Review Snippet

A peasant of China's northeast (cribbing this article)

Hershatter, Gail. Review of Private Life Under Socialism: Love, Intimacy, and Family Change in a Chinese Village, 1949 to 1999, by Yunxiang Yun. Contemporary Sociology, vol. 33, no. 4 (July 2004): 433-4
Gail Hershatter’s review of Yan Yunxiang’s 2003 Private Life Under Socialism admires a sociologist and insider who writes an exposed, personal account not just of the social attachments in Xiajia village, but of the emotional lives of its inhabitants. Yan treats the subjects of his ethnography very much as individuals but also charges people’s attachments and obligations with representative symbolism: they have “begun to fray.”

Yan’s portrait constitutes a large-scale comment about the contemporary situation -- “an accelerating breakdown in community and civility” that accompanied the withdrawal of the state. The biggest worry here is of an “uncivil individual” whose self-interest gives him a focus on romance, intimacy, and pleasure but dispenses with public life, as is especially apparent in the emergence of elder neglect in these villages. Even through the book review, this figure of the “uncivil individual” is shockingly, tragically familiar.

What Yan seems to be doing is somewhat similar to what Yang Jiang does in her essays: make our most intimate attachments to each other, in order that public opinion be influenced in favor of certain values and against others. The artistry that Hershatter identifies here is in painting emotional lives with a candid exposure of the speaker's own emotional investment in living with the subjects. The main difference seems to be a simple fact of the geophysical situation: Yang Jiang lives closer to the center amidst a rich literary cultural apparatus, and trained to use it.