The migration of modernity: an alternative perspective on everyday life in rural communist base areas during wartime, 1937–1949

Abstract

ABSTRACTBy placing an autobiographical account of a performing artist–soldier in the New Fourth Route Army in the context of the spatial fluidity of modern culture, this essay offers an alternative perspective that highlights the multifaceted nature of the Chinese Communist Revolution. It argues that there were many interactions and intersections between urban culture and the rural world during the Anti-Japanese War of Resistance and that men and women of letters and the modern culture they represented occupied a unique space in the Chinese Communist Party’s power hierarchy. The article also maintains that, despite the imperative of collectivism and the pressure for political conformity, in the process through which educated urban youth constructed their new identities as revolutionaries, individual subjectivity, modern feminist values, and a preference for an urban lifestyle remained visible. In other words, modernity without cities was part of the new daily realities in the rural areas where war was fought and revolution was carried out.