A Local Identity Breakdown

Locality and the State in Huizhou’s Tax Controversy of 1577

Bibliographic Data

ID11206237
AuthorsYongtao Du (0000-0001-6712-1104, Oklahoma State University, Stillwater, OK, USA, corresponding author)
Year2020
Volume2020
Issue81
Pages3-27
Publication date2020-01-02
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueMing Studies (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0147-037X • E-ISSN: 1759-7595
PublisherInforma UK Limited (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1080/0147037x.2020.1741906
OpenAlexW3016360167
LanguageEN
Citations received1
References cited17

The geographical scale of locality has never been clearly defined in the recent “localist turn” scholarship on late imperial China: “the local” there could refer to a county, a prefecture, and occasionally a region that contains more than one prefecture. One cause of this scalar inexactitude can be found in the intellectual trajectory of the local history orientation in Chinese studies. Another, probably more important cause is that historical actors themselves in the late imperial period kept the scale of locality fluid in their performances of local identity and their practices of local activism. Behind this fluidity may hide some crucial yet unexplored issues of both locality and localism in late imperial China. This article takes as an example the controversy over the “head tax on silk” (rending sijuan, 人丁絲捐) that broke out in the Huizhou (徽州) Prefecture in 1577 to illuminate the flexibility of scale in local identity formation, as well as the poverty of locality as a source of political loyalty

Aesthetics · Archaeology · Art · China · Economic history · Identity (music · Local History · Localism · Locality · Political economy · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Chinese history and philosophy · History · Law · Reformation and Early Modern Christianity · Vietnamese History and Culture Studies

Tools

Open DOI