KÄREN WIGEN

AHR Forum

Culture, Power, and Place:
The New Landscapes of East Asian Regionalism

In Eurasia's far east as in its far west, the end of the Cold War has put regionalism back on the map. Anchored in a prophetic future if not always in a documented past, emergent regions are being proclaimed everywhere from inner Asia to the Pacific Rim. Hong Kong may be the only place where official borders have been redrawn, but the geography of power in the whole region is evidently in flux. Quickening ties between Taiwan and the mainland, assertiveness along the industrializing Chinese coast, and calls for a new economic bloc around the Sea of Japan—coinciding with ethnic confrontations in Tibet and Xinjiang, a resurgent pan-Islamic movement, and the growing intellectual and economic clout of the diaspora Chinese around the world—have served to rivet global attention on the problematic boundaries of Chinese statehood and nationhood.¹ But the recent South Korean elections have drawn attention to fierce local loyalties on the peninsula as well, while calls for greater regional autonomy in contemporary Japan have their scholarly counterpart in calls for more polycentric perspectives on the Japanese past.² 1

     East Asian historians come to this topic with a mixed record. On the one hand, our fields have been dominated in the postwar period by the same nationalist biases, as well as the same comparative paradigms (notably, modernization theory and Marxism) that have prejudiced our European counterparts against provincial places. Within East Asia itself, moreover, attitudes toward the provinces have been complicated by Cold War geopolitics. A regional historiography that flourished in 1930s Japan under the rubric of native-place studies (kyōdoshi), for instance, was denounced after the war as not only unscientific and unmodern but undemocratic as well. The provincial history (chihōshi) that displaced native-place studies subordinated the local to the national, denigrating attachment to place and recasting regional developments as mere reflections of national themes.³ In Korea, during the same decades, the searing division of the peninsula appears to have trumped most other concerns, rendering regional difference within South Korea a seemingly trivial subject for most of the postwar period.⁴ And in China, the Maoist agenda bluntly subordinated place to class. To unify China's diverse population into one great peasant-worker alliance, the revolutionary regime (like its Nationalist predecessor) for a time discouraged even the study of regional difference.⁵ 2

     Nonetheless, local history has an impressive pedigree in the historiography of East Asia, and American scholars who work on this part of the world are heirs to two rich traditions of regional analysis. The first basically subdivides the landscape on the basis of discrete cultural traits. This so-called formal approach to regions is one that resonates deeply with indigenous East Asian geography. Given the enormous ethnic and ecological diversity subsumed within the historical Chinese Empire, mapping out zones of distinct language and lifeways had a clear political utility on the continent, and the gazetteers compiled by local officials attest eloquently to the evolution of both formal regional differences and formalist regional discourse over the centuries. Japanese geography exhibits similar conventions. Despite its smaller size (and correspondingly narrower range of cultural differentiation), Japan is home to its own venerable tradition of regionalization on the basis of dialect and customs; a myriad of local differences is readily organized around the foundational categories of east and west, seen as grounded in ecology and prehistory but blossoming in the lively landscapes of urban culture in the Kantō and Kansai, respectively.⁶ In the modern period, the project of mapping those traits has been taken up primarily by students of archaeology, linguistics, and folklore, but an implicit notion of cultural regions has been an intrinsic part of the local historian's vocabulary as well. 3

     Parallel to this ethnogeographical paradigm has run a more social-scientific variant of regional historiography: one that subdivides national space into functional rather than formal regions, defined on the basis of complementary exchange rather than uniform traits. In this approach, regions are envisioned as spheres of social and economic interaction, linking prosperous, densely populated cores to their poorer, resource-supplying hinterlands. In a casual form, this kind of modeling is widespread in the literature on Japan. Tokugawa economic history in particular is rife with references to "advanced" and "backward" regions, although their boundaries are rarely mapped.⁷ In the China field, by contrast, a prolonged engagement with regional-systems theory has brought functional regions into much sharper focus. 4

     The first regional-systems maps for China were drawn in the 1970s by anthropologist G. William Skinner, who insisted that the meaningful units of Qing imperial space were those of social interaction, not cultural similarity or political fiat.⁸ Skinner's "macroregions" were essentially physiographic units, shaped by the economics of transport; cores were located in downstream agrarian valleys, while peripheries were traced along the mountain ridges that defined watershed boundaries.⁹ But Skinner added to this skeletal model a series of corollary propositions: that smaller regions were "nested" inside larger ones in a seven-step hierarchy; that each such region was centered on a village, town, or city that took its place in a corresponding hierarchy of central places; and that standard marketing areas, the smallest cells of this spatial grid, also constituted culture-bearing units. In the 1980s, he developed a related theory of periodization, asserting that regional development could be charted in terms of nested cycles of time.¹⁰ Having been tested, expanded, refined, and debated continually for a quarter-century, Skinner's elaborate regional-systems model has created a powerful framework (and foil) for research across the China field.¹¹ 5

     American historians thus bring a dual legacy to the current conversation about regionalism in East Asia. Yet both formal and functional approaches have come in for serious rethinking in the past decade, challenged by the foregrounding of new questions about identity, memory, and power. Like their counterparts elsewhere, a sizable cohort of scholars in Asian studies has begun trying "to construct a historical account of the development of meaning and to show how the activities of symbol-making, interpretation, and imaginative projection continuously interlock with the political and material processes of social existence."¹² This agenda has recast familiar sources on regional history in a very new light. 6

     Schematically speaking, the new literature on East Asian regions may be said to manifest three main strategies of methodological innovation. One approach starts with the cultural vocabulary of formal regions but proceeds to interrogate their discursive and affective dimensions. Rather than seeking objective criteria of regional identification, research in this vein analyzes subjective expressions of regional belonging by insiders—as well as the equally subjective expressions of regional stereotyping by outsiders.¹³ This means grappling not only with observable differences of dialect or house-types but also with the elusive geographies of identity and ideology, morality and taste. Work of this sort typically emphasizes the constructedness of regional categories. In the process, it also reveals that the geographical imaginaries of natives and newcomers, sojourners and scholars are frequently at odds.¹⁴ 7

     A second approach takes as its starting point the core-periphery model of functional analysis but explores the role of both agency and contingency in the patterning of regional exchange. In this view, peripheries are not given but made, and the metropole-hinterland relationship is both more fluid and more dynamic than regional-systems theory would suggest. Economic historians working in this new paradigm have questioned the determining role of topography, arguing that regional formations are in fact shot through with politics.¹⁵ Likewise, cultural historians have questioned Skinner's equation between marketing networks and culture-bearing units. New findings suggest that ethnic solidarities and religious networks do not always conform neatly to the contours of production and trade, and show that the political periphery has often been construed as a cultural "counter-core" in its own right.¹⁶ 8

     Building on these imaginative reworkings of the formal and functional models, a third strategy focuses on the role of regional identity as a social force. Questioning the assumption that local loyalty has historically impeded national unity (and otherwise interfered with the modernization agenda), researchers who adopt this approach are likely instead to emphasize its integrative potential. But whether it has been deployed for nationalist or secessionist purposes, and whether called upon to boost economic development or to resist it, native-place sentiment is construed here as a form of cultural capital. The key issue becomes, "What work does regionalism perform?"¹⁷ Posing the question in these terms points a way toward transcending the formal/functional dichotomy entirely. 9

     Together, I argue, these three strategies make up the key innovations behind recent scholarship on East Asian regional dynamics. Since many studies draw on a combination of the three, however, categorizing individual authors by approach would be misleading. The remainder of the present essay accordingly takes a different tack, surveying the landscape of East Asia in a roughly geographical and chronological progression. Examples are drawn mainly from works on nineteenth and twentieth-century China and Japan, with briefer forays into Taiwan and Hong Kong. 10

     It should be noted at the outset that the terrain of this study skews its findings in a significant way. Compared to most countries in the late twentieth century, those discussed in this essay have relatively old, dense national formations. China, Korea, and Japan are among the most venerable nations in the world; although their boundaries have shifted over time, and the style of their imagining has been continually debated, the notion of nationhood has resonated long and deeply with the majority of each country's inhabitants. This produces a sense of region quite different from what might be encountered elsewhere in Eurasia or in Africa, where national space is often complicated to a greater degree by cross-cutting affiliations from a colonial or pre-colonial past.¹⁸ 11

     This caveat has two further implications. First, regionalism in contemporary East Asia is typically articulated in a localist rather than a nationalist vocabulary.¹⁹ Political separatism is clearly at issue in the formerly independent Okinawa and in the non-Han areas of Tibet, Xinjiang, and Inner Mongolia. Elsewhere, however, statehood is not generally at stake, and regionalism is expressed primarily in a cultural register. Secondly, it follows that East Asian regionalism has been relatively conducive to commercialization. In Japan and Taiwan, and lately on the mainland as well, local color has proven to be a lucrative marketing tool, and regional identity today is increasingly manifested in commodified forms. This commercialization of place has antecedents, in Japan at least, that date to the early modern era. But in recent years, it has advanced rapidly throughout Pacific Asia, with the result that symbols of local distinctiveness are coming to function much like corporate logos. The resurgence of regionalism may be the outcome of multiple forces, but in this part of the world, the market is unquestionably one of the most important. 12

     The end point of our survey is thus a landscape where regional identities seem to be converging in similar directions, appearing more often as a resource for both nationalist and capitalist interests than as a threat to either. But our starting point is another world altogether. For the localisms that are being deployed in similar ways from Shanghai to Tokyo today in fact have very different histories. If recent research tells us anything, it is that period and place have applied distinctive torques to regional dynamics across this heterogeneous terrain. 13

For the Qing elites, heirs to a vast and polyglot empire, regional difference is now understood to have been seen as both a civilizational process and a political problem. The spatial imaginary of the literati elites painted the imperial landscape in shades of moral virtue, with the most brilliant hues reserved for the lower Yangtze Valley. With its exemplary traditions of Confucian learning and filial piety, female footbinding and widow suicide, the wealthy Jiangnan region (or at least its "middle counties") maintained a conceit of moral centrality that neatly matched its position at the empire's economic core.²⁰ The Manchu rulers mapped the moral landscape differently, however. Criticizing the commercialized Yangtze Delta as decadent, effeminate, and courtesan-riddled, they located the favored virtues of warrior society—virility, honesty, and simplicity—in the Manchurian homeland.²¹ Yet the two visions were in some ways more complementary than competitive. Both held that it was a basic obligation of the state to radiate a positive moral influence outward from the center, and both Manchu and Han elites (female as well as male) participated in the civilizing project of the Qing.²² 14

     But recent work argues that cultural interaction was not a one-way process of "Sinification." Despite an impressive degree of integration among the empire's literate elites,²³ local diversity under the Qing remained profound. Interaction with new environments and peoples during the great southward push of the Han peoples continued to bring new ethnic enclaves inside "China proper" throughout the late imperial era.²⁴ Some scholars argue that the state deliberately maintained local differences among its subjects. In the view of John Fitzgerald, "the Empire tolerated variety among localities because it feared mass horizontal communication of the kind we now associate with political nationalism."²⁵ But even where provincial elites took pains to integrate their territories culturally into the empire, the effects could be paradoxical, sometimes protecting deviant practices under a patina of Confucian norms or imperial cults.²⁶ And while "civilizing the barbarians" may have been the only sanctioned cultural dynamic along the settlement frontier, indigenous ways are now known to have been readily assimilated by Chinese immigrants, altering everything from agriculture and diet to marriage practices and footbinding traditions.²⁷ When Hokkien men married aborigine women in eighteenth-century Taiwan, for instance, these in-marrying Chinese males often adopted aborigine customs, dress, and speech, even though their sons might later "re-sinify to claim the prestige and connections advantageous in a Han-dominated social environment."²⁸ Nor can the cultural dynamics of empire be reduced to a two-way flow between the Han and their neighbors. As is now becoming clear, the Qing frontiers were the site of multilateral intercourse among various non-Han peoples as well.²⁹ 15

     The one universal principle of place-based identity that historians have documented across this vast and varied canvas was a profound intertwining of geography and genealogy. What mattered in imperial China was less one's place of residence than one's ancestral home; gazetteers would typically boast about the virtues of native daughters before mentioning the contributions of adoptive sons.³⁰ Native-place associations were prominent features of every commercial emporium in the nineteenth century, sustaining ancestral identities among the sojourning elite over generations—and creating a domestic counterpart to the "portable localisms" that are such a striking feature of the overseas diaspora today.³¹ But the link between genealogy and geography took different forms in different places, depending in part on state policy. In the southern and coastal regions, where the indigenous populations had little status under the Qing, a plausible Han identity was indispensable to social mobility. As a result, virtually all powerful lineage groups claimed at least one ancestor (spurious or otherwise) from the north China heartland.³² In the northern and western territories, by contrast, indigenous ethnic identities retained more prestige. Proud memories of past empires ruled by the Manchu, Mongol, Uighur, and Tibetan peoples were kept alive through what Eleanor Rawski calls the "deliberate multiculturalist policies" of the Qing, who codified the languages and cultivated the lineages of these formerly independent peoples in elaborating their own charter myth.³³ 16

     In the waning decades of the empire, many of these ethnic-cum-regional identities became potential flashpoints for rebellion. New patterns of industrialization and trade disrupted the economic networks that had sustained the Qing economy, provoking new territorial solidarities that contributed to the empire's disintegration. In the process, some historians now argue, the macroregions delineated by Skinner effectively broke down. Surging export markets for tea, silk, and cotton reached deep into the interior, prompting massive migrations, turning former centers of privilege into resentful backwaters, and summoning forth whole new regions centered on the booming treaty ports.³⁴ At the same time, local claims came to be brandished against the center. Opposition was galvanized not only along the empire's frontier, where minority faiths sometimes fostered alternative political allegiances,³⁵ but even in areas of the Han heartland that now fell victim to what Kenneth Pomeranz calls "regional triage."³⁶ 17

     Yet, even in this explosive environment, regionalism could be a resource for national unity. Elizabeth Perry aptly characterizes the politics of place as "a two-edged sword that both opened possibilities and set boundaries to the development of collective action."³⁷ In Shanghai, as Bryna Goodman has shown, immigrant merchants and mill workers alike rallied with co-regionalists for the nationalist cause, activating native-place ties toward such diverse ends as industrial investment and famine relief, factory strikes and anti-Japanese boycotts.³⁸ Others have documented how the early revolutionary movement was nurtured in the fluid culture of the southern coast, with Guangdong and Shanghai serving as radical counter-cores to Beijing;³⁹ shown how intellectuals were propelled into political activism in part by profound disruptions to their learned sense of place;⁴⁰ and uncovered the key role of ethnic bonds among the highly dispersed and mobile Hakka population in the Communists' "Long March" from local to national power.⁴¹ In fact, it is now clear that local loyalties and spatially organized solidarities informed the nation-building project at every step. The Chinese may not have been a "nation of provincials" in the German sense,⁴² but the prolonged process of calling a modern, united China into being—in the imagination as well as on the ground—was advanced from particular provincial locations and drew deeply on local attachments. 18

     For most of the twentieth century, however, the notion that local loyalties could contribute positively to the nationalist project has been deeply heretical. Since the warlord era of the 1920s, if not before, regionalism has been widely equated with feudalism.⁴³ To the Nationalists, even folklore studies was "a dangerous field, promoting local cultures in the face of the government's official view of a monolithic Chinese culture."⁴⁴ For the Communists, the issues were more complex. The early revolutionary movement celebrated minority and regional culture as an alternative to the authoritarian elitism of Beijing.⁴⁵ But once in power, the revolutionary regime embarked on a rigid containment of regional and ethnic difference. One of its first steps was to establish an inventory—and map—of recognized ethnic groups.⁴⁶ In practice, however, central oversight was more extensive in the newly designated minority districts than anywhere else. Moreover, it was not long before the regime went on the offensive against most kinds of inherited spatialities. Native-place associations were outlawed and even physically dismantled, and a cellular grid of production units displaced the organic geographies of neighborhood and village. At the height of the Cultural Revolution, the campaign for national conformity moved inside the household itself, as the young activists who fanned out across the countryside struggled to bring the most intimate practices of dress, speech, and ritual in line with Beijing norms.⁴⁷ 19

     The economic reforms enacted since 1978 have in some ways reversed that momentum, fueling a resurgence of regional pride—as well as regional prejudice.⁴⁸ Recent visitors find local culture being revived (or invented) throughout the country, in everything from folklore revivals to radio shows, theme parks to beauty parlors.⁴⁹ Even minority religious beliefs are finding sanctioned outlets for public expression. Since 1990, Mongols from across China have made pilgrimages to the Chinggis Khan Mausoleum in Ordos.⁵⁰ And in both coastal Fujian and interior Yunnan, local forms of music, dance, and costume associated with Taoist ceremonies are being revived, albeit in some cases packaged in secular frameworks for marketing to tourists.⁵¹ 20

     A number of forces contribute to the new accent on local difference. Chinese artists and writers have turned to the poorer peripheries as a sort of counter-core, tapping the customs and consciousness of the non-Han peoples for a more authentic, more sensual, or simply more exotic sensibility.⁵² At the same time, market practices have also encouraged a celebration of difference. As several scholars note, the spread of commerce has dramatically reconfigured the landscape of status in the Chinese world, turning regional color into a valuable commodity. In addition, the spectacle of wealth in the "special economic zones," with their close links to the overseas Chinese (through popular culture as well as investment flows), has turned first Guangdong and now Shanghai into centers of cultural prestige that rival Beijing.⁵³ Finally, the Chinese state has its own reasons for promoting local difference. According to culture critic Jing Wang, leisure consumption has been identified by the post-Deng regime as a crucial motor for the reformed Chinese economy, and state agencies now take an active role in marketing regional distinctions to entice tourist travel.⁵⁴ The result is a landscape where popular culture is saturated with contradictory political meanings. To flaunt the speech or style of the provinces may be a way of participating in state-sponsored consumption, yet it may also be a way of flouting Beijing's vision of what it means to be Chinese. 21

     What the alternative vision might be is, of course, open to debate. Edward Freidman, who derides Maoism as the product of an impoverished, parochial, peasant north, hails the free-wheeling commercialism and multiculturalism of the south as the authentic heir of China's cosmopolitan traditions.⁵⁵ Harvard's Tu Wei-Ming advances a similar view, holding up the commercial and democratic ethos of the Chinese diaspora as a new model for Chinese national identity, articulated "from the periphery."⁵⁶ But Arif Dirlik—who wryly notes that Tu's "periphery" is now part of the global capitalist core—counters these visions with yet another map: one in which southern China's true legacy includes a long tradition of radical thought and activism.⁵⁷ Clearly, regional rhetoric in contemporary China is not just about regions; it is also a forum for debating the nation's past and for staking claims to its future.⁵⁸ 22

At the crux of this debate lie Taiwan and Hong Kong, two of the most peculiar anomalies of global geographic taxonomy. Taiwan is both more and less than a nation-state. While rhetorically laying claim to the entire territory of the former Qing empire, historically Taiwan is but one small region of China, upgraded to provincial status only in the nineteenth century. In Hong Kong, meanwhile, an odd combination of financial dominance and political dependence creates a different sort of paradox. Both islands support diverse immigrant populations, and in both places, decades of foreign rule have left a contradictory legacy of colonialism and cosmopolitanism.⁵⁹ Not surprisingly, scholars see the imagining of regional community in Taiwan and Hong Kong as both freighted and fraught. As of the late 1990s, both islands' sense of place appeared to be very much under construction. 23

     One of the most provocative recent meditations on this process is Ackbar Abbas's Hong Kong: Culture and the Politics of Disappearance. If Hong Kong in the twentieth century has had a regional identity, Abbas argues, it is essentially a "floating" one. A postcolonial city without a pre-colonial past, and one whose population has always consisted mainly of expatriates and refugees, Hong Kong for Abbas is "not so much a place as a space of transit."⁶⁰ Only on the eve of its "disappearance" in 1997 did the culture of Hong Kong become the object of intense interest. Analyzing the recent rush to define Hong Kong, Abbas discerns three main "temptations," associated respectively with the local, the marginal, and the cosmopolitan. Against these, he advocates a transnational localism that frankly acknowledges the island's character as a hybrid and unstable place. Like the argot of the streets (and of the new Hong Kong cinema)—a pastiche of Cantonese and Mandarin, with elements of Japanese, Taiwanese, and English thrown in—that which is local in Hong Kong is also intrinsically international, and it "mutates right in front of our eyes."⁶¹ 24

     Taiwanese regionalism may seem stolid by comparison, but there, too, identities are mutating rapidly. Scholarship on Taiwanese social solidarities has historically emphasized the aggressive native-place loyalties that made the map of the mainland more salient than the island's own geography for most inhabitants' sense of place. Continual feuding between the different lineage groups from the mainland, and between Chinese immigrants and some ten different aboriginal peoples, kept Taiwanese society violently divided for over a century.⁶² It has been pointed out that Japanese imperialism galvanized a sense of common interests among the islanders. But in their half-century of rule, the Japanese also systematically attacked Taiwanese culture, not least by enforcing the use of Japanese language in the schools. Moreover, liberation from the Japanese was quickly followed by the arrival of a new wave of mainlanders in 1949. Wealthy, well-educated, and profoundly conservative, the Nationalists who took over the Taiwanese government undertook to "re-Sinicize" the island's earlier immigrants, imposing Mandarin dialect and a classical education on an often resentful populace. Settling predominantly in and around the northern capital of Taipei, the newcomers also sowed the seeds of Taiwan's first truly local regionalism, pitting a Mandarin north against a "Taiwanese" south.⁶³ 25

     To judge from recent accounts, southern Taiwan's vernacular culture is emerging as a medium for challenging the hegemony of the Nationalist regime. Flouting the power and prestige of elite Taipei style, a new strain of pop culture revels in the dialects and folk beliefs of the island's southern residents. Yet the same region's songs and speech are also being appropriated as symbols of a more inclusive Taiwanese national identity.⁶⁴ Observers are of mixed minds about the political subtexts of the "new Taiwanese nativism." Philosopher Karl Ning of National Central University in Taipei, writing under the pseudonym A. Taiwaner, charges that the imagined community is being supplanted by an imaginary community. "The nativist spaces in the urban areas," he complains, "(whether it is the nativist section of a newspaper, television advertisements or programs, stores selling nativist wares, nativist snack shops, nativist bars, nativist publications, etc.) are all imagined, and are all fictitious products of a nativist consciousness."⁶⁵ Yet, whether they are condoned or condemned, the fact that mutations of regional identity are taking place under historians' very eyes has drawn attention not only to their changeability but also to the ideological and commercial processes implicated in their formation.⁶⁶ 26

     The view from contemporary Japan is strikingly similar. There, too, local identities are marked and marketed throughout the archipelago today. Whether packaged as native or exotic, and whether deployed to promote train travel or prefectural pride, local color on the Japanese archipelago is constantly on display. And as in both Taiwan and the PRC, analysts have been quick to discern the hand of both the state and the market behind this process.⁶⁷ The main difference may be that Japanese regionalisms have a longer history of being exploited in this way. As Constantine Vaporis has shown, the infrastructure of official transport established in the seventeenth century by the Tokugawa rulers soon came to support a popular "culture of movement." Commoners typically took to the roads for pilgrimage, but their excursions came to sport all the trappings of modern tourism: route maps and guidebooks, souvenirs and brothels, landscape prints and literary works celebrating famous places.⁶⁸ 27

     Travel and the literature of travel thus contributed to a hallmark of Japanese early modernity, national integration. Stimulated by the Pax Tokugawa (and particularly by the "alternate attendance" rule requiring local lords to commute semi-annually between their home fiefs and Edo), commodities, information, and people alike came to circulate throughout the archipelago in networks that grew more extensive and more elaborate over time.⁶⁹ But as Mary Elizabeth Berry has pointed out, national integration had a paradoxical by-product in a growing awareness of sub-national distinctions.⁷⁰ Localities might be steadily incorporated into the larger realm, but a sense of local difference could be heightened in the process. Indeed, Luke Roberts argues that, until the Meiji era, the primary referent of the term "nation" (kuni) for most Japanese was the local domain or province—and the concept of "national prosperity" was first developed by merchants who sold domainal specialties on the Edo market. Only after 1868, Roberts insists, was the rhetoric of "national prosperity" and "national interest" that developed in this competitive inter-domainal arena transferred to the imperial realm as a whole.⁷¹ 28

     Recent work thus complicates an earlier modernization narrative that portrayed Meiji nationalism as a simple outgrowth of Tokugawa integration. We now know that the new regime invested considerable energy after 1868 in dismantling inherited spatial units (from the village on up) and redirecting territorial solidarities toward its own, rationalized administrative grid.⁷² Yet neither can the making of a new social and political geography in the early Meiji years be seen as strictly a top-down project. On the one hand, the state was frequently frustrated by local resistance. Brian Platt shows how school-district boundaries were renegotiated on the ground as parents and teachers resisted nationally imposed norms.⁷³ On the other hand, where the new units did take hold, more credit was often due to local boosters than to central ideologues. Forced to compete with more distant localities for scarce public funds, regional elites frequently found their own interests served by mobilizing residents' loyalties along the new prefectural lines.⁷⁴ 29

     Indeed, competitive boosterism may have been one of the primary forces channeling modern Japanese regionalism in integrative rather than oppositional directions. In twentieth-century Japan, only Okinawan identity has sustained a consistent subversive charge; elsewhere, regional difference has been expressed essentially as variations on a national theme. If wartime propaganda played up native-place attachment as a form of patriotism, postwar ad campaigns promoting native-place nostalgia have bolstered national identity in a different way. One might say that, whereas the language of class unity was deployed to cover regional difference in Mao's China, the dynamic in postwar Japan was reversed: there, regional identities served to mute disparities of class (as well as to cover or compensate for the steady "cosmopolitanization" of lifeways across the archipelago).⁷⁵ 30

     An ethnographic base-map of Japanese regions thus continues to have widespread salience, both in scholarship and in everyday life. As in the China field, however, the utility of this ethnographic map is being questioned. Recent work reveals that Japanese artists and writers have long inverted the received model of metropole and hinterland, seeking in the mountains of Kumano or the streets of Osaka the same kind of cultural "counter-cores" that their Chinese contemporaries have located among the Mongols or the Miao.⁷⁶ And intellectual historians and anthropologists have undertaken a sustained critique of folklore studies, showing its geographical categories to be as much ideological as anthropological in origin.⁷⁷ Meanwhile, a growing body of Japanese historians is busy recasting the early history of the archipelago in multicultural and polycentric terms. Inspired by medievalist Amino Yoshihiko, this group challenges the teleological narrative of "the rise of the Yamato state" by demonstrating that different parts of the Japanese islands maintained distinct centers of authority well into recent times.⁷⁸ We now know that these outlying centers were sustained in part by a highly decentralized or "translocal" geography of exchange, linking different parts of the Japanese island chain directly to their nearest neighbors abroad.⁷⁹ 31

     Overall, research on the successively more centralized regimes from Tokugawa to Taisho thus echoes the same themes that we have encountered in the China field. The new vision of regional dynamics is one that acknowledges more initiative and innovation in the hinterlands,⁸⁰ that treats the core itself as a region,⁸¹ that locates the nation squarely in its Asian context,⁸² and that puts politics back into the picture of regional identity.⁸³ 32

As this brief inventory suggests, recent research on China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Japan reveals regional space to be more fluid than we had previously suspected. Understood increasingly as a process rather than a product, the regional map has been effectively set in motion. One consequence of this view is a looser conception of the ties between region and environment. Rather than being ecologically determined, both the uniform zones of ethnogeography and the functional spheres of regional systems appear now as more elastically linked to their ecological moorings, with economy, politics, and culture continuously reshaping the relationship between a region's inhabitants and their environment. Another consequence is a fundamental rethinking of the terms "core" and "periphery." A new recognition that cultural interaction at the frontiers has contributed to the making of core cultures themselves—and a new appreciation of the ways in which political margins can be turned into cultural counter-cores—turn up in every national literature reviewed here. 33

     The challenge now, I believe, is to integrate this more fluid conception of the region into a broader geo-historical vision: one where regional dynamics are articulated to those of both larger and smaller social units. On the one hand, this means moving "outward," exploring the ways in which regions are embedded in national and transnational networks—and revisiting regional rhetoric for its cosmopolitan as well as its communitarian messages. By my reading, this kind of agenda is already informing the best new work in East Asian studies. Just as the subregions of Japan are increasingly conceptualized in terms of their distinctive overseas ties, so nation-building and class solidarity in China are increasingly conceived as rooted in native-place networks. But more has been done to link regions with nations than to bridge the sub-national with the transnational. We know little, for instance, about how such overarching geographical categories as Islam or Christendom, Asia or the Pacific, Greater China or Global Capitalism relate to more local solidarities. Yet here, too, there are promising starts. Research by Arif Dirlik, Prasenjit Duara, and Pekka Korhonen, among others, shows that even the grandest of geographical visions are voiced from particular locations, whose centrality and prosperity they are typically designed to enhance.⁸⁴ More work on the different mental maps conveyed by pan-Asian or pan-Pacific rhetoric, and on the particular pathways through which this rhetoric is disseminated, would bring these dynamics into sharper focus. 34

     On the other hand, the call for a fuller geo-historical vision also means moving "inward" to the local spaces of everyday life. At issue here is how regional identities are produced around the dinner table or on the shop floor—and, conversely, how regional dynamics help to produce particular domestic forms or workplace relationships. The work of exploring these dynamics has just begun, and we lack as yet the basis for comparative theoretical statements about the ways in which micro-level and meso-level social processes are yoked. But recent research suggests some promising places to look. Households in particular are attracting attention, as sites for the transmission of regional cultures but also as sites where regional identities can be fundamentally transformed. The East Asian literature points to at least three avenues through which these transformations can take shape: language acquisition, marriage practices, and domestic labor. 35

     Instances of dialect change illuminate the role of language learning as a bridge between household dynamics and regional identity. One such case is the spread of samurai dialects from uptown Edo among the commoner classes during the Tokugawa period. Samurai speech (a key element of today's standard Japanese) is said to have diffused among the city's commoners only after well-to-do merchant girls came to be routinely placed in the service of warrior households during their adolescence. Returning to the merchant quarters to marry, these women would pass on the speech habits of their social superiors to their children, gradually transforming the vernacular of one status group into a cross-class regional dialect.⁸⁵ The household appears as a site for language change of a different kind in the Manchu banner communities of China. Despite considerable investment by the Qing in maintaining Manchu identity among the bannermen, who were scattered in urban enclaves around the empire, most lost their mother tongue after a few generations. Pamela Crossley tells us this is because girls were denied access to Manchu education. As unschooled females gradually assimilated the language of the Chinese neighborhoods in which they resided, and passed these dialects on to their children, local variants of Chinese effectively became the bannermen's mother tongue.⁸⁶ 36

     Marriage practices form another link between the household and the region, and an equally dynamic one. Consider the unusual marriage systems that evolved along the Taiwanese frontier and in the Pearl River Delta during the early twentieth century. On Taiwan, a perpetual surplus of male migrants created serious competition for wives. Well-to-do parents responded by adopting a future bride for their son while the two were still children—an anomalous practice whose main advantage may have been to give the mother-in-law a firm hand in her daughter-in-law's upbringing.⁸⁷ The Canton Delta, meanwhile, became notorious during the same decades for a diametrically opposed development: delayed marriage, and even non-marriage, among rural women. This equally unusual practice was made possible by a high demand for female labor in the silk thread factories, but may have been influenced by traditions of relative gender equality among the area's indigenous Tai populace as well.⁸⁸ In both cases, the new marriage practices had important implications for regional identity. Both the "child marriage" institution on Taiwan and the "marriage resistance" pattern in Guangdong have been central to the way American historians (and at least some indigenous observers) defined both areas as regions.⁸⁹ 37

     A third nexus linking the region and the household is economic production. Textiles and foodstuffs, in particular, have historically served as mainstays of domestic economy and as symbols of regional identity throughout rural East Asia. Inevitably, this has meant that regional identities carry strong class connotations. Susan Mann documents how this worked in eighteenth-century China, where women's household handicrafts were conventionally ranked according to a "hierarchy of place." Rough materials, such as cotton, hemp, and straw, were identified both with poor women and with poor regions; elite women from the wealthy Yangtze Delta, by contrast, worked exclusively with silk, esteeming embroidery as the most refined handicraft of all.⁹⁰ Emily Honig discovers a different conflation of class and place in twentieth-century Shanghai, where immigrants from Subei—an impoverished region north of the Yangtze—were invariably relegated to the bottom of the occupational ladder, and "Subei swine" became the standard epithet hurled at anyone who was dirty or vulgar.⁹¹ As this example reveals, the link between locality and labor is not confined to work carried out within the household. Tellingly, taxonomies of courtesans and prostitutes in China have also historically been organized on the principle of native place. According to Gail Hershatter, the venerable practice of ranking prostitutes by region—and of ranking regions according to the purported qualities of their sexual workers—remains alive and well in Shanghai today.⁹² 38

     These examples are essentially anecdotal, but together they offer three methodological pointers for future research. First is the importance of attending to the family as a locus for the transmission and transformation of regional identities. To be sure, we know little as yet about how regional identities are engaged at other local-level sites, such as the street, the workplace, or the school. All of these deserve further exploration. Yet my impression, at least, is that the household has been the essential "capillary" of regional reproduction, the level at which distinctive patterns of speech, labor, and sociability have been both forged and lost. Further investigation on this front would surely be worthwhile. Related is the focus on intimate spaces, which points toward new ways to link the geographical vocabulary of regional analysis with such sociological abstractions as class, gender, and generation. Beyond simply mapping out the distribution of sex, age, or income differentials across space, historians increasingly want to analyze the processes by which these cross-cutting categories both enable and constrain regional history as a whole. Developing an appropriate analytical language for this task may occupy regional historians for another generation. Finally, these cases remind us that micro-level change does not merely represent the working-out of macro-level forces. If even the household, that most local of geographical spaces, is an arena of dynamism in its own right, then the linkage between regional history and biography is truly a two-way street. It follows that turning to such personal sources as fiction and memoirs may be another important avenue for supplementing our understanding of how regions are made, as well as how they are perceived. 39

     In these and other ways, recent work in East Asian history opens up not only new views of the past but new horizons for the future as well. A generation of energetic scholarship has revolutionized the regional canvas, revealing a vibrant local landscape with complex ties to both larger and smaller social units, and giving rise to a host of new questions about geographical process. Whatever form the answers may take, continued research on the region seems certain to remain on the historical agenda for this part of the world for many years to come. 40

Kären Wigen, who trained in geography at the University of California, Berkeley, is the Jack H. Neely Associate Professor of History at Duke University. After completing her first book, The Making of a Japanese Periphery, 1750–1920 (1995), she co-authored a wide-ranging study of Western geographical constructs with Martin Lewis, The Myth of Continents: A Critique of Metageography (1998). Her current project explores the geopolitics and geo-pieties of regional rhetoric in Japan's Nagano Prefecture from the 1890s to the 1990s.

Notes

This essay has benefited in crucial ways from the comments of Anne Allison, Catherine Phipps, Alex Roland, Jing Wang, Marcia Yonemoto, and two anonymous readers for the AHR. Thanks are also due to Judith Bennett and the Triangle Feminist Women in History group, for encouraging me to think about the connections between gender and geography, and to my colleagues in the Asian/Pacific Studies Institute at Duke University, for thoughtful feedback on an earlier version.
¹ Recent collections on identity and regionalism in China include David S. G. Goodman and Gerald Segal, eds., China Deconstructs: Politics, Trade and Regionalism (London, 1994); Lowell Dittmer and Samuel S. Kim, eds., China's Quest for National Identity (Ithaca, N.Y., 1993); David Shambaugh, ed., Greater China: The Next Superpower? (New York, 1995); Tu Wei-ming, ed., China in Transformation (Cambridge, Mass., 1993); Tu Wei-ming, ed., The Living Tree: The Changing Meaning of Being Chinese Today (Stanford, Calif., 1994); Aihwa Ong and Donald Nonini, eds., Ungrounded Empires: The Cultural Politics of Modern Chinese Transnationalism (New York, 1997). For a thoughtful analysis of a geographical category that informs many of these collections, see Harry Harding, "The Concept of 'Greater China': Themes, Variations and Reservations," China Quarterly 136 (December 1993): 660–84.
² For sociological analyses of regionalism in contemporary South Korea, see Eui-Young Yu, "Regionalism in the South Korean Power Structure," in Eui-Young Yu and Terry R. Kandal, eds., The Korean Peninsula in the Changing World Order (Los Angeles, 1993), 123–44; and Byong-Je Jon, "Regionalism and Regional Conflict in Korea," in Kim Kyong-Dong and Su-Hoon Lee, eds., Asia in the 21st Century: Challenges and Prospects (Seoul, 1990), 182–95. For a sample of the new "off-center" perspectives in Japanese history, see Donald Denoon, et al., eds., Multicultural Japan: Palaeolithic to Postmodern (Cambridge, 1996).
³ Kimura Motoi, "Kyōdoshi, chihōshi, chiikishi kenkyu no rekishi to kadai," in Asao Naohiro, et al., eds., Nihon tsushi, betsumaki 2, Chiikishi kenkyu no genjō to kadai (Tokyo, 1994), 3–32.
⁴ Despite recent interest among sociologists and political scientists in the regional preferences and prejudices that mark Korean voting and employment patterns, cultural homogeneity across the peninsula is often assumed, and sometimes flatly asserted. For a critical discussion of this tendency, see Roy Richard Grinker, "Mourning the Nation: Ruins of the North in Seoul," positions: east asia cultures critique 3 (Spring 1995): 192–223, esp. 197–98.
⁵ For a fuller discussion and references, see notes 43 through 45 below.
⁶ For recent discussions of the east/west division in Japan, see Fukuda Ajio, "Yashiki to ie," in Tsukamoto Manabu, ed., Nihon no Kinsei, Vol. 8, Mura no seikatsu bunka (Tokyo, 1992), 41–72; Aoki Michio, ed., Nihon no Kinsei, Vol. 17, Higashi to nishi, Edo to kamigata (Tokyo, 1994); and Kokuritsu Minzokugaku Hakubutsukan Kenkyu Hōkoku 52 (1993), a special issue on Japanese regional culture.
⁷ One early exception is Gilbert Rozman, Urban Networks in Ch'ing China and Tokugawa Japan (Princeton, N.J., 1973). For a more extensive discussion of core-periphery models in the Tokugawa field, see Kären Wigen, "The Geographical Imagination in Early Modern Japanese History: Retrospect and Prospect," Journal of Asian Studies 51 (February 1992): 3–29.
⁸ G. William Skinner, ed., The City in Late Imperial China (Stanford, Calif., 1977).
⁹ It is seldom noted that the resulting regional-systems model is conceptualized in more exclusively economic terms than is the central-place model that Skinner was developing at roughly the same time. Whereas China's urban hierarchy is theorized as a joint product of administrative fiats and marketing functions, the former are seen as largely irrelevant to the shaping of the regional map, whose contours are thus purported to be both more natural and more durable.
¹⁰ The periodization theory, as well as the most compact and comprehensive statement of the regional-systems model, may be found in G. William Skinner, "Presidential Address: The Structure of Chinese History," Journal of Asian Studies 44 (May 1985): 271–92. For a more recent iteration, see Skinner's introduction to Sow-Theng Leong, Migration and Ethnicity in Chinese History: Hakkas, Pengmin, and Their Neighbors, Tim Wright, ed. (Stanford, Calif., 1997), 1–18.
¹¹ Although macroregional maps of the sort delineated by Skinner for China have never been published for Japan, Skinner himself convened a team of Japanese and American scholars to apply his framework to the Nōbi region in central Honshu. Skinner's map of Nōbi is reprinted, and his regional model critiqued, in Iwahashi Masaru, "Chihō keizai kōzō no chirigaku—'kōki Nōbi chihōhen' no bunseki," in Shinbō Hiroshi and Saitō Osamu, eds., Iwanami Nihon Keizaishi, Vol. 2, Kindai seichō no taido (Tokyo, 1989), 219–66.
¹² Richard Slotkin, Gunfighter Nation: The Myth of the Frontier in Twentieth-Century America (New York, 1992), 5. I am indebted to Louise Young for bringing this passage to my attention.
¹³ Marcia Yonemoto, for instance, shows how even the driest depictions of the physical landscape of Tokugawa Japan—whether in maps, travel writing, or popular fiction—were deeply inscribed with cultural values, fusing local sentiments with a more placeless literati elitism. Yonemoto, "Mapping Culture in Eighteenth-Century Japan" (PhD dissertation, University of California, Berkeley, 1995).
¹⁴ Work in this genre is already extensive, and numerous examples are cited in the survey that follows. For one provocative meditation on this approach, see Emily Honig, Creating Chinese Ethnicity: Subei People in Shanghai, 1850–1980 (New Haven, Conn., 1992).
¹⁵ Examples include Kenneth Pomerantz, The Making of a Hinterland: State, Society, and Economy in Inland North China, 1853–1937 (Berkeley, Calif., 1993); and Kären Wigen, The Making of a Japanese Periphery, 1750–1920 (Berkeley, 1995).
¹⁶ Thus Jeffrey C. Kinkley, for instance, writes that "the frontier situation reveals both the genius and the limitations of Skinner's seminal core/periphery dichotomy." The Odyssey of Shen Congwen (Stanford, Calif., 1987), 290, n. 21. For related responses to Skinner's regional-systems model, see Barbara E. Ward, "Regional Operas and Their Audiences: Evidence from Hong Kong," in David Johnson, et al., eds., Popular Culture in Late Imperial China (Berkeley, Calif., 1985); R. Keith Schoppa, "Contours of Revolutionary Change in a Chinese County, 1900–1950," Journal of Asian Studies 51 (November 1992): 770–96; Schoppa, Blood Road: The Mystery of Shen Dingyi in Revolutionary China (Berkeley, 1995), 6; Helen F. Siu, "Recycling Tradition: Culture, History, and Political Economy in the Chrysanthemum Festivals of South China," Comparative Studies in Society and History 32 (October 1990): 765–94, esp. 786–90; Helen R. Chauncey, Schoolhouse Politicians: Locality and State during the Chinese Republic (Honolulu, 1992), 28, 47; Wen-hsin Yeh, Provincial Passages: Culture, Space, and the Origins of Chinese Communism (Berkeley, 1996), 262, n. 3; Jonathan N. Lipman, "Hyphenated Chinese: Sino-Muslim Identity in Modern China," in Gail Hershatter, et al., eds., Remapping China: Fissures in Historical Terrain (Stanford, 1996), 97–112, 100; Jeffrey Wasserstrom, "Comparing 'Incomparable' Cities: Postmodern L.A. and Old Shanghai," Contention 5 (Spring 1996): 69–90, 87; and Helen F. Siu and David Faure, "Conclusion: History and Anthropology," in Faure and Siu, eds., Down to Earth: The Territorial Bond in South China (Stanford, 1995), 209–24, esp. 217–18.
¹⁷ I am indebted to Donald Nonini for this formulation. An extended case for this approach is made by Bryna Goodman in her recent book, Native Place, City, and Nation: Regional Networks and Identities in Shanghai, 1853–1937 (Berkeley, Calif., 1995). See also Emily Honig, Sisters and Strangers: Women in the Shanghai Cotton Mills, 1919–1949 (Stanford, Calif., 1986).
¹⁸ I am indebted to an anonymous reader for this observation.
¹⁹ David S. G. Goodman, "The Politics of Regionalism: Economic Development, Conflict and Negotiation," in Goodman and Segal, China Deconstructs, 1–20, 16.
²⁰ Susan Mann, Precious Records: Women in China's Long Eighteenth Century (Stanford, Calif., 1997), 221; Yeh, Provincial Passages, 47. On the fifteenth-century origins of this phenomenon, see Katherine Carlitz, "Shrines, Governing-Class Identity, and the Cult of Widow Fidelity in Mid-Ming Jiangnan," Journal of Asian Studies 56 (August 1997): 612–40.
²¹ Pamela Kyle Crossley, The Manchus (Cambridge, Mass., 1997).
²² Mann, Precious Records, 44, 212–16. William T. Rowe, "Education and Empire in Southwest China: Ch'en Hung-mou in Yunnan, 1733–38," in Alexander Woodside and Benjamin A. Elman, eds., Education and Society in Late Imperial China (Berkeley, Calif., 1994), 417–57.
²³ Evelyn S. Rawski argues that late imperial China enjoyed greater cultural integration than did early modern France, due to greater diffusion of literacy skills, greater possibilities for upward mobility through education, and less separation between town and village. Rawski, "Problems and Prospects," in Johnson, Popular Culture in Late Imperial China, 399–417. See also Rawski, "A Historian's Approach to Chinese Death Ritual," in James L. Watson and Evelyn S. Rawski, eds., Death Ritual in Late Imperial and Modern China (Berkeley, Calif., 1988), 20–34.
²⁴ Stevan Harrell, ed., Cultural Encounters on China's Ethnic Frontiers (Seattle, 1995); John E. Herman, "Empire in the Southwest: Early Qing Reforms to the Native Chieftain System," Journal of Asian Studies 56 (February 1997): 47–74.
²⁵ John Fitzgerald, "'Reports of My Death Have Been Greatly Exaggerated': The History of the Death of China," in Goodman and Segal, China Deconstructs, 21–58, 28.
²⁶ For conflicting views of this process, see James L. Watson, "Standardizing the Gods: The Promotion of T'ien Hou ('Empress of Heaven') along the South China Coast, 960–1960," in Johnson, Popular Culture in Late Imperial China, 292–324; and Michael Szonyi, "The Illusion of Standardizing the Gods: The Cult of the Five Emperors in Late Imperial China," Journal of Asian Studies 56 (February 1997): 113–35. Prasenjit Duara analyzes a similar dynamic in "Superscribing Symbols: The Myth of Guandi, Chinese God of War," Journal of Asian Studies 47 (November 1988): 778–95.
²⁷ This process is brilliantly documented in Leong, Migration and Ethnicity in Chinese History, 31–40.
²⁸ John Robert Shepherd, Statecraft and Political Economy on the Taiwan Frontier 1600–1800 (Stanford, Calif., 1993), 386–87.
²⁹ Piper Rae Gaubatz, Beyond the Great Wall: Urban Form and Transformation on the Chinese Frontiers (Stanford, Calif., 1996), 23. For a fascinating study of multicultural frontier dynamics from the perspective of the earlier Tanguts, see Ruth W. Dunnell, The Great State of White and High: Buddhism and State Formation in Eleventh-Century Xia (Honolulu, 1996).
³⁰ Yeh, Provincial Passages, 46.
³¹ For a critical overview of the literature on native-place networks, see Emily Honig, "Native Place and the Making of Chinese Ethnicity," in Hershatter, Remapping China, 143–55. See also Linda Cooke Johnson, ed., Cities of Jiangnan in Late Imperial China (Albany, N.Y., 1993).
³² Leong, Migration and Ethnicity in Chinese History, 40; Shepherd, Statecraft and Political Economy, 526, n. 107; Helen F. Siu and David Faure, "Conclusion: History and Anthropology," in Faure and Siu, Down to Earth, 209–24.
³³ Evelyn S. Rawski, "Presidential Address: Reenvisioning the Qing; The Significance of the Qing Period in Chinese History," Journal of Asian Studies 55 (November 1996): 829–50; Rawski, The Last Emperors: A Social History of Qing Imperial Institutions (Berkeley, Calif., 1998). For a trenchant rejoinder to the multiculturalist thesis, see Ping-Ti Ho, "In Defense of Sinicization: A Rebuttal of Evelyn Rawski's 'Reenvisioning the Qing,'" Journal of Asian Studies 57 (February 1998): 123–55.
³⁴ For instance, see Kwan-Man Bun, "Mapping the Hinterland: Treaty Ports and Regional Analysis in Modern China," in Hershatter, Remapping China, 181–93; Antonia Finnane, "The Origins of Prejudice: The Malintegration of Subei in Late Imperial China," Comparative Studies in Society and History 35 (April 1993): 211–38; Yeh, Provincial Passages, 52–56.
³⁵ On the role of Christian missions and Islamic schools in fostering militant regional identities in southwestern China in the later 1800s, see Alexander Woodside and Benjamin A. Elman, "Afterword: The Expansion of Education in Ch'ing China," in Woodside and Elman, Education and Society in Late Imperial China, 525–60; Siu-woo Cheung, "Millenarianism, Christian Movements, and Ethnic Change among the Miao in Southwest China," in Harrell, Cultural Encounters, 217–47.
³⁶ Pomerantz, Making of a Hinterland, 15, 275.
³⁷ Elizabeth J. Perry, Shanghai on Strike: The Politics of Chinese Labor (Stanford, Calif., 1993), 30.
³⁸ Bryna Goodman, "The Locality as Microcosm of the Nation? Native Place Networks and Early Urban Nationalism in China," Modern China 21 (1995): 387–419; Goodman, Native Place, City, and Nation.
³⁹ Arif Dirlik, The Origins of Chinese Communism (Oxford, 1989), chap. 8; Dirlik, Anarchism in the Chinese Revolution (Berkeley, Calif., 1991), 14–18; Ming K. Chan, "A Turning Point in the Modern Chinese Revolution: The Historical Significance of the Canton Decade, 1917–27," in Hershatter, Remapping China, 224–41; Antonia Finnane, "A Place in the Nation: Yangzhou and the Idle Talk Controversy of 1934," Journal of Asian Studies 53 (November 1994): 1150–74; Yeh, Provincial Passages, 208.
⁴⁰ Yeh, Provincial Passages, 5.
⁴¹ Mary S. Erbaugh, "The Secret History of the Hakkas: The Chinese Revolution as a Hakka Enterprise," China Quarterly 132 (December 1992): 937–68. See also Leong, Migration and Ethnicity in Chinese History, 85.
⁴² The phrase is from Celia Applegate, A Nation of Provincials: The German Idea of Heimat (Berkeley, Calif., 1990).
⁴³ Prasenjit Duara, Rescuing History from the Nation: Questioning Narratives of Modern China (Chicago, 1995), chap. 6; Arthur Waldron, "Warlordism versus Federalism: The Revival of a Debate?" China Quarterly 121 (March 1990): 116–28; Fitzgerald, "'Reports of My Death Have Been Greatly Exaggerated,'" 21–58.
⁴⁴ Lucien Miller, "General Introduction," in Miller, ed., South of the Clouds: Tales from Yunnan (Seattle, 1994), 13.
⁴⁵ Chang-tai Hung, Going to the People: Chinese Intellectuals and Folk Literature 1918–1937 (Cambridge, Mass., 1985).
⁴⁶ On the process of reviewing claims to minority status under the early revolutionary regime, see the essays by Charles McKhann, Norma Diamond, and Shelley Rigger in Harrell, Cultural Encounters. See also Stevan Harrell, "Ethnicity, Local Interests, and the State: Yi Communities in Southwest China," Comparative Studies in Society and History 32 (July 1990): 515–48.
⁴⁷ Shih-chung Hsieh, "On the Dynamics of Tai/Dai-Lue Ethnicity," in Harrell, Cultural Encounters, 301–28; Dru C. Gladney, Muslim Chinese (Cambridge, Mass., 1991).
⁴⁸ On the latter, see Emily Honig, "Invisible Inequalities: The Status of Subei People in Contemporary Shanghai," China Quarterly 122 (June 1990): 273–92; and Elizabeth J. Perry, "Labor's Battle for Political Space: The Role of Worker Associations in Contemporary China," in Deborah S. Davis, et al., eds., Urban Spaces in Contemporary China: The Potential for Autonomy and Community in Post-Mao China (Cambridge, 1995), 302–25.
⁴⁹ Dru Gladney, "Ethnic Identity in China: The New Politics of Difference," in William A. Joseph, ed., China Briefing 1994 (Boulder, Colo., 1994), 171–92; David S. G. Goodman and Feng Chongyi, "Guangdong: Greater Hong Kong and the New Regionalist Future," in Goodman and Segal, China Deconstructs, 177–201; Vivienne Shue, "State Sprawl: The Regulatory State and Social Life in a Small Chinese City," in Davis, Urban Spaces in Contemporary China, 90–112, esp. 95.
⁵⁰ Almaz Khan, "Chinggis Khan, From Imperial Ancestor to Ethnic Hero," in Harrell, Cultural Encounters, 248–77.
⁵¹ Kenneth Dean, "Topologies of Power: Regional Ritual Systems in Southeast China," positions: east asia cultures critique (forthcoming); Norma Diamond, "Defining the Miao," in Harrell, Cultural Encounters, 92–116.
⁵² On the continuing search for cultural "counter-cores" in the literature of China's peripheries, see Kinkley, Odyssey of Shen Congwen, 16, 278; Kam Louie, ed., Strange Tales from Strange Lands: Stories by Zheng Wanlong (Ithaca, N.Y., 1993); and Leo Ou-fan Lee, "On the Margins of the Chinese Discourse: Some Personal Thoughts on the Cultural Meaning of the Periphery," in Tu, Living Tree, 221–43.
⁵³ On the contemporary reordering of the social meanings of space, see Helen F. Siu, "Cultural Identity and the Politics of Difference in South China," in Tu, China in Transformation, 19–43; Mayfair Mei-Hui Yang, "Mass Media and Transnational Subjectivity in Shanghai: Notes on (Re)cosmopolitanism in a Chinese Metropolis," in Ong and Nonini, Ungrounded Empires, 287–319; and Xin Liu, "Space, Mobility, and Flexibility: Chinese Villagers and Scholars Negotiate Power at Home and Abroad," in Ong and Nonini, Ungrounded Empires, 91–114.
⁵⁴ Jing Wang, "Public Culture and Popular Culture: Metropolitan China at the Turn of the Century," positions: east asia cultures critique (forthcoming). See also Stevan Harrell, "Jeeping against Maoism," positions: east asia cultures critique 2 (Fall 1994): 177–249.
⁵⁵ Edward Freidman, "A Failed Chinese Modernity," in Tu, China in Transformation, 1–18; Freidman, "Reconstructing China's National Identity: A Southern Alternative to Mao-Era Anti-imperialist Nationalism," Journal of Asian Studies 53 (February 1994): 67–91.
⁵⁶ Tu Wei-Ming, "Cultural China: The Periphery as the Center," in Tu, Living Tree, 1–34.
⁵⁷ Arif Dirlik, "Critical Reflections on 'Chinese Capitalism' as Paradigm," Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power 3 (January 1997): 303–30.
⁵⁸ For an account that explicitly links the two regional cultures with contrasting varieties of cosmopolitanism—a "northern model" that was authoritarian-hieratic, and a "southern model" that was democratic-populist—see Yi-Fu Tuan, Cosmos and Hearth: A Cosmopolite's Viewpoint (Minneapolis, 1996), 68.
⁵⁹ On the debate over whether or not to preserve the architecture of occupation in contemporary Taiwan, see Marshall Johnson, "Making Time: Historic Preservation and the Space of Nationality," positions: east asia cultures critique 2 (Fall 1994): 177–249; for similar debates in Hong Kong, see M. Ackbar Abbas, Hong Kong: Culture and the Politics of Disappearance (Minneapolis, 1997), chap. 4.
⁶⁰ Abbas, Hong Kong, 4. On the "composite" cultural identity of Hong Kong's Chinese community, see also Helen F. Siu, "Cultural Identity and the Politics of Difference in South China," in Tu, China in Transformation, 29.
⁶¹ Abbas, Hong Kong, 28.
⁶² Mark A. Allee, Law and Local Society in Late Imperial China: Northern Taiwan in the Nineteenth Century (Stanford, Calif., 1994).
⁶³ Stevan Harrell and Huang Chun-chieh, "Introduction: Change and Contention in Taiwan's Cultural Scene," in Stevan Harrell and Huang Chun-chieh, eds., Cultural Change in Postwar Taiwan (Boulder, Colo., 1994), 1–18.
⁶⁴ Allen Chun, "From Nationalism to Nationalizing: Cultural Imagination and State Formation in Postwar Taiwan," Australian Journal of Chinese Affairs 31 (January 1994): 49–69; Thomas B. Gold, "Civil Society and Taiwan's Quest for Identity," in Harrell and Huang, Cultural Change in Postwar Taiwan, 47–68.
⁶⁵ A. Taiwaner, "Pseudo-Taiwanese: Isle Margin Editorials," positions: east asia cultures critique 4 (Spring 1996): 165.
⁶⁶ Shih-chung Hsie, "Tourism, Formulation of Cultural Tradition, and Ethnicity: A Study of the Daiyan Identity of the Wulai Atayal," in Harrell and Huang, Cultural Change in Postwar Taiwan, 184–202; P. Steven Sangren, History and Magical Power in a Chinese Community (Stanford, Calif., 1987), 194–95.
⁶⁷ Jennifer Robertson, "It Takes a Village: Internationalization and Nostalgia in Postwar Japan," in Stephen Vlastos, ed., Mirror of Modernity: Invented Traditions of Modern Japan (Berkeley, Calif., 1998), 110–32; Marilyn Ivy, Discourses of the Vanishing: Modernity, Phantasm, Japan (Chicago, 1995); Kären Wigen, "Politics and Piety in Japanese Native-Place Studies: The Rhetoric of Solidarity in Shinano," positions: east asia cultures critique (Winter 1996): 491–518.
⁶⁸ Constantine Nomikos Vaporis, Breaking Barriers: Travel and the State in Early Modern Japan (Cambridge, Mass., 1994).
⁶⁹ Moriya Katsuhisa, "Urban Networks and Information Networks," Ronald P. Toby, trans., in Chie Nakane and Shinzaburō ishi, eds., Tokugawa Japan: The Social and Economic Antecedents of Modern Japan (Tokyo, 1990), 97–123.
⁷⁰ Mary Elizabeth Berry, "Was Early Modern Japan Culturally Integrated?" Modern Asian Studies 31, no. 3 (1997): 547–81.
⁷¹ Luke S. Roberts, Mercantilism in a Japanese Domain: The Merchant Origins of Economic Nationalism in 18th Century Tosa (Cambridge, 1998).
⁷² Carol Gluck, Japan's Modern Myths: Ideology in the Late Meiji Period (Princeton, N.J., 1985); Michio Umegaki, After the Restoration: The Beginning of Japan's Modern State (New York, 1988); Umegaki, "From Domain to Prefecture," in Marius B. Jansen and Gilbert Rozman, eds., Japan in Transition: From Tokugawa to Meiji (Princeton, 1986), 91–110.
⁷³ Brian Platt, "School, Community, and State Integration in Nineteenth-Century Japan" (PhD dissertation, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, 1998).
⁷⁴ Kären Wigen, "Constructing Shinano: The Invention of a Neo-traditional Region," in Vlastos, Mirror of Modernity, 229–42.
⁷⁵ William Kelly, "Finding a Place in Metropolitan Japan: Ideology, Institutions, and Everyday Life," in Andrew Gordon, ed., Postwar Japan as History (Berkeley, Calif., 1993), 189–238.
⁷⁶ Nina Cornyetz, "Nakagami Kenji's Mystic Writing Pad; or, Tracing Origins, Tales of the Snake, and the Land as Matrix," positions: east asia cultures critique 3 (Spring 1995): 224–54; Oda Sakunosuke, Stories of Osaka Life, Burton Watson, trans. (New York, 1990). On Osaka as a refuge from Kantō cultural style for novelist Tanizaki Junichirō in the early twentieth century, see Masao Miyoshi, Off Center: Power and Culture Relations between Japan and the United States (Cambridge, Mass., 1991), 134–35.
⁷⁷ The critique of folklore studies (minzokugaku) is advanced in J. Victor Koschmann, et al., eds., International Perspectives on Yanagita Kunio and Japanese Folklore Studies (Ithaca, N.Y., 1985); Alan S. Christie, "The Making of Imperial Subjects in Okinawa," positions: east asia cultures critique 1 (Winter 1993): 607–39; Tessa Morris-Suzuki, "The Invention and Reinvention of 'Japanese Culture,'" Journal of Asian Studies 54 (August 1995): 759–80; and Mariko Asano Tamanoi, "Gender, Nationalism, and Japanese Native Ethnology," positions: east asia cultures critique 4 (Spring 1996): 59–86, among others.
⁷⁸ For summaries of this work in English, see Amino Yoshihiko, "Deconstructing Japan," East Asian History 3 (June 1992): 121–42; Tessa Morris-Suzuki, Reinventing Japan: Time, Space, Nation (Armonk, N.Y., 1998); and Denoon, Multicultural Japan.
⁷⁹ Entry points into the now vast literature in Japanese on this topic include Arano Yasunori, et al., eds., Ajia no naka no Nihonshi (Tokyo, 1992); Asao Naohiro, et al., eds., Nihon Tsushi, Vol. 2, Chiikishi kenkyu no genjō to kadai (Tokyo, 1994); and Kikuchi Isao, Hoppōshi no naka no kinsei Nihon (Tokyo, 1991). In English, see Acta Asiatica 67 (August 1994), a special issue on "Foreign Relations of Tokugawa Japan: Sakoku Reconsidered." On the Japan Sea region and its links to the continent in the modern period, see Furushima Tadao, "'Omote Ajia' no 'Ura Nihon,'" Rekishigaku Kenkyu 610 (September 1990): 50–52; Abe Tsunehisa, Kindai Nihon chihō seitōshi ron—"Ura Nihon"-ka no naka no Niigata-ken seitō undō (Tokyo, 1996); Abe, "San'in chihō no 'Ura Nihon' ka ni tsuite no oboegaki," Shakai Kagaku Tōkyu 42 (March 1997): 171–96.
⁸⁰ David L. Howell, Capitalism from Within: Economy, Society, and the State in a Japanese Fishery (Berkeley, Calif., 1995); Richard Torrance, "Literacy and Modern Literature in the Izumo Region, 1880–1930," Journal of Japanese Studies 22 (Summer 1996): 327–62.
⁸¹ Henry D. Smith II, "The Floating World in Its Edo Locale, 1750–1850," in Donald Jenkins, ed., The Floating World Revisited (Honolulu, 1995), 25–46; Marcia Yonemoto, "Nihonbashi: Edo's Contested Center," East Asian History, forthcoming; Jinnai Hidenobu, Tokyo: A Spatial Anthropology, Kimiko Nishimura, trans. (Berkeley, Calif., 1995).
⁸² David L. Howell, "Ainu Ethnicity and the Boundaries of the Early Modern Japanese State," Past and Present 142 (1994): 69–93; Kären Wigen, "Bringing the World Back In: Meditations on the Space-Time of Japanese Early Modernity" (unpublished manuscript in author's possession).
⁸³ Tessa Morris-Suzuki, "Creating the Frontier: Border, Identity, and History in Japan's Far North," East Asian History 7 (June 1994): 1–24; Brett Walker, "Matsumae Domain and the Conquest of Ainu Lands: Ecology and Culture in Tokugawa Expansionism, 1593–1799" (PhD dissertation, University of Oregon, 1997).
⁸⁴ Arif Dirlik and Rob Wilson, eds., Asia/Pacific as Space of Cultural Production (Boulder, Colo., 1995); Prasenjit Duara, "Transnationalism and the Predicament of Sovereignty: China, 1900–1945," AHR 102 (October 1997): 1030–51; Pekka Korhonen, Japan and Asia Pacific Integration: Pacific Romances 1968–1996 (London, 1998).
⁸⁵ Nishiyama Matsunosuke, Edo Culture: Daily Life and Diversions in Urban Japan, 1600–1868, Gerald Groemer, trans. (Honolulu, 1997), 35–36.
⁸⁶ Pamela Kyle Crossley, "Manchu Education," in Woodside and Elman, Education and Society in Late Imperial China, 340–77.
⁸⁷ Ying-Chang Chuang and Arthur P. Wolf, "Marriage in Taiwan, 1885–1905: An Example of Regional Diversity," Journal of Asian Studies 54 (August 1995): 781–95.
⁸⁸ Janice E. Stockard, Daughters of the Canton Delta: Marriage Patterns and Economic Strategies in South China, 1860–1930 (Stanford, Calif., 1989).
⁸⁹ Agnes Smedley's escort in Canton, a young Lingnan Christian University professor who studied the silk industry, told her that the women of the Canton delta were "notorious throughout China as Lesbians." Smedley, Portraits of Chinese Women in Revolution (Old Westbury, N.Y., 1976), 105.
⁹⁰ Mann, Precious Records, 160.
⁹¹ Honig, Creating Chinese Ethnicity.
⁹² Gail Hershatter, Dangerous Pleasures: Prostitution and Modernity in Twentieth-Century Shanghai (Berkeley, Calif., 1997), 54, 347–48. For related observations, see Mann, Precious Records, chap. 5. On courtesans as regional icons in the past, see Wei Minghua, "The Thin Horses of Yangzhou," Antonia Finnane, trans., East Asian History 9 (June 1995): 47–66.

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