Going to the Countryside

Going to the Countryside: The Rural in the Modern Chinese Cultural Imagination, 1915–1965 argues that this new body of cultural productions did not merely turn the rural into a constantly changing representational space; most importantly, the rural has been constructed as a distinct modern experiential and aesthetic realm characterized by revolutionary changes in human conceptions and sentiments.

Through her close examinations of the practice, Yu Zhang shows a fundamental epistemic shift in modern China and ultimately how it creates a new aesthetic, social, and political landscape.