Since the beginning of the twentieth century, modern Chinese
intellectuals, reformers, revolutionaries, leftist journalists, and
idealistic youth had often crossed the increasing gap between the
city and the countryside, which made the act of "going to the
countryside" a distinctively modern experience and a continuous
practice in China. Such a spatial crossing eventually culminated in
the socialist state program of "down to the villages" movements
during the 1960s and 1970s. What, then, was the special
significance of "going to the countryside" before that era? Going
to the Countryside deals with the cultural representations and
practices of this practice between 1915 and 1965, focusing on
individual homecoming, rural reconstruction, revolutionary journeys
to Yan'an, the revolutionary "going down to the people" as well as
going to the frontiers and rural hometowns for socialist
construction. As part of the larger discourses of enlightenment,
revolution, and socialist industrialization, "going to the
countryside" entailed new ways of looking at the world and ordinary
people, brought about new experiences of space and time, initiated
new means of human communication and interaction, generated new
forms of cultural production, revealed a fundamental epistemic
shift in modern China, and ultimately created a new aesthetic,
social, and political landscape. As a critical response to the
"urban turn" in the past few decades, this book brings the rural
back to the central concern of Chinese cultural studies and aims to
bridge the city and the countryside as two types of important
geographical entities, which have often remained as disparate
scholarly subjects of inquiry in the current state of China
studies. Chinese modernity has been characterized by a dual process
that created problems from the vast gap between the city and the
countryside but simultaneously initiated constant efforts to cope
with the gap personally, collectively, and institutionally. The
process of "crossing" two distinct geographical spaces was often
presented as continuous explorations of various ways of
establishing the connectivity, interaction, and relationship of
these two imagined geographical entities. Going to the Countryside
argues that this new body of cultural productions did not merely
turn the rural into a constantly changing representational space;
most importantly, the rural has been constructed as a distinct
modern experiential and aesthetic realm characterized by
revolutionary changes in human conceptions and sentiments.
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