2 - New Culture Lenses onto Rural Life

Summary

The series of ecological crises in the years after May Fourth in 1919 presented dramatic opportunities to employ methods and techniques of the social survey movement gaining momentum in China at the time. This chapter focuses on instances in which local accounts of earthquake and famine can be held up against reports by university students reporting on, roughly, the same time and places in Gansu and Zhili (Hebei) in 1920–21. Using the student-run magazine Xin Long (New Gansu) and student reports in Chenbao (Morning Post) and other Beijing dailies, the chapter juxtaposes accounts from different social networks for what it reveals about journalistic practices at a pivotal moment in twentieth- century revolutionary politics. As the chapter shows, student handling of disaster did not necessarily tinker with the time line of events, or with “factuality” itself. Student messaging was encoded with meaning, instead, through a combination of emphasis, repetition and pointed absences. In this way, May Fourth disaster coverage involved politics played at a deeper level than partisan political attack. With gentry or Buddhist initiative excised from disaster accounts – deinscribing, in other words, these actors’ significance from cultural memory – what remained in representations of rural life were dead cultures and communities.