The Local, its Gazetteer, and its Status

The delicate balance between polity and locality came into being during the Tang–Song transition. In terms of political power, the center's domination over the local was unchallengeable. Institutional arrangements since the Song that meant to “strengthen the trunk and weaken the branches” turned county and prefecture officials into genuine agents of court authority throughout the realm. A Southern Song scholar-official described the central and local bureaucracies in a configurative way that “is similar to the way the body commands the arms and the arms command the fingers.”Footnote ¹¹ Outside the bureaucracy, the gentry elites, whose rise has mostly been attributed to the civil service examinations that penetrated deep into local societies, heavily depended on the symbolic rewards distributed by the court, and had neither the will nor the wherewithal to directly challenge the political authority of the center.Footnote ¹² Thus the political center was strong in terms of its relations with both local governments and local societies. In terms of the realm's makeup, such a strong center meant indisputable political unity, whereby local places lost the power to stand as independent entities through political actions such as secession. They could exist only as component parts of the imperial whole, as a lower-level entity controlled from above, or, as it runs in Chinese, as “difang” (the local) vis-à-vis “zhongyang” (the center) or “chaoting” (the court). The local was defined as such by the center.

But the state was not the only agent that defined the local. Within the parameter set by the state and proceeding from it, actual life of people in local societies turned localities into communities through various activities and absorbed state-demarcations into their self-perceptions. Key to this process was the literati gentry, whose enduring localist orientation in family and career strategies—the orientation toward paying more attention to local affairs and building networks and influences in their home places—often generated such local activist projects as the construction of local lineages and local learning traditions. For individual places, recurring local activism gave full display to the gentry's agency and turned the local from the “marked identity” imposed by the state into “felt identity” of their own. For the realm as a whole, it rendered the local places increasingly distinct in time.Footnote ¹³ In this sense the local, though bound by the imperial framework and destined to form the building blocks of the empire, also had its own dignity, for it was never reducible to mere administrative tools.

This balance between the grandeur of the polity and the power of its imperial center on the one hand and the irreducibility of locality and the vitality of gentry's local identity on the other is vividly described by the philosopher Wang Yangming 王陽明 as “the All-under-Heaven [tianxia] is a collection of prefectures and counties.” With minor variations in formulation, this phrase was commonly used in the Ming and Qing dynasties, often followed by a statement to the effect that as long as all these local-level components are put in good order, the whole shall be in good shape.Footnote ¹⁴ What this phrase conveys is a view of the realm that, while paying homage to the grandeur of the All-under-Heaven, put the local prior to it, and honored the local as its foundation. Corresponding to this view is the weight carried by the local as social space. Scholar-officials, including those with national reputations and unusual success, usually started their career from the home locale (as a local candidate of the civil service examination system) and returned to the same place for retirement and burial after death. Ritual, social, and intellectual activities that evolved in the local space, such as learning and lineage building, were often assigned universalistic meanings.Footnote ¹⁵

The mature local gazetteer, as a genre about this specific kind of locality in late imperial China, was born out of this balance and served to facilitate its renewal. The timing of its emergence, during the Southern Song, should not be a surprise if we consider that the same period also witnessed the rise of the new gentry elites and the latter's localist orientation.Footnote ¹⁶ The genre's growth in late imperial China was steady: it gained relatively stable scope and format—as a mix of history, geography, literature, and government records—in the Song; saw the beginning of the central government's request for local gazetteers and guidance on the “rules of compilation” in the Yuan; and enjoyed a substantial increase in the number of gazetteer projects in the Ming (with over a thousand extant titles in contrast to the dozens during the Song and Yuan). In the Qing, a sophisticated gazetteer production system was fully established. It included the repeated promotion and detailed guidance from the imperial government, much keener attention by local officials of various levels, the convention of periodical (i.e., every 60 years) renewal of the gazetteer, and the participation in the compilation projects by some first rate scholars. By the end of the eighteenth century, the local gazetteer had covered almost all local administrative entities. Among the 8,500 pre-1949 gazetteer titles catalogued in the China Local Gazetteer Union Catalogue, about 5,700 are from the Qing.Footnote ¹⁷

Bibliographers in late imperial China often catalogued the gazetteer under the category of “geography,” which itself was usually a subcategory under “history.” This treatment probably can be explained by a stage in the local gazetteer's pre-Song development, when it was called “tujing” (annotated map) and functioned as a geographical handbook on specific places. Occasionally, Ming and early Qing private bibliographers did catalogue the gazetteer as a separate subcategory under “history” but parallel to “geography,” or even as an independent category parallel to “history,” but the status as a subsection beneath the “geography” subcategory (shibu dililei 史部地理類) remained the standard view, and was adopted as such in the siku quanshu project in the 1770s.Footnote ¹⁸ Since “geography” was usually regarded as subordinate to “history” in the traditional classification of knowledge, this rendered the gazetteer lower in status, particularly in comparison with the official dynastic history (zhengshi 正史).Footnote ¹⁹ Every now and then, there were passing remarks comparing the gazetteer to the official dynastic history. These could come from famous scholars such as Wang Shizhen in the late Ming, or powerful figures such as the Yongzhen emperor in the Qing.Footnote ²⁰ These exceptions and variations notwithstanding, the issue of the gazetteer's generic nature was largely absent from serious scholarly discussions despite the growth in its production. It looks as though with regard to the gazetteer, as long as the practical needs of each party—the imperial government, the local elites, and the local officials—were fulfilled, people were willing to leave aside such scholastic issues as the gazetteer's nature and status.

The first serious intervention into this quiet and uncontroversial scene occurred in the late eighteenth century, when Zhang Xuecheng, the posthumously recognized master of historical theory, launched a set of bold proposals and powerful arguments over the nature of the local gazetteer, the proper arrangement of its content, and the institutional reforms to facilitate its production. The essays that best articulated these arguments were written by Zhang in the late 1780s and early 1790s, but the basic ideas had been with him for decades, spanning his career as a talented theorist of history and a devoted compiler of local gazetteers.

The core of Zhang's intervention is the motto that essentially, as a genre, “the local gazetteer is history” (zhi nai shi ti 志乃史體)Footnote ²¹. Along this line he made two specific arguments: first, the gazetteer originated from the “total history of the ancient feudal states” (yiguo zhi quanshi), and should function just like that for the contemporary prefectures and counties even though the hereditary feudal lords had gone, and local places had lost the political status as “states” (guo), because in terms of submitting their local documents to the court of the Son-of-Heaven there is no difference between the prefectures/counties and the feudal states; second, the production of gazetteers should be part of the production of dynastic history, in the senses that the compiling of the gazetteer prepares materials for the compiling of the dynastic history, and that the existence of detailed information in the local gazetteers makes it possible for the dynastic history to be succinct and focused.Footnote ²² Obviously, the target of such an argument was the prevalent view of the time that took the gazetteer as merely a handbook of local information and catalogued it under “geography”; and the purpose of it was to mark the gazetteer as a normal form and integral part of (dynastic) history.

In ancient China, history writing was both official and moralistic. All historical documents (that is, all written materials) were handled by state functionaries (scribes), and the writing of history was a state function that provided a narrative of the state's own. The official historian was supposed to help set the political order of the state through condemning (the evil) and praising (the good). Thus there was an inherent solemnity in historical narrative that was proper only for the state. After the founding of the empire, since there was only one dynastic state, the genre “history” became part of the trappings of the latter: only the narrative of the state deserves the appellation “history,” to the effect that the two words “state” and “history” were often tied together as “state history”(guoshi). The appellation “gazetteer” (zhi), as the writing of and about one local place, therefore denotes a difference from “history” (shi), the writing of and about the state, just like the writing of and about a clan had its own distinctive appellation, “genealogy (pu).” In this sense, the common saying in late imperial China, “the state has its history, the place has its gazetteer, and the clan has its genealogy” (guo you shi, fang you zhi, jia you pu), marks the difference between these three types of writings. Against this background, Zhang's argument was an emphasis on the similarity and connectedness between the history and the gazetteer genres, and hence granted the latter not only a higher status but also a stronger sense of stately solemnity.

Zhang Xuecheng's Intervention in Historical Perspective

As a theorist of history, Zhang fully identified with the statist approach to “history,” and actually made a name for himself in that way. He viewed history in ancient times as the outgrowth of the state's records of its own activities, and highly appreciated the situation when there was no private writing at all, and the state monopolized not only the genre of “history” but also the enterprise of history-writing. The complaint that drove his intervention into the gazetteer issue was not that the relation between “history” and the state was too tight, but rather that between the two of them and the gazetteer was too loose. To understand the significance of this intervention, one has to view it against the social and intellectual context of the late eighteenth century when Zhang lived and wrote: the swelling of the ranks of the literati and the widespread sense of frustration in career prospects befalling most of them, the intellectual predominance of the evidential scholarship that featured highly technical yet somehow fragmented textual analyses, and the normalization of local gazetteer production throughout the empire that provided employment opportunities for less prosperous scholars and fueled the specialization of the field.

Zhang was convinced of his talent as a historian from an early age, and he was critical of the practice of history-writing prevalent in his day, which, according to him, had become no more than mechanical piling of materials in the bureaucratized dynastic-history compiling offices. For him, a true historian should be an individual genius able to grasp the significance of materials and bring it out through proper selection and arrangement. Meanwhile, he insisted on a historical approach to the Confucian classics, which held that the classics are not mystical and abstruse texts, but historical records of the historically formed institutions and policies of the ancient sages, who were themselves coping with actual problems in historically specific situations. Both approaches made him a critic of the dominant evidential scholarship, and hence a strident voice of his time.

For Zhang the marginalized scholar and dedicated statist historian, the local gazetteer, as a lesser form of historical writing, was the only chance he (and scholars like him) had to try his hand.Footnote ²³ While a student in the guozijian, the young Zhang, then in his twenties, once stated that “even if a great man does not become an official historian, he should still serve the people of power with his pen, make a name for himself, and contribute to the contemporary time; compiling local gazetteers is one of these acceptable engagements.”Footnote ²⁴ Indeed, throughout his career, although Zhang made insightful remarks on history writing at the general/state level, he personally practiced it only at the local level. No evidence suggests that Zhang's theoretical thinking was determined by the limitations to his own space of career development, but to argue that the gazetteer be treated like history proper certainly made his works more meaningful. Even if he was to a certain degree compelled to promote the status of the gazetteer, the seriousness and effectiveness with which Zhang argued for his case was unprecedented, as illustrated by his well-known debate with Dai Zhen 戴震, the most famous scholar of the late Qianlong era.Footnote ²⁵ As a result, Zhang and his “gazetteer-is-history” thesis became the single most recognizable in the emerging field of gazetteer compilation.

In addition to this core argument on the gazetteer's status, Zhang made bold proposals about the gazetteer's production. One was the three-way division of the gazetteer, with one part providing historical narrative as succinct and formal as the dynastic history, and the other two devoted to documentation and details. Another called for the establishment of a special “office of the gazetteer” in prefectural and county local governments, to collect and preserve documents from the local government and local society, and to participate in the preparation for the dynastic history of the whole realm. With these proposals, not only would the gazetteer's format more closely resemble the official history, but also its production process would further integrate into that of the latter and constitute a bridge between the imperial state and local societies.

In general, therefore, the event of Zhang's intervention can be viewed as the birth cry of the gazetteer as a self-conscious field, announcing its arrival and claiming its seat in the existing regime of history-writing.Footnote ²⁶ His argument revolved strictly around the issues of the genre instead of the locality itself. Yet in building up this argument, Zhang frequently referred to the locality–polity relationship, both as the foundation of and as an analog to the gazetteer–history relationship. For example, justification of the resemblance between the gazetteer and dynastic history came from the parallel between structures of local and central governments:

The reason for establishing special offices for the gazetteer in local government was the parallel between governance and history writing:

With the phrase “same structure in smaller size,” Zhang drove home the notion that locality is the microcosm of the polity. His review of locality as the site where governance of the polity starts reveals exactly the locality–polity balance mentioned above: the dignified locality, though building blocks of the polity, is also its foundation and prior to it. His argument on the gazetteer follows the logic that it deserves a “history” level status because its subject, the locality, functions just like history's subject, the state. In the proposals, the status of locality was a non-issue; it was used as evidence rather than pitched as the point of argument. Yet this very lack of focal attention, and the unquestioned deployment of it as evidence, makes it even clearer that for Zhang (and his audience the Qing literati) this mode of locality–polity relationship was deeply ingrained in their imagination of the spatial order. Zhang did not highlight the locality's status in his reasoning because he did not expect this to be an issue of controversy at all. And he was right on this. Few people took issue with Zhang's evidence. In the heyday of the Qing, the balance between locality and the polity was taken for granted.

Zhang's argument on the gazetteer's nature and status, “gazetteer is history,” rarely encountered open challenge either. Conscious adoption of the motto increased remarkably in the Qianlong and Jianqing period discussions over the nature of the local gazetteer (see Figure 1Footnote ²⁹). As a private scholar, Zhang's name was referred to sixty times in the database's near 1,400 sets of gazetteers compiled between the Jiaqing reign when he died, and the end of the Qing dynasty. So, in general, his intervention into the practice of the local gazetteer was effective. But as an event, its impact was limited to the relatively small and eventless gazetteer circle. In the beginning of the twentieth century, Zhang's historical approach to the classics was rediscovered and earned him the reputation of one of the greatest thinkers of the Qing dynasty, who held a rather “modern” outlook. In the light of this delayed vindication, his gazetteer intervention appeared an insignificant episode in a field of lower stakes, and the fact that his reputation had been limited therein was regarded as an unfair negligence befalling a genius.Footnote ³⁰ Yet this very lack of attention to Zhang's intervention into the gazetteer, just like Zhang's own lack of anxiety over using the status of locality as his evidence, more effectively illuminates a salient feature of the spatial order in late imperial China: to grant gazetteers the status of “history” is, like citing the polity–locality balance, to recognize something obvious.

Figure 1.

Frequencies of the notion “Zhi wei Shi” (Gazetteer is history) and Chronicle sections in local gazetteers.

Zhang's comparison of contemporary prefectures and counties to the pre-Qin fengjian states calls to mind Gu Yanwu's proposal to combine the fengjian spirit with junxian reality in the early Qing.Footnote ³¹ While Gu sought to solve the problems of local administration inherent in the centralized empire, Zhang addressed a problem of the local's representation in the same centralized empire. Both problems were peculiar to a mature junxian system, and both, while fully accepting unity of the whole as given, tried to secure what the parts duly deserve. Gu's certainly had a broader resonance, but Zhang's apparently moved ahead more smoothly. If the dignified status of locality was the foundation for the vitality of the gazetteer, here the genre's growth and birth as a field was requesting a “rectification of name” for its subject. In practice, however, implementing the motto “gazetteer is history” is much more complicated. Zhang's major proposals on the gazetteer's production—the three-way division of the gazetteer and the establishment of “gazetteer office”—involved too drastic a change of convention, and too-complicated institutional reform. None got even close to realization. It was rather one of his other proposals, requiring neither structural change of the gazetteer nor institutional remodeling of local governments, yet addressing more directly the gazetteer's “history” status, that carried the torch forward. This is his promotion of a special section—the section of the chronicle—to be included in the gazetteer.

Rituals and Politics of the Chronicles

A chronicle section in the gazetteer is almost a logical corollary if one agrees that “gazetteer is history,” for it allows the gazetteer to give a historical narrative of the local place that evolves in time, and it helps to organize the rest of the gazetteer contents more clearly. In Zhang's own words, “the main task of historiography is to record events, the main way of recording events is through chronicles (lit., to braid events along years).”Footnote ³² Although there are other obviously more “historical” elements in the gazetteer (e.g., biographies), there is none as powerful and direct in making it “history” as the chronicle. In the light of this, the usual absence of chronicles in the gazetteer is an obvious problem. Ming and Qing gazetteer writers long before Zhang had sourly felt the troubles it caused. Lin Dachun, the late Ming scholar-official and gazetteer writer from Guangdong, had lamented that

Zhang himself complained about the fragmented narrative in gazetteers where, without a chronicle, major events scattered in different sections such as those on natural disasters and military affairs. Therefore, in his last major gazetteer project, the gazetteer of Hubei Province, he weaved together all major events of the province into an integrated chronicle (biannian ji), and put it upfront in the book's opening chapter so that readers can “know things of the past and the present as they know their hands and fingers.”Footnote ³⁴

But there was a ritual problem with the chronicle as a genre in history writing. The earliest chronicle in China, Confucius’ Spring and Autumn Annals, which takes the reign periods of the Lu state as the temporal axis to construct historical narrative, had already exemplified history's function of upholding the social/moral order through condemning and praising. Shortly after Confucius, some texts started to apply to the chronicle the appellation “ji” 紀, a word that, according to the Tang dynasty historical theorist Liu Zhiji 劉知幾, denotes “ordering normal hierarchies, controlling various things, and conveying unsurpassable grandness to the title of a written piece.” After the coming of the empire, it was Sima Qian who first tied the “ji” chronicle with the universal sovereign and called it “root chronicle” (benji 本紀). The subject of this type of chronicle is the sovereign, and the content of it the major events of the universal state from the sovereign's perspective. From here comes the well-known term “sovereign's root chronicle [diwang benji]” in historiographies throughout the imperial era. By the time of Liu Zhiji, the term “ji,” the genres chronicle and history, and the notion of state sovereignty had become inseparable; as Liu wrote, “the essence of ji, like that of the Classic of Spring and Autumn, is to create order of time by weaving together days and months, and mark the orthodoxy of the state by recording events related to the sovereign.”Footnote ³⁵

Against this background, a chronicle in the gazetteer immediately makes it more stately, but it also carries the air of ritual transgression. Chronological recording of some issues in the gazetteer, such as natural disasters (zaiyi 災異), was inevitable. Concerns of ritual appropriateness made many Qing gazetteers put zaiyi recording under such categories as “miscellanies” or “geo-astrological fields” instead of “chronicle.”Footnote ³⁶ Another such issue, a locality's administrative evolvement (yange 沿革)was often understood as more about the state than about the local place. Many gazetteers followed the example of the Song Jingding era Jiankang zhi (1261) to put recordings of natural disaster, administrative change, and local events all in one chronological table. But in Ming and Qing gazetteers one often sees complaints that, except for the yange, too little is known about a locality's past.Footnote ³⁷ To those who felt strongly the need for a chronological recording of local events, anxiety was common. For example, the late Ming Zhaoqing prefectural gazetteer stated that “compared with the state, the prefecture and county is like a small pond compared with a big lake; for a county or a prefecture to weave its events into a ji chronicle is a risk of transgression.”Footnote ³⁸ The Kangxi era Guanyang County gazetteer, after asserting the ji chronicle as the trademark of history, admitted that “the history and the classics are all books for the Son-of-Heaven, not what a county gazetteer can aspire to.”Footnote ³⁹

People could find excuses to drive through the anxiety, or could take some special maneuver to avoid it. Lin Dachun in the late Ming cited his profound concern that, without a chronicle, the local past of Chaoyang would be lost and the situation would further deteriorate. The Zhaoqing gazetteer adopted a justification that is close to sophistry: was not the Spring and Autumn, which ordered the whole realm, written by a man from the Lu state (i.e., from the perspective of Lu, instead of the “Son of Heaven”)? The tone of the Guanyang gazetteer was more humble but no less sophistic: “yet the county is the Son-of-Heaven's county, the people are the Son-of-heaven's people, all within the four seas are now one family and go through good and bad times together, who can say the county gazetteer is not also the Son-of-Heaven's book?” Zhang Xuecheng's own solution was to include “ji” but drop the word “ben.” His analysis of this problem vividly reflects the position of a statist historian promoting the status of the local gazetteer:

Frequent discussions on the problem make it clear that that the concern was real. On the other hand, this “law” of history-writing that Zhang referred to was a soft “law,” visible to the gazetteer compilers but not enforced by any state agency. Some simply adopted a chronicle for the home locale without saying anything.Footnote ⁴¹ For those who articulated their concerns, the very moment they did so was often also the moment they were already determined to maneuver through it. To the local gazetteer, picking up the chronicle section was like performing its “history” status in action, bold yet without risk; to the state, this type of provocation was like kids crying for attention, carrying no political threat at all. (With the junxian's embeddedness in the tianxia and the center's political domination both beyond question, who would be scared by a pretentious appellation inside the gazetteer of an innocuous local place?) The absence of any serious arguments against this type of transgression indicates that the literati in general were ready to allow localities to partake in the grandiosity of the empire and to have their own narratives, just as they were ready to grant local gazetteers the status of “history.” Zhang Xuecheng's intervention occurred at just the right time: in the heyday of China's ancient regime, when everyone felt comfortable with the age-old locality–polity balance in a centralized empire, and the gazetteer production was flourishing everywhere. All he needed to do was to launch his arguments; the rest would ensue like ripened fruits falling off the tree.Footnote ⁴²

As a testament to Zhang's success, nineteenth-century local gazetteers largely stopped apologizing for their chronicles. On some occasions, the chronicles were dubbed “biannian” (lit. braiding of years) instead of the catchier “ji.” But in either case gazetteer writers simply took it for granted that what they were doing was “history.” On the other hand, however, the percentage of gazetteers with a chronicle section did not increase after the Jiajing reign (see Figure 1). This stagnancy attests to the other side of Zhang's easy success: the issue of local gazetteers’ status was, like that of the status of the locality itself, an issue of low stakes in a largely uncontroversial field. People could agree with Zhang and make some change to their gazetteers; but they could also neglect him and keep on doing gazetteers the old way. When the stakes were low, so was motivation, and simple inertia could easily carry the day. It was only during the Republican period that this scenario of quietness was replaced by one of excitement.

The Dual Thriving of the Local Gazetteer and its Chronicle in Republican China

The conventional view that takes the Qianlong and Jiaqing eras as the heyday of the local gazetteer must have been caused, at least in part, by the fact that the most influential modern studies of the genre's history, by scholars ranging from generalists such as Liang Qichao to specialists such as Fu Zhenlun and Li Taifen, were conducted during the 1920s and early 1930s. By then the real flourishing period of the local gazetteer had not yet finished, and its historians probably did not take into consideration their own time period. In hindsight, though, it appears that the heyday for the studies of the gazetteer was also that of its production. Statistics made at later dates indicate that about 40 percent of the Republican gazetteers were produced during the short period of political stability in 1927–1937, with the year 1936 alone there were 80 titles. If we confine the survey to the twenty-five years before the outbreak of total war in 1937, the annual average of over forty titles is far higher than any period in the Qing, even if counting in the estimated number of non-extant titles from the earlier age (see Table 1).Footnote ⁴³ Meanwhile, the special field of local gazetteer studies that was just emerging at the turn of the nineteenth century became fully established in the early twentieth. Studies of the gazetteer were published in geographical journals such as the Yu Gong (The Tribute of Yu), as well as some more specialized journals such as the Fangzhi Yuekan (Gazetteer Monthly). An incomplete list counted close to 400 journal articles on this subject published between the 1920s and mid-1940s.Footnote ⁴⁴ In addition, there were about a dozen monographs on this subject published before 1949.

Table 1.

Local Gazetteer Production in the Republican Era. Source: Fu Dengzhou, “Minguo shiqi fangzhi xiuzhuan shulue”. Note that Fu's estimate of the total is a modest 1,400

The vast majority of the Republican gazetteers’ coverage were at the county level. This matches the change in field administration, since the new republic abolished the prefecture as a territorial entity. Considering that about 10 percent of all gazetteers between the Yuan and the Qing recorded in the Union Catalogue are at the prefecture level, county level gazetteer production must have benefited from the removal of the prefectural entity per se. The province entered the Republic largely intact, so did the production of provincial gazetteers. The two decades from 1927–1949 alone witnessed more than fifty provincial gazetteers (many unpublished). Since there were less than thirty province-level entities in the Republic, this should be considered a quite high number.Footnote ⁴⁵

The social and institutional background of Republican gazetteer production was similar to that of the late imperial past. The central government, despite its own weakness, made its first request for gazetteers of localities in 1917. After the restoration of political unity through the Nationalist Revolution, the Nanjing government renewed the request in December 1928. Following that, in December 1929, the Executive Yuan issued an ordinance on gazetteer compilation submitted to it by the Ministry of Interior, the “Essentials of Organization and Style for Gazetteer Compilation” (xiuzhi shili gaiyao), to be applied to all provinces, counties, and municipalities. An ordinance with similar content was issued in 1944, under the title “Methods for the Compilation of the Local Gazetteer.”Footnote ⁴⁶ At the local level, the enterprise to compile and publish the gazetteer still depended on the joint efforts of the local officials and local elites, as they had in the past. Overall political instability of the time could make the turnover of local officials high and the compiling/publishing process unpredictable, but the commitment of local elites often made up the difference.Footnote ⁴⁷ Almost all the widely acclaimed Republican gazetteers had stories of extraordinary devotion of the local elite behind them. Some of the projects could last an unusually long time. The Chuansha County gazetteer (pub. 1936), with Huang Yanpei 黃炎培 as chief editor and Lu Binglin 陸炳麟 as the head of the gazetteer bureau, took the relatively stable team twenty-one years of persistent work. The Anyang county gazetteer project started in 1921, went through four local gentlemen (shen) as the heads of the gazetteer bureau, the destruction of the first draft in a conflict between warlords, a renewed initiative by the local elites (shishen 士绅) and approval by the county magistrate's executive council to restart in 1931, and was eventually finished in 1933.Footnote ⁴⁸

The passage of time did have its effects. The makeup of the local elite itself, for example, became more complicated, and motivations for participating in the gazetteer projects varied broadly. Dedicated Qing loyalists supported gazetteer projects because they interpreted local agency as resistance to the new regime, and writing local history was one of the few public engagements compatible with their mood as the “leftovers” from the previous dynasty. Chen Botao 陳伯陶, who had served as literary advisor to the Guanxu emperor and lived the life of a recluse after the fall of the Qing, agreed to join the gazetteer project in his home county of Dongguan only after he was assured that it was supported by funds of the local community and “there is no official appointment involved hence no suspicion of serving the new regime.”Footnote ⁴⁹ In the loyalist cases, as in Zhou Zuoren's more famous promotion of local literature in resistance to the mainstream May 4th discourse, the local carried a link to the past and an alternative to the unacceptable present evolving on the national stage. The strategy of resorting to the local in times of stress and frustration resembled the localist strategies of the late imperial literati, though the forces from which they sought shelter were no longer those of a new dynasty. Footnote ⁵⁰

For those more open to republicanism, engagement in local gazetteer projects became a natural channel of political participation and was pursued with remarkable enthusiasm. Members of the literary organization South Society (nanshe), for example, initiated numerous local gazetteer projects across the country.Footnote ⁵¹ In most cases, however, the gazetteer projects saw collaboration of people with diverse educational backgrounds and cultural outlooks. In the Chuansha case mentioned above, for example, Lu Binglin held an examination degree from the Qing and was a member of the local assembly in the Republic, while Huang Yanpei combined old and new style education and had overseas revolutionary experience as a member of the Tongmenghui. In general, the scene of the local gazetteers’ production suggests that the gazetteer of the home locality was a commitment that people across a wide political and cultural spectrum could agree on, and the old pattern of its production was able to absorb the changes of time and move on.

The same dialectics of change and continuity can be seen in the contents of Republican gazetteers. Calls for innovation in the gazetteer were common in the monographs and the articles, with the rationale that the new era provided new technologies that should be harnessed, and new needs that required new categories.Footnote ⁵² Innovations were indeed impressive. New geographical, cartographical, photographical, and printing technologies were widely applied. For example, modern to-scale map and stereotype printing were common among Republican gazetteers. Meanwhile, introduction of new social and political theories, particularly the rise of “New History” (xin shixue), spearheaded by Liang Qichao and ushering in “the national people” (renqun) as historical subject, brought a broader outlook and much keener attention to common people's livelihood. Hundreds of new categories entered the Republican gazetteers, featuring most prominently new terms in economic life, new educational institutions, and scientific conceptsFootnote ⁵³ (see Table 2Footnote ⁵⁴). Amidst these ardent calls for and effective engagement with innovation, however, the most frequently used categories in the Republican gazetteer were still those that had been in use for centuries, such as “relics,” “administrative evolution,” and “chaste women” (see Table 3Footnote ⁵⁵). The mixture of the old and new in content makes sense if we consider that the purposes of the gazetteers, often stated in the gazetteer prefaces by the prominent personages involved in the production, remained largely the same as during the Qing, i.e., to facilitate local governance, promote local public goods, and keep local memory. The innovations hence helped with more accurate recording of the changing local reality and better fulfilled the gazetteers’ function. Here, too, change took the form of further growth on the same track, and the new was embraced without renouncing the old.

Table 2.

Top 15 New Categories in Republican Gazetteers

Table 3.

Categories Most Frequently Used as Section Titles in Republican Gazetteers

It is in this ethos that we find the dramatic increase of chronicles in the Republican gazetteers. Of the total 459 chronicles from the whole database, 202 were from the Republican era. In terms of both number and proportion, it is much higher than any previous period (see Figure 1). One obvious cause of this surge is the ordinance of 1929, which required that all local gazetteers provide a “chronicle on major events (dashiji).” Since this was the first official request for a chronicle in the gazetteer, the relevant clauses of the ordinance are quoted here:

The distinction between the dashiji and the conventional yange made it clear that the ordinance meant a new section on major political and social events of the locality. By issuing it as a guiding principle for gazetteers at all levels of locality, it was trying to usher in some innovation in the gazetteer. Some chronicle-equipped gazetteers compiled after 1929 clearly stated that they added it because of this ordinance.Footnote ⁵⁷ So, it certainly played a role in the surge. But there are reasons not to explain the surge with the ordinance alone. First, the chronicle clause was not highlighted in the text of the ordinance. Placed as No. 13 in a total of 22 clauses on the gazetteers’ content, style, and institutional setting of its production, it seemed that the request was raised by the central government as part of its routine promotion of the gazetteer that the central government in China had been engaging in for centuries. Many of the clauses involved requests for innovations, such as the use of new style maps and photography. Mixed with others, the chronicle request appears new but not strikingly new. Second, there was no strict enforcement of that requirement, and many Republican gazetteers still came out without a chronicle section. The requirement for the chronicle section was, just like the ritual anxiety against it in the late empire, a soft law enforced by the gazetteer compilers themselves. Therefore, some other causes must be sought to explain the increase in number of gazetteers that did include a chronicle. Third and most importantly, the momentum of increase had already started before the issuing of the ordinance. Among the 202 Republican chronicles, 50 were from gazetteers compiled between 1912 and 1929, which makes that short period itself a breakthrough. Discussions about the necessity of gazetteer chronicles, both in the gazetteers’ own style statements and in academic journals, also became more common in the early years of the Republic than they had been during the nineteenth century, when many gazetteers, if they came with a chronicle section at all, simply did it without theoretical discussion.

Sufficient examples indicate that, by 1929, the chronicle was already a trending issue among gazetteer scholars and practitioners. The prominent professor Deng Zhicheng offered courses on local gazetteers in the newly established history department of Peking University; in 1917 Deng published his “Proposed Rules of Style for Contemporary Provincial Gazetteers,” which includes that of the “creation of ji chronicles.” For Deng the provincial chronicle is analogous to the chronicles of state history in the sense that “while the state-history's ji chronicle is tied to the dynasty, the local gazetteer's ji chronicle is tied to the local place.”Footnote ⁵⁸ Liang Qichao's own promotion of Zhang Xuecheng's gazetteer theories, probably the most powerful and influential in the Republican era, was published in the early 1920s.Footnote ⁵⁹ Yu Shaosong's Longyou county gazetteer of 1925, a highly celebrated and widely cited model piece, argued in its “rule of style” section that the ji chronicle should be treated “simply as the backbone to organize all historical events, not just an honorific title for the monarch.” A sense of liberation from the ritual taboo of the imperial age characterized Yu's republican pride and gave him a sense of superiority over all his Qing predecessors, as he remarked that “for too long gazetteer writers had been so constrained by the convention of geography … and their own fear of transgression that they dare not to install ji for the gazetteer.”Footnote ⁶⁰ The Chengcheng County gazetteer of 1926 probably best demonstrates the Republican gazetteers’ position between the genre's tradition and the new political reality:

Considering this development in the early Republican era, it is better to view the ordinance of 1929 as a state policy that was itself generated by a surging tide to “chronicalize” the gazetteer, and then in turn greatly fueled the tide. Both the production of gazetteers in general and the inclusion of chronicles in the gazetteer peaked in the 1930s. The two commonly cited motivations for the addition of chronicles in gazetteers of the 1930s—the removal of ritual restraints and the increased local political participation—were the same as those cited in gazetteers compiled during the early years of the Republic. The Yu County gazetteer of 1931 attributed the rarity of chronicles in past gazetteers to the fear of ritual transgression and lamented the timidity revealed thereby:

The Dongming county gazetteer of 1933 attributed the rarity of chronicles in the past gazetteers to the centralization of political power, and celebrated the newly created chronicle section as a symbol of democracy and local self-governance:

In general, therefore, the surge of gazetteer chronicles was a trend that spanned the entire Republican era. The central government's request helped the surge but was neither the sole nor the primary cause. The removal of ritual restraint and the increase in local political participation were both related to the 1911 revolution. But if we put this surge in a longer historical perspective, even the revolution appears less a turning point: the ritual restriction was never formally enforced; local self-governance had been talked about by late Qing reformers, implemented before the revolution, and could be traced back to the recurrent discourses of gentry participation in local governance during the late imperial period.Footnote ⁶⁴ Considering that gazetteer chronicles had been promoted by Zhang Xuecheng at the turn of the nineteenth century, and had been implemented every now and then since then, the surge in the Republic was rather an acceleration of a movement long underway in slow motion. It was, just like the other innovations of the Republican gazetteer, a change that enhanced continuity.

Throughout the nineteenth century, the call to include chronicles in the gazetteer had been intertwined with the effort to place the gazetteer on the seat of “history”; both bore the impact of Zhang Xuecheng, and both progressed slowly. In contrast, the dramatic increase of gazetteer chronicles in the Republic, together with the booming gazetteer production, was a clear triumph of the genre. It was also a triumph of Zhang Xuecheng: acceptance of his “gazetteer is history” thesis was almost universal in discussions on the gazetteer's nature during the Republic; he was generally accepted by modern gazetteer scholars as the founder and foremost theorist of the gazetteer field; and his name was referred to 268 times among the 776 Republican gazetteers in the database. (Considering that many of the gazetteers were compiled by non-specialists, that is, people not necessarily familiar with the gazetteer theory or interested in its history, such a rate of reference is remarkably high.) But the gazetteer's triumph should not be attributed all to Zhang himself. After all, there was the century-long low period between his death and the thriving of the cause. Other factors, such as the rise of the “New History,” must have also helped to shift the subject of history from the monarch to the people, and to generate energy among the latter to write their own history.Footnote ⁶⁵ Dynamics of republicanism and nationalism, however, are different from dynamics of gazetteer production. There must be other factors involved for people to turn to the local and the gazetteer in the first place, factors that made the local stand more prominently for the national.

This brings us back to locality itself. The movement that Zhang launched was deeply imbricated in the late imperial social and spatial order. While its stagnancy in the immediate aftermath of Zhang's death could be explained by the lack of urgency, the very locality–polity balance which enabled it also contained the possibility that, under certain social and political circumstances, either the polity's whole or the locality's parts could be pushed to the fore and flare up. Recent scholarship has in fact identified periodic “localist turns,” or high waves of local activism, within the stable locality–polity balance during the late imperial period.Footnote ⁶⁶ What broke the stalemate and caused the drastic acceleration of the gazetteer's movement in the Republic, as the next section tries to demonstrate, was exactly such a conjuncture: amidst the unprecedented challenges facing the polity since the mid-nineteenth century, decades-long attempts to solve the problem bottom-up pushed locality to the foreground, creating another “localist turn,” though with definitely new features.

The Troubled Polity and the Foregrounded Locality

The localist turn since the mid-nineteenth century has been a well-studied subject.Footnote ⁶⁷ Based on available studies but slightly changing the usual perspective of the state–society relationship, this section focuses instead on people's understanding of the locality–polity relationship during this strong and enduring wave of localism, compares it with the late imperial view, and uses this as a way to see what happened in the localities that modern China inherited from its late imperial past.

Late imperial local activism, as recent local history scholarship has demonstrated, could take various forms, ranging from celebrating the local place's excellence in pursuing canonic virtues to exalting the local particularities or engaging in local welfare projects; local identity formation could crystalize on many different levels from the sub-county to the province; and “localist turns” often came after a high wave of state-activism and sometimes coincided with dynastic decline.Footnote ⁶⁸ In the mid-nineteenth century, however, the decline of the Qing converged with the coming of the modern West, and eventually “transformed a dynastic decline of largely traditional type into a social and intellectual revolution.”Footnote ⁶⁹ This transformation, it appears, did not break down the old locality–polity balance. Rather, it brought new forms to express local pride and new theories to explain the significance of the local. Locality was now pushed to the foreground with its various scales as in the past, but it carried newer meanings, greater expectations, and higher urgency.

Mid-century administrative reformers in the aftermath of the Taiping rebellion, such as Feng Guifen, usually resorted to the fengjian theory in their push for enlisting energies of local people to revitalize the state. Feng was inspired by Gu Yanwu; for both, locality's plight is the symptom of the polity's problem, and reinvigorating the former leads to the strengthening of the later. Underlying their proposals was a view of the polity described by both Wang Yangming and Zhang Xuecheng, the view that locality is the microcosm of the polity and the site where good governance of the polity starts. Philip Kuhn described this view of the polity as “immanence,” i.e., the essence of the whole collectivity to be found in every unit of the local component.Footnote ⁷⁰

Constitutional reformers toward the century's end often shared with the fengjian tradition a bottom-up approach to solve problems of the whole.Footnote ⁷¹ Huang Zunxian's lectures to the Southern Study Society in Hunan, for example, mixed the fengjian idea with the new term “self-governance” he borrowed from Meiji Japan, and appealed to the Hunanese local elites to solve their own problems by assuming responsibility for the need of their home districts (xiang).Footnote ⁷² Huang's overall goal of economic development and national strength was already different from such traditional concerns of the local elites as water control and banditry, but the underlying view of the locality–polity relation remains the same: the local parts held the key to the salvation of the collective whole. This view was most dramatically revealed by Huang's young collaborator Liang Qichao, who cited the serious situation facing the state and the real possibility that the polity may be carved up by foreign powers. The meaning of their society and the local self-governance efforts in Hunan, Liang explained, was to prepare for “the struggle of Hunan after the fall of the polity.”Footnote ⁷³ That Hunan has a future after the fall of China—the goal of its future struggle, though not specified, could be nothing but the continuation and restoration of the polity—is conceivable only if Hunan contains all the qualities and potentials of the polity. It is, to use the phrase of Zhang Xuecheng, the “same structure in small size.” Liang made this remark passingly; yet for this very reason it appears a more effective illustration of how profoundly Chinese political thought at the turn of the twentieth century were conditioned by the “immanence” view of the polity.

Following the political catastrophe of 1898, both Kang Youwei and Liang Qichao started to promote the cause of “self-governance.” Kang linked the fengjian line of thought to the social-Darwinian concept of the survival of a “fit” people: enfeoff the people, energize the local, yet organize them within the national system of rules. Liang Qichao, on the other hand, distanced himself from the fengjian tradition, which itself was being discredited with the rise of statism in the early twentieth century, and in its stead sought inspiration from western political philosophies he was guzzling in while in exile in Japan.Footnote ⁷⁴ Yet the immanence concept of the polity is obvious in his treatise “On Self-governance”:

The similarity between Liang's microcosm metaphor and that of Wang Yangming and Zhang Xuecheng is unmistakable, only Liang makes it even more thorough to include the subcounty entities such as school and company in the concentric circles as well. The inclination to resort to the local for the salvation of the nation permeated the writings of Liang's compatriots in Japan, mostly students engaged in radical approaches to save the nation. The pamphlets, magazines, and national salvation organizations they founded were often named after and crystalized along the line of home provinces.Footnote ⁷⁶ The most radical of these province-based nationalists went so far as to call for provincial independence. But even this strand securely anchored their provincial imagination within the parameter of nation. Ou Qujia, author of New Guangdong, predicted that “when the people of Guangdong manage their own affairs and complete their own independence, it will mark the beginning of the independence of all China.”Footnote ⁷⁷ To these radicals, the native place was the epitome and embodiment of the country's whole. Accordingly, political action should properly start from the local, building on the “familiar local soil of human feeling, history, geography, and customs.”Footnote ⁷⁸

Inside China, not surprisingly, the age-old view of the polity was also in full display during the last decade of the Qing. Urban sojourners in big cities such as Shanghai explicitly connected native place organization to national strengthening.Footnote ⁷⁹ Provincial elites sought for leadership in national reinvigoration through their activism in the provinces.Footnote ⁸⁰ The xinzheng reforms in the final years of the Qing often looked at the local as the starting point as well. The educational reform, for example, emphasized learning of things about the home locale in the forging of a “national people (guomin).”Footnote ⁸¹ The court's call for xiangtuzhi, a new type of local gazetteer functioning mainly as primer in the new style schools, occurred in exactly such circumstances. The rationale of such books, as one of them stated, was that “the state is a collection of native places, and the native place is the cell of the state; to arouse the patriotism of children, it must start from the xiangtuzhi.”Footnote ⁸²

In 1908, the idea of bottom-up mobilization finally prevailed, and local self-governance became the law of the land. A hierarchy of assemblies was established at the sub-county, county, provincial, and national levels. John Fincher's study of these assemblies finds that “loyalty to a grouping at one level was compatible with loyalty to a grouping of another level,” and that layers of loyalties seemed to have linked together to form the foundation of nationalism.Footnote ⁸³ In the implementation of local self-governance, the Qing court's quest for control and the local elite's quest for mobilization were often discrepant. While the state sought to co-opt and utilize the local elites, sometimes local elites were ready to go to the extreme on the idea that the realm is a collection of local places, and ignore the state and the center altogether in their discussion of national affairs.Footnote ⁸⁴ Inside local societies, institutional change incurred new strife among different social groups, for example over the drawing of constituency boundaries at the sub-county level.Footnote ⁸⁵ Despite all these, the deeply entrenched “immanence” view of the polity seems to be a common ground. This explains why political thinkers of China at the turn of the twentieth century so keenly examined the emerging new polity through its manifestations at the local level. In Kuhn's words, “if the power of the total society was immanent in every part of it, then presumably the place to revitalize the society was at its grassroots. … to revitalize the nation, it was local society that had first to be revitalized.”Footnote ⁸⁶ “The local,” it seems, had become the catchword for the rising nationalism and the emerging nation-state on the eve of the Republic's founding. The philosopher Feng Youlan once recalled that his father, while an official serving in Wuchang during the final years of the Qing, was advised to quit his official post and go home, for the career of a local gentry brings a brighter future than serving the state.Footnote ⁸⁷

After 1911, the new republic largely retained the Qing structure of field administration system in China Proper, except for the abolishing of the prefecture.Footnote ⁸⁸ Thus, in general, the same provinces and counties of the Qing now stood for localities of the Republic.Footnote ⁸⁹ But decades of debates, experiments, reforms, and revolutionary activities that had pushed the local to the foreground in the late Qing helped to set it on a new footing under the Republic. In terms of institutions, election-based legislative bodies of the province and the county all became constitutional. Concepts, if not smooth practices in all places and all time, of local budget and local tax at both the province and county levels (which, strictly speaking, did not exist at all in the Qing until 1908) come into being from the very beginning of the Republic.Footnote ⁹⁰ In theory at least, such institutional changes made it possible to view localities as distinctive social and political entities in their own rights. In a sense, they did to locality what the chronicle ordinance of 1929 did to the gazetteer: formal recognition of a status that was often already in de facto existence. In real politics, the theme of building the nation through empowering the locality had gathered enough momentum to survive the attempts to rein it in. Yuan Shikai's decree to abolish local assemblies in 1914 dared not to completely remove the trappings of local self-government, and was soon rescinded after Yuan's death.Footnote ⁹¹ The Beijing government after Yuan issued new laws on this matter, and established schools to train local self-governance cadres for the provinces.Footnote ⁹² Sun Yat-sun had long since been interested in local self-governance, and made it clear in public speeches during the years of Yuan's presidency that “local self-governance is the basis of nation-building.”Footnote ⁹³

In the early 1920s, with the center weak and provincial identity strong, and social Darwinism outliving its appeal (now that the country had achieved independence from the Manchus), Western political theories of federalism became particularly attractive, and the dynamics of localism soon took the form of province-based federalism.Footnote ⁹⁴ The most dramatic component of this movement was the Hunan nationalism that involved none other than the young Mao. But the overall view of the locality–polity relation stayed unchanged. Mao's own promotion of Hunan nationalism was never unmoored from an imagined China in the background. He wrote that “we must strive first for a ‘Republic of Hunan,’ to implement the new ideal … and to become the leader of 27 small Chinas.” Eventually, Mao admitted, China would be reunited, if only from the bottom (province) upward.Footnote ⁹⁵

Sun Yat-sen did, for a moment, object to the province-dominated approach of the federalist movement. But this does not conflict with his overall engagement in local self-governance. Sun's difference with the federalist movement was rather that of military vs. civil road to unification, as Sun insisted that “real self-governance of the provinces is possible only after the accomplishment of the National Revolution.”Footnote ⁹⁶ Until the end of his life, Sun remained a believer in the bottom-up approach to nation-building, as he settled on the county as the starting point of democracy in the Outline of National Reconstruction (1924), and stated in the lectures on the Three People's Principle (1924) that “the native place sentiment of the Chinese is very deep-rooted; it is especially easy to unite people from the same province, prefecture or village.” It is clear that he viewed local self-governance as prerequisites for national integration and strength, and was hence perfectly consistent with the age-old view of the locality–polity relationship.Footnote ⁹⁷ Like Sun, many in the 1920s who objected to province-based federalism actually supported sub-province-level local self-governance.Footnote ⁹⁸

In 1928, the Nationalist Party (GMT) came to power through military unification. In terms of Sun's agenda, the enterprise of nation-building now entered the tutelage stage. By then the idea of bottom-up mobilization and the general guideline of local self-governance, i.e., starting from the county, gradually reaching the province, and culminating in national level constitutional rule as envisioned by Sun, had become the mainstream of the GMT political theory. One of the party-state's most proclaimed commitments during this stage was to implement local self-governance according Sun's vision. The County Organization Law, which defined the county as both an administrative and a self-governance unit, was drafted in 1928 and issued in 1929. A nation-wide schedule was made to reorganize county government in 1930 and accomplish county self-governance by the end of 1934.Footnote ⁹⁹ In actual practice, the needs to consolidate power and fight the communist rebels pushed the GMT decisively away from the idea of mobilization and toward more rigorous bureaucratic control. But Chiang Kai-shek never abandoned, nor could he afford to abandon, the idea of popular mobilization from the bottom up, which was a signature program of the party's founder. Throughout the GMT rule, major publications on the country's political system consistently featured the tutelage goal of local self-governance. This was the case also in the internal speeches during GMT's highest level training sessions for its cadre.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ When the effort to tighten bureaucratic control of the county was proved unsatisfactory, Chiang promulgated a “New County System” in 1939 to reinstitute certain aspects of local self-government.Footnote ¹⁰¹ In general, one may argue that local self-governance continued its oscillation between control and mobilization as it had under the Qing. The county elites were often frustrated in their hopes to transform China's politics from the bottom up. But the state power Chiang dreamed of never became a reality, and the surging tide of localism originating in the mid-nineteenth century was never turned around.Footnote ¹⁰² In this circumstance, compiling and publishing local (mostly county) gazetteers was probably the least they could do, and did, engage in and accomplish.

As a whole, the several decades after the mid-nineteenth century crisis presents a picture in which the local stayed in the foreground of political discourses and actions, from saving the state to building the nation. The situations in which the local was called on varied, but the underlying rationale had always matched the entrenched view of the locality–polity balance. It was against such background that local people's sense of agency rose high, culminating in the Republican era, and energizing them to engage the gazetteer more often and more assertively. The statement proclaiming the installation of a chronicle for the Zhongxiang county gazetteer (1937), while directly addressing local people's relationship with officialdom, also reveals their faith and hope in locality if we consider its venue of publication:

Such high-profile celebrations of locality, common in Republican gazetteers, attest to a correlation between locality and the gazetteer, the kind of correlation that was also at work during Zhang Xuecheng's intervention into the gazetteer genre in the late eighteenth century. If Zhang's intervention was a case whereby the growth of the gazetteer requested the “rectification of name” for its subject, the triumph of the genre in the Republic can be viewed as a scenario in which the dynamics of locality pushed its gazetteer ahead.Footnote ¹⁰⁴