UC Davis

This dissertation examines the meanings and feelings of Maoist and post-Mao China through rural cultural practices and productions. Against the backdrop of urban-rural inequalities in twentieth and twenty-first-century China, as well as the uncertain future of agrarian societies worldwide, I reveal why the rural matters through literary and cinematic narratives of rural matters. My study takes a historically contingent approach to explore how cultural forms reflect upon and respond to social contents, challenging the urban-centered mentality regarding questions of modernity and crisis in Chinese studies. The stories of rural China, informed by varying ideological persuasions and cultural institutions, have oscillated between tales of success and crisis throughout the twentieth century and since, with the figure of the peasant alternately portrayed as a progressive vanguard or a conservative laggard. My study moves beyond this binary abstraction to explore rural issues as historical formations and emotional processes. In doing so, it reveals the contingencies in aesthetic framings that at once elucidate allegorical meanings and exude structures of feeling. Taking “rural matters” as the analytical node where social, epistemic, aesthetic, and affective issues are constructed and contested, this project makes three key contributions to interdisciplinary Chinese studies and broader humanistic inquiries. First, by foregrounding agrarian society vis-à-vis the interpellation of global capitalism, it enriches the growing body of scholarship on combined and uneven development. Second, by approaching realism as both a conceptual framework and a cultural form, this study accentuates Chinese articulations for exploring the global revival and rediscovery of realism. Third, it contextualizes affect studies within the sensorium and material conditions of rural China.In four chapters, I explore the complex processes of knowledge formation and emotional fluctuation in rural China through a diversity of media and genres, including fiction, film, popular magazines, and folk performances. Specifically, Chapters 1 and 2 scrutinize the shifting discourses on subjectivity and morality across the Mao/post-Mao divide. Highlighting the dialectic of cultural form and social content, I investigate how Chinese realists navigate between critical orientations and utopian impulses. Chapters 3 and 4 trace the contingencies and contradictions in the transformation of rural storytelling, addressing the potential and limitation of elite-folk coordination during the dynamic processes of transmedial borrowing, adaptation, and revision. Together, with each chapter historicizing an epistemological node pertaining to rurality—namely revolution, migration, justice, and folk—my project grapples with the structures of feeling that manifest as “obsessions with rural China.” By analyzing cultural formulations and social sentiments in the Maoist and post-Mao countryside, I argue that the rural form of the reform era not only mediates China’s marketization but also carries the birthmark of Chinese socialist realism. As such, my dissertation conceptualizes and contextualizes Chinese rurality both within and against capitalist modernity, reterritorializing the rural for envisioning alternatives to the current developmental impasse in China and beyond.