Abstract
A case study of Zhanglin, Guangdong, this article hopes to offer some methodological reflections on the study of Chinese rural society. First, the author believes that with respect to fact-finding, oral recollections and local written-sources as forms of collective memories are equally valuable. Second, what the researcher ought to focus is not whether the collective memories reflected historical truth, but how they were constructed and reconstructed repeatedly in different historical contexts. Third, capital and countryside, state and society relationship was not antithetical, rather, it was dynamic and entangled. And fourth, it is beneficial to take a total-history approach to examine the history of a locality and situate it in the context of regional society in order to reach a more nuanced understanding of state-society relationship.
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