What ever happened to Yan'an? Ka-ming Wu's thought-provoking Reinventing Chinese Tradition brings us up to date, based in fieldwork on the revitalization of “folk culture” in the Yan'an region in the 2000s. Wu's analysis remains firmly anchored in the history of the Yan'an period from 1935 to 1947, while at the same time bringing the study of this largely forgotten region into the present.
Wu's ethnography innovatively pushes forward the “invention of tradition” thesis by analyzing precisely how tradition is invented. Coining the term “hyper-folk” to highlight tradition's fundamental detachment from any type of stabilizing authentic origin, Wu poignantly traces how the production-cum-invention of “Chinese tradition” is always a site of struggles between multiple highly contentious narratives: traditional visions, Party-state interventions, market forces, and contemporary communal anxieties all come together to form today's “folk culture.” Wu develops this insight through a series of case studies of modes of folk culture in Yan'an today, focusing in turn on paper cutting, storytelling, and spirit mediums.
Wu begins by tracing the complex history of Yan'an paper cutting from the Maoist era to the present. She shows how, in the early Maoist era, local paper-cutting traditions became a target of socialist reformation, appropriating this medium to communicate the state's messages. In the 1980s, paper cutting was rediscovered as “folk culture” and thus came to represent a direct pathway to forgotten traditions, ironically imagined as unaffected by recent history. Then, in the 2000s, as capitalism expanded and rural areas became increasingly urbanized, paper cutting was dually envisioned as a medium for preserving the region's disappearing landscapes and a commodity for developing a tourist economy.
The contested nature of tradition is demonstrated powerfully in the second chapter's recounting of the attempt to establish Xiaocheng village in rural Shaanxi as a folk art village: tradition is neither naturally passed down from earlier generations nor purely invented in the present, but rather exists as a locus point of multiple contesting narratives among divergent players—locals, intellectuals, state officials, and developers—who ascribe different and even often diametrically opposed meanings to tradition itself.
Wu proceeds in chapters 3 and 4 to trace the path of storytelling as a folk tradition from the 1930s to the present. Originally used, like paper cutting, as a reformed medium to promote Party policies, storytelling experienced an unexpected revitalization in the reform era. Wu interprets this revitalization as being less about the stories themselves than about the gatherings they facilitate, providing a rare platform to gather and discuss emergent problems in rural Shaanxi: households split between the cities and the countryside, the lack of career prospects for youth in the area, and the lack of care for the elderly left behind by the young. Chapter 4 profiles a group of storytellers who make their living visiting work units, using this traditional medium to promote state-friendly messages for their own private profit: one ditty asserts “selfish and greedy thoughts hurt people, the heaven and the earth, people should be alert about the fakes, everyone learns the Law of Quality Control to facilitate the Great Development of West China” (p. 106). Wu provides unforgettable accounts of the tense negotiations held with any work unit unmotivated to purchase the storytellers’ services.
Finally, in chapter 5, Wu turns her analyses to spirit cults, consisting of largely female mediums who claim to be possessed by and speak for various deities. This chapter contains some of the most fascinating ethnographic details in the book, as Wu recounts various interactions with such “dancing deities” and their puzzling performances, as well as interviews detailing their life paths into this unique social role. Parallel to the therapeutic role of storytelling gatherings noted in earlier chapters, Wu argues that these spirit cults promote a surrogate rural subjectivity otherwise missing in an age of rapid urbanization.
Wu's ethnography provides novel insights into the ongoing and always contested production of tradition in China today. I strongly recommend the book to any historians and anthropologists dealing with the question of how actors in China are grappling with the country's invented but rhetorically insistent five millennia of cultural tradition.
My sole complaint about Reinventing Chinese Tradition is the all-too-brief two-page conclusion: considering the wealth of ethnographic materials and theoretical insights covered in the preceding chapters, the story comes to an all-too-sudden end. There is, nevertheless, still plenty for the reader to think through. I found myself particularly fascinated by Wu's historical insights into how the Chinese Communist Party used folk tradition as a medium to spread its messages under Mao: a point that raises thought-provoking questions about the “revolutionary” nature of the regime. The continued effects of the Maoist era on “tradition” today similarly raises important questions about precisely how different or similar the folk culture revitalization of today really is. Even the standard historical periodization that we use to discuss modern Chinese history and its relationship to tradition is also, like the traditions that Wu analyzes, a meeting point of multiple contesting narratives, making it fundamentally impossible to finally determine what is old and what is new, what is original and what is invented.
