In Yu Zhang's exciting new book Going to the Countryside, the rural is treated as a representational space open to interdisciplinary inquiries across the fields of literature, film, history, and cultural studies. Taking a cross-genre and intermedia approach, Zhang carefully attends to the local and the affective dimensions of modern Chinese experiences of “going to the countryside.” Her sources range from social survey essays to fiction and reportage, from illustrations to performance and film, from news essays to rural storytelling, through which she demonstrates how cultural productions have shaped new subjectivities and created affective and political communities.

Going to the Countryside is composed of three parts, and each part comprises two chapters. Part one, “The Rural as a Reflexive Vision of Chinese Enlightenment,” examines the individual mode of sentimental homecoming in chapter 1 and the reform mode of rural reconstruction in chapter 2. Chapter 1 stresses that the social survey essays and native soil fictions offer a critical entryway into understanding the experience of “going to the countryside” as a reflexive vison of Chinese Enlightenment during the May Fourth Movement. The individual mode of sentimental homecoming highlights the coexistence of different values and lifestyles rather than treating them as opposing ends.

I found chapter 2 particularly compelling. It focuses on the creation and practice of what Zhang terms a “rural vernacular,” a communicative mode encompassing lantern slides, illustrated primers, and spoken drama, all designed to be legible and accessible to the peasant population in Ding County, where the Rural Reconstruction Movement was carried out in the 1920s and 1930s. Zhang highlights the written, the visual, and the performative in the composition of such a “rural vernacular” and the “extraordinary, imaginative experiments” (p. 45) carried out by James Yen, Xiong Foxi, and their colleagues in Ding County. Through visual and theatrical practices, the introduction of the “guiding student” (daosheng), and the cultivation of the “scholar-farmer,” the movement was able to build substantial connections between rural education and the everyday lives of the peasants. Zhang treats Xiong Foxi's experiments with peasant theater as a new performance practice aimed at dissolving the boundaries between actors and spectacle, which, according to her, “created a pleasure that was centered on the ability of audience members to move into the show and that gave them power to command the spectacle” (p. 72).

Part two, “The Rural as a Constructive Vision of Chinese Revolution,” examines the revolutionary mode of journeys to Yan'an in chapter 3 and the love-law-labor conjunction in the Yan'an revolutionary culture of the 1940s in chapter 4. Chapter 3 juxtaposes the construction of a legendary Red China in Edgar Snow's 1936 Red Star over China with personal stories of Yan'an from Chen Xuezhao, Ding Ling, and Fang Ji. Zhang's perceptive analysis brings out Snow's representation of an “industrial culture” in Yan'an, which “played an important role in turning primitive living conditions into a communal life of dignity and vitality” (p. 88). She then moves on to a fascinating discussion of the “time consciousness” in Yan'an as reflected in Chen Xuezhao's 1940 A Visit to Yan'an. Chen complained that there was no sense of standard time in Yan'an, which led Zhang to reflect on quotidian details and their power to interrupt the transcendence of revolution. Zhang further articulates “the importance of being patient” in Yan'an through an analysis of Ding Ling's 1940 “In the Hospital” and Fang Ji's 1945 “The Power of the Loom.” Such a focus on patience illuminates an alternative way in which revolutionary passion manifests itself and enriches the affective regime of the rural in the Chinese revolutionary imagination.

Chapter 4 approaches the revolutionary mode of “going to the countryside” by examining Zhao Shuli's “The Marriage of Little Erhei” (1943) and the making of Ma Xiwu-Liu Qiao stories (1943–45). Zhang's comparative reading of Zhao Shuli's rural story in light of Zhang Ailing's urban fiction illustrates how revolutionary literature represented an aspiration to enable social practices to establish its political legitimacy (p. 119). Through a close reading of the adapted Liu Qiao stories, Zhang articulates how the labor hero, the weaving woman, the social scene of “man tilling, woman weaving,” and the foregrounding of the agricultural field all work together to demonstrate how cultural productions helped turn the rural into a multimedia space of revolutionary governance.

Part three, “The Rural as an Industrial Vision of Chinese Socialism,” investigates the creation of a rural industrial aesthetics in the 1950s and early 1960s in chapter 5 and the social engineering, industrial mode of going to the frontier from 1949 to 1965 in chapter 6. Chapter 5 highlights the formation of rural industrial culture in which collective labor is turned into a playful, artisanal experience in the 1959 film The Young People in Our Village. Zhang's sensitive attention to the issue of creativity drives home the argument that the screenscape itself became an audiovisual space to experiment with utopian dreams (p. 161). Zhang provides a convincing analysis of how a scene of partying smoothly transitions to a scene of laboring in the film (pp. 164–66) and stresses that such “fun” helped generate productive passion in socialist films and counteracted the reality of hard labor.

Taking readers on a journey through the first seventeen years of the People's Republic of China, chapter 6 places cinematic representations of urban youths’ experiences of railway travel and working in the frontier regions in the larger context of the socialist political culture. It examines a series of films featuring trains and trucks as inspirational works, motivating people to devote their youth to building socialism in underdeveloped areas. Zhang argues that the rural here was constructed as a new aesthetic realm in which camaraderie, professional care, domestic warmth, and communitarian intimacy generated energy for building socialism.

Zhang concludes by reiterating how the rural was turned into an experiential site to contest and reconceptualize a set of globally circulated ideas, such as enlightenment, universal education, nationhood, citizenship, revolution, romantic love, law, labor, and science and technology. The book's coverage of 1915 to 1965 crosses the 1949 divide, thereby providing a great opportunity to situate the Chinese case both historically and in a global context.

The book could be enriched by further contextualizing the history and historiography of the rural across time and space. Indeed, the modern construction of the folk, the rural, and the countryside have generated wide-ranging scholarship in multiple languages, my preliminary attempt at linking the folk and the avant-garde in modern China being just one among many.Footnote ¹ Scholarship on China's building a “new socialist village” could help connect this study to contemporary developments.Footnote ² The book could also benefit from a better dialogue between the main text and endnotes. For example, Zhang refutes treating this study as leading to the “going to the countryside” of the Cultural Revolution on a teleological historical path, but such an important discussion is buried in an endnote. Moreover, relevant illustrations could have enriched visual analysis throughout the book.

All in all, Zhang's historically grounded and globally conscious study of the rural in the modern Chinese imagination significantly contributes to the study of modern Chinese culture by foregrounding fantasies, aesthetics, and imagination regarding the countryside as a constitutive part in the making and remaking of modern China.