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Date(s)： 2026/05/27
Time： 15:00~17:00
Venue： Archives 3rd Conference Hall
Host： Prof. Wu Jen-shu (Research fellow and Deputy Director, IMH, AS)
Speaker：Prof. 杜勇濤（Professor, History Department, Oklahoma State University）
Organizer： Urban History Research GroupState and Society Research Group、State and Society Research Group
Abstract, The suppression of local sentiment among the communist cadres is probably the least talked about among the cultural effects of the Communist revolution in China. This suppression can be found in many well-known characteristics of the Communist cadres, particularly in comparison with their late imperial counterpart. Whereas late imperial literati typically chose to spend their retirements, die, and get buried all in the home locale, the Communist veterans rarely returned home at the end of successful, even glamorous careers. The bond between fellow native-place men was crucial to the literati’s career; for the Communists, it mattered little and was often the target of party discipline and thought reforms. Serving the interests particularly of the native place and its people was inevitable and praiseworthy for the literati, whereas it became a taboo and stigma to the Communists. There is an unmistakable universalistic orientation in the Communist persona that appears incompatible with particularistic place affiliation. It is this orientation, riding on the tide of the Communist takeover of China in 1949, that helped effectively suppress the age-old localism of China’s ruling class and delivered a society that was not only “classless” but also “local-less”. But locality in China was far from being doomed from the beginning of its modern journey. Prior to 1949, in the several decades of political crisis, the local had been resorted to repeatedly as a powerful solution to the troubles of either the old dynasty or the new nation-state. In the republican era, modern intellectuals’ compilation of local gazetteer, which had been the major form of literati localist engagement in the late imperial era, reached a level never witnessed before in history. China’s new elites, from foreign-trained new intellectuals like Hu Shih to conservative political leaders like Chiang Kai-shek, generally retained the localist sentiment that they inherited from the old times. The Communist takeover in 1949 meant the millennium-long localism died a sudden death at the peak of its career. The fate of locality in modern China is vividly reflected in the life and career of Zhang Jinjian, hailing from Anyang where the discovery of oracle bones and the excavation at the Ruins of the Shang Dynasty capital brought world-wide fame to the place in the 20th century. Although Zhang was trained in social science at Stanford University, his engagement in the native place followed the same pattern as the Anyang literati in the past centuries. He also tried to bring the old-style literati localism into modern election politics and give it a new form. Zhang almost succeeded in this when the Communist win in the civil war changed everything. His efforts to recalibrate locality therefore died a sudden death just like locality itself. Before the fall of Anyang, however, Zhang managed to airlift from the besieged city hundreds of teenage students. Most of these youth ended up settling in Taiwan, like Zhang himself, and spent the rest of their lives yearning for a return to the hometown when they couldn’t, performing loyalty to the native place vicariously, and mourning for its death when they eventually made it to return.