the Bishan Commune, just like those North American communes in the Back-to-the-­ land Movement during the 1960s and 1970s. Through these activities, we brought a lot of people back to the depopulated village. The empty houses are now B&Bs or restaurants or shops run by local villagers; the young people who had left to work in the cities are coming back to run organic farming businesses and sell their produce to the cities through the Internet, making more incomes than when they were migrant workers in the cities. The local economy and cultural life have been activated, but it is not moving toward a model of gentrification: it is not middle-class outsiders but villagers themselves who have become the main body of the new society.

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I come from an art and design background, but I identified myself in the Bishan Project as an activist and facilitator. I’m interested in social engagement with art and design, but I’m only a person who works to bridge and activate different resources. What I did is more about animation (animating the existing power) than empowerment (giving power top down). As a so-called anarchist, I don’t believe organization or leadership; I prefer horizontal power. I live in the village with my family and friends as part of the neighborhood, and we share equally with the local villagers. The common people do not need to be educated by the elites. We just need to learn from each other. In the exhibition at Florence National Library, I showed two of my Moleskine notebooks, How to Start Your Own Utopia (2010) and How to Continue Your Own Utopia (2015); a documentary film about the Bishan Project by Sun Yunfan and Leah Thompson (2015); various products and publications (2011–2015); and the newest “Back to the Land: Agritopia Dress for Bishan Commune” (2015), a collection designed according to Mencius’ words on Agrarianism (372–289 BC), Thomas More’s Utopia (1516), Henry David Thoreau’s Walden or Life in the Woods (1854), William Morris’ News from Nowhere (1891), and Burrhus Frederic Skinner’s Walden Two (1948) to deal with the relationship between body, dress, land, and utopia. Celebrated Chinese photographer, Xiao Quan visualized my narration, incorporating the newly designed dress into a beautiful photo story. In the eighteenth-century buildings of Florence National Library with Dante Alighieri’s statue, the exhibition was designed and installed perfectly by the Polimoda team. Being utopian means not only thinking of a perfect society in nowhere, but also trying to make it happen in somewhere. In the workshop organized by the lettera27 Foundation and Polimoda, the Moleskine brand founder Maria Sebregondi and I discussed “How to Make Ideas Happen” with the Polimoda students. I was drawn to two Russian girls’ ideas in their notebooks; they had researched the traditional tribe life in their country and brought this old spirit and handicraft into their fashion design. I also learned a lot from the “In the Conversation with…” session at the Odeon Cinehall, where the discussion went far beyond fashion, touching on society, politics, and philosophy. Just like the theme “Momenting the Memento,” the IFFTI 2015 created a special moment for all participants in Florence. It was a temporary think tank that contributed a lot of exciting ideas and opinions for the

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creative industry and education system. Many thanks to the open-minded educator and thinker Linda Loppa; as a facilitator, you brought us together.

Autonomy: Utopia or Realpolitik3 Autonomy is a key concept in anarchist thought. Regarding anarchism, Peter Kropotkin provided the following explanation in the eleventh edition of The Encyclopedia Britannica: “The name given to a principle or theory of life and conduct under which society is conceived without government—harmony in such a society being obtained, not by submission to law, or by obedience to any authority, but by free agreements concluded between the various groups, territorial and professional, freely constituted for the sake of production and consumption, as also for the satisfaction of the infinite variety of needs and aspirations of a civilized being.”4 The term “anarchism” comes from the Greek anarchos, meaning “without ruler,” and this etymology points us to its core idea: that there is no need for a government, that a society can be maintained autonomously. The Chinese translation wuzhengfu zhuyi (which roughly translates to “no-­government-­ ism”) is not exactly imprecise, but considering its various historical contexts, and particularly polemic disputes and conflicts with Marxism, the word has taken on a different meaning in Chinese society. Once Marxism became China’s mainstream ideology, anarchism was marginalized, its power diminished. The fact is, however, that many communists were anarchists at first, and in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries anarchism had many followers in China. Many of the attempted assassinations of Qing dynasty rulers were committed under the influence of the anarchist doctrine known as “propaganda of the deed,” which entails using demonstrative actions to promote and mobilize revolution.5 Such acts of 3  Completed in Chinese on December 10, 2012, in Bishan. The English version was translated by Jeff Crosby. Published in  Chinese and  English in  Hou Hanru, ed., Zizhiqu: Autonomous Regions (Guangzhou: Times Museum, 2013). The English translation revised by Austin Woerner was published in Ou Ning, Bishan Commune: How to Start Your Own Utopia (Aarhus: OVO Press and Antipyrine, 2015). 4  Hugh Chisholm, ed., The Encyclopedia Brittanica: a dictionary of arts, sciences, literature and general information (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1910), 914. 5  One example is Liu Shifu (Liu Shih-fu, 1884–1915), often called China’s first anarchist. Liu plotted the assassination of Guangdong Naval Commandant Li Zhun in 1907 and founded the “China Assassination Corps” together with Xie Yingbo, Gao Jianfu (Gou Gimfu), and Chen Jiongming (Ch’en Chiung-ming) in Hong Kong in 1910.

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violence committed by individuals led society to reject anarchism and equate it with violence, chaos, nihilism, moral degeneracy, and opposition to existing governments, rather than the separation from government and practice of autonomy that was advocated by original anarchism. As one of the most important human philosophical and political ideas of the past two centuries, anarchism runs an extraordinarily diverse and complex spectrum, with advocacy of violence accounting for only a small faction. For instance, the Christian anarchism of Leo Tolstoy (which inspired Japanese Shirakaba-ha writer Saneatsu Mushanokō ji’s Atarashiki-­ mura practice) and the Buddhist anarchism of Taixu6 (the term was later coined by American poet Gary Snyder)7 both advocate non-violence. Many anarchists also set a very strict moral code for themselves. Of the many thinkers who comprise the intellectual tribe of anarchists, Kropotkin is in a sense the epitome, and he is also the one who made the most profound contributions toward the construction of gentle social ideals in anarchism. At the time, Marxism was spreading across the world like wildfire, and the anarchist pioneers Pierre-Joseph Proudhon and Mikhail Bakunin were no match for it in the battle of ideas. Because of this, Kropotkin resolved to reconstruct the anarchist system of thought by drawing on the philosophy of empiricism that was popular at the time. In his 1902 work Mutual Aid, Kropotkin attempted to use the scientific methods of empiricism to refute the social Darwinist theory of the “struggle for survival” from the perspective of evolutionary history and demonstrate that mutual aid is a human instinct and the driving force behind social progress: “Neither the crushing powers of the centralized State nor the teachings of mutual hatred and pitiless struggle which came, adorned with the attributes of science, from obliging philosophers and sociologists, 6  Taixu (Tai Hsu, 1890–1947) was a Chinese Buddhist modernist, activist, and thinker. Before the revolution of 1911, he made contact with political radical Pan Dawei, socialist Jiang Kanghu (Kiang Kang-hu), and anarchist Liu Shifu among other revolutionaries, and participated in some secret revolutionary activities in Guangzhou. Later he described the formation of his political thinking during this time: “My social and political thought was based upon from Constitutional Monarchy, to Nationalism Revolution, to Socialism, then to Anarchism. … I came to see Anarchism and Buddhism as close companions, and as a possible advancement from Democratic Socialism.” Taixu, Autobiography (Taipei: Bliss & Wisdom Press, 1996). 7  See Gary Snyder, “Buddhist anarchism,” originally published in Journal for the Protection of All Beings #1 (San Francisco: City Lights, 1961). The online version can be found at The Anarchist Library: https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/gary-snyder-buddhist-anarchism.

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could weed out the feeling of human solidarity, deeply lodged in men’s understanding and heart, because it has been nurtured by all our preceding evolution. What was the outcome of evolution since its earliest stages cannot be overpowered by one of the aspects of that same evolution. And the need of mutual aid and support which had lately taken refuge in the narrow circle of the family, or the slum neighbours, in the village, or the secret union of workers, re-asserts itself again, even in our modern society, and claims its rights to be, as it always has been, the chief leader towards further progress.”8 The idea of autonomy in anarchist thought is founded upon Kropotkin’s theory of mutual aid—it is only because solidarity and mutual aid are part of human nature that lofty morals can be established; that production and economic development can be achieved through the direct exchange of labor and the bartering of goods (this economic model, in avoiding the use of currency, has anti-capitalism in its DNA); and that the free energy of the individual can be released. There is no need for political agents (parties, governments, or the state), no need for leaders, no need for authority, no need for force, no classes, no exploitation. There is no need for taxation and no need to rely on public services (that is to say, there is no need for compulsory taxation in exchange for public services) when everyone shares “horizontal power” (all people participating together in shared decisions) and engages in “direct action” (spontaneous individual participation with no need for representation). Such ideas were often deemed utopian pipe dreams, lacking the “realpolitik” conditions necessary for operation. In modern society, party politics, the taxation system, and the state model are ubiquitous, with most people passively accepting this system’s plans for them all their lives, viewing its existence as inevitable. They have never imagined the possibility of a different society or different politics. One could say that in today’s mainstream society, the space for anarchism is very narrow, and anarchist autonomy has never been practiced on a grand scale. But anarchism does not demand a seat in mainstream thought. Its marginalized position is an inherent part of its ideological stance. If an anarchist were to accept a position at a university, gain recognition in academia, or appear as a public intellectual on TV, that person would become part of an organization or system, and that runs counter to the principles of anarchism. Anarchists are more focused on action and practice, constantly refreshing their ideas within the possible social space 8

 Peter Kropotkin, Mutual Aid (Mineola: Dover Publications, 2006), 241.

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and constructing their own “prefigurative politics” (the prefiguration of future social and political modes). The Paris Commune of 1871 has been held up by anarchists as a model for autonomy. Though it only lasted for two months, it encouraged later anarchists to engage in the practice of autonomy at a grassroots level. In the twentieth century, the Spanish anarchist union Confederación Nacional del Trabajo (CNT) played an important role in the Spanish Civil War from 1936 to 1939 and engaged in many experiments in autonomy. Later, the Situationist International movement promoted by Guy Debord, the May 1968 protests in France, and the 1971 establishment of Freetown Christiania in Copenhagen all contributed to the theory and political practice of anarchist autonomy from different angles. The emergence of “neo-­ anarchism” was marked by the establishment of an autonomous base and guerilla operations by the Zapatistas deep in the mountains of Mexico in 1994. The movement against neoliberalism that arose in Seattle in 1999; the publications and actions of the French philosophical group Tiqqun (who once issued a pamphlet entitled L’Insurrection qui vient under the name of the Comité invisible; and one of whose core members, Julien Coupat, was arrested in 2008 as a suspect in attacks against French railways); the Arab Spring, which began in 2010; and the Occupy Wall Street movement, which began in 2011, have all successively pushed the grassroots political practice of neo-anarchism to new heights. Two thinkers, Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt, have provided current theoretical support and academic summations of these movements that have emerged since the 1990s: “…the movements are immediately subversive in themselves and do not wait on any sort of external aid or extension to guarantee their effectiveness. Perhaps the more capital extends its global networks of production and control, the more powerful any singular point of revolt can be. Simply by focusing their own powers, concentrating their energies in a tense and compact coil, these serpentine struggles strike directly at the highest articulations of imperial order.”9 The 2010 book Indignez-vous!,10 by German-born French writer Stéphane Hessel, directly catalyzed the Spanish Indignados movement, which together with the Arab Spring influenced Occupy Wall Street.

9  Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001), 58. 10  Stéphane Hessel, Time for Outrage! (English version, New York: Twelve, 2011).

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Most contemporary neo-anarchists are activists who do not seek fame or honor and maintain their distance from the social elite, though there are some among them who strive for innovation and dissemination of anarchist thought. Much of the noteworthy discussion on neo-anarchism in recent years has come from David Graeber. Graeber was born and raised in the United States and had identified himself as an anarchist by age 16. He participated in the 2002 World Economic Forum protests in New York City, helped to start the Occupy Wall Street movement in 2011, and originated the slogan “We are the 99%.” Graeber was an assistant professor of anthropology at Yale University, and after failing to attain tenure, he took a position at Goldsmiths College in London. Like Kropotkin, he had strong ambitions regarding the construction of anarchist theory. In his 2004 book Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology, he attempts to use anthropological methods to prove that the autonomous ideals and economic modes of anarchism are feasible in the real world. People have always doubted that anarchism could become a real political model, asking, “Can you name me a single viable example of a society that has existed without a government?” At the mention of primitive tribal societies, they then ask about contemporary societies. When you give contemporary examples, they respond, “These are small, isolated cases. I’m talking about whole societies.” When you bring up the Paris Commune and the Spanish Republic, they will say, “Yeah, and look what happened to those people! They all got killed!”11 Graeber says that often, skeptics mistakenly believe that anarchism strives to establish a political body akin to a nation-state, when in reality, anarchism opposes the organizational mode of the state: “There is a way out, which is to accept that anarchist forms of organization would not look anything like a state. That they would involve an endless variety of communities, associations, networks, projects, on every conceivable scale, overlapping and intersecting in any way we could imagine, and possibly many that we can’t. Some would be quite local, others global. Perhaps all they would have in common is that none would involve anyone showing up with weapons and telling everyone else to shut up and do what they were told. And that, since anarchists are not actually trying to seize power within any national territory, the process of one system replacing the other will not take the form of some sudden revolutionary cataclysm—the storming of a Bastille, the seizing of a Winter Palace—but 11  David Graeber, Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology (Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press, 2004), 38–39.

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will necessarily be gradual, the creation of alternative forms of organization on a world scale, new forms of communication, new, less alienated ways of organizing life, which will, eventually, make currently existing forms of power seem stupid and beside the point. That in turn would mean that there are endless examples of viable anarchism: pretty much any form of organization would count as one, so long as it was not imposed by some higher authority, from a Klezmer band to the international postal service.”12 In his essay “The New Anarchists,” published in the January/February 2002 issue of the New Left Review, Graeber explores the relationship between neo-anarchism and the anti-neoliberalism movement that is active around the world (which the American media calls the “anti-­ globalization movement”). This relationship is framed in terms of how to maintain Henry David Thoreau’s principle of civil disobedience through “direct action” and how to realize “direct democracy.” In many people’s view, the North American anti-neoliberalism movement, though it has attracted a lot of attention, lacks a clear central theme or coherent ideology. It is like a child throwing a temper tantrum. As Graeber sees it, however, “This is a movement about reinventing democracy. It is not opposed to organization. It is about creating new forms of organization. It is not lacking in ideology. Those new forms of organization are its ideology. It is about creating and enacting horizontal networks instead of top-down structures like states, parties or corporations; networks based on principles of decentralized, non-hierarchical consensus democracy. Ultimately, it aspires to be much more than that, because ultimately it aspires to reinvent daily life as whole.”13 This form of direct democracy that Graeber and North American activists are striving to create has become the core methodology of neo-anarchist autonomy experiments. It was successfully realized in the Occupy Wall Street movement of 2011, with the establishment of the New York City General Assembly at the occupy site and the use of consensus decision-making to decide on strategy. Each person had the opportunity to speak through the “people’s microphone,” and any person could “block” a motion, not through a “no vote” but through a “veto”; or they could choose to “stand aside,” neither taking part nor blocking. The entire process was overseen by a “facilitator” who helped the group  Ibid., 40.   David Graeber, “The New Anarchists,” New Left Review 13 (January/February 2002): 70. 12 13

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reach a consensus and make decisions. This method of consensus-building and decision-making was not like a voting system, which “subjects the minority to the majority.” It did not reach decisions by suppressing the will of the minority but through ample discussion of proposals in order to reach a consensus. The “consensus process” employed at Occupy Wall Street demonstrated that “another world is not impossible.” Realpolitik may be a hard slab of iron, but in the crucible of imagination and creativity, it can be melted and re-forged, loosening, changing, and growing into new possibilities. Utopia may be a distant prospect, even just a mirage, but through our tireless explorations, it might someday take root and grow before our eyes. Anarchism is often called a fantasy, but anarchists are the most patient and energetic activists today. In this day and age, sudden revolution and immediate transformation of society are impossible. If you wait for a hero, a team of pioneers, or a class within society to represent your desires, then your hopes will likely never be realized. Anarchism does not set exceedingly high or distant goals. Instead, it patiently and painstakingly strives for piecemeal progress. The path of individual action, starting with the self, participation for all, mutual aid and love, constant accumulation in everyday life, and the powers of individuals joining to form a river until the vision is realized is perhaps the easiest path to take. Though Western researchers see Lao Tzu and Chuang Tzu as the world’s first anarchist theorists, Graeber also views the “School of the Tillers” (nongjia), which emerged during the Hundred Flowers period, as anarchism’s earliest practitioners.14 However, in contemporary China, the room for anarchist practice is perhaps narrower than in other countries and regions. But if you stop waiting for the tidal wave of a grand revolution and instead engage with the minutia of everyday life—joining the shared life of urban communities, engaging in volunteer work in exchange for time coupons, going to the countryside to learn about labor-exchange traditions, observing and taking part in village autonomy and grassroots democracy; or creating shared, independent media platforms in cyberspace and engage in various public issues in a personal capacity— then you may encounter, learn about, and practice the ideas of anarchism. In this nation of endless ideological struggles, we have never learned to tolerate different views. Perhaps now is the time to “rehabilitate” anarchism’s good name.

 David Graeber, Debt: The First 5000 Years (New York: Melville House, 2012), 237.

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The Discourse of Utopia in the Post-Mao Era15 China today is defined by the rise of the so-called middle class, penetration of the market economy into all domains of life, and orientation toward practical benefit. Especially in the rash and ruthless populist undertones of online public opinion, the word “utopia” is not only used to criticize the political catastrophe of the Mao era, but also to satirize and mock today’s socially unrealistic deliriums and daydreams, monstrosities and abnormalities that run counter to the mainstream. In these days, people are ashamed to earnestly discuss utopia, let alone act on utopian ideas. Times indeed have changed. Only when danger is imminent and everything is on the verge of collapse do people begin to urgently ponder and search for an alternative plan. Utopia calls to mind a cheerful earth that is elsewhere, a negation of reality. If people find this prospect dull, it is perhaps because their lives are calm and orderly, and it quite simply does not speak to their interests. Or, because it negates reality, perhaps it touches the red line of discourse before which people suppress their voices to protect themselves. In China, discussing utopia requires bravery; putting it into practice requires power. After learning of the Japanese author Saneatsu Mushanokō ji’s idea of  “New Village” (Atarashiki-mura) through Zhou Zuoren in the early 1920s, the young Mao Zedong thought about organizing a “work-study mutual aid group” with his compatriots in order to build a new village utopia at the base of Mount Yuelu in Changsha. Due to the constraints of that particular time in history, this process never gained traction. Instead, Mao would have to wait until the 1950s—after he obtained the power to govern China by means of violent revolution—to act on his utopian impulse, which took the form of People’s Communes. If Mao’s ambition only resembled the small-scale utopian experiment pursued by intellectuals of the Shirakaba-ha (literally, “White Birch Group”) deep in the mountains of Miyazaki prefecture in Japan, the impact on society would be limited to the scale of a community. But propelled by Mao’s power, People’s Communes sprung up in a vast political campaign and the entire country was transformed into a utopian experimental laboratory. By concentrating the means of production, militarizing 15  Completed on  October 21, 2017, in  Yantai. The  English version was  translated by Christian Sorace, published in  Christian Sorace, Ivan Franceschini and  Nicholas Loubere, eds., Afterlives of  Chinese Communism: Political Concepts from  Mao to  Xi (New York: Verso, 2019).

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management, and enforcing collective labor, People’s Communes thoroughly eradicated the social structure of China’s clan-based villages and the tradition of small peasant production methods. The laziness of human nature was indulged by imitating the system of “communal feeding” (daguo fan) of Zhang Lu, a Han Dynasty warlord, with its principle of “setting up shelters for those in need of meat and drink” (qi yishe, zhi mirou).16 Although the construction of water conservation works left a legacy for collective agriculture, by the end of the 1970s, fields were no longer cultivated and lay in waste. It was peasants from Fengyang County in Anhui Province, who had suffered untold miseries during the Great Leap Forward, that finally sparked the bottom-up reform of “household contract system” that eventually put an end to the era of the People’s Communes. Almost all utopian experiments on earth end in failure. Although the origins of Mao’s utopian thinking can be traced back to small anarchist groups from the end of the nineteenth century, Mao magnified utopia at the national scale. When Mao in practice merged the communist principle “from each according to ability, to each according to need” with Kang Youwei’s explication of the Confucian idea of “Great Unity” (datong)— that is, a utopian vision in which everything is in its proper place and peace prevails17—a disaster was born. In humanity’s infancy, when population was scarce and natural resources were abundant, it was possible to form small-scale societies that practiced communist mutual aid and emphasized morality. But with the rapid increase of population, the proliferation of ethnic communities, and the growing diversification of interests, the ideal society of ancient times vanished into smoke. As early as the Warring States period (475–221 BCE), legalist thinker Han Fei wrote in the treatise “The Five Vermin”: “Men of high antiquity strove for moral virtue; men of middle times sought out wise schemes; men of today vie to be known for strength and spirit.”18 To enlarge the ideals of a small society to the scale of a whole nation is like using one’s childhood experience in the adult world. When such a brittle utopia collides with reality, it inevitably shatters into fragments.

 Fan Ye, “Biography of Zhang Lu,” Book of the Later Han.  Kang Youwei, The Book of Great Unity (Shanghai: Shanghai Ancient Books Press, 2009). 18  Burt Watson, trans., Han Feizi: Basic Writings (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003), 101. 16 17

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The Chinese word for utopia (wutuobang) has two synonyms: “ideal state” (lixiangguo) and “nowhere place” (wuyouxiang), meaning something nearly impossible to discern in the real world. For this reason, utopia is in itself a discourse outside of time and space, an action that is unlikely to be realized. If utopia is put into action, it is destined to be connected with failure. Beginning with Sir Thomas Moore’s sixteenth-century treatise Utopia, a school of utopian thought arose in England, culminating in Robert Owen’s New Lanark experiment in Scotland and his commune in New Harmony, Indiana, in the early 1800s. Owen devoted his life to improving the environment for workers, nurturing their character, and creating a new society in which to use once again the words of Han Fei, “no rich rewards were doled out, no harsh punishments were administered.”19 Throughout the rest of the nineteenth century, which was the age in which all kinds of experimentation were possible, numerous other efforts to build utopias arose, most of which were short-lived, but which nevertheless often had significant implications for society going forward. In the United States, the Shaker Villages (the first one was founded in 1774) and the Oneida Community (founded in 1848) were distinguished by their rejection of the nuclear family and private ownership of property. This rejection manifested itself differently in these groups, as celibacy in one, and “complex marriage”20 in the other. However, these communities were unable to stave off the pressures from orthodox Christianity and the vigor of industrial capitalism. Entering the twentieth century, these formerly shocking practices were generally covered in dust and forgotten by mainstream society (despite the persistence of some like the Amish). After World War II, this kind of small-scale utopian project reappeared in two distinct responses to the crisis of Western society of that era: first in B. F. Skinner’s novel Walden Two published in 1948, and later in the social movements of the 1960s and 1970s symbolized by the hippie communes. After Donald Trump’s rise to power in 2016, several new books on utopian practices have been published.21 Even before this present crisis,  Ibid., 98.  The Oneida community strongly believed in a system of free love which was known as “complex marriage,” where any member was free to have sex with any other who consented. 21  These books are: Erik Reece, Utopia Drive: A Road Trip Through America’s Most Radical Idea (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2016); Chris Jennings, Paradise Now: The Story of American Utopianism (New York: Random House, 2016) and Ellen WaylandSmith, Oneida: From Free Love Utopia to the Well-set Table (New York: Picador, 2016). 19 20

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globally there has been an intermittent accumulation of experimental small-scale ecological villages and intentional communities, which represent the evolution of utopia in the contemporary era. It would seem that the moment to discuss utopia is, once again, upon us. At the time when Mao turned to violent revolution, there were still several intellectuals who attempted to improve society by other means. Although intellectuals involved in the Rural Reconstruction Movement of the 1920s and 1930s seldom invoked the discourse of utopia, the desire to challenge the cruelty of that period’s realities had a certain shade of utopian thinking. Reformers such as James Yen and Liang Shuming attempted to transform China through mass education and moderate social experimentation. Although they shared the same starting point of dissatisfaction with the state of the world as Mao Zedong, they selected different paths. In response to historical conditions, Mao’s belief in Marxism became an ideological pretext for revolutionary mobilization; utopia was shelved as a remote ideal and the urgent needs of political reality became a “you die, I live” factional struggle for power. Subsequently, the Rural Reconstruction Movement was abruptly cut short by the Japanese invasion of China. It ended in failure, whereas Mao’s violent revolution succeeded. After seizing state power, Mao had a free hand to start building his utopia. Liang Shuming remained in China only to be persecuted in ideological campaigns; James Yen went to the Philippines where he strove to internationalize the Rural Reconstruction Movement. As described earlier, people’s communes transformed China into a place in which the people had no way to survive. After Mao’s death, the adoption of the “household contract system” broke up collective agriculture and land-use rights were returned to the hands of farmers. For an ephemeral moment, there was vitality in the countryside, which was soon to be extinguished by the urbanization movement that would swallow agricultural land and atomize the peasantry. In the new millennium, the problems of the countryside have returned, giving rise to a New Rural Reconstruction Movement. This new version originated among intellectuals outside of the state system, as a continuation of the historical experiments of Yen and Liang, in an attempt to find new methods to address contemporary problems. In the Deng Xiaoping era, the tanks that rolled into Tiananmen Square cleared a path for neoliberal economics to enter China. After Deng Xiaoping’s Southern Tour in 1992, China was transformed from a political society into a consumer society. The trauma of 1989 was forgotten as

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people threw themselves into the business of making money. The reform of state-owned enterprises plunged millions of workers into unemployment; due to the opening and expansion of real estate markets, farmers lost their land; economic construction consumed natural resources and intensified ecological destruction; and social wealth was redistributed resulting in a staggering gap between the rich and the poor. The concentration of China’s population in megacities has hollowed out its villages. But China’s growing urban middle class is filled with discontent over the struggle to find work, traffic congestion, air pollution, and competition over limited educational resources. In response, a trend of anti-­urbanization has begun. The New Rural Reconstruction Movement was initiated by Wen Tiejun, a well-known professor at Renmin University of China, as an attempt to reverse the dire realities of China’s urban-rural situation. It proposes to reconstruct a positive and mutually interactive relationship between the rural and urban, motivate young people to return to the countryside, establish cooperatives in different village areas, develop ecological agriculture, and form community colleges that follow in the tradition of Yen’s practice of mass education. In addition to taking care of people left behind in the villages, it also attaches importance to communities of migrant workers struggling to survive in the city. Aspects of this project have been extremely successful, while others have failed and been shut down. Although he does not define his efforts as utopian and views himself as pragmatically working at the frontlines of the countryside, Wen Tiejun is associated with contemporary China’s leftist intellectual pedigree because of his opposition to neoliberalism and pursuit of social justice. For this reason, some of his “failed” projects have dismissively been labeled as “utopian.” Whether in China or abroad, utopian experiments often take place in the countryside. The reason for this perhaps comes from the imagination of the isolation of rural life from the urban mainstream: it is either wilderness or a place that has preserved the traces of humanity’s infancy. In reality, an untouched “place beyond civilization” already ceased to exist in ancient times, let alone in post-Mao China. Rural areas do not have fewer problems than cities and are fully intertwined in the contradictions of Chinese society. For this reason, most efforts to improve rural areas have been derided as “utopian.” Among the numerous approaches to practicing the New Rural Reconstruction Movement, the Bishan Project is perhaps the only one not

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to be ashamed to admit its utopian orientation. In 2010, this project took root in Bishan Village, Yi County, Anhui Province, beginning with the renovation of tattered old houses and their conversion into living and work spaces, as well as a newly established bookstore, library, and art center. The project also conducted research on village history and traditional handicraft, organized large-scale cultural and art activities, provided work opportunities for volunteers returning to the countryside, and helped villagers increase their incomes by using Taobao and Airbnb—until Beijing shut it down in 2016. The Bishan Project was not the same as the Mao era’s state-led mobilization of youth and intellectuals to go “down to the countryside” (xiaxiang) to work and reform themselves through labor. And its utopian direction was also distinct from the large-scale People’s Communes of the Mao era. Rather, it was founded voluntarily after much consideration and reflection on the urbanization crisis and agricultural situation. Moreover, it was based on a survey of the explorations of individuals and small groups in different historical periods from all over the world. That being said, Bishan was unable to incorporate some of the historical experiences and experiments such as community currency, co-housing, and consensus decision-making from other places, which would be non-starters in China’s atmosphere of political control. In contemporary China there can be no genuine utopian practices, only utopian discourses. But sometimes even words themselves can disappear.

Utopian Nostalgia22 The Return of the Utopians In 2016, three new books on similar subjects were published in the United States: Utopia Drive,23 Paradise Now,24 and Oneida.25 In the review 22  This is a  brief summary of  my ongoing book Utopian Field. Completed in  Chinese and English on September 17, 2019, in Shashi, Hubei. The Chinese version was published in Paper on December 2, 2019. 23  Erik Reece, Utopia Drive: A Road Trip Through America’s Most Radical Idea (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2016). 24  Chris Jennings, Paradise Now: The Story of American Utopianism (New York: Random House, 2016). 25  Ellen Wayland-Smith, Oneida: From Free Love Utopia to the Well-set Table (New York: Picador, 2016).

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published in the New Yorker, Akash Kapur called their simultaneous emergence “the return of the utopians.” Compared to the “enthusiastic, even laudatory” tone of the books, Kapur expressed skepticism over the nineteenth-­century American utopian projects, concluding that society under utopian experiments “couldn’t be better.”26 However, in a review published in the Financial Times on two of other new books, Utopia for Realists27 and Basic Income,28 he took a less-skeptical approach, asserting that utopian thought could be a means of diagnosing the ills of society: “it forces us to confront the present, and to at least acknowledge the need for a very different future.”29 No matter what his attitude, “the return of the utopians” is an undeniable fact, revealing dissatisfaction with our current society. Since the end of the Cold War, economic globalization has allowed mobile capital to cross national borders, and the US manufacturing industry has begun to shift to those countries with cheap labor. The financial industry has become the main force behind the US economy, and its combination with state power has not only led to a high concentration of wealth, but also a gap between the rich and the poor. Due to excessive laissez-faire freedoms and lack of supervision, it led to the 2008 Subprime Crisis and the 2011 Occupy Wall Street protest. Government functions have further contracted under the principles of the neoliberal market, not only being unable to salvage the financial crisis, but also to recover the long-stagnated “Rust Belt.” Imbalances in regional development and competition in the international labor market, coupled with the government’s policy of outsourcing public services to market-oriented companies, has made it difficult to sustain an equality of opportunity and conditions, not to mention the welfare system that has painstakingly been built over the past three centuries. Automated production and artificial intelligence can deplete job opportunities, but there is still no corresponding ethical philosophy or institutional designs to calm people’s worries. The persistence of the role of the world hegemon, in excessive overseas wars to meet the interests of military enterprises, has pushed the United  Akash Kapur, “The Return of the Utopians”, New Yorker, October 3, 2016, 66–71.  Rutger Bregman, Utopia for Realists: The Case for a Universal Basic Income, Open Borders, and a 15-hour Workweek (Amsterdam: The Correspondent, 2016). 28  Philippe Van Parijs and Yannick Vanderborght, Basic Income: A Radical Proposal for a Free Society and a Sane Economy, (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2017). 29  Akash Kapur, “Money for Nothing: The Case for a Basic Income,” Financial Times. March 2, 2017. 26 27

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States into the deep mire of terrorism—greatly reducing its society’s sense of security; and competition with a rising China is causing a trade war that will cause mutual harm. Donald Trump’s presidency also marks the retreat of the United States from a leader in globalization to a past nationalism. It is no doubt a retreat as well to talk about nineteenth-century American utopias in such an era. In his last book, published just before his death, Zygmunt Bauman used the new term retrotopia to describe a trend, occurring not only in the United States but also in Europe and elsewhere: “From that double negation of More-style utopia—its rejection succeeded by resurrection—‘retrotopias’ are currently emerging: visions located in the lost/stolen/abandoned but undead past, instead of being tied to the not-yet-unborn and so inexistent future, as was their twice-removed forebear.”30 Since Thomas More invented the word utopia 500 years ago, people have believed that a better society exists somewhere in the future, but after many failed utopian experiments, people have been denied their utopia; when they are in the chaos of today’s world, people do not see a bright future and deny the negation of utopia and going back to the past. Bauman further cites Jacques Derrida to explain that this regression is not a reiteration of the past, but an iteration of the best.31 This means, if people look backward to the utopian projects in their history, they probably will separate the wheat from the chaff; eliminate tyrannical options like the Soviet Union’s Gulag, Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge, Mao Zedong’s People’s Communes, and ISIS’ Caliphate; pick up those small-scale experiments in Shaker villages, New Harmony, Brook Farm, and Oneida to rediscover and reform those historical experiences for resisting social crises and rebuilding life today. With this new concept of retrotopia, Bauman profoundly summarizes the various retrogressions that have taken place in our world up to this moment. For example, because of the failure of the state and the regime, people are back to a world without Leviathan, falling into “the war of all against all”; because of the drawbacks of globalization, people are back to nationalism, tribalism, communitarianism; because the competition between dominant countries has intensified, and borders and barriers are strengthening, people are back to Cold War; because the gap between the haves and the have-nots is radically expanding, people are back to inequality; because of extreme insecurity, people are back to personal autism, and  Zygmunt Bauman, Retrotopia (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2017), 4–5.  Ibid., 15.

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if possible, people even want to go back to the womb-like surroundings, that is, a pre-life experience without contact with the outside world. The term retrotopia also strongly explains why utopian issues are coming back today, and why so many related books are being published. Some of the authors of these new books pay attention to the American communitarian utopias of the nineteenth century, some boldly write new iterative proposals on Universal Basic Income (UBI) for Europe. Utopian Narratives But all utopian thoughts in history contain two meanings without exception. The first is the rejection of reality, followed by the design of alternatives. In the Axis Age, Plato’s The Republic was dissatisfied with the decline of Greek civilization after the Peloponnesian War (431–404  BC). He hoped to replace failed democracy with the sage politics of “the philosopher king” and force the improvement of the quality of the population with eugenics. To overcome the era of chaos and disorder, from Spring and Autumn Period (771–476  BC) to the Warring States Period (475–221 BC), Lao Tzu suggested “an ideal nation is small and with few people. Although there are abundant weapons, there is no need for the use. Let the people cherish their life and not pursue after fame and wealth, so that they have no intention to move to faraway places”32; Mencius recommended the “Field-Well System,” “If those who together till a well field’s land befriend one another at home and abroad, look out for one another, and support one another in illness, the people will live in close comradeship”33; Chuang Tzu imagined “in the age of perfect virtue, men lived in common with birds and beasts, and were on terms of equality with all creatures, as forming one family”34; Confucius believed in the “Great Unity”: “When the Great Way is practiced, the world is for the public. Those with virtue and those with ability are chosen and used. People value trustworthiness and cultivate harmony with each other.”35 Although China neither used the term utopia nor has an abundant utopian narrative tradition, from ancient times it did have strongly similar discourses, that searched for a better world. Compared with the Western  Lao Tzu, Chapter Eighty, Tao Te Ching.  Mencius, “Duke Wen of Teng,” Mencius. 34  Chuang Tzu, “Ma Ti,” Nan Hua Jing. 35  Confucius, “Operation of Rites,” The Book of Rites. 32 33

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utopian concept, we can name Lao Tzu and Chuang Tzu’s thoughts as Taoist Utopianism, while Confucius and Mencius’s thoughts are Confucian Utopianism. Tao Yuanming’s The Story of Peach Blossom (421  CE), the most famous piece of utopian literature in China, describes an isolated village founded by people who escaped from the tyranny of the Qin Empire (221–206 BC)—which is a perfect sample of a Taoist utopia. Mo Tzu’s “Universal Love, No War” can be defined as Mohist Socialism, Xu Xing’s “A Sage should cultivate and eat together with the people” represented the School of Tillers, which David Graeber has called “an anarchist movement of peasant intellectuals.”36 Thomas More’s Utopia (1515) was written in the sixteenth century, when the Anglican Church began to break away from the Roman Catholic Church, and the Enclosure Movement kicked off earliest capitalism. He sensitively foresaw the evils of the coming era, and then issued the first diagnosis and course of treatment during the long night before the Industrial Revolution. Since then, the fantastic lands, off-world travel, dialogues with strangers, collective ownership, egalitarianism, and educational experiments have all become tropes in a new genre of literature. This utopian narrative literature comprises a long list of books, some of which have had a profound impact on people’s thinking, some even becoming practical guides. Solomon’s House, mentioned in Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis (1623), influenced Robert Owen to invite Philadelphia’s intellectuals for scientific research and educational innovation in New Harmony; Étienne Cabet’s Voyage en Icarie (1839) became the blueprint for his own Icarian communities founded in America (since 1848); Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward (1888) influenced the writings of both Garden Cities of To-morrow (1898) by Ebenezer Howard and The Book of Great Unity (1902) by the Chinese Confucian utopian theorist Kang Youwei, in late Qing Dynasty; William Morris’ News from Nowhere (1890) influenced the new life experiment of Fabian Society; B. F. Skinner’s Walden Two (1948) became the bible and guide of the Twin Oaks Community (founded in 1967), in Virginia. Charlotte Gilman’s Herland (1915) is the rare feminist utopian novel. In an all-woman country, they self-propagating and have no paternal sources; so they have only given names but no surnames. It was destined that Herland could not transition from fiction to reality.

 David Graeber, Debt: The First 5000 Years (New York: Melville House, 2012), 237.

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Communitarian Practices in the Nineteenth Century When the Industrial Revolution burst on the scene in the eighteenth century it drove a large number of peasants into the factories, turning Britain into what Friedrich Engels called a “Hell upon Earth,” and also igniting utopian action on the land. In 1774, the Manchester woman Ann Lee couldn’t bear the persecution of the Anglican Church and harsh living conditions, so she boarded ship across the Atlantic Ocean to the New World to find her own kingdom of Zion, and the following year she founded the first Shaker settlement in Upstate New York. Owen was the leading entrepreneur of the emerging cotton industry, and he started the New Lanark experiment in 1880 to improve the working and living conditions of workers. After encountering besiegement from conservative religious forces, he also transferred to the United States in 1824, taking over a piece of land in Indiana from the German religious separatist group Harmony Society (founded in 1805)—where he continued his own secular utopian dream. When Owen announced that he would create a “new moral world” in New Harmony to impact American values, Charles Fourier sent Owen a new book, Traité de l’Association domestique-agricole (published in 1822), and recommended himself as the best but low-wage manager of New Harmony. Fourier, who experienced the French Revolution in 1789, published his brilliant book, The Theory of the Four Movements, in 1808. It is still very shocking and inspiring even now.37 His imagination of the future world is far more creative and interesting than other utopian writers, but few people knew the book in his time. Fourier kept waiting at his small apartment in Paris every day, but no enlightened monarch or millionaire came to knock on his door. He was confident that his design of “Phalanstery”38 was more perfect than Owen’s “Parallelogram,”39 but his proposal did not attract the attention of Owen, and was finally rejected. Unexpectedly, in the years after the failure of Owen’s New Harmony experiment in 1827, Fourier’s thought was boosted by Albert Brisbane 37  Charles Fourier, The Theory of the Four Movements, trans. Ian Patterson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). 38  In French, Fourier composed Phalanstère (Phalanstery) with phalange (phalanx) and monastère (monastery) to name the main buildings of his utopia. 39  British architect Thomas Whitwell was invited to design the main buildings for New Harmony, which was an enclosed parallelogram layout. Afterwards, “Parallelogram” became a synonym of the Owenist utopia.

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and Horace Greeley, and from 1840 ignited the raging fire of the “Phalanx”40 movement in the United States, which directly affected George Ripley’s Brook Farm (founded in 1841) and John Humphrey Noyes’s Oneida (founded in 1848). The United States itself was a product of utopianism. Whether the Mayflower pilgrims led by William Bradford or the Protestant immigrant group led by John Winthrop, they came to the wilderness of North America in order to rid themselves of the embarrassment of the Anglican Church, look for their new Jerusalem, and establish “a city upon a hill.” The new country founded in 1776 was the result of this long-term utopian effort. The religious “First Great Awakening” (1730s–1740s) played a role in fueling the independence movement. Many pastors of the Congregational Church, such as Jonathan Edwards, through popular touring sermons, slammed the erosion of the colonies by moral and political corruption from Britain, trying to revive the beliefs of their Protestant ancestors. The early survival spaces of the Shakers also benefited from the lingering influence of this revival movement, but their expansion from New England to the Midwest had to wait for the “Second Great Awakening” (1790s–1840s), when their new-founded settlements would reach their peaks. The “Second Awakening” began around 1790 and gained momentum through the famous “Kentucky Revival” of 1800—an enthusiasm for the large-scale camp meetings in the Midwest that is comparable to today’s rock festivals. Its main appeal was the belief in the Second Coming of Christ and Millennialism, and people believed that through hard work they could build a heaven on earth. At the height of its climax, it led to the emergence of Perfectionism, that is, people could achieve “sinless” perfection through practice in daily life. Perfectionism was a new theology, and was different from the old Calvinism—the representative fruit of its practice was Oneida, located in New York State, which the Revivalist leader Charles Finney called the “Burned-over District.”41 The intensive outbreak of American communitarian utopian experiments after 1840, in addition to the most radical and striking religious community at Oneida, which practiced Perfectionism and “Bible Communism,” also included secular experimental communities—as represented by Brook Farm, which practiced Fourierism. There was another reason which brought them  Phalanx is a basic unit in the Fourierist utopia.  To name the entire district with the enthusiasm of Revivalism.

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prosperity: the “Panic of 1837,” the first mass economic crisis in American history. The economic crisis was caused by the dissolution of the central bank in 1833, when the excessive banknotes and loans issued by state-chartered banks caused a bubble in western land transactions. In order to curb inflation and land speculation, the seventh president, Andrew Jackson, signed the Specie Circular in 1836. In the case of shortage of precious metals, the United Kingdom had controlled the outflow of gold and reduced agricultural imports, which triggered a series of chain reactions in 1837—such as the collapse of the US cotton market, the exhaustion of bank credit, the bankruptcy of companies, and the closure of factories. The Panic of 1837 exposed the deadly virus of capitalism, but also opened the gates to alternative social experiments, allowing various civil forces to emerge. In a letter to a friend in 1840, the Transcendentalist Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote: “We are a little wild here with numberless projects of social reform. Not a reading man but has a draft of a new community in his waistcoat pocket.”42 The Panic of 1837 did not calm down until the discovery of gold mines in San Francisco and the start of the Gold Rush in 1848. Brook Farm, which had close ties with Emerson although he had never been involved, was devastated by an unexpected fire in 1846. The community of Oneida, which had experienced a long period of economic prosperity and practiced both “free love” and “complex marriage,” was finally forced to disintegrate in 1881 by Anthony Comstock, “the most severe censor in American history,” and local conservative clergymen. The next wave of the utopian movements in the United States would take a long time to return the stage of history. It came back in the mode of hippie communes and the Back-to-­ the-land Movement until the emergence of the Vietnam War crisis and the outbreak of the civil rights movement in the 1960s. In the nineteenth century, the United States had the most radical utopian practice in history. The celibacy of the Shakers and the Harmonites, and the “free love” and “complex marriage” of Oneida, represented two extreme and opposite sexual relationships, but they shared the same aim— maintaining the collective ownership of property by denying traditional marriage and family. Today, this kind of practice is hard to imagine, but the reason why it could work at that time depended on the openness and tolerance of American politics and society, and the aggregated power of religious belief. Zionism and Millennialism, which are derived from The  Jennings, Paradise Now, 190.

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Bible, provided an inexhaustible spiritual drive for people to explore heaven on earth. The Shakers, the Harmonites, and the Perfectionists of Oneida, although not Jews, saw themselves as God’s people in the broad sense, regarding their self-founded settlements as New Zion or New Jerusalem on the American land. In accordance with their own understanding of The Bible, they invented a completely different way of life from secular society. The action of the true Jews returning to God’s “Promised Land” took place in 1910, when Zionists in Ottoman Turkey established their own settlement in Degania, a swamp in northern Israel, and lived a collective life. They named this commune a kibbutz. Since then, Jews around the world have been returning to Palestine, have purchased land, cultivated it together, implemented collective ownership, and established more kibbutzim. This movement has lasted for more than a hundred years. Until 2010, Israel still had 270 kibbutzim, whose factories and farms produced 9% of Israel’s total industrial output, worth US$8 billion, and 40% of its agricultural output, worth more than US$1.7 billion.43 Most of the utopian thoughts or utopian practices mentioned above had geographical boundaries in the form of isolated islands, wilderness, or rural areas. China’s Taoist utopianism prefers going back to nature and primitive society; Confucian utopianism is rooted in the vast agricultural territory on which the fiscal incomes of the great unified empires depend. More’s Utopia was an island, and the utopian narratives after him followed similar geographical positioning; the Shakers’ settlements were almost all in backcountry areas, relying on their diligence and economic know-how to turn them into “lands of milk and honey”; Owen’s New Lanark mills were close to a falls in the forest and valley because they needed water-­ power; New Harmony had a perfect rural location because the previous owner, George Rapp (founder of the Harmony Society), had built the place into a rich-growing base for agricultural and handicraft production; Brook Farm and Oneida were already farms before they settled in; the early kibbutzim were concentrated in the deserts, swamps, no man’s land, or the cheap, remote areas. Utopia needs wilderness because it clears the past away, putting everything at the beginning; it prefers an isolation because it wants to eliminate the influence of the outside world; it goes to the countryside, because, since the Industrial Revolution, utopian efforts

43  “Kibbutz reinvents itself after 100 years of history,” Taipei Times, November 16, 2010. http://www.taipeitimes.com/News/editorials/archives/2010/11/16/2003488628/2.

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were against industry, and anti-city, to keep a far distance from these “sources of sin.” Asian Agritopianists After World War I, the Japanese writer Saneatsu Mushanokō ji was influenced by Leo Tolstoy’s Christian Anarchism and began to launch the Atarashiki-mura (“New Village”) movement with his Shirakaba (White Birch literary journal) colleagues. They went to Takajo in Miyazaki Prefecture (1918) and Moroyama in Saitama Prefecture (1939), two villages in the mountains, to begin lives of study and farming, establish egalitarian communities without class-divisions, oppression, or exploitation, and deny the just-concluded world war with Cosmopolitanism.44 To a certain extent, this was in line with their predecessor, the eighteenth-­century utopian philosopher Andō Shō eki’s idea of the “Self-Acting World.” Shō eki believed every human was equal and the “World of Nature” had a natural order including an ideal agricultural society, and those people with the energy gained from rice would follow the “Right Man,” a Messiah-like figure, with “Right Cultivation” (only producing and consuming what was necessary) to resist the flawed, unnatural, and unequal “World of Law” which was full of the disaster of war.45 The anti-­ Confucian Shō ekian thought can be further traced back to the influence of the School of Tillers and Taoist’s naturalism in the pre-Qin period of China. The poet Miyazawa Kenji, who emerged later than the White Birch writers, was also a utopian who immersed himself in agriculture. His Rasuchijin Association (founded in 1926) was an experimental community of both intellectuals and farmers, to learn and practice farming together. All these Japanese intellectuals mentioned above shared the same East Asian ideological resources of Agriculturalism and Ruralism. In order to identify this utopian thought cultivated by this “rice culture,” they can be called the “Agritopianists.” From a modern point of view, the Agritopianists had a strong “pastoral imagination.” This kind of imagination is not unique, and it is 44  More story details can be found in Tessa Morris-Suzuki, “Beyond Utopia: New Villages and Living Politics in Modern Japan and across Frontiers,” History Workshop Journal 85, (2018): 47–71. 45  See the manuscript photocopy of Andō Shō eki, Shizen shin’eidō (The True Way of Administering the Society According to Nature, written in classical Chinese in 1753), University of Tokyo General Library. https://iiif.dl.itc.u-tokyo.ac.jp/repo/s/shizen/ page/home.

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innumerable in the history of world literature. Raymond Williams’s book The Country and the City lists examples of this in English literature, pointing out that the country is not as beautiful as the poets and writers imagine, but full of suffering; the city is not necessarily progressive, there are also infinite problems.46 When the cruelty of the real countryside was pushed to the front, the intellectuals couldn’t bear to continue their poetic gaze and began to consciously walk out of their small community of the literati, trying to use their own strength to reform and rescue the ailing rural society, initiating the Rural Reconstruction Movement. In 1922, Rabindranath Tagore established the Rural Reconstruction Institute in the village of Surul near his family-owned Santiniketan, with the Englishman Leonard Elmhirst as its director (who brought a substantial grant from Dorothy Whitney, a wealthy heiress in the United States). Tagore’s goal was to take his people away from poverty through an experimental education program that was closely integrated with labor practice. His rural education experiment in Santiniketan, with the blessing and promotion of Gandhi, later helped to form India’s basic education system. In 1924, Elmhirst accompanied Tagore to visit China as his English secretary. The two rural reconstructionists from India, in addition to meeting various Chinese intellectual elites, went to Shanxi, the “model province” of the time, to meet with local politician Yan Xishan, intending to introduce the Indian experience into China. But in the chaos of the Chinese warlords continuing to fight, this plan had been silently left behind. In 1925, Elmhirst married Dorothy Whitney, who bought Dartington Hall in the southwestern part of England, and decided that Elmhirst would continue what he did in India at their new estate. After a protective restoration of the more than thousand-year-old estate, Elmhirst and Whitney founded a school blending John Dewey’s Progressive Education theory and Tagore’s educational concepts, bringing a large amount of international culture and art resources into rural England. At the same time, they operated a farm business to activate the local economy. The famous “Dartington Experiment” was born. In India, Elmhirst faced an agricultural society on the verge of bankruptcy that was plundered by Britain as a suzerain, dumping industrial products into the colony’s market; in Britain, he faced the conservative rural landed gentry that was depopulated after high industrialization. Although with Whitney’s 46  Raymond Williams, The Country and the City (London: Chatto and Windus & Spokesman Books, 1973).

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generous financial support, the difficulty of advancing the new experiment in Britain was not much lower than in India. In contrast to the popular “Garden City” theory by Ebenezer Howard, to make the urban more rural, Elmhirst intended to make the rural more urban.47 This did not mean changing the rural landscape, but bringing the rural on the same level as the urban for jobs, income, education, and cultural services. Rural Reconstruction Movement in China In China, before Elmhirst and Tagore visited, the Rural Reconstruction Movement had already sprouted in different places. After the collapse of the Qing Empire in 1911, various military forces began to divide the country into different parts. Their financial support was not only dependent on international borrowing but also based on local society under their rule. As an exchange, warlords and local gentry formed the “Military-­ Gentry Coalition,”48 offering some space for political participation for the gentry, in the name of “local autonomy”; and the creditor countries would benefit from some market opportunities or political interests. In the absence of national industries, the military-gentry regime’s acquisition of social wealth could only sink to the underlying agricultural society; and creditor countries, like the colonial sovereigns, would turn Chinese rural areas into the markets for their industrial products and the destinations for their resource plundering. The countryside in China, like India, was a land of lament and despair in the early twentieth century. Facing this predicament, some Chinese intellectuals, returning from Japan, the United States, and Europe had begun to voluntarily devote themselves to the improvement of rural China. In the inability to reach a political solution, they kicked off non-governmental reform action. Their sporadic efforts accumulated from the small social experiments, gradually becoming the tide of the Rural Reconstruction Movement, and finally reaching its climax before the Second Sino-Japanese War began in 1937. James Yen was born in 1893, the same year as Elmhirst. They both became Christians in their youth and studied in the United States (Yen at Yale and Princeton, Elmhirst at Cornell), participated in overseas volunteer work for World War I (Yen in France, belonging to the North  Michael Young, The Elmhirsts of Dartington (Totnes: Dartington Hall Trust, 1996), 257.  Jerome Ch’en, The Military-Gentry Coalition: China under the warlords (Toronto: University of Toronto-York University Joint Centre on Modern East Asia, 1979). 47 48

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American YMCA; Elmhirst in India, belonging to the British YMCA), and later devoted themselves to mass education and rural reconstruction. The institutions they founded had the same name (Rural Reconstruction Institute), their funding came from the same country (the United States), but they never met. In 1935, Yen raised a million dollars from the Rockefeller Foundation49; in 1948, he successfully lobbied President Truman and the US Congress to pass an amendment to the “China Aid Act,” known as “Jimmy Yen Provision,” which stipulated that 10% of the total China aid package of US$275 million be allocated toward rural reconstruction.50 In 1926, he started the “Dingxian Experiment” in Hebei Province under the name of the Chinese National Association of the Mass Education Movement. Through the experiment, not only tens of thousands of local farmers became literate, but also agricultural income was increased by the introduction of better breeds and the organization of cooperatives; the public health of each village was improved, and active political participation of the villagers brought about real autonomy to meet modern standards of civil rights in a grassroots society.51 It was not like the “local autonomy” under the warlord’s rule, which was just a money-power trade between the warlords and gentry, without the participation of ordinary farmers. Compared with Paulo Freire’s “Pedagogy of the Oppressed”52 developed from Brazil’s literacy movement in the 1960s, Yen’s approach to mass education was more inclined to soften the social conflicts. There was no smell of gunpowder through class struggle in Yen’s practices. The similar early lives of Yen and Elmhirst may reveal some commonalities of their time. Liang Shuming, another representative of the Rural Reconstruction Movement in the Republic of China, had a very different resume. He was called “the last Confucian of China” by Guy Alitto,53 49  “A Digital History,” The Rockefeller Foundation, accessed September 9, 2019, https:// rockfound.rockarch.org/china. 50  “International Institute of Rural Reconstruction Records (1914–1999)”, Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Columbia University, accessed September 9, 2019, http://www.columbia.edu/cu/lweb/eresources/archives/rbml/IIRR/main.html. 51  More about the “Dingxian Experiment”: Pearl Buck, Tell the People: Talks With James Yen About The Mass Educational Movement (New York: International Institute of Rural Reconstruction, 1984). 52  See Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed (New York: Bloomsbury, 2012). 53  Guy Alitto, The Last Confucian: Liang Shu-ming and the Chinese Dilemma of Modernity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979).

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rarely stepped out of China during his life (he only visited Japan one time), and he inherited the temperament of traditional Chinese intellectuals from his father Liang Ji, who chose not to live and see the failed fate of his country, carrying a very strong sense of responsibility for his country and people. Liang Ji was disappointed in the political situation of the new-founded Republic of China after Qing Empire collapsed, but his son cared more about the culture of China, which has lasted for thousands of years. He witnessed the process of the construction of the Chinese nation-state, under different regimes, and was most concerned about the peasants and rural society, where traditional China was rooted. In 1931, with the support of the warlord Han Fuqu in Shandong Province, he began the “Zouping Experiment.” He established the Shandong Rural Reconstruction Research Institute as an administrative center to take the place of the Zouping’s county government to coordinate the reform. The Institute also worked as a center for research and training, and, under its umbrella, there were many schools in different villages. The schools acted as the government of the villages. This “Administration and Education Integration” system was designed for “autonomy”: the villagers who were trained at the Institute and schools would be responsible for agriculture, economy, culture, and local security. In 1938, he visited Mao Zedong in Yan’an, and the two men had a reformist and revolutionary debate on the issue of where China should go. In 1953, he offended Mao again at a public meeting in Beijing and criticized the Communist Party’s rural policy. Liang Shuming and James Yen crossed paths during the climax of the Rural Reconstruction Movement; however, after the Communist Party took over the political power in 1949, Liang stayed on the mainland, while Yen left for the Philippines to establish the International Institute of Rural Reconstruction, training people who would work for the villages in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. Intersection of Histories The characteristics of cross-border connections are typically embodied in Yen and Elmhirst. From 1932 to 1940, Elmhirst invited British potter Bernard Leach to teach at the school in Dartington. Leach lived and worked in Japan from 1909 to 1920, was the only foreign member of the White Birch group, and was a very close friend of Saneatsu Mushanokō ji and Yanagi Sō etsu. The Japanese raku pottery opened up Leach’s interest in pottery art, and his continuous practice made him the “father of British

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studio pottery.” In 1925, Sō etsu kicked off the Japanese mingei (Folk Craft) movement, which was comparable with William Morris’s Arts and Crafts Movement. The continuous exchanges between Leach, Sō etsu, and the Japanese potter Shō ji Hamada led to the Dartington meeting in 1952 by these three people.54 Through the intermediary of Elmhirst, the Japanese New Village Movement, the British Dartington Experiment, and the Japanese Folk Craft Movement not only made a spiritual connection, but also triggered an intersection of a magical time and space. Six years later, when Mao Zedong launched his utopian project, the “People’s Commune” in China, the ghosts of history crossed again. In a very popular propaganda booklet of the People’s Commune in 1958, there was a sketch of Fourier’s “Phalanstery” with a Chinese title: “The Fourierist’s Brook Farm in America.”55 The idea of ​​the People’s Commune was a variation on Mao’s proposal for a “New Village” in Mount Yuelu, Hunan Province, which was published in an article titled “Student Work,” in 1919. At that time, he learned about Mushanokō ji and the Japanese New Village movement through the translation of the writer Zhou Zuoren, so he started to wander around the villages in Mount Yuelu, looking for a suitable place to realize his “New Village” dream.56 The dream did not come true in his youth, so when he became the leader of the People’s Republic of China, he picked up this old dream, and the People’s Commune was born. Just as Stalin’s collective farms cited the mir commune of the Russian Empire as a historical precedent, Mao also found inspiration from his readings: the “communal feeding” system with its principle of “setting up shelters for those in need of meat and drink,” originated with Zhang Lu, the third leader of the Celestial Masters (aka the Way of the Five Pecks of Rice), a Taoist group of the Eastern Han Dynasty.57 Thus, the People’s Commune became the crucible of Mao’s personal experiences and crazy ideas. In the 1960s, Maoism was not only popular among European leftists, but was also absorbed by the Black Panthers, a minority organization in the United States—not to mention its wide impact on Peru, Indonesia,  “History of the Leach Pottery,” Leach Pottery, https://www.leachpottery.com/history.  Jin Guantao, “The Utopian Spirit of Chinese Culture,” The 21st Century (No. 2, 1990): 29. 56  Zhao Hong, The Chinese Dream of New Village (Guiyang: Guizhou People’s Press, 2014), 37–43. 57  Fan Ye, “Biography of Zhang Lu,” Book of the Later Han. 54 55

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Africa, Southeast Asia, India, and Nepal.58 In the era when Mao helped Vietnam defeat the United States, a large-scale Back-to-the-land Movement broke out with numberless Hippie Communes appearing in North America. The Whole Earth Catalog, founded by Stewart Brand in 1968, became the bible of this movement. This was not only a response to the crisis of the Vietnam War, but also a protest against excessive consumption, energy exhaustion, environmental collapse, reduced job opportunities, and intensified inequality. This movement had also spread to other parts of the world. In New Zealand, people edited and published The New Zealand Whole Earth Catalogue. “Go bush!” became an attractive call to practice intentional communities in the wilderness of the valleys and forests; in Australia, Nimbin had emerged as a “Rainbow Zone” with the intensive eco-villages; in India, Auroville had attracted many international members; in Europe, the legendary anarchist community Christiania Fristaden was born in Copenhagen for “squatting”—they issued the community currency LØN, like the “Cincinnati Labor Note” invented by Josiah Warren, refusing to attribute the community to the Danish government or the European Union, and can be regarded as the upgraded version of the Modern Times, the earliest anarchist community founded by Warren in 1851 on Long Island, New York. Today, some of these communities are still in operation, but many have become tourist destinations. In the wave of the neoliberal economy, they face various difficulties, but still preserve the fire of communitarianist experiments. The Era of Neoliberalism The important historical moment of neoliberalism arrived in 1989. The successive collapse of the Soviet Union and Eastern European socialist bloc lifted the iron curtain and opened up a new space for the market economy. One of the main manifestations of the globalizing economy was the intense urbanization of undeveloped countries. In 1992, the third year after the Tiananmen protests, Deng Xiaoping’s Southern Talks led to the rapid transformation in China. The surge in the export processing industry, the service industry, and the real estate industry forced the cities to expand, not only incorporating large amounts of non-urban land for urban development, but also inhaling large amounts of rural labor into cities. The depopulation problem emerged in Chinese countryside just like in  Julia Lovell, Maoism: A Global History (New York: Knopf, 2019).

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the United Kingdom after the Industrial Revolution. The excessive concentration of resources in cities caused the rural economy to rapidly wither, the deepening of the free market atomized the remaining rural population, the strengthening of the state’s authority shrunk the social space for grassroots action and reduced peasants’ rights for political participation; the illness of rural China that had made the reformists in Republican Period worried was coming back. In 2005, the Chinese intellectuals Wen Tiejun and Li Changping, among others, launched the “New Rural Reconstruction Movement” to take up the ideas and actions of the Chinese rural reconstructionists in the first half of the twentieth century. They believed that the key to China’s modernization lies in the modernization of the countryside. This problem has not been solved so far, but new difficulties have arisen. The new rural reconstructionists went to the countryside, mobilized the farmers to reorganize cooperatives, and invented a new “built-in finance” system to raise the self-reliance of the farmers. They also paid attention to the farmers-­ turned-­migrant-workers in the cities, engaging them in self-improvement. The new rural reconstructionists inherited the passions of their predecessors; however, they also upgraded the academic tools and working methods to contemporary conditions. Although limited by an unchangeable political structure, they did many things that the government could not do or had no time to do, contributing their talents to social change in the Chinese countryside. Both the past and current rural reconstructionists believed what they did was a pragmatic reform for the wider rural population, rather than a narcissistic utopia in countryside, but from the point of view of making a better rural society, I think their efforts can still be classified into the trajectory of utopian practices. Inspired by them, I also launched the Bishan Project in 2011 to join these movements, seeing art intervention and cultural construction as different paths. I visited The Land project, founded by artists Rirkrit Tiravanija and Kamin Lertchaiprasert in Thailand, and the Echigo-Tsumari Art Field, founded by Fram Kitagawa in Japan; the latter has achieved remarkable results in activating the depopulated Japanese countryside. But in response to the complex rural problems in China, the festivalism of arts and culture is obviously not enough to provide comprehensive solutions. I went on to search for more critical thinking resources and historical experiences from different countries and regions, then a new research project Utopia Field came to my mind. This project would include the study of various utopian theories and narrative

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literature, as well as field research on communitarian experiments and rural reconstruction practices in different historical periods. Its original purpose was to provide references for the Bishan Project—but as the Bishan Project was banned by China’s central government in 2016, I decided to turn Utopia Field into a book project. Egalitarianism and Its Future Looking back at all the utopian thoughts and practices mentioned above, to summarize their spiritual heritage in one sentence, I would like to say that it is the pursuit and construction of egalitarianism. The equality of human beings is a long-standing and beautiful concept, but it does not mean to smooth over genetic differences—it means more equal rights, equal opportunities, and equal conditions in social life. The pursuit of human equality has been used as a yardstick for identifying ideological differences, but actually it does not reflect the truth of history. The equality policies of the socialist system have caused a large number of inequalities, while the welfare constructed of the capitalist system has achieved equality in certain areas. Robert William Fogel, the Nobel laureate in economics, made a study of egalitarian pursuits in the United States over nearly 300 years from the perspective of the four Great Awakenings of religion.59 Although he only noted the efforts of various large national evangelical groups and neglected the contributions of the small communitarian utopian experiments activated by the first and second Great Awakening to the political growth and welfare system of the United States, the lack of ideology in the research still makes the book very objective and pertinent. Engels approved of Owen, Fourier, and St. Simon as “utopian socialists” because they did not use the secret weapon of Marxist class struggle. Their efforts could only be identified as reforms, not the revolutions of what Engels called “scientific socialism.”60 The communitarian utopianists couldn’t afford the price of the revolution, so what they did was not the immediate revolution of “abolishing an old country” and “smashing an old world,” but building intentional communities step by step on small-­ scale “topos” inside of greater society, which they were trying to repair or heal. Every utopianist was like Owen, dreaming his idea and practice 59  Robert William Fogel, The Fourth Great Awakening and the Future of Egalitarianism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000). 60  Ruth Levitas, The Concept of Utopia (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1990), 35–58.

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would spread “from Community to Community, from State to State, and from Continent to Continent,” until they would “overshadow the whole earth.”61 But as long as they could not take political power through revolution, they were unable to mobilize any single nation to change the entire world. This in turn became a safety valve against the danger of radical utopianists. I accidentally discovered that, when John Humphrey Noyes, the founder of Oneida, published the first edition of Bible Communism in America in 1853, Hong Xiuquan, the founder of “Taiping Heavenly Kingdom,” published The Land System of the Heavenly Kingdom in China in the same year. The former was born three years earlier than the latter, and they were both inspired by The Bible to claim and practice collective ownership—the difference was that the former was a small-scale community experiment, while the latter was a revolution with mass slaughter, leading China to lose tens of millions of people, and almost subverting the Qing Empire. In fact, although Owen’s New Harmony was a serious failure, he gave birth to the earliest public education movement and the earliest free library in the United States, which affected today’s public schools and public library systems in the United States to some extent. Under his influence, the feminist Frances Wright founded the Nashoba community in Tennessee, known for the liberation of slaves, and was one of the earliest practices of gender and ethnic equality in the United States. The achievement of women’s equality in Shaker Villages and Oneida was unattainable even for the feminist pioneers Elizabeth Stanton and Susan Anthony at that time. Brook Farm’s Transcendentalist intellectuals (except Nathaniel Hawthorne!), truly broke the line between mental labor and physical labor, becoming the “sages who cultivate and eat together with the people.” Through cooperative labor, they not only knew more about plowing, but also brought more leisure to the farmers and handicraft workers in the community, giving them more opportunity to learn about culture and conduct spiritual improvement. In regard to education equality, it is necessary to mention the achievements of Chinese civilian educators and rural reconstructionists, such as James Yen and Tao Xingzhi, who creatively practiced the British Bell-­ Lancaster Method (also known as “mutual instruction”) from the early nineteenth century in rural literacy education in China. The young peasant students who learned best would become “little teachers” (ushers)  Jennings, Paradise Now, 125–126.

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who taught older peasant students. This ripple-like self-education amongst peasants greatly “mined their intellectual mind.” Education was the most successful part of various utopian experiments because they firmly believed it would be the most important and effective way to transform society. In addition to James Yen and Tao Xingzhi’s educational projects, Owen’s “first kindergarten in the world” in New Lanark, and William Maclure’s Working Men’s Institute in New Harmony, the experimental schools in Brook Farm and Dartington left a great legacy to today’s education. In regard to community economy, the Shakers, Harmonites, Oneida, Joshua Warren, Kibbutzim, and Dartington had all achieved amazing successes. They were not relying on the competitive rules of the outside world; instead, they organized production around cooperation, mutual aid, diligence, voluntary labor, and a sense of belonging—creating a large amount of collective wealth. It is necessary to mention that, after disintegration in 1881, the community of Oneida transformed into a joint-stock company, later becoming the largest corporate tableware group in North America which is still in operation. Certainly, all utopias had their fatal flaws, otherwise they would not fail one after the other. Failure seems to be the common destiny of all utopias, which involve degrees of friction and power contrasting with those things they want to resist, the sustainability of the alternative social proposals they advocate, and the personal character and energy of the leaders of utopian practice. Oneida ended with strong opposition in traditional society. The decline of the Shakers and Harmonites was due to the fact that their adherence to celibacy could not sustain their communities for long. Owen’s failure was due to being too keen to pursue theoretical impact and personal fame, neglecting the daily operations of the community. New Harmony relied on the investment of his wealth without giving up his private property rights; while the members did not invest any money in equity, it was not even a joint-stock model, let alone egalitarian collective ownership. As a result, lazy people just stayed around, awaiting free cake from Owen the philanthropist—and Owen’s arbitrariness disrupted the order of the community all over again. In various failures, the factors caused by force majeure should also be counted. For example, the accidental fire ruined the “Phalanstery” in construction (which had invested large amounts of money and manpower), causing high debt and leading to the disintegration of Brook Farm; the Rural Reconstruction Movement during the Republic of China came to an abrupt end just as it reached its climax because of the outbreak of the second Sino-Japanese War and

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became a typical example of a social reform mission giving way to the mission of national salvation. Despite this, “a map of the world that does not include Utopia is not worth even glancing at,” as Oscar Wilde said, “for it leaves out the one country at which Humanity is always landing. And when Humanity lands there, it looks out, and, seeing a better country, sets sail. Progress is the realization of Utopias.”62 This is a famous quotation that can be found in almost every latter-day monograph on utopias. The reason given by Wilde is irresistible and drives many of us today to continue searching for Utopia. In 2000, David Harvey published a book, Space of Hope. In the post-Cold War era, when the “end of history” and academic discourse turned sharply, he still insisted on rereading the Communist Manifesto and Das Kapital, trying to use the new “fire of formation” to harness classical Marxism’s critical power to present reality. He took Baltimore, a city that he has lived and worked in for many years, as an anatomical sample to analyze issues such as “contemporary globalization,” “space-time compression,” “uneven geographical developments,” “degenerate utopia,” “privatopia,” and “body politics.”63 He neither concealed his revolutionary desires as a Marxist nor was ashamed to present a serious alternative political proposal in the seemingly triumphant era of the free market. Although I think that today’s utopian studies should be non-ideological and should objectively deal with the pursuit of egalitarianism whether through socialism or capitalism, when reading about “Edilia,” Harvey’s fictional utopian world, I thought he was lovelier than most of the leftist intellectuals who claim themselves “rational” and “restrained.” Margaret Thatcher’s slogan “There is no alternative” (TINA)64 has been resisted by many radical intellectuals. Just two or three years ago, the latest proposals for Universal Basic Income were boldly presented to the world by Bregman, Van Parijs, and Vanderborght, and it was said that the idea of UBI originally came from Marx (maybe inspired by Fourier) and Belgian attorney Joseph Charlier.65 So the new proposals are not totally new but an iteration of the original idea. The egalitarianism writings by Bregman, Van Parijs, and Vanderborght are so persuasive that Bauman 62  Oscar Wilde, “The Soul of Man under Socialism,” Fortnightly Review (February 1891): 292. 63  David Harvey, Space of Hope (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000). 64  The slogan was used to signify Thatcher’s claim that the market economy is the only system that works, and that debate about this is over. 65  Bauman, Retrotopia, 174–176.

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quoted much in his latest book, Retrotopia. On the surface of the “return of utopias,” or “utopian nostalgia,” people in the present are looking backward to the past, but as long as there is a rooted desire of “iteration,” the despair of the future will not be complete. The fire of the future, which Utopia has always been stubbornly searching for, will not be extinguished.



Postscript

All the Wind and Rain in a Drink1 The twenty-some years were like a dream Through still alive I feel like starting Leisurely going up the little pavilion to see the sky clearing I hear so many things of the past and the present In the fishermen’s song at the third watch —Chen Yuyi, “Going up a Pavilion at Night, Remembering a Visit to Luoyang”, 1135 AD2

At the end of December 2018, although the weather in the south is never cold, there is a cool and light rain. I just attended the memorial service for Meng Lang, a poet I had known for over 30  years, in Hong Kong. Afterwards I went to a bookstore to buy the book A Single Tear, by Wu Ningkun, to read on the high-speed rail. After experiencing the Anti-­ Rightist Campaign and the Cultural Revolution, Wu Ningkun quoted the Song Dynasty poet Chen Yuyi to express his thoughts about his 1  Completed in Chinese on July 7, 2019 in Jingzhou. The English version was translated by Matt Turner and Haiying Weng in 2019. 2  The English translation is quoted from Ningkun Wu and Yikai Li, A Single Tear: A Family’s Persecution, Love, and Endurance in Communist China (New York: Back Bay Books, 1994).

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comparatively bad fortune. This summer, I happened to go to Luoyang, Chen’s hometown, for the first time. Standing at the gate of the old city bell tower, on West Street, where the words “Close to Sun and Emperor” are written, I can’t help but “consider the vastness of Heaven and Earth, and weep sadly all alone”.3 Luoyang, as a city, has been on center stage for major events since prehistory. It has experienced the Yangshao, the Xia, the Shang, the Zhou, both Han dynasties, the Wei, the Jin, the Northern and Southern dynasties, the Sui, the Tang, the Song, and the Jin. Rise and fall have repeated over 13 dynasties, and the city has been through many ups and downs as well—and the sorrow of departure has been heard for generations. “If you want to ask about rises and falls in the past and the present, please just look at Luoyang!”4 Chen Yuyi’s pathos is simply a repetition of the feelings of past generations of the people of Luoyang. However, after seeing off the teacher and friend I had known since youth, and after reading the true story of Wu Ningkun, Chen Yuyi’s poem produces a powerful feeling in me. After being forced to leave Bishan in 2016, my family and I floated through Shenzhen, Yantai, New York, and Shashi. We often saw reports and comments about the Bishan Project in the media and on the Internet. Some said that I was “expelled” for offending the local government, some said that “villagers destroyed the School of Tillers”, but it was all conjecture based on guesses. Just like the “fisherman’s song” that Chen Yuyi heard when he “leisurely going up the little pavilion”, what happened has been interpreted in different ways as the story has spread. I can only keep silent and remain depressed about the state of things—there’s no way to express my feelings. But while I’m lamenting the ups and downs of my fate, I am very grateful for the publication of this book, which allows me to share the whole story. This book collects various texts related to the Bishan Project since 2001, including my own writings on hometown and growth, which are used to explain my motivations and reasons for participating in rural reconstruction; including the records of my first visit to Bishan Village in 2007 and 2008, which explain why I was attracted by the local history and traditional culture of Huizhou; and interviews and talks that I gave prior to launching the Bishan Project, focusing on how I organized my thoughts and actions at the time. It also includes published materials about the Bishan Harvestival, which I curated in 2011; about the Yi County  Chen Zi’ang, “Song on Ascending the Youzhou Tower”, 696 AD, Tang Dynasty.  Sima Guang, “Passing the Old Capital Luoyang”, Song Dynasty.

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International Photo Festival, which I took over in 2012; the Bishan Bookstore, which I helped to found in 2014; the School of Tillers, which I founded in 2015; as well as the articles, interviews and talks during the six years of the Bishan Project that I published in various media and on various topics, including climate politics, peasants’ rights protection, the history of the rural construction movement in the Republic of China, urban–rural relations, food safety, environmental protection, vernacular architecture, folk crafts, children’s education, the cultivation of public spaces, social participation in art, knowledge production, gentrification, organic intellectuals, villagers’ relations, utopia, topophilia, and placemaking—for all of that, they are different aspects of the concept and plan for the project. The foreword to this book is a detailed review, where for the first time I disclosed the truth of the event of my forced relocation in 2016, written after an academic publication in England. It simply provides readers with a more comprehensive overview of things. I divided the contents into 15 chapters according to the approximate chronology of events—and the Kwan-Yen Project in Yantai, in the 14th chapter, is actually the extension and deepening of the practices of the Bishan Project. Although I began to study the history of, and do fieldwork on, different communitarian experiments and rural reconstruction practices around the world in the early days of Bishan, the articles I wrote at that time and any additional articles I wrote will be included in my upcoming book, Utopian Field. Together, these two books contain all my responses to the Bishan Project. At this time, as the book nears publication, the countless relatives and friends who have shared weal and woe with me or helped me along the way, along with the days and nights we spent together in Bishan, spring up in front of me. First of all, I would like to thank Han Yu and Zheng Xiaoguang. Before the Bishan Project, they had already settled down in Xidi and Bishan, and opened their famous Pig’s Inn. They were one of the earliest pioneers of homestays in China, and their local experience provided a great support and helped both at the start of the Bishan Project and in its later development. Second, the co-founder of the Bishan Project, Zuo Jing. As an Anhui man, he provided me, a newcomer from Guangdong, with knowledge about Huizhou history and culture, and contributed considerable time and energy during our cooperation. In 2016, as a result of the Bishan Project, the “Bishan Craft Cooperative” he was rebuilding was partially demolished and he suffered serious economic losses. Ge Yaping, who was one of my close poetry friends while I was in in high

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school and knows Han Yu and Zuo Jing, used personal financial resources to provide vital financial support for the two Bishan Harvestival activities, in 2011 and 2012. Our many reunions in Bishan took us back to the enthusiasm of youth. It is also worth mentioning that Qian Xiaohua brought various other resources to Bishan since he opened the Bishan Bookstore, including funding support from BMW Mini for renovating the School of Tillers, as well as support for the manufacture of “Bishan Agritopian Dress” and “Happiness Pavilion” from Chen Zhong, the CEO of Eaton Kidd. After I was forced to leave Bishan, Qian Xiaohua helped my family and me through our difficulties with the compassion of a Christian. Consuelo Romeo, who was Branding Manager of Moleskine Asia, provided support for the Bishan Harvestival in 2011. Also, after returning to the Milan headquarters, she convinced Maria Sebregondi, the founder of Moleskine, to sponsor the Bishan Project’s retrospective exhibition held at the Florence National Library, in 2015. Wu Jingdong, an investor in Bishan’s Hefu residence, also generously sponsored the Bishan Harvestival in 2011, as well as the exhibition of Liu Chuanhong held at the School of Tillers, in 2015. During the six years of the Bishan Project, Xiaoma and Chengzi did all their visual design work without any compensation. Peng Yanhan, Xu Yijing, Xu Lili, Qiu Keman, and other members of my long-term cooperative exhibition team all worked hard for every exhibition, in rural areas for low wages. Zhu Rui and Liu Zhao were the leaders of the volunteers for the 2012 Yi County International Photo Festival. Zhang Xiaoguang, Feng Si’te, Gao Nan, Gu Xuechen, Chen Yicheng, Zhao Kunfang, Jiang Du, and Zhang Lioaran were volunteers at the School of Tillers, in 2015. Each of them insisted on working unpaid in Bishan for more than three months. Mai Corlin, from Aarhus University, visited Bishan many times. She not only wrote her doctoral dissertation on the Bishan Project, but also translated and helped to publish my notebook, The Bishan Commune: How to Create Your Own Utopia, in Denmark. Adele Kurek, from the University of Toronto, also stayed in Bishan for a long time and wrote her master’s thesis on the Bishan Project. During their stays at the Buffalo Institute, they took part in much volunteer work in addition to their research and thesis preparation. Leah Thompson and Sun Yunfan, following the 2012 Yi County International Photo Festival, came to Bishan to work on an exhibition for the New York Asia Society, and spontaneously decided to shoot a documentary on the Bishan Project. They recorded the whole process of the Yi County International Photo

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Festival being stopped by Beijing. They also followed me back to Xialiu, my hometown, filmed my parents and family, and followed me until the Bishan Project was banned. Later, Leah also filmed my life in Yantai and New  York, and went back to Bishan for follow-up shoots several times. Their efforts yielded the most comprehensive and in-depth video archives available of the Bishan Project. Their short film, from 2015, was widely disseminated to NPR and other media outlets. In 2017, Leah participated with the Bishan Project in the Guggenheim exhibition “Art and China after 1989: Theater of the World”, editing a new short film for the public screening. I sincerely thank both of them, especially Leah, for their persistence, and look forward to seeing the long version of the film she cut. I would also like to thank all the artists, designers, architects, musicians, filmmakers, scholars, poets, writers, rural reconstructionists, organic agricultural practitioners, and other professionals who participated in all the exhibitions and activities organized through the Bishan Project. Many have been to Bishan many times, such as Matjaž Tančič, Liu Chuanhong, the native Haifeng folk band Wu Tiao Ren, and Xiao Quan—an old friend who took wonderful photos of “Bishan Agritopian Dress” as well as my wedding in Bishan—and Liu Liangcheng, the writer who wrote School of Tillers in calligraphy. Other names can’t be listed here because the list is too long. But I would like to especially thank the curator Hou Hanru, who visited Bishan in 2012 and invited the Bishan Project to participate in the 2013 Auckland Art Triennial in New Zealand, and the 2017 Guggenheim show; also Andreas Fogarasi and Christian Teckert, who invited the Bishan Project to participate in 2013 exhibition “Eastern Promises: Contemporary Architecture and Spatial Practices in East Asia”, at the MAK in Vienna; and Roan Ching-Yueh, who invited the Bishan Project to participate in the exhibition “Cloud of Unknowing: A City of Seven Streets”, at the Taipei Fine Arts Museum, in 2014; Linda Loppa, director of Polimoda Institute of Fashion Design and Marketing, who invited the Bishan Project to hold its first retrospective exhibition at the Florence National Library; Nikita Yingqian Cai, who invited the Bishan Project to hold its first exhibition at the Guangdong Times Museum, in 2011. The list of other individuals and institutions who invited me to attend various academic conferences to give speeches cannot be listed here, but I sincerely thank them for giving me the opportunity to organize my thoughts and practice, and to spread the Bishan Project to different places. When I was forced to move out of Bishan and was in urgent need of leaving China, many friends gave me advice. In the end, my old friend

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Jeffrey Johnson persuaded Amale Andraos, the new dean of the Columbia University School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation to give me a one-year teaching post. I also cannot list all of the friends that helped me during my stay in the United States. I’m grateful to all of you. I still remember that on February 20, 2016, our family of six (including my mother and nephew) was forced to leave Bishan. Zheng Xiaoguang came to see us off at night while we waited for a flight to Shenzhen, at the Xin’an Country Villa Hotel, in Tunxi; Zhu Jing hosted us at One Moment Inn in Yang Meikeng village for more than a week, and the beautiful seaside in Shenzhen made us forget the difficulties facing us. At that time, I could still attend the academic conference of the Shenzhen and Hong Kong Bi-City Biennale of Urbanism \ Architecture, hosted by Doreen Heng Liu, an architect. However, my own lecture at Shantou University was afterwards investigated. I decided to send my mother and nephew back to my hometown, where my nephew could find a middle school to continue his studies at. Me, my wife, and children would go to Yantai, Shandong Province, for a temporary stay, and join my wife’s mother there. Fortunately, Tan Fang found a local primary school for our eldest child, Tang Tang. Out of gratitude, I agreed to her invitation and started the work of the Kwan-Yen Project. In the first month, Leah and my old friend Scott Lash came to visit us from the United States and Britain, which gave me the comfort of friendship. In May, the Shenzhen OCT Contemporary Art Terminal informed me that my speech, “Distribution System and Utopia”, was cancelled by Beijing—confirming that I was being monitored by Beijing. My studio, which I rented for a short time in Yantai, began to be monitored by my neighbors, who confirmed my identity under the pretext of registering me as part of the community’s migrant population. Before I received my US Scholar Visa in August, and went to New York with my wife and children, there were two police investigations—one of which was by the “special police”, with their guns and bulletproof clothes. The local police seemed to treat me as a dangerous person. Before we left for New York, we decided to go back to Bishan to clean up the house, since we had left so suddenly before. The local government knew our schedule before we arrived, and required us to leave in only a few days, not giving us much time to clean up. I sent several boxes of necessary books away, leaving the house—with the cut-off water and electricity completely still not restored—in chaos. In the summer of 2017, my work at Columbia ended, and the Kwan-­ Yen Project, which had been being prepared for a year, was ready to be

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launched. I went back to Yantai with my wife and children to let Tang Tang continue her studies there, while I was busy hosting the opening of the Suochengli Neighborhood Library and the Kwan-Yen People’s Station. After that, I contacted the local government of Yi County about restoring water and electricity to my house in Bishan. Since I had been away for more than a year, had kept silent during my stay in the United States, and didn’t tell the world about “forced relocation” in 2016—I thought the matter would be settled. At that time, the Temporary Secretary of the Village Committee was still in the village. He promised to restore water and electricity, and said by phone, the villagers don’t like what you do in Bishan. Bishan is not yours, it’s the villagers’, and it’s not a place where you can do whatever you want, not a place where you can serve your personal ambitions. The house is yours. It’s your freedom to sell or rent it. We welcome you to live in Bishan, but as long as you live in China, you must obey the leadership of the Communist Party. You can no longer do any activities in the name of the Bishan Project, and you can no longer talk about the Bishan Project. Whether you are at home or abroad, if you talk about it again, what we have done once can be done again.

The last sentence was equivalent to confirming that the water and electricity cut-off in 2016 was a government action. I immediately reported it to the police after the incident that year, and two policemen went there for a routine check, but to no avail; no government representative came to meet with me, they just informed me through an intermediary that I had to leave immediately, and said that the house could not be rented or sold after I left. As for the “public opinion of the villagers” that the local government grabbed, I’m used to hearing it, and I don’t feel like I need to respond: it is not true because the people are often forced to be represented by the Party. Whose Bishan is Bishan? This was the most frequently asked question in the dispute between Zhou Yun and me in 2014. As I said later in Leah’s documentary interview, Bishan is certainly not my Bishan, but it is not the villagers’ either—it’s the Party’s. When we were in New York, we received a WeChat message from the villagers saying that the house had been broken into. Although there was nothing valuable there to steal, knowing that our one-time home had been violated still made us very sad. When I returned, I saw that the weeds in the yard had grown to the height of a person, the tile roof was leaking,

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the brick wall seeped water, and some corners were in danger of collapse. Because there had been no water or electricity for a long time, I couldn’t ask someone to clean the place regularly, and there was trash everywhere. I really did experience what was “the sorrow of parting”. After the violent eviction, emotionally I just couldn’t go back to Bishan to settle down— but the house that I had invested so many years into had to continue to be maintained. After I arranged for an overhaul, the Kwan-Yen Project was reported in the national newspapers. And before I could return to Yantai from Bishan, the police had already visited my mother-in-law. Soon, Tan Fang was also interviewed by the local political security department. They told her that I “have close relations with many foreign human rights organizations, whose main activities are in the United States and Canada. He usually has no income. The reason why he can speak about utopia and anarchism all over the world is because he is funded by foreign forces. When he was in Bishan, the local government couldn’t control him…” Through her, I asked to meet with this departments, but was refused. They asked Tan Fang to stop working with me immediately, or else they would break up her company. It’s funny that they heard that the Kwan-­ Yen Project was my attempt to revive the Bishan Project: Tan Fang works for me, and I had sent her to Yantai from Shenzhen, and some other people would be sent to Yantai as well… In order not to affect Tan Fang, I had to leave, and moved out of Yantai in the summer of 2018. Going with my mother-in-law back to her hometown of Shashi in Hubei, Tang Tang was forced to transfer schools again. One year after returning to Yantai from New York, Iwan Baan and Liu Chuanhong, two artists who visited Bishan many times and participated in the Bishan Project, came to visit me. We went together to investigate and to photograph the surviving fishing villages and seaweed houses of the Jiaodong Peninsula, and had an unforgettable time. In Yantai, I made many local friends who took me to many of the villages in the surrounding areas to help me understand the folk customs, culture, history, and reality of the place, which enhanced my research on “topophilia” and “placemaking”. It benefited me deeply. The Jiaodong Peninsula and my hometown, in the Leizhou Peninsula, are very similar in many aspects, such as geography, diet, and so on, and, to a certain extent, it comforted my homesickness. The chapter about the Kwan-Yen Project in this book is really a continuation of some of the ideas originating in the Bishan Project, and was the result of my efforts to understand a place that was likely to change from being distant to being my hometown. The chapter is also my

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thanks to Yantai. At present, I have arrived in an ancient city along the Yangtze River. The life that I face seems to be unavoidable, so I need to devote myself to searching for its daily flavors, embracing its human temperature and enjoying its historical charms. Because I can’t find a job, I have a lot of time every day, so in addition to spending time with my family and children, I began to write Utopian Field. Soon after relocating, I received an invitation from Jacob Dreyer to start editing this English-­ language book about the Bishan Project for publication by Palgrave Macmillan. Apart from the three chapters that I wrote in English, this book was entirely written in Chinese, including interviews and speeches. Half of them had already been translated into English by different translators, and published in magazines, on websites and in academic collections, and half of them needed new translations. I would like to thank all the translators here, especially Matt Turner and Weng Haiying, who have helped complete most of the manuscripts needing new translation under conditions of limited remuneration. If there are any mistakes in this book, I am responsible for them all. At the same time, I welcome readers’ criticisms and corrections. Between 2018 and 2019, I went back to Bishan several times. After the restoration of water and electricity and the completion of the renovation, I rented the Buffalo Institute and the School of Tillers to an artist from Anhui whom I met in New  York. During her rental period, she will inevitably be closely watched. All visiting friends and guests will need to register with the Village Committee, and she cannot hold any public art activities. At the beginning of 2018, I decided to sell my car, so I drove back from Yantai back to Yi County with the buyer, to handle the paperwork. Without informing the Village Committee, I don’t know how they knew my itinerary. They outright forbade me from staying in Bishan. Not in my own home or at Pig’s Inn—I could only stay at a county hotel. From my most recent visit, in 2019, I found out that I needed to report to them in advance, and that I couldn’t stay for long. But despite the strict supervision of the local government, every time I went back I was warmly and considerately entertained by Han Yu and Zheng Xiaoguang, and especially their successor, Ding Mu’er. The villagers, including Qian Shi’an, Hu Xiaogang, and Yang Yan and their family, invited us to have dinners at their homes every time. And every time I hosted a dinner party at the Goodwill Guesthouse (Tailai Nongzhuang) in the village, Wang Shouchang and Wang Ling, who work in Bishan Bookstore, Yao Lilan, a retired teacher in the village, and Wang Juxin, a woman who used to cook

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and clean for us—they would all come and see me without trying to “avoid suspicion”. Wang Ling and Wang Juxin regularly checked on and took care of the house for us, while Zha Jianfei and Wang Xingmei have been helping us to organize workers to maintain and repair the house. During the six years of living in Bishan, we were friends and neighbors. After leaving Bishan, we have still maintained our friendship. I would like to express my heartfelt thanks to them here. Finally, the most important person I need to thank is my wife, Tang Xue. She left Wuhan and life in the big city, and took Tang Tang, who was four-years-old at the time, to Bishan to form a new family with me. That was a very difficult decision for an urban woman of her age. She first served as the manager of the Bishan Bookstore, and later participated in the establishment of the School of Tillers. We held a lively and unforgettable wedding in the village, and gave birth to our “Bishan baby”, Niu Niu, who is the single most important thing in the latter half of my life, allowing me to enjoy family life even more. I dedicate this book to them, Tang Xue, Tang Tang, and Niu Niu. I feel deeply ashamed that they have lived turbulent lives in different places as I was forced to move around. Tang Tang has gone to different schools, in Bishan, New  York, Yantai, and Shashi, and Niu Niu hasn’t been able to develop regular playmates because of our migrations. I would also like to thank Tang Xue’s family, who accepted my exile without complaint, and never gave up. To my mother, I am also deeply ashamed. She lived with me in Bishan for two years, and she always worried about the “unfair” treatment I received. Even today, she is in my hometown worrying about me. In her old age, I should be nearby—but I am forced to live far away. I promised my nephew, Ou Jian, that he would spend his youth in Bishan, close to nature and far away from the noise of the city. Now he has to leave my shelter and meet the challenges of the college entrance examination all on his own. For these relatives, I feel helpless at not being able to give them better care. I can only hope that the days of turbulence will come to an end, and that a stable life will quickly arrive. Although the Bishan Project ended so unpleasantly for me, the happy years we spent in the village are nevertheless worth remembering. We lived in an old Hui style house, welcoming guests and seeing them off every single day. We often participated in the villagers’ festive banquets, attended their Huangmei Opera performances, danced with them in the square, swam together in the Yuanyang Valley in summer, and chatted in the winter before a fire. We also sat reading by the brazier, and went to the

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swap meets in the county town every new year’s day to purchase local specialties. The beauty of the surrounding unknown villages and the natural scenery was never tiring. September 28, 2015, was the Mid-­ Autumn Festival that year, and Li Ming, the new head of the Bishan Bookstore, came to the School of Tillers late at night. After seeing her off, Tang Xue and I decided to take a moonlight walk around the village. At that time, she was still pregnant with Niu Niu. We walked slowly down the village road, feeling the tranquility of the full moon night. When I got back home, I wrote on WeChat: “Then, I went to the fields, and only a bright moon poured out its milky light. The mountain in the distance showed its ridge. The mulberry trees on the ground shook their leaves. Only the insects were cheering, while the people had fallen asleep, and only we saw the loneliness of Heaven and Earth. Electronic images can never record such a night, only our naked eyes and hearts can be engraved. Thanks to the generosity of this village, we can enjoy this breathtaking beauty. “As I read this record, I am on the 31st floor of a high-rise apartment in Shashi. My family is asleep. Outside the window, I can see the Yangtze River Bridge in halflight. The water under the bridge is sparkling. And the scene switches back and forth between the reality in front of me and the memories in my mind. I think of Yu Youren’s couplet: “All the wind and rain in a drink, all the mountains and rivers in a heart”. In this land, I have lived in many different places, in Guangdong, Beijing, Anhui, Shandong, and Hubei, and have experienced different lives and storms. If all this wind and rain can turn into a drink, what magic that will be…

Epilogue

Rat1 Push aside the night to find the source of your sleeplessness. Light a stick of incense to calm the beating of your heart. Your body isn’t what’s burning, it’s the breeze from a palm-leaf fan in winter. Memory is a rat poised to run. Draw a secret chamber and keep time from seeping in. Don’t put on your clothes, don’t sit up in bed, and don’t think of reaching for a blank page. Just chew it, turning it over inside yourself, holding at bay the sudden awareness, growing, like the urge to pee, that you are lost.

1  Completed in Chinese on January 4, 2014, in Bishan, the English version was translated by Austin Woerner in 2019.

© The Author(s) 2020 O. Ning, Utopia in Practice, Contemporary East Asian Visual Cultures, Societies and Politics, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-5791-0_15

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Bishan Geography Bamboo House 金竹园 Bishan Academy 碧山书院 Bishan Bookstore 碧山书局 Bishan Craft Cooperative 碧山工销社 Bishan Granaries 碧山粮站 Bishan Nursing Home 碧山敬老院 Bishan Plaza 碧山文化广场 Blue Cloud Guesthouse 碧云古村客栈 Book & Plow Gardens 耕读园 Brilliant Cottage 奕舍 Buffalo Café 牛圈咖啡 Buffalo Institute 水牛学院(牛院) Cloud Gate Pagoda 云门塔 Cloud Gate Guesthouse 云门农家乐 Dog’s Bistro 狗窝酒吧 Dunda Ancestral Hall 敦大堂 Goodseed Cottage 嘉种堂 Goodwill Guesthouse 泰来农庄 Grace Gardens 恩园 Green Mountain Senior Home 黟县青山老年公寓

© The Author(s) 2020 O. Ning, Utopia in Practice, Contemporary East Asian Visual Cultures, Societies and Politics, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-5791-0_15

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GLOSSARY

Happiness Pavilion 时安寮(闲寮) He Family Country Hotel 何府乡村酒店 Hillside Garden 靠山邸 Jade Rice Farm 昱田 Ji River 霁河 Jianxi Reservoir 枧溪水库 Jianxi Village 枧溪村 Master He’s Bridge 何公桥 Mingxian Ancestral Hall 明贤堂 Old Jianxi Bridge 枧溪古桥 Peijun Gardens 培筠园 Pig’s Inn 猪栏酒吧乡村客栈 Rapeseed Oil Workshop 老油厂 School of Tillers (SOT) 理农馆 Shiting Village 石亭村 Village Hall 碧山大会堂 Village Reading Room 农家书屋 Wang Bo Shrine 汪勃纪念馆 WOW 蛙舍 Zhang River 漳河

Huizhou Geography Biyang 碧阳 Guanlu 关麓 Guanlu Cottage 关麓小筑 Hongcun 宏村 Huangshan City 黄山市 Huizhou 徽州 Jiancun 江村 Jingde 旌德 Jixi 绩溪 Longchuan 龙川 Mount Huangshan 黄山 Qimen 祁门 Shangzhuang 上庄 Shezhou 歙州 Shexian, She County 歙县 Tunxi 屯溪

 GLOSSARY 

Wuyuan 婺源 Xidi西递 Xin’an River 新安江 Xiuning 休宁 Yixian, Yi County 黟县 Yuding 渔亭

Vernacular Architecture banbianqiao 半边俏 donggua liang 冬瓜梁 dong ping xi jing 东瓶(平)西镜(静) dujianting 独间厅 fengshui 风水 guanyin qiang 观音墙 huatiao 花条 huipai 徽派 hujing 护净 huotong 火桶 jiaoxiang 角厢 kang 炕 langbu sanjian 廊步三间 matou qiang 马头墙 meiren kao 美人靠 mingtang 明堂 paoma lang 跑马廊 sanhe wu 三合屋 shuikou 水口 sihe wu 四合屋 taishi bi, screen wall 太师壁 tianjing 天井 tongzhuanwu 通转屋 tuibu 退步 two-jin houses 两进院子 wai chyun 围村 wai uk 围屋 xiaosanjian 小三间 yi tang jia ju 一堂家具 zhong sheng ping jing 终(钟)生(声)平(瓶)静(镜) zhongtang 中堂

373

374 

GLOSSARY

Culture and Art Agritopia Dress for Bishan Commune 碧山服 Artistic Rural Reconstruction 艺术乡建 Bishan Harvestival 碧山丰年祭 Bishan Project 碧山计划 Chefoo Institute & Library 芝罘学馆 Chefoo School 芝罘学校 cheongsam 长衫 Chudifang 出地方 Chung Hwa Daily 《中华日报》 Chutzpah! 《天南》杂志 Get It Louder 大声展 guyu 谷雨 Kwan-Yen People’s Station 广仁众空间 Kwan-Yen Project 广仁计划 Librairie Avant-Garde 南京先锋书店 Meishi Street 《煤市街》 New Masses 《新群众》 puxue 朴学 San Yuan Li 《三元里》 Shennong 神农 SOT Researchers in Residency Program 理农馆研究者驻地计划 Suochengli Neighborhood Library 所城里社区图书馆 U-thèque Organization 缘影会 Village Government Monthly 《村治月刊》 xiangcun shuju 乡村书局 xiangsheli 乡射礼 Yixian International Photo Festival 黟县国际摄影节 zhonghua laogong zhoubao 《中华劳工周报》 zoumalou wujian 走马楼吴简

Economy baochandaohu 包产到户 Bishan Hours 碧山时分券 Community Oriented Mutual  社区经济互助计划 dabaogan 大包干

Economy

(C.O.M.E.)

Project

 GLOSSARY 

Household Contract System 家庭承包责任制 huangong (jiaogong) 换工(交工) jiaogongliang 交公粮 Talk & Buy 淘与拍 The Lily Land 打碗花农场 Young Village Official Vegetable Garden 村官菜园

Society Bishan Commune 碧山共同体 chai 拆 chaxu geju 差序格局 chengshihua 城市化 chengzhongcun 城中村 cunzhi 村治 gaokao 高考 gengfu 更夫 gongtongti 共同体 guanxi 关系 huanxiang ti 还乡体 jiafeng 家风 New Rural Reconstruction Movement 新乡村建设运动 nongcun 农村 nongcun chengzhenhua 农村城镇化 Rural Reconstruction Movement 乡村建设运动 sannong wenti 三农问题 shijian kanshouzhe 时间看守者 shouyeren 守夜人 St. James’ Settlement 圣雅各福群会 tong-xiang 同乡 xiangcun 乡村 xiangxian 乡贤 Xiaozhuang Normal College晓庄师范 xiaru 侠儒 Xin’an Primary School 新安小学 Xin’an Traveling Group 新安旅行团 yicang 义仓 youxia 游侠

375

376 

GLOSSARY

Administration and Politics China Assassination Corps 支那暗杀团 cun 村 daguo fan 大锅饭 danwei sushe 单位宿舍 dayuan 大院 Deng-Lai-Qing Circuit 登莱青道署 feixingzhengcun 非行政村 gongshe 公社 guangchang 广场 hukou户口 hukou dengji tiaoli 户口登记条例 jiedao 街道 jingtianzhi 井田制 jinshi 进士 juminqu 居民区 Military-Gentry Coalition 军绅政权 Mount Qi Thousand Households Defense Garrison 奇山守御千户所 nongdi 农地 People’s Commune 人民公社 qi yishe, zhi mirou 起义舍, 置米肉 shequ 社区 Taiping Heavenly Kingdom 太平天国 The Land System of the Heavenly Kingdom 《天朝田亩制度》 tudi caizheng 土地财政 weiquan 维权 xian 县 xiang 乡 xiaoqu小区 xiaxiang 下乡 xingzhengcun 行政村 yaxiya 亚细亚 zhaijidi 宅基地 zhen 镇

 GLOSSARY 

Ideology Contemporary Agrarianism 当代农本主义 lixiangguo 理想国 Nongjia 农家学派 Ruralism 乡土主义 wudoumi dao 五斗米道 wutuoban 乌托邦 wuyouxiang 乌有乡 wuzhenfu zhuyi 无政府主义

Wade-Giles Romanized Names and Sinicized Names Alitto, Guy S. 艾恺 Buck, Pearl 赛珍珠 Chang, Tsong-zung 张颂仁 Changhua 彰化 Chefoo 芝罘 Chen, Chi-kuan 陈其宽 Ch’en, Chiung-ming 陈炯明 Ch’en, Jerome 陈志让 Chiung Yao 琼瑶 Chow, Sze Chung 周思中 Chung, Yung-feng 钟永丰 Elmhirst, Leonard 恩厚之 Erh, Deke 尔冬强 Gou, Gimfu 高剑父 Ho, Elaine W. 何颖雅 Hsieh, Ying-chun 谢英俊 Hu, Shih 胡适 Huang, Yen-pei 黄炎培 Hui, Yuk 许煜 Hulmanbiek, Yerkesy 叶尔克西·胡尔曼别克 Kaohsiung 高雄 Kwok, Lenny 郭达年 Lai, Cing-Soong 赖青松 Lam, Tong 林东 Lang, Hsien Ping Larry 郎咸平 Leung, Michael 梁志刚

377

378 

GLOSSARY

Leong, Sze Tsung 梁思聪 Liu, Kuo-chang 刘国沧 Liu, Shih-fu 刘师复 Meinung 美浓 Roan, Ching-Yueh 阮庆岳 Tai Hsu 太虚 Tengchow (Penglai) 登州(蓬莱) Tinghsien 定县 Tong, Tekong 唐德刚 Tsang, Tsou-choi 曾灶财 Tuan, Yi-Fu 段义孚 Weihsien (Weifang) 潍县(潍坊) Yen, Y. C. James晏阳初 Yung, Ho Chang 张永和

Japanese Andō , Shō eki 安藤昌益 Atarashiki-mura 新村 bigei 美艺 chanoyu 茶道 guriddo shoppu, lattice shop 架子铺 Hamada, Shō ji 滨田庄司 mingei 民艺 Miyazaki Prefecture 宫畸县 Miyazawa Kenji 宫泽贤治 Moroyama 毛吕山町 Mushanokō ji, Saneatsu 武者小路实笃 Okakura, Kakuzō 冈仓天心 raku pottery 乐烧 Rasuchijin Association 罗须地人协会 Saitama Prefecture 琦玉县 Sen no Rikyū 千利休 shirakaba 《白桦》 shirakaba-ha 白桦派 Shizen shin’eidō 《自然真营道》 Sukiro 数寄 sukisha 数寄者 Takajo 木城町

 Glossary 

Toyotomi Hideyoshi 丰臣秀吉 wabi-sabi 侘寂 Yanagi, Sō etsu 柳宗悦 zakka 杂货铺

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Appendix A

Chronology1 2003 Produced the documentary San Yuan Li in Guangzhou. 2004 Han Yu and Zheng Xiaoguang renovated the first Pig’s Inn. 2005 Participated in the first Shenzhen Biennale of Urbanism\ Architecture curated by Yung Ho Chang. Noticed the rural practices of Hsieh Ying-­ chun and Huang Sheng-yuan. Learn more about Wen Tiejun’s rural construction projects. Read James Yen’s biography. 2006 Produced the documentary Meishi Street in Beijing.

1

 The timeline is traced back according my diaries and social media archive.

© The Author(s) 2020 O. Ning, Utopia in Practice, Contemporary East Asian Visual Cultures, Societies and Politics, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-5791-0_15

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2007 Oct 4–7. First field trip in Huizhou villages with Zuo Jing. Met Han Yu and Xiaoguang in Bishan. Oct 22. First proposal of the Bishan Project came out on paper. 2008 May 14–15. Visited Bishan and Met with Wu Wenda, the party secretary of Yi County to put forward the idea of Bishan Project. Jul 29–Aug 6. Visited Bishan for a longer stay and research. Nov 20. Met with Rem Koolhass in OMA Beijing office to kick off a marathon conversation event with him and Hans Ulrich Obrist in next year’s SZ-HK Bi-City Biennale. Coined the term “ruralism.” Nov 21–23. Visited Jay Brown’s Lijiang Studio. Dec 6. Jay was invited to Beijing to give a public talk on his rural work. 2009 Apr 13–16. Visited Bishan with the SZ-HKB curatorial team. May 4–13. A field trip around Taiwan to meet the intellectuals who live and work in rural area: architects Huang Sheng-yuan and Liu Kuo-chang; CSA farmer Lai Cing-Soong; poets Wu Yin-ning, Wu Cheng, Chung Yung-feng and musician Lin Sheng-xiang. Jun 23–24. Visited Hsieh Ying-chun and his post-Wenchuan earthquake reconstruction project in Yangliu Village, Mao County, Sichuan Province. Dec 9. Hosted the “Rural China” forum at the opening of 2009 SZ-HKB. Guest speakers included Hsieh Ying-chun, Huang Sheng-yuan, Chung Yung-feng, Wu Yinning, Qiu Jiansheng, He Huili, and Lü Xinyu. Was shocked by the newly emerged dialect songs of Wu Tiao Ren brought by Yung-feng. Dec 22. The “Shenzhen Marathon” started: Koolhass and Obrist led the non-stop, eight-hour conversation toward the grand topic: “The Chinese Thinking”—under its roof there were several sections focus on rural issue. Dec 28–31. Visited Zhaicheng Village, the historical site of James Yen’s “Dingxian Experiment” in Hebei Province and the agricultural heritage Red Flag Canal in Henan Province.

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383

2010 Aug 23–Sept 14. Conceived and drew the blueprint of Bishan Project in a Moleskine notebook. Oct 20–Nov 20. The notebook exhibited in “Detour: The Moleskine Notebook Experience” in Shanghai. Dec 11–13. Visited Rirkrit Tiravanija and Kamin Lertchaiprasert’s The Land project in Baan Mae Village, Sanpatong County, Chiang Mai. Dec 29–31. Shot video of Han Yu and Xiaoguang in Bishan for Chutzpah!’s online channel. 2011 Jan 7–11. Prepared for the launching of Chutzpah!. Visited Qiu Jiansheng’s projects in Fujian Province. Participated in a conference in Peitian Village led by Wen Tiejun. Jan 22–24. Visited He Huili’s projects in Lankao County, Henan Province. Mar 30–31. Accompanied Hsieh Ying-chun for a field trip in Bishan. Apr 1. The first issue of Chutzpah! focused on “Agrarian Asia”, launched and immediately sold out. Apr 27. Bought an old house in Bishan and turned it into Buffalo Institute. Apr 27–May 1. Philosopher Wang Min’an, curator Guo Xiaoyan, artists Wang Yin and Stanislav Miler, fashion designer Ma Ke, graphic designers Xiaoma and Chengzi visited Bishan. May 21. The logo of Bishan Commune came out. Jun 5–19. The ongoing Bishan Project was invited to exhibit its preparatory work in Times Museum, Guangzhou. Jul 3–10. Artists Liang Shaoji, Qiu Anxiong, Liu Qingyuan, designers Zhang Lei, Chen Feibo, Zhu Xiaojie, and musician Dadawa Zhu Zheqin visited Bishan. The students of Anhui University led by Zuo Jing kicked off the research project “Handicraft in Yi County.” Jul 29–30. Wu Tiao Ren was invited to visit Bishan. Aug 13. Launched the 3rd issue of Chutzpah! in Librairie Avant-Garde and waved the first invitation to Qian Xiaohua to establish Bishan Bookstore. Aug 15. Buffalo Institute was partially renovated. It became the working base to prepare the first Bishan Harvestival. Aug 26–28. Bishan Harvestival.

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Appendix A

Sept 22–25. Presented Bishan Project at the BMW Guggenheim Lab, New York as the 2011 member of Asian Art Council in Guggenheim Museum. Sept 29–Nov 6. Included Bishan Project in the Chengdu Biennale International Design Exhibition with one-third of the exhibition space. Villagers Wang Shouchang and Yao Lilan were invited to attend the opening. Oct 28. Hanyu and Pig’s Inn were featured in the coverage of the New York Times on rural tourism in southern Anhui by Justin Bergman. Nov 9–12. Qian Xiaohua visited Bishan to find site for Bishan Bookstore. 2012 Jan 20. Zuo Jing founded Hanpin, the predecessor of the mook Bishan. Mar 7. Accepted the official invitation from Yixian People’s Government to curate the 7th Yixian International Photo Festival with Zuo Jing. Mar 26. Was invited to Visit Moleskine’s headquarters in Milan. Met with brand founder Maria Sebregondi. May 17–25. Slovenian photographer Matjaž Tančič and French artist Tal Isaac Hadad visited Bishan to conduct new projects. May 22. Bishan Project was featured in Modern Painters by Madeleine O’Dea. Aug 15. The 9th issue of Chutzpah! featured the dialect lyrics by Wu Tiao Ren and Chung Yung-feng. Sept 11–14. Visited Fram Kitagawa and Echigo-Tsumari Art Field. Oct 11–16. Iwan Baan was invited to conduct new project in Bishan. Oct 15. Bishan Project was awarded the “Innovator of the Year” by the Wall Street Journal in China. Oct 25. Leah Thompson, Sun Yunfan, and Jeroen De Vries from Asia Society, New  York, came to Bishan to install Coal + Ice in the photo festival. Oct 31. Donated and installed a bronze statue of Wang Dazhi in Bishan. Nov 1. The photo festival was canceled by Beijing. Nov 11–12. Hou Hanru and Evelyne Jouanno visited Bishan. Nov 30. Presented Bishan Project in the 4th National CSA Symposium at Renmin University in Beijing. 2013 Apr 10. Ended the lease of Beijing apartment and completely moved to Bishan. Apr 30–May 13. Participated in the 5th Auckland Triennial with Bishan Project, then conducted a field research on intentional communities in New Zealand.

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385

Jun 4. Participated in the exhibition “Eastern Promises: Contemporary Architecture and Spatial Practices in East Asia” with the Bishan Project in MAK, Vienna. May 14. Historian Wang Zhenzhong visited Bishan. Jul 6–8. Scott Lash visited Bishan. Jul 16. An interview by Kim Rathcke Jensen about Bishan Project was published in Danish newspaper Politiken. Jul 30–Aug 1. Visited the activist-turned-farmer Chow Sze Chung and the C.O.M.E. projects in St. James’ Settlement, Hong Kong. Aug 7. Heinz-Nobert Jocks visited Bishan. Aug 30. Tom Cliff, research member of “informal life politics” project led by Tessa Morris Suzuki in Australian National University, came to Bishan for fieldwork. Aug 31. Supported by Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting, Leah Thompson and Sun Yunfan came to Bishan to make a documentary about Bishan Project. Sept 7–8. Formally introduced the idea of Bishan Project to villagers and cadres in Buffalo Institute and village hall. Sept 9–10. Robin Allison, founder of Earthsong ECO neighborhood in New Zealand, and Jon Sawyer, Executive Director of Pulitzer Center, visited Bishan. Sept 15. Organized a seminar on “intentional communities” in Beijing in the name of V-ECO mook with support from Vanke Group. Among the participants were Shi Yan, founder of Shared Harvest Farm in Beijing; Robert Jenkin, a member of Rainbow Valley Community from New Zealand, and Robin Allison. Oct 1. Zhang Yu founded the Jade Rice Farm in Bishan. Oct 5. Bishan Bookstore was ready to open. Oct 12. Qiu Zhijie brought about 60 students from China Academy of Fine Arts to Buffalo Institute for discussion. Oct 18. Met with David Graeber in London. Oct 22. Visited Shared Harvest Farm with Zhang Yu. Oct 26–28. Andrea Berrini and Dinda Elliott visited Bishan. Nov 3. Mai Corrin and Rasmus Graff visited Bishan for the first time. Nov 10. Talked about Bishan Project at Taipei Center for Contemporary Art and Taipei International Art Fair. Nov 14. Presented Bishan Project at Barcelona Autonomous University. Dec 6. Bishan Project participated in the 5th SZHKB. The Handicraft in Yi County was published.

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Appendix A

2014 Jan 25–26. Talked about Bishan Project in the seminar “Post-occupation: Art, Gentrification and Civil War” organized by philosopher Yuk Hui in Hong Kong. Jan 28. It was the first time to have the whole family gathering for Spring Festival in Bishan. Leah and Yunfan came to continue filming the documentary. Feb 1. Welcomed and gave a talk in Buffalo Institute to more than thirty middle school students and their parents from Wuxi. Feb 5–8. Went back to Xialiu, my hometown in Guangdong Province, followed by Yunfan and her camera. Mar 15. Architect Zhang Lei visited Bishan. Mar 16. Began to draw the second blueprints of Bishan Project. Mar 25. Leah and Yunfan premiered a short version of their Bishan film in the Environmental Film Festival in the Nation’s Capital, Washington DC. Mar 25–28. Visited Metelkova Autonomous Cultural Centre (AKC) in Ljubljana. Apr 9. Matjaž Tančič came back to Bishan for further photographing. Apr 23. Bishan Bookstore opened. May 9–Aug 17. Bishan Project participated in the exhibition “Cloud of Unknowing: A City of Seven Streets” in Taipei Fine Arts Museum. The time currency Bishan Hours was put into use among the museum volunteers for the first time. May 18. Postcards drawn by Wang Shouchang were put on sale in Bishan Bookstore. May 30–31. Talk about collectivism and countryside in the international symposium “The Collective Eye” Organized by Heinz-Nobert Jocks in Central Academy of Fine Arts. Jun 6–9. Met with Ann Marie Gardner, editor-in-chief of Modern Farmer in Upstate New  York; Paul Glover, founder of Ithaca Hours in Philadelphia; James C. Scott, Jonathan D. Spence and Peter C. Perdue in New Haven. Visited Nancy Berliner and the re-erected Huizhou house Yin Yu Tang at Peabody Essex Museum. Jun 12–17. Zuo Jing curated the exhibition “Handicraft in Yi County” at Anhui University. Jun 20, W. J. T. Mitchell visited Bishan. Jun 28. Adele Kurek came to Bishan for one-month research on her master thesis.

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387

Jul 2. The nationwide “Bishan Dispute” outbroke. Jul 6. Mai came back to Bishan for her research on PhD dissertation. Jul 21. Wang Jiyu led the first reading event in Bishan Bookstore with villagers. Jul 27. Scholar Fu Guoyong visited Bishan. Aug 12. Architect Ma Yansong visited Bishan. Aug 27–Sept 10. Participated in the exhibition “Inquiries in Earth and Art” in Aarhus and researcher-in-residency program in Fristaden Christiania in Copenhagen. Presented Bishan Project at Aarhus University and University of Copenhagen. Sep 27. Writers Li Juan and Yi visited Bishan. Oct 18. Mai organized Danish music and art group YOYOOYOY’s “Bevægeligt Akkurat” event in Bishan Bookstore. Oct 26. Iwan Baan and Oliver Wainwright visited Bishan. Nov 13. Leah returned to Bishan. Dec 2. Oliver Wainwright published an article on Bishan Project in the Guardian. Dec 17. Leah and Yunfan’s new short film about Bishan Project was launched online by Pulitzer Center and Asia Society. Dec 18. Start learning carpentry from villager Qian Shi’an. 2015 Feb 7. Al Jazeera reported on the preparations for School of Tillers in Bishan. Mar 5. Launched the architectural and visual design of School of Tillers in a presentation about Bishan Project in a conference at Australian National University. Mar 12. Writer Liu Liangcheng wrote the plaque for School of Tillers. Apr 19. The first ten designs of “Agritopia Dress for Bishan Commune” were produced. Photographer Xiao Quan was invited to Bishan to produce a fictional photo story Back to the Land with the newly made dresses. Apr 25. Villagers came to apply for the “lattice shop” in School of Tillers to sell their agricultural and handicraft products. Apr 27. The mural of Shennong which designed by artist Chen Duxi and drawn by artist Ding Nan was completed in School of Tillers. May 1. School of Tillers opened and held its first exhibition, “Matjaž Tančič: Timekeepers”. The opening events included various talks by Scott Lash, artist Elaine W.  Ho, HK FARM member Michael Leung and microbiologist Chen Hao.

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Appendix A

May 9–10. Tang Xue and I held our wedding ceremony in Bishan according to traditional customs. Wu Tiao Ren was invited to perform their music in School of Tillers for all villagers and guests. May 13. The first retrospective exhibition of Bishan Project opened in Florence National Library. May 26–Sept 22. School of Tillers received five study tour groups from Xi’an Academy of Fine Arts, Northeastern University, Buffalo School of Architecture of New York State University, International Summer School on China Studies of Nanjing University and Yale University + Singapore National University. Jun 8. School of Tillers held the first daily movie screening for villagers. Jun 21. School of Tillers held the first second-hand market-“Talk & Buy” for villagers and tourists. Aug 8. School of Tillers opened its second exhibition, “Liu Chuanhong: Memoir in Southern Anhui.” At the opening, artist Liu Chuanhong and filmmaker Na Yingyu premiered their film Biography of Mr. Liu San, while artist Sigrid Holmwoom gave a lecture-performance. Sep 4. Delivered a keynote speech on Bishan Project in the “Post City” symposium organized by Ars Electronica, Linz. Sept 9. Delivered a keynote speech on Bishan Project in “Lugares de la Memoria,” VI Encuentro Nacional de Patrimonio, Bogota, Colombia. Sept 13. A two-week exhibition “Back to the Land: School of Tillers in Shanghai” with pop-up shop opened in BLANK Space in Shanghai. Oct 3. Wang Jiyu led the second reading event in School of Tillers with villagers. Oct 10–11. Presented Bishan Project in MIT and Harvard GSD. Nov 17. Our son Niu Niu (Ou Hanzhi) was born in Bishan. On the same day, School of Tillers held a poetry reading event for Macedonian poet Nikola Madzirov. Dec 18. School of Tillers started to prepare the third exhibition “The Happiness Code: Qian Shi‘an’s Story” and conducted an experimental bamboo-structured tea house “Happiness Pavilion” in the mountain which would be hand-made by Qian Shi’an and his village fellows. 2016 Jan 12. Feng Zhiyin was invited to Bishan to create a children’s picture book There Is a Village Named Bishan in China. Feb 18. The government took the action to ban the Bishan Project and drive us out of the village. The water and electricity supply in Buffalo

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389

Institute and School of Tillers were cut off. The nearly completed “Happiness Pavilion” was forcibly burned by the government. Parts of Zuojing’s Bishan Craft Cooperative under construction were forcibly dismantled. Feb 20. Totally Six members of my family were forced to leave Bishan. Mar 15. My family went to live in Yantai temporarily. April 11. Started working on the Kwan-Yen Project in Yantai. May 5. My public talk “Distribution System and Utopia,” originally scheduled for May 7 at OCAT in Shenzhen, was canceled by Beijing. Aug 15. Arrived New York City with my family. Sept 2. Presented Bishan Project in New  York State University at Buffalo. Sept 7. Started to teach at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation. The course of Fall 2016 was “City and Countryside in China” and Spring 2017 was “Curatorial Practices and Placemaking.” Nov 12. Presented Bishan Project in the public event “In Our Time: A Year of Architecture in A Day” of Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Dec 18–19. Visited Oneida Community in Upstate New York. Dec 26–Jan 1. Visited the site of Josiah Warren’s “Cincinnati Time Store” in Ohio, Shaker Village in Pleasant Hill, Kentucky and New Harmony in Indiana. 2017 Feb 13. Joined an open conversation on Utopia with Erik Reece in University of Kentucky. Apr 7. Presented Bishan Project at UC Berkeley. Jun 27. Back to Yantai with my family. Jul 29–30. Suochengli Neighborhood Library and Kwan-Yen People’s Station opened as the two pilot spaces of Kwan-Yen Project in Yantai. Aug 11–12. Visited the historical sites of Tao Xingzhi’s Xiaozhuang Normal College in Nanjing and Wang Dazhi’s Xin’an Primary School in Huai’an. Oct. 6. Bishan Project participated in “Art and China After 1989: Theater of the World” at Guggenheim Museum in New  York. The exhibition then toured to Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao and San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Nov 14–15. Visited New Lanark in Scotland, the historical site of Robert Owen’s experiment.

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Nov 18. Presented Bishan Project at Leicester University. Nov 20–21. Visited Kurt Schwitters’ Merz Barn in Lake District. Nov 21. Delivered a keynote speech on Bishan Project in the international symposium “Hyper-Rural: The End of Urbanism” at Manchester School of Architecture. Nov 25. Presented Bishan Project and Kwan-Yen Project in V&A Museum. Dec 2. Presented Kwan-Yen Project at Design Society in Shenzhen. 2018 Mar 2. An interview about Bishan Project and Kwan-Yen Project by Crystal Bennes was published in ICON magazine. Apr 11. Participated in the “Countryside Marathon” conversation event hosted by Rem Koolhass, Stephen Peterman, and Jiang Jun at Muxin Art Museum in Wuzhen. May 23–27. Kwan-Yen Project participated in the collateral event “Across Chinese Cities—The Community” of the 16th Venice Architecture Biennale. Jul 27. Moved to Jingzhou, Hubei Province with my family. Aug 28-3. Visited Echigo-Tsumari Art Field again. Sept 20. Visited Dartington Hall in Totnes, the historical site of the experiment by Leonard Elmhirst and Dorothy Whitney. Sept 30–Oct 8. Went to the University of Kentucky as a short-term visiting scholar, visited the Shaker Village in Pleasant Hill again. 2019 Jan 1. Start writing the book Utopia Field. Apr 3–4. Presented Kwan-Yen Project at Harvard GSD and visited the historical site of Brooke Farm. May 20. Was selected as a 2019–2020 research fellow of the Boston-­ based Center for Arts, Design and Social Research (CAD+SR) for the “Utopia Field” research project. May 30. Signed the contract of Utopia in Practice with Palgrave Macmillan. Jun 3–6. Field trip in Songyang County, Zhejiang Province to see the rural reconstruction projects there. Sept 27–29. Field trip in Zouping County, Shandong Province for historical research on Liang Shuming’s “Zouping Experiment.”

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Oct 19–26. Field trip in various cities of Japan for the historical research on Atarashiki-mura. Nov 15–19. Field trip in Nanyang City, Henan Province for the historical research on “Wanxi Autonomy Experiment.” 2020 Mar 23. Submitted the manuscripts of Utopia in Practice to Palgrave Macmillan.



Appendix B

© The Author(s) 2020 O. Ning, Utopia in Practice, Contemporary East Asian Visual Cultures, Societies and Politics, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-5791-0_15

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01. Location Map: Bishan Village, Biyang Town, Yi County, Huangshan City, Anhui Province, P. R. of China. Drawing by Xu Yijing and Neil Mclean Gaddes / San Practices, 2012

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02. Bishan map by Feng Zhiyin, in There is a Village Named Bishan in China, children’s picture book curated by Ou Ning, 2016 (unfinished)

03. The mind map of Bishan Project by Ou Ning for the exhibition “Art and China after 1989: Theater of the World,” Guggenheim Museum, 2017-2018. Designed by Xiaoma + Chengzi, 2017

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04. Zhang River, Bishan Nursing Home and Cloud Gate Pagoda, 1970s. Courtesy of Cultural Center of Yi County

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05. Bishan militia, 1970s. Courtesy of Cultural Center of Yi County

06. Woman basketball team of Bishan, 1974. Courtesy of Cultural Center of Yi County

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07. Bishan Supply and Marketing Cooperative, 1970s. Courtesy of Cultural Center of Yi County

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08. Ou Ning, Bishan Commune: How to Start Your Own Utopia, Moleskine sketchbook, 108 pages, 13 x 21cm, heavy acid-free paper, 2010

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09. Ou Ning, Bishan Commune: How to Start Your Own Utopia, Moleskine sketchbook, 108 pages, 13 x 21cm, heavy acid-free paper, 2010

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10. Logo of Bishan Commune, designed by Xiaoma + Chengzi, 2011

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11. Visual design of Bishan Harvestival by Xiaoma + Chengzi, 2011

12. Chudifang Dance by Bishan Villagers, Bishan Harvestival. Photo by Hu Xiaogeng, 2011

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13. “Mutual Aid and Inheritance,” the main exhibition of 2011 Bishan Harvestival. Photo by Hu Xiaogeng, 2011

14. “Poetry Course,” the literary activities of 2011 Bishan Harvestival. Photo by Ou Ning, 2011

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15. “Screen Nostalgia,” the film screening events of 2011 Bishan Harvestival. Photo by Hu Xiaogeng, 2011

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16. The opening program and schedule of 2012 Yixian International Photo Festival and 2012 Bishan Harvestival. Poster designed by Xiaoma + Chengzi

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17. The bronze statue of Wang Dazhi donated by Ou Ning and Zuo Jing before the opening of 2012 Bishan Harvestival. Photo by Zhu Rui, 2012

18. The villagers were helping to install the “Coal + Ice” exhibition in 2012 Yixian International Photo Festival. Photo by Sun Yunfan, 2012

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19. The Bishan Bookstore. Photo by Matjaž Tančič, 2012

20. The Bishan Bookstore. Photo by Matjaž Tančič, 2012

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21. The Bishan Passports, designed by Xiaoma + Chengzi. Photo by Zhu Rui, 2012

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22. A guide for how to use “Bishan Hours” in Taipei Fine Arts Museum. Designed by Xiaoma + Chengzi. 2014

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23. Shennong, painting by Chen Duxi, 2015

24. The Chinese logotype of School of Tillers, designed by Xiaoma + Chengzi, 2015

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25. The yard, School of Tillers. Photo by Zhu Rui, 2015

26. The library, School of Tillers. Photo by Zhu Rui, 2015

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27. The gallery, School of Tillers. Photo by Zhu Rui, 2015

28. The villagers came to the School of Tiller for the film screening. Photo by Zhu Rui, 2015

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29. The villagers at the opening of the School of Tillers, 2015. Photo by Cao Haili

30. The volunteers of School of Tillers, 2015. Photo by Jin Ming

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31. The “Happiness Pavilion” in construction, January 20, 2016. Photo by Ou Ning

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32. The villagers who built the “Happiness Pavilion”: Qian Shi’an, Cheng Guofu and Chu Chunhe, February 16, 2016. Photo by Ou Ning



Appendix C

Test of Our Vision: A Conversation between Hou Hanru and Ou Ning1 HHR Hi Ou Ning, in this very strange and challenging period of lockdown, I had a chance and time to read through most of your new book. It’s a very timely contribution to the current need of reflecting on the difficulty of how to continue with living in the world, which has been so much dominated and transformed by “globalization” and urbanization. There is a global tendency to “return” to nature, to the countryside and also the “local.” In particular, the recent “Countryside, the Future” exhibition in Guggenheim by Rem Koolhaas and AMO may trigger many discussions. At the same time, doubts and “corrections” on the modernization model and values brought by the pandemic may be a “timely rain.” However this new interests in the countryside may also be turned into superficial “fashions”. Your experiments in Bishan, lasting for years, was in fact very down-to-earth and “prophetic,” sometimes radical, with “persistent” idealism. Its value certainly should not be represented merely in fashionable discussions. 1  The dialogue was  written through WeChat during May 25–29, 2020, in  Briançon, Provence-Alpes-Côte d’Azur, France and Jingzhou, Hubei Province, China. Hou Hanru is the artistic director of Museo nazionale delle arti del XXI secolo (MAXXI) in Rome.

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However, in many ways, as a matter of fact, “returning to the origin” is impossible. Not only returning is impossible, but “origin” has never really existed! What have existed and continue to exist is history, with all sorts of diversities of how human beings live in the world, by transforming it and inscribing the process in memory. There’s always been entanglements between idealism and realism, between utopianism and “real life.” You have been very much inspired by the legacy of anarchism, trying to mobilize the public awareness to embrace social equality, and independent initiatives, to realize their own “selves.” “Returning” to the countryside here is about a kind of one-to-one dialogue to enlighten everyone’s potentiality, especially for those who have been categorized as peasants or farmers, and often stuck at the bottom of the modern society structure. If the topic of the countryside is now being turned into a fashion, and therefore, another excuse of consumption, then, this “returning” would be a risk to become a double punishment for those living in the countryside—enduring more exploitation and ideological injustice. How do you think your book can contribute to challenge and change this dilemma? ON Hi, Hanru! Thank you for taking time to read my manuscript and start this dialogue. In fact, the countryside has already become a “fashion” in a decade before the outbreak of COVID-19. It is a reaction to the problems of over-urbanization. People regard the countryside as a destination to escape from cities to avoid the urban problems such as overcrowding, air pollution, fierce competition for job opportunities, and educational resources. Of course, there are also intellectuals who pay attention to the bankruptcy of agriculture, the depression of the rural area, the atomization of farmers and the “upside down” urban-rural relationship. They advocate “rural reconstruction” to carry out social reform. As a “landing site” for crisis transformation, at least in the case of China, the countryside has already received and digested the shifting crises passed from the cities when the two international financial crises occurred in 1997 and 2008. This did not start from the current pandemic at all. My writings and practices may have boosted the popularity of rural issues, especially the large-scale debate in China in 2014, which overflowed the circle of rural research and construction and turned it into a national “clamor.” However, as the writings collected in my book shows, from the very beginning I was very alert to the “gentrification” in the countryside, that is, the urban middle class poured into the countryside, occupied and consumed the countryside. It is a “population reshuffle” rather than a solution to the

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depopulation problem in the countryside. My idea is that the move-in people and the indigenous villagers should live and work together to establish an intersubjectivity. However, in the debate taken out of context at that time, such an idea was completely ignored by the opposition. Actually, when I prepared for the 2009 Shenzhen and Hong Kong Bi-City Biennale of Urban \ Architecture, I already discussed the concept of “ruralism” with Rem Koolhaas, and invited him and Hans Ulrich Obrist to host the “Shenzhen Marathon” conversation, which also included rural issues. The “Countryside, the Future” exhibition he researched and prepared for years, opened in coincidence with the outbreak of the pandemic, will undoubtedly deepen people’s interest in this topic worldwide. This exhibition shows the radical change of the rural landscape in different regions of the world under the neo-liberal economy, the potentiality of “nonurban” land resources, and the possibilities brought to agriculture by new biotechnology and AI technologies. It makes people feel strongly that the European architect has great ambition and surging momentum to open up a “new world,” without any sense of crisis of the agrarianism that Asian regions have been anxious and struggling to maintain. Under the impact of the newly pandemic, the Chinese quarantined at home would still be frightened by the “food reserve” problem, and the “Showa Agricultural Panic” in Japan triggered by the 1929 Great Depression was one of the triggers for Japan to launch the Pacific War. Saneatsu Mushanokō ji, a Japanese writer who launched the “New Village Movement” after the WWI and participated in the “Agrarian Union” movement before the WWII, has a poem: “There is no better way to keep me alive than this, I will take this way.” This may explain the “persistence” of the utopianists. To “be alive,” we really need the imagination of the future. HHR Your interest in the countryside may have derived from your life experience in the village of San Yuan Li and subsequent research on the social evolution there. The emergence and multiplication of urban villages in the 1990s not only produced the new urban texture and architectural typologies of “urban-rural fringe,” but also gave rise to a mixture and, simultaneously, class differentiation and conflict between immigrants (migrant workers) and aborigines (the native farmers who lost their land but became rich because of land sales). In this new type of social relationship, an unprecedented “autonomous region of urban-rural integration” had been formed. Did this kind of research stimulate your

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interest in “autonomy” and “commune”? This new experience has been brought back in wider rural area because of the return of migrant workers. What inspiration does this have for the popular “Townization” (chengzhenhua) in recent years? Does this also mean that the direction of your experiment of “activating rural life” is not a romantic “return to nature,” but a process of self-enlightenment? ON Without your kindly invitation for me to participate the Venice Biennale in 2003, the San Yuan Li project would not happen. I still remember that when you set up the theme “Z.O.U” (Zone of Urgency) for the exhibition to focus on the radical urbanization movement in the Asia-Pacific region, I picked up the phenomenon of “urban villages” in Guangzhou to resonate with your curatorial thoughts. My interest in San Yuan Li originated from my brief visit and residence there during my college days, while Koolhaas’s Great Leap Forward published in 2001 opened my eyes to the “alternative modernity” in Pearl River Delta. Today, looking back at the indigenous villagers of San Yuan Li, the wisdom they radiated in their cramped living space is exactly what James C. Scott summed up in his peasant study as “metis,” or “cunning” in plain terms. They had followed the government-­ set building spacing on the ground level, but expanded the area as far as possible from the second floor onwards, thus forming a spectacle of “handshake buildings” with only “one line of sky.” These buildings block out the sun, shaping the streets like dark mazes. A policeman who is not familiar with “local geography” will absolutely not be able to catch the hiding criminals. They have created an inexpensive, convenient, 24-hour functioning community life space for newly graduated college students and migrant workers without temporary residence permits. The most interesting thing is that it seems chaotic, but in fact it has its own hidden order. The traditional village organization has been corporatized by villagers in the new era of urbanization. Their collective assets can not only make dividends every year, but also maintain a large villagers’ security teams. The village association and community school (shexue) used in the Opium War to mobilize villagers against Britain evolved into a new form of autonomy. This is the vitality of the rural society, especially in Guangdong, where urbanization began at the earliest in China. This lively, steaming urban village was once defined as a “cancer” in the eyes of the municipal government, but we made experimental documentary film to demonstrate its social value. It was also triggered by San Yuan Li that I became interested in further studying the rural society. I wanted to find

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out its genes and different variations. Why did it decay in one place and survive tenaciously in another place? This was the earliest starting point for me to move to the countryside later. Of course, it is not for the seclusion in nature, it is “self-enlightenment.” Thank you for providing such an accurate statement. The later chengzhenhua did not absorb the informal vitality of urban villages, because it is a top-down arrangement and reflected more of a state will to solve rural problems. “Townization” refers to the use of administrative means and national resources to concentrate farmers in nearby towns, providing them with orderly and standard houses that have been professionally planned, while vacated rural homestead and cultivated land are used to develop vacation tourism and industrialized agriculture. This is a typical modernist rural construction and governance scheme, which still belongs to the train of thought of urbanization, reflecting the government’s imagination of “modernity” in rural areas. The cost is staggering. I quoted a report of the National Academy of Governance on the cost of urbanization in the book. It pointed out that in the eight years from 2013 to 2020, the annual additional financial cost for transforming farmers-turned-migrant-workers into registered urban residents will be 226.138  billion yuan. And the statistics from the National Bureau of Statistics show that in 2012, the total number of farmers-turned-workers nationwide was 262.61  million, of whom 163.36  million were farmers-­ turned-­migrant-workers. The report also pointed out that if the 160 million migrant workers are turned into registered urban residents at one time, the minimum additional financial expenditure will reach more than 1.8  trillion yuan. In fact, after farmers move into buildings like urban residential areas, if there is no guarantee of employment opportunities, they will even have difficulty to pay electricity bills. Therefore, some farmers moved back to the village to live their former lives. HHR In fact, from the perspective of modern history, rural areas, as the edge of modernization, have always been the objects that economic and political centers try to cover, intervene, develop and utilize. From the government to non-governmental organizations, there are all kinds of elites trying to project their imaginations and schemes to this “marginal zone” to realize their social ideal. There are peaceful inducements and radical revolutions. Whether it is in peace or violence, they all take the “improvement” of the rural living conditions as the premise and try to “reform” the relationship between human beings and nature. They are somewhat of a belief in “man

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is sure to conquer nature,” and utopian spirit is its fundamental motive force. Then, how can the wishes of the “native” rural residents be represented and expressed? The starting point of your work must also be based on this contradiction. How do you face it? ON Rural areas cannot be ignored by any political power in any period. In the pre-modern Confucian-driven empires dominated by imperial power, the countryside was the source of the suigu (grain tax) and guarded the lifeblood of the economy. The settled agriculture itself was the ideological basis for the successive dynasties to worship the gods of earth and grain together with their ancestries in the temples (sheji, zongmiao) as the symbol of legitimacy. Therefore, even if the countryside was “far away from the central,” it would be organized by the central power to unite the people and administer the tax incomes in a unified way. When China entered the modern era, the warlords who divided the power and separated the country could only plunder the wealth of the countryside to support the supply. The Communist Party’s revolution also could not succeed without the support of the countryside. In the contemporary era, the stability of the countryside is the most important political factor too. In Japan, the countryside was an important source of soldiers for militarism to wage war, so during the Pacific War the Japanese government kicked off the “Imperial Rural Establishment Movement” to ensure the state machine’s control and monopoly over the countryside. In the United States, Roosevelt’s New Deal used a large amount of public resources to support agriculture. In addition to coping with the food crisis caused by the Great Depression, another reason was related to the large number of the agricultural population attached to the land before the rise of large-scale industrialized agriculture, which were very important sources of votes. Trump’s election was also inseparable from the support of the US agricultural region and the “Rust Belt.” Farmers have always been regarded as passive election tools. In fact, they can also actively “create” their own agents and leaders. It can be imagined that if only the farmers in Koolhaas’s exhibition who monitor the “farming” by robots through screens at home were left in the United States, a large number of agricultural communities will die out and the political ecology of US will be more easily controlled by Wall Street. Farmers have not been deprived, but the decrease in population will weaken the political influence of this group. Therefore, in 2016, several writers wrote books to trace the communitarian utopian movement in US in the nineteenth century. They advocated

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learning and reviving the land philosophy of early intentional community members who rooted in rural areas, such as Shakers. They were, of course, representatives who insisted investing as much manpower as possible, using recyclable natural energy, and implementing a collective system of communal ownership of property to run agriculture and communities. However, as you said, “return” is impossible, but it is necessary to maintain a certain number of farmers, maintain a rural lifestyle, and operate agriculture in an eco-friendly way. These are not only for the sake of sustaining the diversity of human life or saving an available political force, but also because modern nation-states cannot cut off the links with agriculture, rural areas and farmers. Just imagine, if China’s “urbanization” turns all farmers into registered urban residents and no one cultivates the land, wouldn’t it be binding the supply of food and the feeding of the entire population to the risky ship of international trade and global economic integration? Moreover, farmers are not “human waste” eliminated by the modernization process as many people think. Their “cunning” wisdom is often unexpected. Their “brain mine” (James Yen’s term) is rich but just ignored. The problem of contemporary Chinese farmers is that they live at the bottom of an “authority-driven” society where state power permeates in an all-round way. They can neither return to the “autonomy of landed gentry” of the era of monarchy in which the “imperial power extended down only to the county level,” nor can they speak through the electoral system like American farmers. The space to realize their potential is very limited. As an outsider with neither power nor capital, all I can do in the countryside is to use my own cultural resources to improve their visibility in society, broaden their contact with the outside world, and build platforms within my ability to let them give full play to their intelligence. Under the limited realistic conditions, the so-called “empowerment,” and “moralization” are all extravagant to me, and they are also elite rhetoric that I oppose. I prefer the words “mutual aid,” “mutual learning,” and “communal life.” HHR In essence, you firmly believe in the classic modernity principle of “knowledge is power,” and hope to bring it through personal and “autonomous” efforts to a place where one has lost his cultural independence, so that people can rediscover and implement self-esteem and power in various ways, while communication and sharing are the methods to seek equality in this process. Thus, as your experiment in Bishan shows, some form of autonomous community can sprout. Because

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of this, it also triggered the repressive response from the upper-level institutions. The rejection and suppression of the diversity of personal and social life and values is the center of the problem. This is not only China’s increasingly serious trend in recent decades, but also the situation caused by the mainstream and increasingly “globalized” developmentalism and capital forces. At the same time, the forces of reflection and resistance, especially the “organic intellectuals” and NGOs, are also constantly trying to put forward alternative opinions and solutions. The COVID-19 pandemic has sounded the alarm bell for everyone, getting us stuck in the negative effects of the developmentalism model of modernity, and at the same time proving the value of your efforts and those of like-minded people. The advent of your book should be a timely call. How can you continue your experiment in practice? Art and culture are an important part of your “experimental field.” How can you cultivate some kind of “rural autonomy aesthetics”? ON The newly COVID-19 pandemic has indeed dealt a heavy blow to the proud achievement of “globalization.” It freezes the “borderless, barrier-­ free and far-reaching” mobility of human beings, not only deprives lives and destroys the economy, but also urges the reorganization of the global political structure. Transnational capital began to flow back or transfer elsewhere, the global economic supply chain began to “unhook” voluntarily, the significance of international organizations and political alliances was doubted, the people who traveled out urgently wanted to return to their usual place of residence, the voices of nationalism, localism and protectionism previously regarded as “conservative and retrogressive” had more supporters, and the long-term marginalized “anti-globalization” movement had unexpectedly gained more convincing power. Environmentalists were overjoyed that economic shutdown and travel ban might lead to a reduction in carbon footprint and a slowdown in global warming. People like me who moved to the countryside almost 10 years ago were also considered to have “foresight.” In fact, I think that after the pandemic subsides, people will still be unable to give up the convenience and prosperity of “globalization” and will gradually return to the pre-­ pandemic inertia. However, after this unprecedented crisis, especially in the case of possible economic depression, the small, decentralized, low-­ cost, nature-friendly mutual aid communities that I have always been keen on may become a pragmatic choice for people. For the past two years, I have been living in Jingzhou, a small city along the Yangtze River in Hubei

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Province, only 200 kilometers from Wuhan, the birthplace of the pandemic. Jingzhou has rich history and natural resources to explore, and the cost of living is not high. The living experience is very good, but I have no chance any more to continue communitarianism experiments like Bishan. Bishan is a traditional agricultural settlement located in the mountain valley of southern Anhui, but in my vision of the years when I lived there, it should be an open and international village. Today’s rural areas no longer rely on “defensive houses,” “fortresses towers,” or “walled village” to form a closed society to fight against banditry as before. It should welcome more outsiders to join as “locals.” The rural society, that relied on clan groups, armed self-defense, and yicang (communal grain storage) to cultivate together and cope with the nature disaster and war crisis, is gone forever. However, during the epidemic period, many villages in all parts of China still want to isolate the virus by cutting off village roads. This may be effective in the short term, but under normal conditions, villages are no longer as self-sufficient and isolated as they used to be. According to my life experience in Bishan, what the villagers have eaten is not the rice they grow, but the Northeast rice or Thai rice from the market. Therefore, when I said that the village should be built as a “place,” it does not refer to traditional “localism” or “protectionism,” but to a site-specific “community” that is open and diversified with common memory and identity at the same time. Just as Wes Jackson, an American sustainable agriculture experimenter, said in his 1993 book Becoming Native to This Place, it should welcome “homecomers” who are not necessarily native to jointly cultivate a new “nativeness.” In the same way, I regard the agrarianism originated from China’s legendary Shennong era and spread to the Asian region as a very cherished ideological tradition, but at the same time I am very wary of its evolution into nationalism. When it was converted into nationalism by Japan before WWII, further expanded into Pan-Asianism, and absorbed into the ideological framework of “Greater East Asia Co-prosperity Sphere” to become a war theory, its influence was a disaster. I also understand the importance of rural ecological protection, but not in response to the call of anthropocentrism such as “protecting the earth for future generations,” instead of acceptance of land ethics and natural rights. Extreme ecologism may also turn into terrorism, while environmentalism will be absorbed by the updated capitalist system, because products labeled “environmental protection” can be sold at higher prices. In terms of ecological construction, the difficult problem in the countryside is how to release its economic

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potential while protecting the ecology, just as the historical protection of villages cannot only rely on incorrigibly obstinate rules but also consider its real development space. In what you call “aesthetics,” Bishan has a very broad space to develop. First of all, its Hui-style architectural heritage is a very eye-catching existence, which can be called the representative of Chinese vernacular architectural art. In the process of activating these historic buildings, we tried our best to keep their traditional design and appearance, but introduced various facilities that conform to the modern living standards, endowed them with more functions suitable for practical use, and even adopted the minimalism interior style of traditional Japanese House. The materials and furnishings used in the renovation process are all taken from the old goods market in Yi County, so the final effect is very “local.” In addition, Huizhou’s rural folk crafts tradition is also very rich. It has become the inspiration source for many artists and designers participating in the Bishan Project. Slovenian artist Matjaž Tančič used 3D photography to catch the portraits of villagers in Yi County and their hall decorations, showing the relationship between the traces left by time on their bodies and their spiritual space. Liu Chuanhong, a Chinese artist, drew more than 140 oil paintings full of local details in a crude style similar to “peasant paintings.” He divided them into different chapters according to the rural geography of southern Anhui and set up a fictional narrative about a folk ranger. Graphic designers Xiaoma and Chengzi designed a set of changeable visual communication systems for Bishan Project, all based on local folk visual materials. In addition to these foreign professional artists, we also published and exhibited villagers’ hand-drew Bishan landscape and hand-­ made bamboo arts, arranged their Yi County Minor and Huangmei Opera performances, and interacted with foreign artists. In a word, what we were exploring together may be an aesthetic that can be called “contemporary vernacular.” HHR From your practice, your emphasis on the contemporary nature of “vernacular art” was the fundamental motivation to seek this “aesthetic.” However, what went deeper into the changes of daily life and conditions was reflected by architectural projects. For example, the cooperation between you and the villagers had resulted in a new contemporary “rural architecture.” Of course, such exploration has evolved in history. To give some names, such as Johan van Lengen of the Intuitive Technology and Bio-Architecture School (TIBÁ), who wrote the popular book The

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Barefoot Architect; Samuel Mockbee of “Rural Studio” in Auburn University, and so on. Not to mention the various practices of “green buildings” all over the world today. Among them, there is also a large number of architects who are good at turning “environmental protection” and “back to roots” into “politically correct” symbols and propaganda images for new capital accumulation and expansion. Nowadays, new buildings and urban planning almost inevitably have to wrap their facades in “green” so that they can be successfully promoted in politics and the market. I recently wrote a passage titled “Green is Capital.” How do you face this contradiction when exploring “contemporary vernacular”? ON Regarding “green capital,” Xi Jinping has a more vivid saying, “Green mountains and clear water are mountains of gold and silver,” which has become the golden rule of today’s “Rural Revitalization” movement in China. Natural landscape (shanshui) is no longer a secluded place for ancient literati, but an attraction swarmed by contemporary tourists and a grand carnival for holiday consumption. In order to find the next popular destination, the online video channels send drones to capture the undiscovered wilderness and the isolated villages and to photograph the homesteads (B&Bs) in the mountain designed by star architects. At this time, the eyes represented by aerial photography are the eyes of capital. The rivers and mountains hunted by drones and edited by video makers, are neither “nature” nor “landscape,” but what Debord called “spectacle.” They are as attractive as the pin-up girls in the shopping center windows. The commentary will describe “a night in the mountains” as an emotional consumption, which can contribute to the local economy and engage you to voluntarily pay more for your room than a five-star hotel in the city to meet your moral satisfaction. Investment in B&Bs has become a craze for local governments to encourage and consumers to pay for it, while architects have described the commissioned building projects in countryside as “rural construction” and earned enough attention on social media. In fact, this is the result mixed up with the spillover of real estate capital after exhausting the urban land reserves, the outbreak of the “anti-­ urbanization” tendency of the middle class and the government’s determination to solve the problem of rural depression. The countryside suddenly became a newly found “virgin land” for capital, but its income has nothing to do with peasants. Peasants may be able to be waiters or sell some local specialties, but the main body of the B&B economy is not for the benefit of the peasants.

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This is why the countryside seems to be full of surging hot money while the peasants are still poor. Kropotkin also answered a similar question in The Conquest of Bread: Why is there still a large number of poor people in a capitalist society with such advanced production technology and rich social wealth? Because the outcomes of workers’ production are not for self-sufficiency, but for trading and making profits for capitalists. If “rural architecture” is regarded as kind of space production, its most fundamental characteristic is for self-use. For thousands of years, it has followed the life needs of villagers. Like plants growing from soil, it can continuously “grow” new space with the increase of family size. It is very different from the identical apartments in city which are “planed” and “designed” to regulate people’s life. The original meaning of “Bed & Breakfast” is to share the spare room with tourists, but it has become the same operation as hotel investment in China. Architects are invited to design B&Bs in countryside not for self-use, but for time-based sale, so even if the buildings conform to the local style and emphasize “green” and “environmental protection,” they cannot be regarded as “rural architecture,” not to mention those buildings that drop the urban style onto the rural areas. Rural Studio is a commissioned architectural lab, but the users of their design projects are local residents in rural areas and there is no problem of “local user absence.” The principle of “folk crafts” is the same. The handicrafts of peasants are all utensils and appliances used in their daily life. However, nowadays in China, they are collected by designers and converted into expensive luxuries, which have become “artistic crafts” for the middle class to demonstrate their self-called lifestyle as “returning to the basics.” In Bishan, Pig’s Inn is one of the earliest pioneers of B&Bs in China. Han Yu moved to the countryside and renovated the old houses abandoned by the villagers. Because there were too many friends who liked it, they had to accept visitors to pay for their stay. The reason that I decided to move to Bishan was also related to my first experience in their houses: I fell in love with Hui-style architecture. Later, after setting up the “School of Tillers” in the village, I used it as a platform and signed up an account on Airbnb to collect the spare housing resources of the villagers, listed them in the “School of Tillers Researchers in Residence” program, and began to accept people from all over the world to stay in, with all the income going to the villagers. These villagers didn’t need to invest money in renovating their houses. Instead, they just needed to clean up their houses and take photos directly according to their current

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situation and upload them to Airbnb with our help. We indicated that there would be no service. When guests stayed in villagers’ homes, they could eat with them and experience their most basic daily life. I regard these as real “B&Bs.” The guests enjoyed them, while the villagers could make income. Hui-style houses have many advantages, such as fire-proof horsehead wall, nature-friendly patio, temperature-regulating hollow brick wall, moisture-proof interlayer storage space, light-increasing roof windows, reasonable circulation drainage system, etc., which are all worthy for contemporary architects to learn. The local artisans who helped us to renovate the old houses are very skilled, so I liked to cooperate with them in some small experimental projects, such as the specialshaped thatched toilet hidden in the inner courtyard and the specialshaped all-bamboo tea pavilion on the mountain. Their traditional skills are more than enough to cope with these unusual requirements. At the beginning of the environmental movement in the 1960s, tribal dwellings, hand-made houses and “vernacular architecture” were once popular among hippie communes. Lloyd Kahn’s Shelter, edited and published in 1973, collected a large number of such examples, is one of my favorite books. Since Airbnb was founded, it has not only brought traditional dwellings of different styles from all over the world into people’s view, but also provided the opportunity to live and experience in person. At present, architects’ interest in “nonurban” areas and their architectual practices in rural areas seem to be developing into a wave of “cosmopolitan vernacular.” Today, the environmental movement is getting more and more deeply involved in politics. It contributed to the growth of the “Green Party” as a political force from the 1970s, which now keeps growing all over the world and seeking political solutions to issues such as “anti-capitalism” and “global warming.” “Green” stands for nature. It was originally the pursuit of environmentalism, but surprisingly, its rival capitalism is also competing for “green.” The spectrum of the world is becoming more and more complex. It is really a test of our vision. HHR I think this test of our vision is one of the biggest challenges we’re facing today, and will be facing in the future, because it is the starting point of self-awakening!

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