Chapter 5 explores xiangchou as a materially and culturally embedded concept in the 2010s, which represented an ‘era of crises’ in China. The chapter frames crises as both the acute global COVID-19 pandemic, as well as through longer-term and more embedded ‘crises,’ categorized broadly as: the ’big city disease’, the existential crisis of meaninglessness, and the three-rural issue. Discursive analysis of various government text illustrates how different state organs can invoke the language of xiangchou to describe both a symptom of such crises as well as a response and potential remedy to these crises. Various case studies also demonstrate how feelings of homesickness and the inevitable separations from those ‘left behind’ can compel various forms of ‘rural return,’ but to varying effects and opportunities.

Using the case of the New Right movement in South Korea beginning in the early 2000s, Chapter 4 analyzes how far-right intellectuals – academics, journalists, writers, and political analysts – constructed reactionary historical narratives and discourses in the post-authoritarian period. Analyzing disputes over historiography in the last decade relating to Japanese colonialism (1910–45), the founding of the Republic of Korea (1948), and the Park Chung Hee regime (1961–79), New Right intellectuals contributed to generating historical knowledge and narratives to construct positive images of the past. I argue that, to solidify their influence, New Right intellectuals have proactively adopted the leftist strategy of targeting the cultural sphere, disseminating ideas, and building cultural hegemony. In doing so, they have sought to restore the right’s political legitimacy and symbolic power in a post-authoritarian context.

Who were the women of Meerut, said to have turned a nonviolent military mutiny – a refusal to load and fire a weapon – into a violent revolt that nearly toppled the British Raj? Were they prostitutes, or were they wives? There is much in the book to suggest the latter, but (ironically) that same evidence also suggests the simultaneous possibility of the former. This paradoxical formulation requires a more nuanced understanding of the nature of north Indian marriage in mid-century. A more fundamental question is: Did the women of Meerut exist? Or were they the product of overheated imaginations casting about for exculpation – on both sides of the racial divide? This necessitates a further examination of the two sources for the story of the Meerut women, or rather the question of their independent narrative origin. While the evidence militates in favor of their historicity, gender humiliation was already in the air: Even if they did not exist, they would be invented. They matter not simply because they enable us to add women to the mix of history (and stir, as the saying goes), but because they allow us to perceive something fundamental about the nature of history itself.

As is well known, the 1857 mutiny of Indian soldiers in the Company Army – collectively known as sepoys – was prompted by the proposed introduction of a new weapon for general use, a rifled musket known as the Pattern 1853 Enfield. This weapon required a new kind of greased cartridge, the loading of which entailed a new “firing” drill. Controversies over this new cartridge and drill prompted discontent among the “native” soldiery, which ultimately led to the collective decision to refuse to touch the offending cartridge and, naturally, load the weapon – a refusal that constituted the “mutiny” phase of 1857. This chapter begins with a reexamination of this drill and the circuitous, controversial decision to order eighty-five elite “skirmishers” of the Bengal 3rd Light Cavalry to perform it in late April. Their refusal to obey that order led to their court-martial for mutiny and imprisonment. The violent revolt began two weeks later, but not in the cantonment proper. Rather, it began in a hybrid space of commerce, leisure, and recreation on the edge of the cantonment known as the “sadr” (main) bazaar. The bulk of the chapter is devoted to a description of the sadr bazaar and its denizens.

Chapter 6 examines another group of ‘returnees’ in Heyang: young entrepreneurs with various backgrounds of urban socialization. They represent a generation of youth caught in the crosshairs of institutionalized competition, an achievement-complex, mounting youth unemployment, and a pervasive experience of ‘involution.’ Through the social category of fanxiangqingnian, “return youth,” this chapter examines how xiangchou becomes a mobilizing discourse that can encourage return from the standpoint of individual choice and desire, and how it helps reshape the overall discourse surrounding the countryside as both a place and ‘lifestyle’ considered as desirable to return to. Xiangchou becomes a language of ‘escape’ and a materialized reality where one can seemingly ‘escape to’. However, the experience of the young entrepreneurs in Heyang also underscore the complexities of this ‘return’ in the forms of the limitations, challenges, and dilemmas that they encounter in the village.

The conclusion describes the current political circumstances after the 2022 presidential election and explores what this means for South Korean democracy. It summarizes the book’s main arguments and theoretical contributions to the broader field, and it outlines future directions for the study of right-wing politics and activism. I also discuss some of the comparative implications that this study has for a more general understanding of the relationship between historical legacies, political institutions, and democratic life.

This chapter focuses on the county level of analysis. Drawing from fieldwork conducted in the county seat, it studies the Jinyun County’s response to the 19th Party Congress and state’s further elaboration upon the Rural Revitalization Strategy. It highlights how a ’xiangchou plan’, concocted in summer 2018, culminated in a five-year developmental strategy: ’Jinyun’s Xiangchou Industries to Enrich the People’. Interviews highlight the county’s ambitions to coin the term “Xiangchou Industries” and to make it a national model for revitalization, replicable and adaptable by small towns and villages nationwide. The usage of xiangchou as the means and model for rural revival highlights the potency of feelings such as ‘homesickness’ embedded in xiangchou, and it reminds us how the countryside is central to the imagining of this ‘hometown.’ This Chapter also discusses the application of the ’hometown ethnography’ as method and explores the ’hometown’ as a topic for ethnographic study.