Modern China

Although the name of Liu Zhidan is a celebrated one in the history of Chinese Communist organizing, Liu provided little hard information about his strategy for creating a revolutionary base in his native “Shaanbei.” Lacking trained recruits for his movement, he sought to win over as many as possible of the bandits created by the area’s widespread political and environmental disruption that had been ongoing since the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. However, the opprobrium in which bandits were generally held by Chinese people led most of his fellow revolutionaries to reject this approach, with the result that it has been ignored until now. To better understand Liu’s principles for popular mobilization, and also to show the options available to men of violence in the insurrectionary environment of Shaanbei, this article examines his relationship with three local bandit chiefs. Using hitherto overlooked sources together with personal interviews, it concludes that Liu’s success in winning over men like these owed more to his charisma than to their conversion to abstract revolutionary ideals, but that, for him, it was enough if this brought them around to an overall appreciation of the movement’s aims.

This article examines recent changes in the functioning of the state and in state-society relations in Chinese cities as market reforms have deepened. The pursuit of “Olympic urbanism” as a developmental strategy by the municipal government of Beijing—that is, hosting the mega-event as a means of capital mobilization for public investment conducive to the pursuit of economic and political ambitions—has involved a concentration of resources in certain sectors of the local government with a concomitant and significant weakening of the governing capacity in other sectors. The result has been an uneven capacity to govern. This in turn has opened up an important space for certain disadvantaged societal actors to maneuver for survival. It has sparked protest by the weakened sectors of the local government through, for example, the promotion of the work of a leading photographer campaigning for urban modernity. Based on field work in Beijing, this article demonstrates how the municipal leadership’s long-standing neglect of waste management has created leeway for a strategy of self-protection at the grassroots level of the society, and how the sectors of the municipal government in charge of urban sanitation have reasserted their position by publicizing the chaos of debris dumping through the work of an influential photographer. This case study shows the active role that rural villages have played in the transformation of the urban environment and their interaction with a reformed state that has become not just inconsistent and segmented but also self-conflictual and self-contradictory.

The recent reincarnation of Songyang Academy, one of the “Four Great Academies” of the Northern Song dynasty, is an example of “academy fever” 书院热 in China today. Along with nearby Shaolin Temple, the academy has become a site for cultural heritage tourism in northwestern Henan. In addition to its attraction as a tourist destination, however, Songyang Academy has also been appropriated by neighboring Zhengzhou University as an auxiliary Confucian campus. Focusing on its relationship with Zhengzhou University, this article considers Songyang Academy’s restoration in the context of current debates in China about modern university education, Confucianism, and “national studies” (guoxue 国学). The Zhengzhou University–Songyang Academy partnership provides a concrete, if ambivalent, example of cultural governance in action, as provincial Communist Party officials and university administrators collaborate to produce a national studies curriculum rooted in their vision of Confucian pedagogy.