Yu Zhang, "Going to the Countryside: The Rural in the Modern Chinese Cultural Imagination, 1915–1965" (U Michigan Press, 2020)

Sep 20, 2025

Yu Zhang, Associate Professor at Hong Kong Polytechnic University, dives into the cultural significance of 'going to the countryside' in early 20th century China. She explores how this movement symbolized a bridge between urban and rural life, leading to revolutionary transformations. Key discussions include the impact of social surveys, the intertwining of romance and revolutionary politics, and how local gossip shaped political discourse. With intriguing insights on cinematic portrayals of collective labor, Zhang reveals the complex dynamics between rural experiences and modern Chinese identity.

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INSIGHT

Rural Ties Reframe Chinese Modernity

Chinese modernity must be read through rural-urban ties, not just cities like Shanghai.
The countryside shaped modern meanings and bridged urban and rural studies.

INSIGHT

The Countryside As Media Environment

Going to the countryside is a media-cultural practice that moves texts and technologies into rural life.
Media like lantern slides, primers, and posters helped construct a rural experiential realm.

INSIGHT

Three Eras Shape Rural Imaginaries

The book frames going to the countryside through enlightenment, revolution, and socialist industrialization.
It focuses on homecoming and venturing into unknown rural spaces to trace epistemic shifts.

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Since the beginning of the twentieth century, modern Chinese intellectuals, reformers, revolutionaries, leftist journalists, and idealistic youth often crossed the increasing gap between the city and the countryside, which made the act of "going to the countryside" a distinctively modern experience and a continuous practice in China. Such a spatial crossing eventually culminated in the socialist state program of "down to the villages" movements during the 1960s and 1970s. What then was the special significance of "going to the countryside" before that era? Yu Zhang explores the cultural representations and practices of this practice between 1915 and 1965, focusing on individual homecoming, rural reconstruction, revolutionary journeys, the revolutionary "going down to the people" as well as going to the frontiers and rural hometowns for socialist construction. As part of the larger discourses of enlightenment, revolution, and socialist industrialization, the act of going to the countryside entailed new ways of looking at the world and ordinary people, brought about new experiences of space and time, initiated new means of human communication and interaction, and generated new forms of cultural production. Going to the Countryside: The Rural in the Modern Chinese Cultural Imagination, 1915–1965 (U of Michigan Press, 2020) 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.

Jing Li teaches Chinese language and modern Chinese literature and film. Her research focuses on rural China and independent cinema. She is developing a public humanities project on Chinese rural cinema, and serves as guest editor for the Chinese Independent Film Archive (CIFA).

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