Portraits of belief: Constructions of Chinese cultural identity in the two worlds of city and countryside in modern Sichuan Province

This project is an intellectual history addressing the question of who defines Chinese cultural identity in the post-Mao era (1976-present). The study focuses on the conflict of worldviews between intellectuals and villagers, both through intensively exploring the values, beliefs and reflections expressed by individual Chinese on the meaning of "Chinese traditional culture," and by critically examining the construction of social group identities on this contested field. It argues that the different conceptual worlds of intellectuals and villagers can be understood as diverging over the questions of belief and the definition of "Chineseness." In the post-Mao period, the dominant ideology of intellectuals in China--modernization nationalism--cast their group role as the conscience of society, an enlightened elite struggling to create a modern, rational Chinese cultural identity. Intellectuals defined their modernization mission, and their self-identity, in negative reference to what they term "peasant consciousness," an abstract construction through which they distilled the essence of problematic Chineseness, isolated the peasant personality as the pathogenic source of China's backwardness, and alienated peasant identity from their vision of what China should become. Despite the peasant consciousness stereotype, the goal of modernization was widely embraced in the countryside. But villagers weighed modernization's promise of increasing wealth against what they perceived as increasing moral disorientation and "chaos." In response to this social decay, villagers asserted their own sense of moral order, expressed through reflections on their historical experience, and in the revitalization of local religious traditions. The thesis argues that the conflicts with authorities over the rebirth of a local temple underscore the conceptual rift between intellectual elites and villagers surrounding the definition of Chinese cultural identity. The study is based on documentary evidence, and interviews with informants from widely different social contexts in Sichuan province (including villagers, academics, and poets), the research combines textual analysis and oral history with the participant-observation method of extended fieldwork in both urban and village settings.