The "Localist Turn" and "Local Identity" in Later Imperial China

For many years historians of the middle period of Chinese history—roughly from mid-eighth century into the fifteenth century—found considerable appeal in the idea that the Tang-Song transition represented a transition from a feudal society dominated by great aristocratic clans to an emerging "modern" world of commerce, urbanization, social mobility, rationality, and technology. This search for the modern in China's past, which assumed that European history represented the necessary course of human progress, ultimately led to questions about why China did not continue to develop toward modernity. The modernization question has gradually receded from middle-period historiography and attention has shifted away from a search for the causes of either progress or stagnation. But what has remained is a conviction that the middle period saw the emergence of a new and lasting set of connections between social formations, economic processes, international relations, political institutions, cultural forms, and religious and ideological practices and movements, and that historians need to account for this. 1 At times it has seemed that the modernization question has found a new life in the study of the late imperial period with the idea that the late Ming marks the advent of an "early modern" period of Chinese history. As in the case of the Tang-Song transition, the use of categories such as modern or early modern points to a sense that the late Ming was also a period of profound change. [End Page 1]