THE NATIONAL/THE LOCAL

Conflict, Negotiation, and Capitulation in the Revolutionary Imagination

When I use the word local here, it is a spatial concept that I counterpose to the centralized power of the national state. Of course, this concept cannot be delimited by the position of a local administrative entity, nor can it be contained in some naturalized geographical description. Rather, my interest is more on the multiple elements that comprise this space, such as systems, mores and customs, social groupings, the disposition of the population and its languages (or dialects), as well as those deep accumulated cultural modes that are hidden in the heart of these spaces. It is these multiple elements and their inner cultural modes that comprise what we will call the local or even local knowledge.

Naturally, one could unconsciously evoke the local as if it were a self-regulated or self-sufficient space; but I rather tend to see the national and the local in relations of mutual constitution. For the nation-state not only deploys myriad forms — as well as systemic methods — to effectively incorporate into itself local knowledge (for example, the ancient system of collecting folk songs); but at the same time, it deploys different methods to deeply implant its own political vision, its own quest for power, and its own forms of knowledge into the local (for example, the form of traditional storytelling). This is so much the case that the nation-state has become a sort of dominating ideological form.

It is precisely because of the complex interactive relationship between the state and the local that, in the process of China's modernization, the transformations in China's ruling power have never been simple substitutions of one kind of power for another kind. Rather, at the same time, these transformations have always also implied changes in the nation-state structure and its ideologies. It is precisely because nation-state ideology is in an instructional position with relation to the local that the disintegration of older national ideologies usually spreads to the local, even producing great instability and disorder in the local order. In certain historical descriptions — for example, in Zheng Chaolin's Memoir (Zheng Chaolin huiyilu) — we can see that popular disorder in Xiangping villages began only four or five years after the Xinhai Revolution [of 1911]. In these four or five years, "in order to express certain differ