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Chinese consumers: The Romantic reappraisal
Michael B Griffiths, Malcolm Chapman and Flemming Christiansen
Ethnography 2010 11: 331
DOI: 10.1177/1466138110370412

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Article
Ethnography
11(3) 331–357
Chinese consumers: ! The Author(s) 2010
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DOI: 10.1177/1466138110370412
eth.sagepub.com
Michael B Griffiths, Malcolm Chapman
and Flemming Christiansen
University of Leeds, UK

Abstract
Drawing on evidence from Anshan City, Liaoning Province, the People’s Republic of
China, we argue that the recent commodification and proliferation of idyllicized repre-
sentations of rurality, a trend that runs directly counter to the symbolic infrastructure
of China’s mass urbanization and industrialization, indicates a paradigm shift in Chinese
consumer perceptions. We explore a theory of the ‘Romantic reappraisal of Chinese
consumer values’, drawing upon the reappraisal of values ascribed to the ‘Romantic
period’ which followed the industrial revolution in Britain and Western Europe in the
late 18th century. Similarities and differences with this earlier shift are explored. One of
the authors has spent several lengthy periods of ethnographic investigation in Anshan
since 2005, drawing on networks from a wide range of social spheres.

Keywords
China, consumer, self, other, urban, rural, Romantic reappraisal, authenticity

Most studies of consumption in contemporary China are of a quantitative nature,
and are centred on Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, Hong Kong, and to a lesser
extent on other ﬁrst-tier provincial cities (e.g. Cui and Liu, 2001; Paek and Pan,
2004; Zhou and Hui, 2003). Though qualitative work on the impact of urbanization
on China’s ‘Consumer Revolution’ (Davis, 2000; Li, 1998) exists, the emerging
transdisciplinary ﬁeld of Urban China Studies reports very little research on the
second- and third-tier cities of China (Ma, 2006). Excellent recent research ethno-
graphic in style has come out of Harbin, the capital of Heilongjiang Province
(Hanser, 2008; Hsu, 2005) – part of what a previous generation called
Manchuria and that became known as Manchukuo under de facto Japanese occu-
pation between 1931 and the end of the Second World War. Our research is similar,
but located in Anshan, the third city of Liaoning province in China’s North East,

Corresponding author:
Michael B. Griffiths, National Institute of Chinese Studies, White Rose East Asia Centre, University of Leeds,
14–20 Cromer Terrace, Leeds LS2 9JT, UK. Email: mbgriffiths@gmail.com


332 Ethnography 11(3)

thus extending research into one of those many hundreds of China’s smaller cities
that commentators from the world of commerce suggest present the highest poten-
tial for new growth in consumer-oriented business (Lane et al., 2006; Rein, 2008).
China is of course a vast country/market characterized by immense diversity
(Schmitt, 1997; Walters and Samiee, 2003), yet Anshan is likely to represent
much of China’s rich internal dynamics. Anshan’s consumers are undoubtedly
among those that social scientists and international marketers most urgently
need to understand. The analysis presented here is based on data collected for a
much larger work from more than 200 people over three years through participa-
tion and in-depth interviews.

Self/other, and the urban/rural contrast
The theory underscoring our research is the anthropological conﬁrmation that
human societies have tended to deﬁne themselves as ‘orderly’ by reference to the
natural (non-human) world as a source of metaphors concerning order and disor-
der (see Ardener, 1989; Douglas, 1966; Durkheim and Mauss, 1963; Ellen and
´
Reason, 1979; Levi-Strauss, 1962; Turner, 1967). We build on the idea that
people/s have opposed themselves to the perceived ‘disorder’ of the natural
world, and also very commonly to the perceived ‘disorder’ of their social and
geographical human neighbours, rather than making this case de novo (see the
works already cited, and the extensive discussion in Chapman, 1992). We maintain
that, in many cultures, the opposition ‘order/disorder’ is viewed as congruent with
the opposition ‘culture/nature’; and that these oppositions are often used by a
culture, or a society, to characterize ‘self’ in contrast to ‘other’, where ‘other’ can
either be the natural world, or other cultures and societies which fail to measure up
to the standards of orderliness that the ‘self’ imposes on its environment as a result
of its own conceptual structures and preoccupations. We maintain (again in align-
ment with a well-established anthropological tradition) that the ‘self/other’ oppo-
sition is closely related to a list of congruent oppositions, as follows:

Self/other – the basic oppositions:

Self/Other
Rule/Disrule (absence of rule)
Order/Disorder
Culture/Nature
Human/Animal
Controlled/Uncontrolled
Lawful/Lawless
Clean/Dirty

We assume, for the moment, that the ‘self’ characterizes itself as good and
virtuous while characterizing the ‘other’ as bad and lacking in virtue.1


Griffiths et al. 333

Whether these oppositions are fundamental patterns inscribed in human evolu-
tion or superficially similar functions of social development is not our concern here.
Suffice to say that many of the major changes in human social conditions, over
dramatically different time scales, can arguably be interpreted within a ‘nature/
culture’ opposition. The move from the ‘raw’ to the ‘cooked’, both literally and
metaphorically, has famously been claimed to be an important, even universal,
feature of the evolution of the human mind and body, with multiple consequences
for how homo sapiens perceives the world.2 These changes can be lived and under-
stood in terms of great economic and demographic shifts over millennia, and in
terms of little things of the moment.
We concentrate on the urban/rural recension of these oppositions. Our argu-
ment holds that the urban/rural opposition, as it is lived by those involved, is often
characterized using the ‘self/other’ oppositions listed above. We focus on what is
perhaps the most important social, economic and demographic development of our
age – China’s urbanization – arguing that the ‘self/other’ oppositions listed above
resonate strongly in this context.
Our primary contribution relates to the new and different modulation in the way
city people talk about the rural which acute European observers of urban life in
China will have recently picked up. The note is familiar, and resonates with cultural
tenors of the European urbanization process. This research aims to explore the
parallels and differences between the current Chinese dynamics and those in the
European past, arguing that new forms of consumption in contemporary China
can be usefully understood through the prism of the so-called ‘Romantic reapprai-
sal of values’.
In Europe, of course, before the industrial revolution, ‘town’ and ‘country’
tended to be contrasted to the credit of the former and the disdain of the
latter: ‘town’ was where to find good taste and good manners; ‘country’ was
where to find ignorance and simplicity. The ‘first’ industrial revolution in
(parts of) England and (parts of) Scotland, through changes in land use and
rural technology, coupled with new technologies and the rise of manufacturing
in the towns, led to large population movements from country to town (Glass
and Eversley, 1965; Mathias, 1983). Although conditions for the urban poor
in the towns were meagre, the very fact that rural–urban migrations continued
meant that the town was perceived to offer something – work, opportunity,
possible wealth.
As rural people came to the towns, with no or rather increasingly obsolete
agricultural skills, the townspeople continued to operate the contrast of ‘town’
and ‘country’ as ‘urbane’ and ‘rustic’ (the etymologies of the adjectives resonate
with the ideas). Simply put, as cities grew in importance, high fashion, high taste,
and high manners found their focus and expression in the urban life of the
privileged. Urban life also offered possibilities of social mobility that the older
social structures of rural life did not. Dick Whittington went to London because,
he had heard, ‘the streets were paved with gold’.3 This was all to change with the
Romantic reappraisal of values.



Self/other, the rural/urban contrast, and the Romantic
reappraisal
Short of defining romanticism, we will sketch the social, demographic and eco-
nomic circumstances of its emergence.
As urban life began to dominate the UK, from (say) the mid-18th century
onwards, in senses at once political, economic, demographic and cultural, so we
get the first expression of the idea that rural life was both at risk of disappearance
and contained virtues which urban life did not. In industrializing Europe, these
ideas are closely associated with the complex network of ideas and action that
is usually called ‘romanticism’. Key to this was Macpherson’s Ossian, published
between 1760 and 1763. Before Ossian, outsiders experienced the Highlands of
Scotland as wild, undesirable and dangerous. Ossian established a place (the
Highlands of Scotland), an ethnicity (the Scottish and Irish Gaels), a language
(Gaelic), and a landscape (wild, mountainous), as quintessential locations
of Romanticism and of its desires and aspirations. A literature around
these themes arose across 18th- and 19th-century Europe, with Rousseau,
Wordsworth, Goethe and Herder as great innovators seeking meaning in a wild,
primitive world (see Wu, 1999).
An important theme of romanticism was to reappraise the source of order and
virtue. Generally speaking, in 17th- and 18th-century Europe, civility and manners
were regarded as the result of education and discipline; their lack left only
brutishness and ignorance. These metaphors applied to people, and to the societies
and landscapes in which they lived. Against the cultured and stilted elegance
and rational circumspection of culture rose a restless passion and natural urge
for the real, primitive and wild, best expressed in Sturm und Drang (the German
name for the early Romantic Movement). Romanticism thus provided a new,
contrary, and enduringly influential view – that beauty and virtue emerged directly
from wildness and naturality, and that education and discipline diminished,
destroyed and enchained them. Rural and wild landscapes, rural people and
fringe people, peripheral customs and marginal languages, all became subject to
this reappraisal.
We have argued that the basic ‘self/other’ oppositions listed above almost con-
stitute ‘human universals’, in a structural anthropological sense. It has also been
argued that these oppositions, refracted through the lens of romanticism, generated
a new but related set of metaphors:

Self/other – the Romantic reappraisal:

Self/Other
Constraint (rule)/Freedom (disrule, absence of rule)
Predictable (order)/Unpredictable (disorder)
Artificial (human)/Natural (animal)
Urban (culture)/Rural (nature)



Reserved (controlled)/Impulsive (uncontrolled)
Formal (controlled)/Informal (uncontrolled)
Conventional (lawful)/Creative (lawless)
Sterile (clean)/Fertile (dirty)

We term this the ‘Romantic reappraisal’ (after Chapman, 1992; see
Gajewska-de Mattos et al., 2004), because the oppositions remain the same,
but the ‘values’ (that is to say, whether the left and right hand columns are
seen to be a virtue or not) change. The old oppositions, in parentheses, give
way to the new glosses of the Romantic reappraisal before the parentheses.
So whereas rule, order, law, control and cleanliness once characterized the
‘self’, the ‘self’ now emerges as constrained, predictable, artificial and sterile.
Whereas before we had, as characteristics of the ‘other’, misrule, disorder,
lack of control, and dirt, we now find freedom, creativity, impulsiveness and
fertility.
This article argues that the urban/rural aspects of these oppositions have appli-
cation to the rural/urban meeting in China, situating Anshan as the main locus
for our argument, a city of heavy industry currently undergoing intense urbaniza-
tion, in many ways the last place one would expect to find a ‘Romantic reappraisal’
of consumer values. We show how the process of the ‘Romantic reappraisal’
is manifested in a range of specific, local and temporal contexts, contending in
particular that new forms of food, leisure and clothing consumption conjure
`
an image of the rural ‘Other’ in order to facilitate its internalization vis-a-vis
the pursuit of authenticity and unity of self-definition as understood by the
urbanized sphere.
The new forms of consumption we present as evidence have barely been
documented by professional literature. A range of Chinese scholars have charted
the emergence of the highly relevant nongjiale (happy farmer) facilities on the
outskirts of towns and cities around China, but these studies are limited to an
economics and rural tourism development perspective; they do not examine
these practices as situated within shifting, structured discourses driven by indi-
vidual actors (Han, 2006; He, 2006). Some of these same scholars have also
published in the English-language journal Mountain Research and Development,
but with much the same macro-economic and policy inflection (He et al., 2004).
The Chinese language ‘Survey of the Chinese Middle Classes’ edited by Zhou
Xiaohong (2005: 287) briefly alludes to the sociology of the practices we
observe, but only in passing. But enough can be garnered from contemporary
newspaper articles to indicate that the phenomena we discuss are new and
proliferating rapidly across China, and that wherever they are manifest they
share a similar form; relevant articles in the Anshan area spiked from 2006
onwards. As far as we are aware, however, no extant literature has synthesized
the trends we observe into an argument that addresses their structural tectonics
or that makes sufficient allowance for the role of individual agency in their
genesis.



The rural/urban dichotomy in China
China’s social history did differ significantly from Europe’s, and so did the great
narratives of the rural, even if some examples of colonial projections of European
rurality in the context of early 20th-century Shanghai have been documented
(Gerth, 2004; Lee, 1999).
In China’s traditional Confucian universe agriculture occupied a central posi-
tion, with peasants ranking second after scholar-bureaucrats, followed by artisans
and merchants. Agriculture was seen as a creator of nourishment, while the
scholar-bureaucrats gave (moral) leadership. This thinking (pretty much compara-
ble to European physiocratic thought) was sustained by bringing rural areas into
the empire through lineages that controlled land, replicated imperial rites, and
trained the brightest of their young for officialdom. Lineage structure, ancestor
worship and Confucian teaching amalgamated into a structure of elite control and
agricultural management.
The arrival of modernity broke the link with the rural. The view of lineage as
repressive for women (concubinage, bound feet, male inheritance) and the urban/
treaty port setting of modern life (Yeh, 1992) meant that new political elites
regarded the lineage and rural power as dark forces, holding China back.
Nationalists sought to undermine lineages through, for example, taxation and
inheritance laws. The Communists later revolutionized rural areas through peasant
organizations, land reform and collectivization, leading through the disastrous
Great Leap Forward of 1957 to the rural people’s commune system, which was
finally stabilized in 1962. When the Nationalists split with the Communists in 1927,
the Communists retreated into rural base areas from where they conducted guer-
rilla warfare. From the mid-1930s till 1949, the Communist leadership stayed in
Yan’an, a northern semi-arid region with a poor agricultural economy. The relative
hardship imposed a regime of frugality and egalitarianism, combined with infor-
mality, on the Party leadership. Mao Zedong’s ‘Report on the Peasant Movement
in Hunan’ of 1927 (outlining the strategy for peasant revolution), and the exposure
of the top leaders to a simple life, made the Communists credible allies of the
poorest peasants, and gave them an edge over other forces in China at the time.
Yan’an, accordingly, has entered public perception as the ‘golden age’ of
Communism and remains the symbolic source of legitimacy for the contemporary
Chinese Communist Party (CCP) (Apter and Saich, 1994; Selden, 1971). This res-
onated with a classical dichotomy of frugality and righteousness versus hedonism
and transgression, evident in heroic narratives of the Three Kingdoms (San Guo
Yanyi) and the Water Margin (Shuihu Zhuan), allowing rural deprivation to sig-
nify Communist moral supremacy (Ci, 1994).
In the 1950s the long-term task of the CCP was phrased as resolving the ‘Three
Big Differences’ (between cities and countryside, industry and agriculture, and
physical and mental labour). The economy was divided into two sectors that
were differently organized: rural areas, with collective ownership of the means of
production within the cellular, jurisdiction-based structure of the people’s



communes (Chan et al., 1984; Potter and Potter, 1990; Shue, 1988); and urban
areas, with (mainly) state ownership of the means of production, organized in work
units (gongzuo danwei) (Lu and Perry, 1997; Walder, 1986). Public Security,
¨
Labour, and Personnel bureaux only allowed labourers needed in urban industry
to live in cities. The hukou (household registration) system was invented to police
this, explicitly registering individuals’ jurisdiction of legal abode and status of
‘agricultural’ or ‘urban resident’ (Christiansen, 1990; Wang, 2005). As a conse-
quence, social contact declined, and the de facto apex of career aspiration of
rural people ended in the people’s commune hierarchy. Rural–urban intermarriage
became rare. The rural–urban boundary hardened to an extent never before seen in
China. Expansion of cities halted in the 1960s and 1970s, and the rural/urban
divide appeared permanent and absolute. The rural areas were poorer than the
cities; movement from rural to urban was seen as positive, and movement in the
other direction seen as negative. Sending cadres and intellectuals to the countryside
during the Cultural Revolution often involved revoking urban resident status as a
punishment. From the early 1960s, ‘young intellectuals’ (zhishi qingnian), meaning
secondary school leavers, were ‘sent down’ to the countryside, to learn to withstand
hardship (chiku, literally ‘eat bitterness’), and to learn the right revolutionary spirit
from the peasant masses (for the huge literary heritage on this movement, see Cao,
2003).
Post-1949, accordingly, the urban and rural populations have been idealized,
planned and managed in very specific ways. In this, central state interventions in
the ideology and enactment of the urban/rural contrast had profound influence.
Urban and rural people, and the discourses on their place in the social order, did
not grow organically but were centrally controlled and policed. Urban residents
were undoubtedly privileged by the social and economic benefits of belonging to
their work units. Peasants, however, were encouraged to think of themselves as
equal partners with their urban comrades in the Communist enterprise. Their fru-
gality and hard work were lauded as examples to all, and popular expressions such
as ‘take pleasure in poverty’ (yiqiongweile) became mantras to live by.
The iconic representations of the rural other by the CCP are closely linked with
the political economy. Perhaps the greatest mythological representation is about
Dazhai (a poor production brigade), which improved the land through terracing,
led by its heroically determined head Chen Yonggui. Heavy torrents washed away
the terraces, but the peasants rebuilt them, undeterred, following the spirit
described in Mao’s ‘The Old Foolish Man Who Removed the Mountain’ (Yu
Gong Yi Shan), achieving ‘bumper harvests’ (fengshou) happily ever after. The
Dazhai yarn is based on real events, real people and a real place, but the narrative
is woven into a colourful presentation of peasant virtue and revolutionary spirit,
allowing it to be used as a model (see Landsberger, 1998; Sigurdson, 2004). The
narrative and the hugely visual propaganda surrounding Dazhai had great effect,
and the place itself became a centre for worship of revolutionary fervour, visited by
people from all over China and abroad (Zhao and Woudstra, 2007). Its signifi-
cance, politically, was that the accounting unit (collective proxy owner) was



a production brigade rather than a production team. The larger scale of egalitarian,
collective management in a brigade allowed, in the view of radicals in the CCP,
a better and more revolutionary scale of operation. Dazhai thus became not only
a model for emulation in its spirit, but also in terms of what was a policy dis-
pute over the organization of the production structure. Chen Yonggui was ‘heli-
copter’ promoted into the core leadership of China, serving as vice-premier of the
State Council. Other similar examples include the ‘little sisters of the grasslands’
(Bulag, 1999) – the crassly caricatured, colourful, and innocent revolutionary
counterpoint to the industrial/urban part of the dual political economy which
was symbolized by Daqing’s proletarian oil fields, an icon of perfect industrial
production.
As a broader cultural (and less politicized) undercurrent regaining vigour in the
1980s, Chinese New Year posters tend to have strong, positive images of a boun-
tiful rural happiness. They are cleansed of symbolic references to old-style lineage
life, but depict rich harvests, fish (as a symbol of surplus), and smiling, fat baby
boys (sometimes matched with baby girls, especially in recent years – but the whole
point is of course about traditional prosperity) with traditionally cropped hair, and
with the ‘god of wealth’ (caishen) and old-style coins referring to business wealth.
These very widespread posters of rural wealth (or the rural as source of wealth)
contradict in a way the frugality, deprivation and hard labour themes, but at the
same time underpin the colourful, picturesque notions of simple rural life.
The visual aspect of the New Year posters spills over into the ‘classical’ (i.e.
1950s–70s) Huxian (or Hu County) paintings which depict a highly structured,
well-organized, simple yet mechanized and partly industrialized rural idyll, painted
in bright poster-type colours (many were reproduced as posters), often in pano-
ramas with narrative detail. As a general point, people’s lives are simple, and they
always look industrially occupied with handiwork or political study. The message
is that order, a simple life, harmony and naturalness reign. The pictures are man-
aged in their detail and produced a powerful image of the countryside, which
downplayed the agit-prop realism of propaganda heroism: the heroism lay in the
plain living of ordinary people, well-organized, well-nourished, and selfless in
an unaffected way.
The stereotypical juxtaposition of rural idyll and urban industriousness in such
agit-prop art was a powerful manifestation of the ‘Three Big Differences’ govern-
ment policy aimed to erode but, de facto, consolidated and deepened. The predic-
ament was one of social separation of the rural from the urban, of propagandistic
suppression of the basic opposition that associates the rural ‘other’ with filth
and disorder.
It was not until the 1979 reforms that China began to turn into a society where
individuals could manifest their preferences in action and consumption. As the
reforms moved on, several things quickly became clear. One was that rural disad-
vantage was widespread and keenly felt (Chen and Wu, 2004). Another was that
official views of rural life were profoundly in conflict with reality (Wang, 2005). Yet
another was that millions of rural inhabitants were anxious to get to the towns



(Zhang, 2001). The hukou system remains formally in place, although millions of
migrant workers choose to ignore it, and local governments enforce it only when
politically expedient – moving ‘undesirables’ out of the cities and so on (Dutton,
1998). The accumulation of new capital in China’s cities partly depends on the
exploitation of rural aspirations to the urban (Hanser, 2005; Pun, 2005), which is
why the mass movement of rural people has been tolerated. Most international
business with China depends on this too (Chan, 2001). But the point is made again
and again in the literature that freeing individual consumer choice has given greater
agency and political freedom to China (Davis, 2000, 2005).
Although rural–urban relationships in China thus historically served central,
state discourses of development, China has in the most recent years experienced
a new Romantic reappraisal resting on three elements that also characterized the
early industrializing countries of Europe: rapid growth of cities; rapid growth of
manufacturing industry in these cities; and mass movement from the rural to the
urban environment. These movements are now more spontaneous in China than
they have been for decades, and in this respect also they resemble the more organic,
less planned, development of Europe in an earlier period.

The rural/urban metaphoric in China: The basic
oppositions in Anshan
If we compare China in 2008 with the UK and mainland European experience, it is
a society where the pre-Romantic, urbanizing and industrializing current is at full
voltage, driving internal migration, industrial production, consumption, social
aspiration and so on (Chen and Sun, 2006; Smart and Zhang, 2006). In such an
environment, we find that the rural is considered ‘natural’, in a generally dispar-
aging way: the rural is dirty, ignorant, lacking in taste and manners, disorderly and
threatening. The urban, by contrast, is considered ‘cultured’, in a generally praise-
worthy way: the urban is clean, polished, rich in taste and manners, orderly and
safe (Lei, 2003).
With its state-owned steel and mineral mining industry structure, Anshan was
slow to feel the benefits of China’s economic reforms, and has been hurt by massive
layoffs since the mid-1990s (e.g. Solinger, 2001). It has, however, recently managed
to cultivate a booming private sector and commercial centre. This is partly because
Angang, the giant steel refinery at Anshan’s core, an icon of Soviet-style produc-
tivity under Mao, is one of the few state-owned enterprises in China’s North East
that managed reform effectively, achieving both real efficiency gains and local and
regional economic growth through a painful transition involving high levels of
redundancies.
In Anshan in 2009, towering structures of steel and glass define the horizon. The
tatty and monochrome greyness of 1980s concrete is being flattened to make way
for the promise of new distinguished urban living. The largest shopping complex in
all of Liaoning was built in the city centre in 2005; another was already under
construction by 2007; yet another in 2008. Total consumer expenditure for the



11 months of 2006 until November was 22.5bn rmb (US$3.1bn), up 14 percent on
2005 (Qianshan Wanbao, 12 December 2006). Retail giants Carrefour and Tesco,
and a number of large Hong Kong and mainland firms, entered from 2007
onwards. The present and the future look like high-rise concrete, glossy magazines
and consumer gratification. Unequivocally, the city is where the action is, and
where people want to be.
Those most moved by this vision, and arguably those most challenged by it, are
the estimated 0.5 million migrants from rural areas in other jurisdictions who by
2004 had joined Anshan’s 1.7 million registered ‘urban’ inhabitants (Anshan’s
registered ‘rural’ population counts another 1.7 million people, that is, the locally
registered population was 3.4 million in 2004, while the de facto population was
3.9 million). The migrants have come for the dream – the dream of consumption, of
social aspiration, of streets paved with gold. They are, however, disadvantaged in
many ways; they are poor, they are not well-educated, they are obliged to accept
jobs at the bottom of the scales of earning and prestige, a predicament recorded by
Griffiths in his extensive field work among them (Griffiths, 2009a, 2009b), and by
Hanser (2005) and Hsu (2005). Moreover, rural migrants still remain very much
prevented by the hukou system (see above) from accessing the benefits of manda-
tory health, education and child-care that registered ‘urban’ residents enjoy
(Solinger, 1999) in spite of legislation in the most recent years to improve their
conditions.
We can look again at the basic oppositions of the ‘self/other’ distinction, and
point out some of the small practicalities of this, as these are realized in the lives
of those involved in the urban/rural meeting in Anshan. Society exerts its desire
for orderliness upon many areas of material and mental life. Prominent
among these are, for example: the presence, movement and dispersal of people;
sexuality, and the prevalence and distribution of its practice and expression; food
preparation and consumption; the construction and interpretation of cleanliness;
and so on. Disorderliness in these areas is often attributed to those people
and places that are beyond, or come from beyond, the bounds of urban civility.
Looking at the contemporary Chinese example, we see that these areas are all
vividly alive in the experience and interpretations of the society that is being
reported.
Take the presence, movement and dispersal of people. The urban dwellers of
Anshan know the urban space: they have defined it; they know where they should
be, and when; they know where to find one another. The new in-migrants from
rural areas are often homeless, or in temporary, shifting and illegal accommoda-
tion. They are conspicuously present on the streets, moving without anywhere
obvious to go, searching and needy. They have scant means of cleaning themselves
or their clothes. They are, from the perspective of the urban residents, manifestly
‘disorderly, uncontrolled, lawless and dirty’ (and all the other related adjectives
and judgements that this metaphoric can generate). In these circumstances, visual
metaphors, particularly ‘blindness’, may combine with a liquid metaphor such as
‘flow’, ‘tide’, ‘drift’, ‘float’ or ‘current’ to make constructions such as ‘blindly



flowing with the tide’ (see also Lee, 1996). By the mid-1990s the expressions ‘liu-
dong renkou’ (floating population) and ‘mangliu’ (blind floater) – a perversion of
the earlier term ‘liumang’ which was used to describe all manner of persons from
wayward criminal types to homosexuals as well as to an internally migrant popu-
lation – were in popular usage (Dutton, 1998). The meeting of different classifica-
tory systems frequently produces observations of this kind (Ardener, 1989;
Chapman, 1992).
Take sexuality, and the prevalence and distribution of its practice and expres-
sion. Many of the recent migrants from rural areas are young. The presence of their
sexuality can seem like both a threat and a temptation. Many young female
migrants who often encounter discrimination on account of their gender and
age, that is, where younger and more productive bodies are seen as more desirable
than older and less productive ones, work in the sex industry and in its penumbra
of semi-respectable occupations (Zheng, 2007). The coming together of perception
(there seems to be a lot of youthful sexuality around) with reality (many young
female migrants actually do work in the sex industry) is confirming (Hyde, 2001).
There are also matters of dress. Young urban women have a range of dress pos-
sibilities by which they make themselves look both trendy and sexually attractive.
These fashions are copied by young women new to the city. They are, however,
inexpertly adopted, either through lack of means or lack of relevant judgement
(Lei, 2003). This inexpert copying can easily lead to what looks like flagrant sexual
provocation, as too much naked flesh is displayed, or as the boundary between
legitimate and illegitimate sexuality is inadvertently crossed.
The following excerpt from an interview illustrates well how these distinctions
can overlap. The speaker, a 23-year-old woman from a broadly ‘middle-class’
urban family, addresses ‘hairdressers’, who are often rural migrants and who
often offer a range of services outside the scope of that usually provided by hair-
dressers in the UK:

Hairdressers look like whores with their blonde hair. They smoke, they have bad skin.
They look like they’ve got an illness. They look like poor people who work in massage
parlours. They all think that if they’ve got blonde hair they’re not only fashionable but
also different from other people: they think they have a unique individuality. They
don’t know how to use make-up; they put it on but don’t know how to make it look
nice. They think make-up and blonde hair is a way to attract men. This is a way to
hide their dark side: because they do this kind of work they are always feeling very
guilty. Blonde hair shows that they’re confident and have nothing to hide; they think
strong colours are attractive and confident. It’s like they’ve nothing to hide; it’s like a
mask, it’s like they are living under a mask. They’re like a package: they’re dirty on the
inside but they try to make themselves clean on the outside. Before they were all poor,
but now they try to show as much as they can. This is because, deep down in their
hearts, they don’t want other people to think they are poor again. Something they
can’t change is that their inside is still poor; they can’t package, they can’t wrap up,
their spirit.



Take, now, the construction and interpretation of cleanliness. Rural life has soil
and water, and consequent mud. Rural life has people and animals urinating and
defecating. Urban life either does not have these things, or hides them. Rural
migrants are accustomed to levels of ‘dirt’ (mud, say) on skin and clothes that
may be unacceptable in the urban environment. They may feel themselves to be
normally presentable, while in a state of apparent uncleanliness to their urban
observers. They also live in conditions which make attention to the cleanliness of
body and clothes difficult. Again, reality and perception compound one another.
The character for ‘soil’ (tu) is variously applied to mean: ‘crude’, ‘lacking in sophis-
tication’, ‘handmade’, or ‘rustic’, so implying proximity to the land, the past, the
traditional and the local. The same expression is used to denigrate inappropriate
or unrefined matching of clothes, colours, or unguardedly conspicuous forms of
consumption. It can also indicate characteristically coarse, uncivil or obtrusive
public behaviours. The perceived opposites of tu, less explicitly used in practice,
are yang, which has a decidedly Western flavour meaning literally ‘foreign’ or
‘overseas’ (which in the China context means ‘the West’), and ya, which means
‘refined’ or ‘cultured’ (as in wenya, a term closely linked with urban intellectuals).
Notwithstanding the resurgence of Chinese consumer nationalism (Hooper, 2000),
the attendant successes of Chinese domestic brands in the elegant setting of con-
temporary urban China (Ewing et al., 2002), and the ‘localization’ of Western
tastes in China more generally (Eckhardt and Houston, 2002; Zhou and Belk,
2004), ‘the West’ remains where higher tastes are thought to derive from (Dirlik,
2001; Wei and Pan, 1999).
The ‘flow’ (liu) of rural migrants into the cities contrasts with the rootedness
of tu: peasants should know where they belong (Dutton, 1998). However, the
movement from the fields to the cities in China is so recent and rapid that many
urban people still have one foot in the countryside. The tu quality is about the
purity and innocence of ignorant ‘peasants’, and everything that comes with
that – rootedness, family, simplicity – and any scorn is paralleled by a certain
affection; not least because of the political idealization of China’s peasants
under Mao (see above), to overtly scorn peasants remains a social faux pas
in urban China. Although urbanites do liberally condescend to the rural, the
discourse is most often implicit, just beneath the surface of everyday life. Where
it does become explicit, in the form of critical remarks or invective, there is
usually also a certain caution, and an acute consciousness of shared recent
experience of hardship. Those most given to scorn are likely those closest to
the fields themselves. Consider the following statement from an elderly urban
woman:

Participant: Rural people haven’t studied; they’ve got no knowledge; they haven’t
read anything; not even a newspaper . . . They’re really black; they’ve been burnt
really black by the sun. They look old, and they dress unfashionably. They’re
vulgar and dressed all in a mess (worse than a dog fart) . . . The younger rural people
want to make themselves look like urban people, they learn from the city.



Researcher: What do city people think about this?

Participant: We look down on them; they’re dirty as hell! . . . They don’t even wash
their fruit before they eat!

When we say that urban residents perceive rural in-migrants as ‘disorderly, lawless,
and dirty’, it should be clear by now that there are multiple arenas of fact and
perception, thought and action, where these perceptions can be generated and
sustained. Why should urban residents do anything other than disdain their
rural counterparts?

The Romantic reappraisal of Chinese consumer values
We have seen how urban Anshan presents multiple confirmations of the ‘basic
oppositions’ – a picture of urban taste, manners and sophistication, contrasted
with rural squalor and backwardness. In thought and practice, this is overwhel-
mingly the dominant discourse.
However, there are the first whispers of change. The exhibition centre of
Anshan’s Urban Planning Department strongly emphasizes nature in the plans
for 2010: promoting urban afforestation and prioritizing the natural environment
above other concerns. In the promotion of tourism, ‘natural’ attractions – natural
spring health spas and rural or nature tourism – stand out. Of course, these reflect
the Chinese government’s millennium goal of achieving a ‘harmonious society’ –
balancing man and nature, rich and poor, China and the world, etc. Promoting
rural tourism as a means to boost economic growth is part of this strategy (Sofield
and Li, 1998). But we are arguing for something more fundamental, more auton-
omous, more ‘grassroots’, than the mere meddling of the state.
A will towards nature seems to underpin the conception around the year 2000 of
‘Green Wisdom Estate’ (lu zhihui cheng), a large area of high-quality housing
¨se
sufficiently far away from the city centre to necessitate owning a car – a criterion
that ensures that only the reasonably wealthy can move there. A similarly exclusive
place has been carved out of the city centre called ‘Great Moral Verdurous Pagoda’
(Dade cuiyuan huating). The guarded gates prevent undesirables from entering (and
particularly prevent peasants selling rural produce; there are some fine ironies in all
this). The sign above the gates presents the name, as is the fashion, in English as
well as Chinese, to show that the ideas embodied by the space are modern and
desirable.
In the interaction of the ‘basic oppositions’ and the ‘Romantic reappraisal’, it is
worth looking at the ‘moral’ (de) of ‘Great Moral Verdurous Pagoda’ as part of a
major theme of contemporary Chinese consumer culture. The state currently
attempts to force about ‘civilization’ (wenming), a discourse which both replaces
and extends an earlier discourse on ‘population quality’ (renkou suzhi) and ‘quality
education’ (suzhi jiaoyu) which conflated the issues of procreation (high fertility),
lack of education, manners and progress among rural people and the lower rungs



of urban society, promoting educational solutions (Fong, 2007; Kipnis, 2007;
Murphy, 2004; Yan, 2003). The central government is particularly keen to improve
behaviour in the public environment – to decrease the prevalence of spitting, for
example. This discourse juxtaposes national pride, sporting excellence and new civil
norms in TV adverts promoting the 2008 Beijing Olympics. You should not spit in
the ‘Great Moral Greenery Place’, or sell vegetables there. This is ‘greenery’ san-
itized – a slice of the natural world without the dirt. This step towards a re-evalua-
tion of the natural world is both tentative and highly qualified. It is, moreover, very
clearly articulated and designed by wealthier urban dwellers. The rural peasants
and their habits are not welcome. We are still very close to the basic oppositions.
We already see in the literature that ‘green’ consumption is becoming a popular
and distinctive theme in China (Chan, 1999) – signifying the need for harmony
between environment, health and consumption: ‘good citizenship’ in short – but we
have not yet seen the idea that rurality itself, ‘warts and all’, should be desirable.
More interesting, however, and more dramatic, are some evidences of a
re-evaluation of food and food consumption (see also Griffiths, 2009a). Since
2004, a number of restaurants and shops offering explicitly ‘rural’ produce have
opened in Anshan’s central commercial district. Among the names given to these
are: ‘nongcun caiguan’ (rural restaurant); ‘tucaiguan’ (rural/local food restaurant);
‘tujiacai’ (rural home food); ‘jiaxiang caiguan’ (hometown food restaurant); or
‘jiachangcai’ (home style cooking). These businesses are successfully selling rural
and natural virtue to the wealthier urban classes. One important metaphor,
reflected in the names of a number of restaurants, invokes the opposition between
‘culiang’ (coarse grain) and ‘xiliang’ (fine grain) cereals. ‘Coarse grain’ cereals are
those which are whole and unhusked; ‘fine grain’ cereals are those which have had
the husks removed. In the industrialized world, technologies for milling grain were
employed to remove the husks, so that the grain was ‘polished’. The consumption
of white flour, white bread and white rice became the norm. Whole grain was old-
fashioned. The terms ‘fine’ and ‘coarse’, and ‘polished’ and ‘unpolished’, implied a
distribution of virtue towards the former. In the second half of the 20th century,
however, changes in evaluation that were a complex and interesting mix of dietary
and moral issues, led to a concern for ‘whole grain’ foods – breakfast cereals,
breads and so on. The new terminology, with the emphasis on the natural virtue
of ‘wholeness’, indicates the nature of the re-evaluation. White bread has become,
in many contexts in the UK, a ‘lower class’ food. Something like the same sequence
of changes seems to be happening in China, but a generation or so behind. Before
the economic reforms of the late 1970s, food in general was scarce, and common
people ate only culiang, the coarse grain: xiliang was rare. After the reforms, xiliang
became much more readily available, and coarse grains went almost entirely out of
fashion in urban circles. Xiliang was refined, in both a physical and a moral sense,
while the coarse culiang was the food of poor peasants.
Since 2004, however, ‘coarse grain’ has re-entered city life in Anshan. A restau-
rant called Xiandai Culiang (‘Modern Coarse Grain’) opened in Anshan city centre
in October 2006, to join three others also with ‘coarse grain’ names. ‘Modern



Coarse Grain’ is exceptionally clean both inside and out, and yet the manager,
chefs and clients all call the food ‘nongjiacai’ (peasant family food). The food is
attractively presented, the tables have table cloths, the chefs (migrant workers from
rural regions) wear clean whites. Only a small proportion of Anshan’s population
can afford to eat in such a place, and probably a smaller number still would see the
point of doing so.
Staff in ‘Modern Coarse Grain’ argued that ‘urban people are used to fine grains
of the city’ (chengshideren yijing xiguanle chengshide de xiliang), and ‘want to
change to peasant tastes’ (xiang huanhuan nongmin de kouwei). The manager was
careful to point out that this was not just ‘coarse grain’ (culiang), but ‘modern
coarse grain’, and as such a new sophistication: ‘modern people already have high
tastes’ (xiandairen de kouwei yijing hen gaole). According to one chef, it was the
range of healthy ‘green food’ dishes (lu¨se shipin) that distinguished ‘modern’ culiang
from plain-old ordinary culiang. Consumers in this restaurant explained their liking
for it with phrases and adjectives like: ‘have no pollution’ (meiyou wuran), ‘no
chemicals’ (meiyou huaxue), ‘healthy’ (jiankang), ‘natural’ (ziran), and ‘pure’
(chun). Some referred to a ‘return to the simple and plain’ (fanpu guizhen), and
to ‘going back to nature’ (huigui ziran).
A shop called the ‘Local Products Shop’ (Tutechan shangdian) opened in 2006,
and became an instant success. It sells a variety of rural, ‘homemade’, ‘handmade’,
and even ‘wild’ (ye) produce. The bulk of its products come from the small nearby
city of Benxi. In conversation with the shopkeeper here we are told: When seen
from the perspective of science, ‘local products’ are ‘original/primeval’ (yuanshi)
and ‘have not suffered pollution’ (meishouguo wuran). ‘Yuanshi’ here is as opposed
to ‘refined’ and shares semantic proximity with ‘pristine’, ‘untouched’ and
‘uncooked’. Mentions are made of ‘pure wild ginseng, the best known to man,
not like the transplanted stuff’, and several rural locations are referred to as the
sources of these kinds of purity. The shopkeeper waxes lyrical about rough cloth
and candles ‘from places where the wind of reform has never blown’ working a
myth of the pure, exotic and remote rural ‘Other’.
Among the most popular products at the ‘Local Products Shop’ are packets of
pancakes (jianbing) with a ‘chiku’ (eating bitterness) theme. The pancakes, made
from coarse grain, are sold as ‘Zhiqing jianbing’, the ‘young intellectual pancake’,
looking back to the ‘purification’ of young and educated urban souls during the
Cultural Revolution (Davies, 2005). This theme of rural nostalgia (Gao, 2008) is
not one which has any obvious parallel in the UK experience. The front-side pack-
aging of the pancakes features a simple sketch drawing of three peasants sitting on
the ground happily eating these jianbing, having laid their wheat sheaves and sickles
(liandao) to the side. The rear-side packaging of the pancakes invites consumers to
‘feel the era of the sent down intellectual youth, taste the charm of the rural’
(ganshou zhiqing shidai, pinwei xiangcun fengyun), ‘exercise body and spirit’
(lianxi ziji de shenxin), ‘experience rural life’ (tixian nongcun shenghuo) and ‘support
the development of rural areas’ (zhichi nongcun fazhan). It is in many ways extraor-
dinary that the Cultural Revolution and its events could be used to promote



anything at all, given the damage caused by the period. This nostalgic and some-
what leisurely re-interpretation, somewhat at odds with the political ardour por-
trayed in the Huxian paintings discussed above, was mentioned in passing recently
in the Journal of International Business Studies (Hung et al., 2006). We see this
element as symptomatic of a much broader, profound and current shift in con-
sumer desires/behaviours.

Romancing the rural Other – further evidence
The experiences of sent-down youths (zhishi qingnian; or shangshan xiaxiang
qingnian) have left strong traces in China. Basically around 17 million school
leavers are believed to have been deprived of their urban resident status and
sent to the countryside between 1962 and 1979. The policy was stopped in
1979, when the last five million were invited back into the urban economy.
A large contingent of them were admitted to higher education through highly
competitive entrance examinations in 1979 and 1980 to make up for their lost
opportunities; they formed a highly life-experienced group of ‘adult’ students,
and many made a career in the 1980s and 1990s. Their shared experience trans-
lated into networks and ‘subcultures’ like restaurants in major cities styled on
hardship and local food from the far-flung destinations of their banishment.
These included Heilongjiang and Inner Mongolia (major destination of people
from Beijing) and Yunnan (major destination of people from Shanghai).
Television melodramas and literature picked up core themes of adolescent love
in rural poverty in beautiful settings; betrayal of youth friendships during urban
adulthood, when mandated by greed and new opportunities; existential searches
of the ‘fruits of love’ of sent-down youths with peasants going to the cities to find
their parents (involving themes of unrecognized and almost consummated incest);
or old lovers from the rural youth finding themselves entangled in intractable
quandrangles of passion, doubtful parenthood of children, etc. Themes in the
cultural representation of this span opposite like: repression, deprivation, love,
loyalty, and simplicity (rural), versus freedom, material wealth, opportunist liai-
sons, betrayal, and complexity (urban).
We argue that the value reversals/Romantic reappraisals we are looking at today
incorporate and are informed by these issues. These opposites are not straightfor-
ward, but we can explore some instances of their occurrence that will allow us to
trace inflections over the theme, understanding them in their discursive context. In
particular, some of them are strong political images that are tying poverty and
backwardness into a perception of order and low-level prosperity, identifying her-
oism in selflessness (and self-sacrifice) or in plain living, weakness versus collective
strength, and reliance on the state versus self-sufficiency (see the cultural represen-
tations of the rural under Mao – Dazhai, etc. – discussed above). Others are
glossing over the rural as a traditional source of wealth, or as exotic patterns (as
in the calendars discussed above).



In the 1970s, the Huxian paintings, although rather naı¨ vist in style, were in
essence realist, avoiding distortions of forms. In the 1990s a new generation of
peasant paintings, some even capitalizing on the Huxian ‘brand’, has introduced
new types of motifs, borrowing and adopting naı¨ vist and cubist traits from generic
Chinese and national minority folk patterns used in traditional paper cuts and
batik.4 This new peasant art downplays or even avoids ‘real life’ simplicity, asso-
ciating rurality with abstract forms and crudely colourful motifs. The stylized and
exoto-eroticized representation of the rural has thus become less ‘down-to-earth’
(tu) and more ‘Othered’ – more (genuinely) romanticized (see Schein, 1994).
Since 2005, we have observed the emergence of women’s clothes stores in various
Chinese cities at both middling and higher ends of the market, selling clothes with
rural/ethnic minority themes as far apart as Shanghai, Hangzhou and Beijing.
Situated in an undercover market area at Jing’an in one of the most upmarket
areas of downtown Shanghai, Zhou, a small-scale independent trader, owns three
small shops selling clothes styled similarly to those worn by peasants living in
mountainous regions of China’s far-away interior provinces. The garments,
made of coarse, roughly cut fabrics, many with elaborate patterns or fringes, are
clearly designed to evoke an ‘ethnic’, ‘peripheral’, ‘minority’, as well as ‘rural’,
response. This kind of style is unprecedented in urban China: why would anyone
want to look like a peasant? The ideograph above Zhou’s shop-front itself speaks
of the blurring of boundaries and reversal of signifiers we are arguing for: it is far
from clear whether the shop-name reads ‘yishang’ (clothing fashion) or ‘nongshang’
(short for ‘rural fashion’), a most extraordinary juxtaposition of characters. Zhou
says the style has come over from Japan; she seems to feel that this fact has much to
do with the desirability of her product – ‘China’s fashion is always following Japan’
– indicating that she is perhaps not entirely aware of the significance of what she is
selling herself. Regardless, Zhou’s clothes have been very successful with
youngfemale consumers seeking something out-of-the-ordinary, and since Zhou
knows that she is the only trader in the area exploiting this theme at present, she
plans to open still more stores. On the streets outside the market area where Zhou’s
stores are located, beneath the vast concrete flyovers and towering malls selling
Chanel and Dior, a family of homeless ethnic minority migrants from Xinjiang
Province try to sell handmade beads and trinkets to whoever will give them the time
of day, a reminder that acting rural as a consumer is not at all the same as actually
being rural.
A related phenomenon, with perhaps even more far-reaching consequences,
involves urban consumers from Anshan going to rural areas (nongcun) to experi-
ence and consume (see Griffiths, 2009a). This phenomenon is distinctly different to
the state-sponsored or large industrial-scale countryside tourism complexes that
employ a rural veneer but remain nevertheless urban and contrived in their feel.
Many of these outlets in the borderlands between the city outskirt and countryside
are natural health spas by day that become pumping karaoke bars and dens of
licentiousness, prostitution and general waywardness after dark – distinctly urban
trappings that prey off the eroticization of the rural ‘Other’ by night, offering up



almost invariably rural women for consumption by urban clients. The ‘Otherness’
of the women may be deliberately exploited to enhance this appeal, as in the case of
Teresa Hyde’s work on Yunnan where Han Chinese women disguise themselves as
minority Dai (Hyde, 2001).
Around the towns and cities of Liaoning, independent peasant-family entrepre-
neurs have transformed their homes and lifestyles to cater to urbanites who have
begun to seek out ‘home-cooked’ food and clean air in their newly acquired cars.
The converted home restaurants are known as ‘nongjiayuan’ – (farmers’ courtyard);
the general phenomenon goes by the name ‘nongjiale’ (literally ‘happy farmer’).
Consumers eat, sleep, drink heartily, and play cards alongside peasants in an envi-
ronment that affords them the luxury of not having to abide by the urban ‘rules’ for
behaviour. Here the behaviourisms regarded as ‘tu’ are celebrated in an orgy as
consumers stick their hands in the soil, metaphorically speaking. Some may fish
using ‘primitive’ methods; some may pick their own grapes and vegetables; others
will select their game for slaughter, but perhaps leave the job itself to the propri-
etor; still others will use these businesses as platforms for hill-walking and camping.
In many cases, apart from the presence of urban consumers and cash, the only
difference between the ‘nongjiayuan’ and plain-old ordinary peasant homes is the
shop-front sign itself, which may be no more than a few hand-scrawled characters –
‘rural accommodation’ (nongshe), ‘rural snack food’ (nongcun xiaochi), ‘peasant
family farmhouse food’ (nongjia fanzhuang), or ‘farmhouse courtyard food’
(zhuangjiayuan fanzhuang). The iron cooking-pans, the smoke filled kitchens, and
the ‘firebeds’ (huokang) where guests will warm themselves alongside the resident
family in the winter, are identical to the neighbours’. The experience sought is much
more than just the food itself: it is explicitly about the rediscovery of the familial,
the naı¨ ve, and the innocent – a world pre-dating the complexities, social competi-
tion and judgement of the contemporary urban era, fast vanishing under deserts of
steel and glass.
Customers at the nongjiyuan speak about consuming the re-enacted rural in the
same way as the consumers in the urban ‘coarse grain’ restaurants (‘healthy’; ‘no
pollution’; ‘back to nature’; ‘back to the pure and simple’, etc.). Here, though, they
explicitly add a little ‘eating bitterness’ (chiku) to their palate. This reveals a certain
demographic trend: though their families may accompany them, it is quite often the
generation who actually experienced the Cultural Revolution who are the prime
movers of these behaviours. But this is not just nostalgia: this is self-cultivation; a
kind of moral training – a new kind of moral training, significantly different from
the era of egalitarianism and shared hardship, though this is what is ostensibly
invoked. Many parents explain that this kind of consumption is ‘good for educat-
ing’ their pampered urban children, who have never known the idea that the rural
could be desirable, and who remain largely unimpressed. But by no means all
urbanites of this age are jumping at the chance to eat up bitterness; life for most
of the urban poor in China’s cities is still quite bitter enough already. And the last
thing urbanites who have just recently come into new money will want to do is to
consume alongside peasants. The shift in values we are describing is distinctly the



province of those urban consumers possessed anew of ‘middle-class’ dispositions as
well as a surplus of time and money.

The pursuit of authenticity: A discourse of individuality
In an article from Renmin Ribao (Haiwaiban) (22 September 2007, Tourism, p. 3)
the reader is encouraged to follow a group of youths as they embark on the new
craze of ‘self-driving’ (zijia) into the distant mountains to the north of Beijing. ‘I
just want to escape the city’s showiness and clamour (fuhua), let my moods have
unbridled (ziyi) relaxation in the blue hills and green water, and find a long lost
stimulation and pulse in an easy and comfortable life’, plays the popular song that
the protagonists listen to as they drive their Mazda 6. The explorers are headed for
a holiday village known as ‘Mountain Bar’ set in an idyllic rural location. On the
face of things, the trip is about the pursuit of the nongjiayuan cooking and expe-
rience. The journalist romanticizes the scene: ‘With a gentle breeze stroking the face
and the babbling sound of the brook filling the ears, it really feels like one is in
paradise.’
It is clear that the urbanites consuming the rural in the nongcun are engaging in a
Romantic reappraisal of the kind described above. Various points need to be
stressed here. First, given the immense power of the drive towards urbanization
and economic development in China, this reappraisal of the rural is an extraordi-
nary and possibly extremely important phenomenon. Second, it is a phenomenon
in the very early stages of its realization. Third, the reappraisal is entirely in the
hands of ‘middle-class’ urbanites; it is a variation on the dominant discourse, and
they are still in charge of it. The rural is packaged and made available for the
‘arbiter elegantium’ (Bourdieu, 2005: 255), when, how, and where they want it. The
rural is not experienced in its entirety, but only as a series of virtues arising from
the romantic re-evaluation – dirt, disease, poverty, parasites and starvation are not
part of the desired experience, except perhaps as a marginal and imaginary thrill.
The re-evaluation of the rural is an urban re-evaluation of the rural; it is not a
re-evaluation of the rural by itself. This is supported by the secondary literature
cited, and the chronological pattern of its emergence: the ‘nongjiale’ phenomenon
emerged first in the outskirts of China’s larger metropolitan cities before only later
appearing around provincial and county towns – it is urban driven.
Importantly, the urbanites do not passively engage with the countryside; they
are not merely nostalgic or eco-conscious about it. The expression is about the
assertion of the self: they desire to consume the very best nature has to offer even as
they drive around at top speed polluting it. The ‘self-drive’ article (see above)
describes how middle-aged working adults from Beijing find liberation in pushing
the limits of control: ‘Never mind the straight and narrow path of her daily job,
and the fact that she’s driving on windy old roads’, nurse Meng ‘drives at speeds of
up to 100 km per hour, earning her increased respect from the younger people
sat in the back’. Similarly, dog trainer Yin, ‘who dared to ride the whirlwind
with nurse Meng’, says: ‘The more precipitous the road is, the more those who



love self-drive touring are tempted by it.’ Thus, the race is on to be the first to
rupture nature’s hymen, the first to be identified with the new symbolic order, the
first to drive a stake into the unspoilt, and make it subject. We have already made
the point about this being a consumer-driven movement rather than a mechanism
of the state: a romantic ‘breaking free’ and self-realization clearly relates to the
argument in the literature about consumption being a vehicle to greater agency and
political freedoms in China, an argument that until now has proved ‘seductive but
unconvincing’ (Dutton, 1998: 273; see Pun, 2003). But lest we create the impression
that there is something in this for everyone, let us remember that this phenomenon
is highly exclusive: though poorer urbanites may occasionally find a way to enjoy
the fruits of the nongjiayuan too, this is less likely, and perhaps they do not appre-
ciate it in the same way. There is a freedom of sorts here, and there might be
something in it for everyone in time, but the phenomenon is perhaps better con-
ceptualized in terms of competing for social power: for distinction from one’s past
or that of one’s family – one only re-invokes it in order to consume it and thus
master it utterly, to sever the root that makes one still tu – and for distinction from
the vast majority of China’s population as they struggle to establish themselves in
the cities. Now that the cities are ‘flooded’ with migrating peasants in search of
work, what more tasteful than to aspire to make of what the commonest and
lowliest of peasants regard as the most common and lowly objects of consumption
objects of desire, luxury, beauty, and even art.

Return to the source: Profiting from the new hyperrurality
The peasant entrepreneurs, who have profited from the reappraisal, are not com-
plaining, however. They are offered a means of self-validation and a means of
earning, and it perhaps does not matter that they are dependent on the dominant
urban discourse for their livelihood.
Consider this fieldnote narrative from a nongjiayuan set up two years ago beside
the main road leading up towards the Qianshan mountains. The owners say this is
a brand new trend. Previously it was just a peasant home. They believe their road-
side location gives them an edge over the nongjiayuan further up into the mountains
because consumers have to pay a 50 rmb surcharge to enter the area of scenic
reserve, whereas here they can pull in right off the road. Consumers here can
rent a room for 50 rmb for as many people as one cares to fit in. Wood collected
during the winter is burnt for fuel, which keeps the costs down. There is a natural
well used for washing dishes. There are big(ish) spiders and the smell of chickens in
the run, animal excrement of various varieties on the floor, dust in the air and
smoke from the wood fires.

‘This place is really sincere/honest (shizai), just like home’, says the host. ‘The city is
formal (zhenggui) but out here you can do as you please (suibian)’, says another. ‘In
the city you have to sit like this . . . but here it’s relaxing (fangsong): in the city one can’t
relax when eating, one has to ‘‘behave’’.’



The host goes on:

Here, waitresses don’t follow the customers; in the city, they wait and serve, making
people feel uncomfortable. Here, they won’t even come over to you if you don’t ask.
In the city you need to listen to the staff and sit when they say so, but here you can sit
whenever you want. This gives you a ‘home-feeling’, relaxed; you can do whatever you
want to do, not like in the city.

All persons present say there is no pollution in the water. ‘Here’, the host says, ‘we
have the big iron pan (datieguo); this kind of feeling can’t be found in the city.’ It is
argued that the foods sold here have a better, more genuine taste than in the city.
They guarantee the fish and vegetables are fresh: customers can pick or choose
them themselves. Customers can also pick their own fruit from the trees in the
garden and eat as much as they like for free. Fresh dates and sunflower seeds are
picked from the garden. ‘Try these dates’, we are urged. ‘They’re a completely
different taste from the ones you’ll find in the city.’

‘Even the 5-star professional chefs in the city can’t cook the real rural food that we
cook; they may add luxury sauces etc., but we get real chickens from the hillside. We
fry caterpillars out here, and little fairy insects that no-one in the city has ever even
heard of. This is specialized/special character food (tese cai). You can experience what
you can’t experience in the city. Goose, duck, chicken, pigeon, fish, natural, natural,
all the animals that fly in the sky and all the animals that swim in the river, we have
them all here to eat . . . The pork in the city can’t even compare to the pork here. Here
the pig grows 1–2 years naturally; in the city it grows 1–2 months and is fed by
chemicals. So they’re no competition; you can’t even talk about us competing with
them . . . We only eat/use in-season vegetables; we never buy food from the greenhouse
(artificially raised).’

‘What is the fundamental feeling offered by the places like this?’, we ask. ‘It gives the
urban people the feeling of being ‘‘sent down’’ in ’66 (the Cultural Revolution)’, comes
the reply.

‘Who comes here to eat?’, we ask.

‘City people mostly, with cars. They come from Shenyang too. Students from Anshan
Science and Technology University (back down the long road towards Anshan City)
too, in big parties. The customers are not necessarily rich since a table is only 1–200
kuai [i.e. rmb], but with spare time and money. They are the luxury class
(xiuxian dengji).’

Some of these peasant entrepreneurs have become considerably wealthy. Their
offering is, we might say, at the very beginning of its product life cycle, and we
do not know what the end will be. The irony of peasants getting rich by



offering an idyllicized version of themselves up to urban consumers for con-
sumption is doubly thick: the peasants’ uprisings in the Communist revolution
were directed against the rich landlords, leading us to ask whether this
Romantic reversal has completed the ideological shift from Communism to
capitalism.
It is worth further stressing that the nongjiayuan compete fiercely, and one of
the most important dimensions of their competition concerns authenticity. In a
way, the most authentic are the dirtiest, most diseased and most poverty-
stricken. For the consumers, however, the demands of comfort and pleasure
are in conflict with the extremes of authenticity. There then arise interesting
comparative matters which will be the arena of contestation in coming years.
How rough-hewn and humble do you need to be? What is the optimum com-
bination of pain and pleasure? Even in the same nongjiayuan, consumers will
behave very differently: those slightly older consumers who forfeited an educa-
tion in return for a truly authentic experience of eating rural bitterness in the
Cultural Revolution, now recently laid off early from reforming state-owned-
enterprises, easily slip back into those ‘authentic’ behaviours increasingly inap-
propriate in the cities – spitting, shirts off, shouting, public drunkenness and
competitive displays of comradeship, for example. But younger professional con-
sumers who were educated during the early years of reform, though they seek
the authentically rural on the face of things, nevertheless continue to conduct
themselves in accordance with the ‘civil’ norms of the city: they do not spit, they
remain fully clothed, they do not forcefully compel each other to drink more,
their voices cannot be heard from other tables, they leave their empty beer
bottles on the table between them, that is, together, rather than piling
them up in individual piles on the floor behind their own seats as if to say
‘mine’s bigger than yours’, as the formerly mentioned people can often be
observed to do.
Where, then, is the real nongcun? How far does one have to go into the hills and
‘wild’ country in its pursuit? How far up the long road into the Qianshan moun-
tains does one have to go before one gets to the real rural? Certainly past what
usually passes for nongjiale – the pumping karaoke bars and morally ambiguous
spas, etc. Certainly past the ‘tourist’ district, an area of Buddhist shrines, where all
but local peasants have to pay an entrance fee. The mountains roll on and on for
hours, ever further away from the city; but even here, we still find astute peasants
who, although they have not altered their homes at all, not even posted a sign, yet
stand by the roadside calling: ‘Come here to eat rural food, come here to stay’ (lai
dao zher chi nongcun cai, lai dao zher zhu). Customers at the nongjiyuan speak
wistfully of the ‘real’ nongcun, referring to ever more distant regions elsewhere in
the northeast – Inner Mongolia, Xinjiang, places ever more bitter, ever more poor.
But, of course, the further one goes in pursuit of the authentic rural, the closer one
gets to the real old-style dangers of rural life. The call of the romanticized rural gets
ever fainter the closer one gets to the source of its purity. But the boundary is
always being pushed back: the fainter the call, the more refined is its pursuit.



Consumption, the environment, and the Chinese individual
China has some of the most polluted cities in the world. It has traffic jams and air
pollution. It has water pollution on an epic scale. It has massive urban populations,
growing all the time as the rural poor flee rural poverty. For the urban dwellers
with the means, the weekend trip out to the nongjiayuan to breathe clean, fresh air
and eat natural homegrown food is highly appealing. Where the consumer pioneers
are going today, all of China may go tomorrow.
In Anshan, the journey from industrialization to the beginnings of whole grain
has taken only about 25 years. Current indications are that China cannot sustain
the urbanization of the remainder of its non-urban population (approximately 800
million people), especially at the current rate of change. We expect too, then, that
aspiring urbanites will quickly realize that owning a car and sitting in traffic on the
smog-filled roads of the world’s most polluted cities is not the vision of the urban
sphere they had imagined, and will reject urbanism as the paradigm of desire.
Environmental management and economic policy may be altered to capitalize
upon and best manage this zeitgeist. Slowing the rush to the cities will take time,
but certainly economic development in rural areas has an important part to play: if
the rural economy can be improved, perhaps by initially offering urbanites access
to a ‘hyperrealist’ version of the rural, complete with bare chests and muddy hands
but stripped of the disease, crushing poverty, and violence which has characterized
the ‘real’ recent rural past, perhaps the ‘real’ can be eclipsed altogether – a change
that will benefit the entire world, not just local Chinese peasants. Retailers, too,
stand to benefit from this reappraisal of values: international marketers should be
on red alert. For out of what are, on the face of it, minor metaphorical shifts, great
changes can grow.
The original romantic passion for the real, recklessly pursuing nature and
origin, went hand in hand with the rise of individualism in European culture
(see Balet and Gerhard, 1936), defying tyrants and deities in pursuit of self. The
Romantic reappraisal in Anshan reflects the fact that for the first time whole
cohorts have the liberty and means to grasp for a reality beyond their own lives
and at the same time to assert their individuality, thus posing new challenges for
the retail sector.

Acknowledgements
Thanks are due to Adam Cross (Centre for International Business, University of Leeds) for
assistance in the early stages of Michael Griffiths’ doctoral research. Thanks are also due to
the Sino-British Fellowship Trust, the Universities’ China Committee London, and the
Worldwide Universities Network for contributing towards funding this research.
Delegates at the 1st Biennial Conference of Fudan University International Urban Forum
(Shanghai, 3–5 November 2006), the ‘China in the World’ Summer School 2007 (University
of Leeds, 24–27 July) and the Euro-Asia Management Studies Annual Conference 2007
(University of Leeds, 28–30 November), as well as anonymous reviewers of Ethnography,
offered valuable comments on earlier versions of this work. A shorter version of the article



was presented at the competitive working paper stream of the World Association for
International Business annual conference 2008 (Bocconi, Milan, 30 June).

Notes
1. For most societies, through most of human history, this has been morally unproblematic.
In order to allow these ideas to live, we need to put aside, at least temporarily, the idea
that other cultures should be held in equal respect to one’s own. The idea is praiseworthy,
but in the context it is out of time and place.
2. Various subsequent major changes could similarly be viewed as a move from a more
‘natural’ to a more ‘cultural’ state: from hunting and gathering to transhumant pasto-
ralism; from nomadism to agriculture; from agriculture to industry; from village life to
urban life, and so on.
3. These statements are something of a generalization, and the actual picture was more
complicated. Not least, old money, with all its prestige, usually came from landed estates,
which meant that country life could be tinged with glamour from an urban perspective.
Those making new money from commerce in urban areas often sought to ally themselves
with old money in order to disguise their social roots.
4. See http://www.chinesefolkart.com/peasantpaintings and
http://www.peasantspainting.com.

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Michael B Griﬃths is Associate Research Fellow at the National Institute of
Chinese Studies, White Rose East Asia Centre, University of Leeds.
Malcolm Chapman is senior lecturer in International Business, Centre for
International Business, University of Leeds.
Flemming Christiansen is Professor of Chinese Studies and Director of the National
Institute of Chinese Studies, University of Leeds.


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