On the day of Lantern Festival, the fifteenth day of the Lunar New Year of 2006, the newly rebuilt Huanglong Miao (Temple of the Yellow Dragon) held its very first temple fair since it was torn down in 1957 during the national shuilihua campaign (the irrigation systems mobilization). On that day, Jianzhou, a villager retired from the county liquor factory, who is now in charge of the temple along with two other senior Shang villagers, announced a meeting to be held that afternoon in the meeting room of the Village Committee courtyard, “concerning the rebuilding of the Shang ancestral hall.” Zhishu, the village Party Secretary, was also at the temple fair. But as a public official he was not in a position to announce the meeting because, he told me later, it was jiawushi (a family affair). (Zhishu is, after all, a member of a Shang lineage.) Still, it is significant that this jiawushi meeting was allowed to convene in the Shang Village Committee meeting room. Most of the senior male Shangs came to the meeting, and Jianzhou was presiding. He concluded his own brief remarks with some excitement. As he opened the meeting, Jianzhou invited Zhishu to make a few remarks and the latterchose to give a report on his achievements during the past year to the assembled elders. Zhishu's talk was not restricted to issues relating to the families of the Shang surname; he talked not only about the ancestral temple of the Shangs, but also introduced his project of building a Wenhua Guangchang (Culture Plaza), which would be located in a site belonging to the whole administrative village. The relationship expressed between Zhishu and the senior Shangs on this occasion was interesting to me: this intertwining of patriarchal and official bureaucracy seemed to be a relationship of mutual respect.

It should be obvious that, for Zhishu, official administrative responsibilities should outweigh family matters. In Chapter Three, I argued that state provisions and entitlements could not replace the many kinds of interdependency and cooperation that continue, as immanent sociality, to make life possible in the village. But state activity is nevertheless an important feature of the active and heterogeneous plane of immanence that is village sociality.