Helen F. Siu

Agents and victims in south China : accomplices in rural revolution

When peasants live in complex agrarian societies with distinct hierarchies of power, how much are they able to shape their world? In this socio economic, political, and anthropological history, Helen F. Siu explores this question by examining a rural community in Guangdong Province from the late nineteenth century to the present.

Recycling Tradition: Culture, History, and Political Economy in the Chrysanthemum Festivals of South China

In the mid-nineteenth century, a gentleman in Xiaolan having the Mai surname wrote in his memoir: Age eighteen, the forty-seventh year of Qianlongs reign [1782], there was a chrysanthemum festival. Each major surname group put on floral displays, and six platforms were set up throughout the town. There were scores of theatrical troupes whose performance brought together kinsmen and friends. The tradition of the festival started that year.

Redefining the Market Town through Festivals in South China

In David Faure’s paper on Foshan town (zhen) during the Ming (Faure, 1990), one finds dynamic processes of culture making. The mercantile elite created vast territorial bases in the sands with the language of lineage, reinforced by their ‘literati’ pretensions. They successfully marginalized former leaders whose power bases centred on local temples and negotiated their emergent positions in the expanded late imperial state. Their shrewd manoeuvres gave the town a peculiar flavour — fluid social mobility and public contests juxtaposed with increasingly established notions about identity, status and authority. The town gained significance as an open arena where cultural meanings and political agendas were debated and reworked, transmitted, experienced — out of which emerged notions about agriculture and trade, village and town, popular society and state, lineage and ethnicity, merchant and literati. These notions were perceptions of differences based in fact on intense social interaction and fluidity in membership. Faure’s treatment of the town’s cultural dynamics is quite similar to that of Raymond Williams on emergent images of country and city in English literature whose authors experienced unprecedented social change. (Williams, 1973)

Unity and Diversity: Explaining Culture and History

This is a personal reflection on how Professor G. William Skinner’s scholarship has deeply influenced generations of academics who are interested in state agrarian societies and their modern transformations. I juxtapose his regional systems analysis with the works of Maurice Freedman, Arthur Wolf, Myron Cohen, Barbara Ward, James Watson, and David Faure to highlight their perspectives in explaining unity and diversity in Chinese culture and history and in understanding ＂the original trans-local society and its modern fate.＂

Remade in Hong Kong

When China tells Hong Kong to ‘Keep on dancing, keep on horse racing’, locals ask to what extent ‘the people of Hong Kong’ can choose to dance to their own tunes?