For centuries, China was a collection of local places where ancestral home and local roots were essential to people’s life and career. This lifeworld was shattered by the Communist Resolution, but not before some of its brightest sons made efforts to bring it into modern times.
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Why did China become a single country unlike Europe? Can birthplace still be called home anymore in the twenty-first century?
One man’s story from Anyang may provide answers to these intractable conundrums. For centuries China was, just like Europe, a patchwork of ancestral homes and familial roots that rallied people’s lives and careers around local gentry elites. The political and intellectual revolutions of the twentieth century shattered the lifeworld of “old” China such as Anyang on the Central Plain.
Unlike their forefathers, most men of letters began to pursue diverse careers, loosened their links with their ancestral origins, and, if at all, only returned there late in life. Zhang Jinjian (1902–1989), our protagonist, an Anyang native and American-trained political scientist, fought to remodel the age-old gentry localism, and carried it into the young Republic of China founded in 1912. The effort eventually failed during the Communist revolution. Under the totalitarian regime, Anyang was reduced to little more than an administrative entity devoid of its cultural uniqueness. In the failure, however, both the place and Zhang’s experiences pointed to the road not taken in modern China—an alternative to the rootless People's Republic.
Yongtao Du PhD is Associate Professor of History of East Asia at Oklahoma State University.
Why did China become a single country unlike Europe? Can birthplace still be called home anymore in the twenty-first century?
One man’s story from Anyang may provide answers to these intractable conundrums. For centuries China was, just like Europe, a patchwork of ancestral homes and familial roots that rallied people’s lives and careers around local gentry elites. The political and intellectual revolutions of the twentieth century shattered the lifeworld of “old” China such as Anyang on the Central Plain.
Unlike their forefathers, most men of letters began to pursue diverse careers, loosened their links with their ancestral origins, and, if at all, only returned there late in life. Zhang Jinjian (1902–1989), our protagonist, an Anyang native and American-trained political scientist, fought to remodel the age-old gentry localism, and carried it into the young Republic of China founded in 1912. The effort eventually failed during the Communist revolution. Under the totalitarian regime, Anyang was reduced to little more than an administrative entity devoid of its cultural uniqueness. In the failure, however, both the place and Zhang’s experiences pointed to the road not taken in modern China—an alternative to the rootless People's Republic.
Yongtao Du PhD is Associate Professor of History of East Asia at Oklahoma State University.
