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.
Om författaren
Dr Dong Wang Ph D is a historian of U.S.-China relations, modern and contemporary China, and China and the world. She is a naturalized American citizen (since 2006) and a permanent German resident (since 2012) based in Boston, Massachusetts, the Lower Rhine of Germany, and Shanghai where she holds a university chair in history. She conducts original research in Chinese, English, French, German, and Japanese while also learning Russian. Her books include Longmen’s Stone Buddhas and Cultural Heritage: When Antiquity Met Modernity in China (2020), The United States and China: A History from the Eighteenth Century to the Present (2nd and rev. ed. 2021), Managing God’s Higher Learning: U.S.-China Cultural Encounter and Canton Christian College (Lingnan University), 1888-1952 (2007), and China’s Unequal Treaties: Narrating National History (2005).
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