Paoge, Teahouses and Street Culture: What Did a City Where Society Governed Itself Look Like?

This is Chengdu as the historian Wang Di sees it. He has been a harsh critic of the expansion of modern state power, always looking at problems from the side of the weak, and at history from the bottom of society.

Wang Di is Distinguished Professor and chair of the history department at the University of Macau. He works on Chinese social history, urban history, the new cultural history, the history of everyday life, and microhistory. His books include Striding Out of the Closed World (《跨出封闭的世界》), Street Culture (《街头文化》), Teahouse (《茶馆》) and Paoge (《袍哥》).

He was born in Chengdu, Sichuan, in June 1956. After finishing high school he was sent down to the countryside as an "educated youth." Back in the city, he spent nearly a year doing heavy manual labor at a brick-and-tile factory in the construction division of the Chengdu Railway Bureau. Because he could draw, he was moved to the union, where he painted propaganda posters and brushed large-character slogans. The year after the college entrance exam was reinstated, he gave up his "iron rice bowl" at the railway bureau and entered the history department at Sichuan University, studying under Professor Wei Yingtao. He took his bachelor's degree in 1982 and his master's in 1985, then stayed on to teach.

In the spring of 1991, Wang Di left his hometown for Johns Hopkins University in the United States, where he studied under the sinologist William T. Rowe. He earned his PhD in 1998 and then taught in the history department at Texas A&M University, where he stayed for 17 years. Only in 2015 did he return to China, joining the University of Macau.

Wang Di has spent most of the years since 1991 away from Chengdu, but in one sense he has never left. The city has always been his subject: "I study her every day, exploring all her secrets."

That is the mark of his scholarship today. Where many Chinese historians favor grand political narratives, he cares about the daily lives of ordinary people in local society, and is drawn to microhistory and popular culture.

It was not where he started. The turn took ten years.

In 1993 he published Striding Out of the Closed World. Deeply influenced at the time by the French Annales school and by modernization theory, he studied society in the upper Yangtze region between 1644 and 1911 and produced a sweeping social history told from the top down.

In 2003 came the English-language Street Culture in Chengdu: Public Space, Urban Commoners, and Local Politics, 1870-1930. It won the Urban History Association's best-book award, and it turned his career around.

After Street Culture, Wang Di finished three more monographs: Teahouse: Public Life and the Microcosm of Chengdu, 1900-1950 (《茶馆：成都的公共生活和微观世界，1900-1950》), Teahouse: The Decline and Revival of Public Life in Chengdu, 1950-2000 (《茶馆：成都公共生活的衰落与复兴，1950-2000》) (the English edition is out; the Chinese edition is forthcoming), and Paoge: Violence and Order in Rural West Sichuan in the 1940s (《袍哥：1940年代川西乡村的暴力与秩序》). The subtitles of these four books tell the story: his work has grown steadily more microscopic, steadily more attentive to the daily lives of people at the bottom and to change in local society.

The two halves of the career are connected. "If Striding Out of the Closed World looked at social change through the eyes of the elite, then these two later books [Street Culture and the first Teahouse] explore, from the perspective of the lower classes, how modernization affected their daily lives... In analyzing social change, I paid closer attention to how ordinary people responded, and to their relationship with the elite and with state power, examining how people paid the price of modernization while also revealing how they accepted and how they refused the changes they faced," he wrote in Inside the Chinese City: History Seen From the Bottom of Society (《走进中国城市内部：从社会的最底层看历史》).

In that book he also set out his view of history plainly. "Studying everyday life, studying the lower orders — in the end this is a question of historical outlook and method. Although our mainstream ideology never stops repeating that 'the people are the force that creates history,' our historical research in fact treats that force very lightly... Our historians' appetite for grand political narrative also comes from the influence of what might be called 'judgmental history.' That 'judgmental history' plainly descends from the Chinese tradition of pronouncing historical figures good or bad. Under that tradition, historians weigh value judgments heavily and neglect the causes and consequences of events, let alone offering, within the context of history, a logically coherent explanation for the behavior of a given event or figure... Historical research should be an academic and cultural undertaking, and it should be kept apart from utility and application."

He does not hide the present-day concerns behind the work. He agrees that historians "should have feeling, a sense of justice, and a concern for the present," but insists these "should not sway their cool historical judgment."

His interest in the everyday lives of ordinary people in local society is bound up with the unlimited expansion of state power in China since the late imperial period. He is a harsh critic of that expansion, "always observing problems from the side of the weak, sympathizing with what happens to those at the bottom," and hoping to see the macro world through the micro one. His work in urban and cultural history carries another hope: that China's old cities will stop being sacrificed to projects that decorate officials' records, and that something of a real historical and cultural inheritance, and of local character, will be left for the generations to come.

In a 2013 interview with Academic Monthly (《学术月刊》), Wang Di said:

"Across the whole of the 20th century, Chinese politics and society moved in one direction: state power kept strengthening and expanding without limit, while society kept shrinking, reaching its historical peak from the 1950s through the Cultural Revolution... After reform and opening, state control loosened somewhat and society was gradually allowed to develop, including the appearance of various social organizations, giving people more freedom. Reform and opening has gone on for more than thirty years, and we are still in that transitional stage. Any power needs checks. However successful, however good a government is, its power still needs checks."

"Across the whole of the 20th century, you can watch national culture gradually change and even replace local culture... Cultural differences between places used to be very large. Differences still exist, but with modernization, better transport and mass media, cultural distinctiveness keeps shrinking, local cultures are dying out, and culture is converging into one."

In late 2018 and early 2019, Wang Di published the English and Chinese editions of Paoge, along with a collection of columns, The Vanished Ancient City: Memories of Everyday Life in Late-Qing and Early-Republican Chengdu (《消失的古城：清末民初成都的日常生活记忆》). Paoge was seized on by readers and the press, set off a wide discussion, and won several prizes.

That has something to do with the hold the Paoge still have on popular culture and daily life. If you have lived in Sichuan, you have probably heard old people mention them. They turn up all over literature and film: Li Jieren's novel Ripples Across Stagnant Water (《死水微澜》), Sha Ting's story At the Qixiangju Teahouse (《在其香居茶馆里》), Jiang Wen's film Let the Bullets Fly (adapted from Ten Night Tales, 《夜谭十记》, by the Sichuan writer Ma Shitu), and the Sichuan-dialect television dramas The Foolish Division Commander (《傻儿师长》), The Foolish Corps Commander (《傻儿军长》) and The Foolish Commander-in-Chief (《傻儿司令》). They have left their mark on daily speech too, in sayings like "a Paoge man never flakes out," "falling off the horse," "abiding by the code" and "backing someone up."

But Wang Di finds that for all the talk about the Paoge, most of it is legend, with little serious history behind it. They are a group we are at once familiar with and ignorant of, and he wanted to show how complicated they were.

By his account, the Paoge — the Sichuan branch of the Gelaohui, or Elder Brother Society — were the secret society with the deepest and widest hold on Sichuan society from the Qing dynasty through the Republican era, a match for the Green Gang and the Hongmen. At their height more than 70% of adult men in Sichuan were members, and their reach extended into every corner of the countryside and the cities. They filled the power vacuum in local society and were an important force in the revolution at the end of the Qing.

"The Paoge we see were at once an anti-Qing political body and a gang that broke into houses and robbed them... In their own words, the Paoge were righteous warriors charged with overthrowing the Qing court; in the government's eyes, they were rebels and criminal gangs to be put down without mercy; and for ordinary people, what they thought of the Paoge depended on what had happened to them — those who got their protection and care were grateful, those who did not could hardly help resenting them," Wang Di writes in the book.

In late 2018 we met the 62-year-old Professor Wang Di at a hotel in Beijing. He speaks with a thick Sichuan accent, and right up to the day Paoge was published he was still saying "Paoguo," "Paoguo." To let him speak freely, and to let you feel more of him and of Sichuan history, we ended up conducting the interview in Sichuan dialect and keeping its flavor in the text.

Q = QDaily

Wang = Wang Di

More Than 70% of Adult Sichuan Men Were Once Paoge Members, and Yet We Have No Research on Them

Q: Why is the new book called Paoge: Violence and Order in Rural West Sichuan in the 1940s? Are violence and order the two key words for understanding the Paoge? I saw that the earlier title was Paoge: A Rural Secret-Society Family, 1939-1949 (《袍哥：一个乡村秘密社会家庭，1939-1949》).

Wang: That came out of talks with my editor at Stanford University Press. Why violence? Because the Paoge really did rely on violence. They had to fight the government, so armed confrontation was unavoidable. And they had no central command — every mountain lodge, guild hall and dockside branch went its own way, disputes among them were bound to break out, and those too had to be settled by force.

But the violence wasn't purely negative. The Paoge were also a crucial force for keeping local order. As I wrote in Paoge, when bandits ran wild and the local government could do nothing, the Paoge stepped in and put them down. They helped the government collect taxes and they upheld a certain moral, traditional order. When Lei Mingyuan heard that his daughter was involved with the tailor the family employed, he made no inquiry at all — he simply had her killed. He believed it was his duty to defend traditional moral order.

By the 1930s and 1940s the Paoge had already worked their way into local administration. At every level of government — township chiefs and their deputies, baojia headmen, police, soldiers — the men in place were Paoge members, and keeping local order came to require Paoge participation.

So the two things fit together and fed each other. On the surface "violence" and "order" are opposites; in practice they were one. That is exactly, concretely, the part the Paoge played locally.

Q: You wrote, "Before the new regime reached Sichuan, the Paoge had almost complete control of rural society." What part did they play in the power structure of the cities? Were they as important there as in the countryside?

Wang: Just as important. A late-Qing county magistrate named Zhou Xun wrote Reminiscences of the Hibiscus City (《芙蓉话旧录》 — "Hibiscus City" is a nickname for Chengdu). By his account, almost everyone running the baojia household-registration system and public security in late-Qing Chengdu was a Paoge member. In the Republican era it was more obvious still. In Chongqing, anyone elected to the assembly had Paoge backing behind him; without it there was no way in. Society at large was the same. Nearly every trade and every street was under Paoge control, each with its own lodge. Chengdu had just over 600 streets and several hundred lodges. Workers at the very bottom joined too. And many teahouses, restaurants, hotels, inns and opium dens were run by Paoge members. It amounted to an enormous social web.

The Paoge also did illegal business, of course — smuggling opium, gold and guns, very busily, in the cities. By the Republican era bandits were everywhere. When the 1911 Revolution broke out and Sichuan set up a provincial military government, the soldiers mutinied, burned down Chengdu's commercial center, robbed the provincial treasury and broke into houses to steal. The Paoge organized, kept watch for one another and held the city gates so the mutineers couldn't carry the loot out.

Think about it: there was no other force. The police had run off, the army was in mutiny — who was going to keep order in the city? In times of chaos, when state power is absent, the Paoge's function is obvious. They filled the vacuum.

Q: You wrote, "The destruction of the Paoge was certainly the work of the state apparatus, but it was also the inevitable end of this organization's traditional confrontation with that apparatus." Why do you think their end was inevitable?

Wang: At the close of the book I say that this organization began as an anti-Qing, pro-Ming movement rooted in the common people and ended up cut off from them. However broad your social base, however many resources you hold, once you turn away from the people you cannot escape your fate. My real subject there isn't the Paoge. It's a general truth: anyone holding power must put the people's interests first, rather than trampling on them in the name of the national interest.

The actual destruction of the Paoge shows something else — that the Communist Party would not tolerate any social organization capable of standing up to the state. It wasn't only the Paoge. After 1949 the trade guilds went as well, charitable bodies were no longer allowed to operate, and traditional social organizations were phased out one by one. So strictly speaking, whether the Paoge had cut themselves off from the people had little to do with their end. I simply wanted to add that general truth at the close of the book and let readers work it out for themselves.

Q: You also say in the book that the immediate cause was grain requisition by force, and that the Paoge resisted and were destroyed for it.

Wang: Right. The Paoge knew that taking on the Communist Party was an egg against a stone, so when the Communists came into the Chengdu Plain they had no plan to resist. There were no risings in the countryside or the cities. The Communists had also done the groundwork early, sending underground party members into Sichuan to make contact with them. So why did the trouble start? Mainly the grain. That year's grain had already gone to the Nationalists; then the Communists arrived and demanded it again. Even the landlords had nothing left to give.

Cao Shuji of Shanghai Jiao Tong University has done fine work on rural China. He studied Jiangjin, and the Jiangjin archives show landlords with no grain left, selling off land in the end. And when you handed over the public grain you had to have your own family cart it there. The landlords had a hard time of it. Girls of eleven and twelve were sent along to haul grain. It was the state that used force first, and the Paoge always stood for local interests. With nothing to eat, of course they resisted. Where would they find the strength to take on the Communist Party? Nowhere. But when you can't survive, you fight back.

Q: You go on to say that although the organization "was destroyed, it left behind many questions still worth answering seriously today." Which questions? Or, put another way, what present-day concern lies behind Paoge?

Wang: Because this was a social organization of such historical weight, growing in such broad social soil, taking in such a large share of the population — more than 70% of adult men in Sichuan — and yet we have no research on it. Look at all the questions. How did the Paoge grow to that size? By what routes did they come to control local society? The Qing government suppressed them again and again and the Republican government declared them illegal, so why did they flourish instead of fading? How could one organization take in people of every class and every background? And so on.

There have been books about the Paoge, but most chase the exotic and the legendary — good-looking, fun, with no real scholarly inquiry. So these questions have gone unanswered for decades. This book is only a first answer; a fuller study of the Paoge later on will argue them out in more concrete terms.

Q: I hear it's a trilogy.

Wang: Right. The first volume is history and myth. The Paoge's whole history is tangled up with its legends. Some they made up; some really happened. The official version, the popular version, the Paoge's own version — how do they relate? How did the Paoge begin? How did they rise?

The second volume is ritual, symbol and language. Their sense of ritual was extremely strong. How did they hold a meeting? How was the hall laid out? The verse recitations and call-and-response? How did they open the mountain gate? Calling Lord Guan to attend, and so on. These rituals were highly specific, each step by a set procedure. Then their symbols, which have to be decoded. Why was the hall laid out that way? Then language. Why did they alter their coded characters the way they did? Hand signs, body language, the tea-bowl formations — all of it ritual. In anthropological terms, laying out the tea bowls was a performance. But behind the performance lay a great deal of inner logic: political thinking, identity, a contest of power with an opponent you had never met.

The third volume is the network — above all its relations with politics and government, and the relations among the mountain lodges. How did it grow? How did it fight the Qing government? By what methods? How did the network spread? How was it controlled inside? And how did it build a structure of power at all? There was no central authority, it was scattered across regions, yet it went by one name. How did that happen? Why that way? What did it do to the localities? What did it do to the organization itself? All of this needs answering.

The Paoge have been gone for more than half a century and we know very little about them, for all the influence they once had. It is a real hole in the field. Astonishing that after so long there is still no proper study. Thirty-odd years of collecting material, and finally the writing stage arrived on its own. I had planned one book in three parts, but the material turned out so rich and so precious that squeezing it into a single book felt like a waste — hence the trilogy. I write cautiously, though, so it takes years, and I can't say how many. Consider that the second Teahouse took me a full 12 years.

Q: You wrote, "The Paoge vanished as history more than 60 years ago, but the group does not seem to have vanished from our lives. From the angle of language alone, its legacy survives in everyday life and popular culture." And you gave many examples: "falling off the horse," "flaking out," "abiding by the code," "backing someone up." Apart from language, are there other traces of the Paoge in daily life and popular culture today?

Wang: One is popular culture — fiction, film and television, oral tradition. People are still fascinated. If you want to talk about Sichuan society in the Qing and the Republic, you can hardly leave the Paoge out.

Another is organizational form. You won't find anyone in Sichuan today saying "I'm founding a Paoge lodge," but plenty of criminal gangs — that is the government's term for them — organize themselves in ways very close to the Paoge.

Liu Han, for instance. In 2014 Liu Han was charged with running a criminal organization, and it was said he was a Paoge man of the first rank who applied Paoge rules inside the group and outside it. I never met him, but from press reports I know he was seen as open-handed and generous, a philanthropist. So many school buildings collapsed in the Wenchuan earthquake, and the ones he paid for didn't. Did that have anything to do with his Paoge character? I'd say certainly. You can imagine him telling a contractor: build the school properly for me and you won't be short of money, but cut corners on me and I won't be polite about it. That Paoge swagger of his meant nobody dared play games with him either.

Right after Chengdu's Global Center was finished, Deng Hong, the businessman behind the investment, was arrested — a big affair. Then Li Chuncheng's fall, and a whole run of big cases, all of them officials in league with businessmen. The Paoge worked the same way in their day, always tangled up with local power. Liu Han's own line ran all the way up to Zhou Yongkang. He had a business quarrel with the Yuan brothers in the northeast, and in 2006, through Zhou Yongkang, he got the three Yuan brothers — Yuan Baojing and his siblings — sentenced to death. Later, when Zhou Yongkang fell, Liu Han went the same way.

The things behind a case like Liu Han's, officials and businessmen in league, are very complicated. But the trial was rushed, the death sentence handed down, the sentence carried out. I put a line in the English edition specifically: no one knows how many secrets he took to his grave. That is exactly how it is — dig deeper and it's more than you can handle. Collusion between the Paoge and local power was a tradition, and you can still see that tradition today. It is no longer called Paoge, but the nature of it, the way of doing things, the culture, has carried on.

My first book, Street Culture, argued precisely this. We used to say that the impact of the modern West was so great that everything changed. That isn't how it works. Cultural things change slowly; they do not turn over in a day. The Paoge were destroyed long ago, and if you really go looking for what they left behind, you can still find it.

Why Have Teahouses Survived So Much Political, Economic and Cultural Change?

Q: Your second book on teahouses, Teahouse: The Decline and Revival of Public Life in Chengdu, 1950-2000, comes out before long. In it you try to answer why teahouses have proved so tough through political, economic and cultural change. Do you have answers now?

Wang: That's the question the second Teahouse tries to answer. It really is strange. In the first Teahouse I described how, during the War of Resistance, many people from the coast came to the wartime rear, saw how Chengdu's teahouses were thriving — every one of them packed — and scolded the locals: the country is in danger, soldiers are bleeding at the front, and you people in Chengdu are still sitting in teahouses talking nonsense? Idle talk ruins the nation! Chengdu people were unhappy about this and answered back. A writer using the pen name "Laoxiang" — fellow townsman — wrote a piece called "On Chengdu People Drinking Tea," saying these outsiders didn't understand the city. A Chengdu teahouse was not simply a place to relax; it served all kinds of functions and mattered most to people at the bottom. Conditions at home were poor; they couldn't even boil water. After a day's labor they had to have somewhere to go. There was nothing to object to. But he also said we shouldn't shout "long live the teahouse" either: as society developed, teahouses would die out by themselves.

He never dreamed society would develop this far — reform and opening, commercialization, internationalization, modernization — and, crucially, that so many competing public spaces would appear: Starbucks, karaoke lounges, internet cafés, hotel facilities, on and on. By the old logic an old form like the teahouse should have been swept away. And plenty of traditional ways of life were. Does anyone still watch puppet shows or shadow plays? They survive as cultural heritage. Whole trades that existed in the Republican era are simply gone — the smoke-cured water pipes sold in Chengdu teahouses, all the little peddlers, the knife sharpeners. When we were children you still heard the cry, "Sharpen your scissors, hone your kitchen knives!" (Wang Di gives the street cry.) Where do you hear that now? Those trades have vanished.

But the teahouse is still here, and so are the public spaces that do similar work. Why? That's what I set out to explore.

I already noted in the first Teahouse that water was inconvenient. Chengdu drew well water, high in alkali. Boil it and a white scum forms on top, and it tastes slightly bitter — no good for tea. So tea depended on river water. But the rivers inside the city were polluted, and water had to be hauled in from outside, which was very hard for a single household. A teahouse could bring it in by water cart or by hired water carriers. Fuel was a problem in old Chengdu too — expensive, bought as firewood, awkward to handle. So a Chengdu household generally lit no fire unless it was cooking a meal. Lighting one just to boil water for tea wasted too much fuel, so people bought their tea and hot water at the teahouse. The abundance of teahouses in Chengdu had a lot to do with the local ecology.

And why so many teahouses in the small market towns of the Chengdu Plain? The American anthropologist G. William Skinner studied the plain's market structure. Settlement there is unlike the north: people live scattered rather than in villages, each household beside its own fields, with little contact between them. How did they stay connected? By market day — going to the market town. They needed to go, to gather, to rest. Where? The teahouse. Teahouses met that need, which is why market towns had so many. In Paoge I mention that a place as small as Chongyiqiao, one little market town, had ten or twenty teahouses.

The Chengdu Plain differs from the north in another way. The North China Plain is relatively flat, and transport there leaned on ox and horse carts, which move fast. The roads of the West Sichuan Plain were winding and narrow, and the land — called a plain — is mostly hills. People relied on pushing single-wheeled "rooster carts," pulling rickshaws and carrying loads on shoulder poles, punishing physical work. Since it ran on muscle, people needed somewhere to rest.

All these things produced a lot of teahouses. And none of them is an issue anymore. So why have teahouses not declined but multiplied?

I put forward some ideas in the second Teahouse. First, I found that teahouses are better than anything at adapting to social change. They are flexible, they take little capital, anyone can open a small one. And as society changes they keep up at once. You can see it across the 20th century: whenever something new appeared, it appeared in the teahouse first. When the gramophone arrived, whether it played Sichuan opera or Beijing opera, teahouses used it to pull in customers. When distilled water first appeared in the late Qing, teahouses made it a selling point: our tea is brewed with distilled water. Li Jieren describes this in The Great Wave (《大波》). When films arrived, teahouses became places to screen them. When air conditioning arrived, teahouses installed it right away.

And teahouses held poetry societies of every sort. Look at the diary Wu Yu kept in Chengdu: as soon as he wrote a poem he took it to the teahouse and hung it up, and it would even be sold there. Riddle-guessing and the like all happened in teahouses. Not to mention how much they took in — all kinds of small traders, some quite specialized, serving the local economy. It continued after reform and opening. Particular trades and particular hobbies gathered at particular teahouses: bird fanciers, pigeon fanciers and chess players at this one; steel dealers and ceramics dealers at that one. Buyers and sellers both knew where to meet, and goods-exchange fairs were held in teahouses too. In the old days teahouses hosted amateur opera-percussion sessions where Sichuan-opera enthusiasts sang; these were banned in the 1950s, and after reform and opening the enthusiasts went back to meeting regularly in teahouses. Later, when grown unmarried children became a worry, parents brought their children's particulars to the teahouse to trade information, and the teahouse became a marriage bureau.

So teahouses have kept adapting to what economic and social life needed.

They keep changing and can serve any purpose. A doctor could even see patients in one. Teahouses used to be fairly downmarket; as the economy grew and expectations rose, mid-range and high-end teahouses appeared, meeting different needs and serving every class. In Chengdu the cheap tea used to be 2 or 5 yuan a cup, while the expensive kind ran to 70 or 80. When I did fieldwork in the 1990s, Sentosa was the most upmarket teahouse in Chengdu. The manager told me that whenever some big star came, or the government was entertaining, or an important figure from the TV station was in town, they were brought to Sentosa. In recent years, with the anti-corruption campaign, business collapsed, and Sentosa, which had bet on the high end, had to close.

And with so many retired people now, teahouses give them somewhere to gather. Plenty of retired people in Chengdu meet at teahouses. It used to be 10 yuan for the whole day, lunch, tea and mahjong included. Now it's not even 20 yuan. Cheap. Very low cost, very low profit — and that is how teahouses keep meeting what people need.

Why have teahouses thrived in Chengdu? Because Chengdu has a townspeople's culture, a grassroots stratum. In Beijing teahouses have a hard time surviving. Lao She Teahouse has become a kind of symbol, but it only represents the past; it hasn't managed to serve what ordinary people need. Chengdu is different, because there the teahouse serves the daily lives of so many ordinary people. That is the secret of its survival.

Teahouses face a challenge now, though. What kind? Changes in urban space. Teahouses used to depend on small streets and lanes — traditional neighborhoods where residents lived along both sides of a street and were regulars. It was convenient: a guest arrives, and off you go, next door to the teahouse. Even Meng Wentong, the history professor at Sichuan University, would take students who came to find him to the teahouse next door. He even held exams there: his students came, and he sat waiting to talk to them one by one. That kind of urban space suited teahouses. Now, with demolition on a large scale and residents moved into high-rises, traditional neighborhoods and neighborly ties are gone, and that change in the shape of space is bound to tell on teahouses. The effect will only be visible slowly. For now, at least, Chengdu's teahouses face no crisis: there are more than 9,000 of them.

Q: And that's the most there have ever been.

Wang: Right. But bear in mind that what we used to call Chengdu was the small patch inside the city walls, inside today's First Ring Road. Chengdu has since expanded many times over, so the growth is understandable. Still, it is certainly the city with the most teahouses in China, no question.

How long can this last? 20 years? 50? Even 500? Only time can answer. Because I study history, I make no predictions. I only look at what has already happened.

Q: For the first Teahouse you drew heavily on archives and historical documents. For the second, many archives had not been declassified — you couldn't consult records from before 1970 — so you had to rely on your own fieldwork notes, oral accounts and material from newspapers and magazines, which pulled the second book's method away from the first. How to handle the shift from working through archival language to a narrative built mainly on individual accounts, a shift of voice and of genre, was something you thought about for a long time. How did you finally resolve it?

Wang: Yes. Why did the second Teahouse take so long? The first took about six years; the second took 12. The second became a genuinely interdisciplinary project. Traditional history rests mainly on written sources, above all archives. Mining the archives is a large task in itself. But for the socialist period, the 1950s and early 1960s weren't bad — especially the 1950s, where the archives are rich, and I happened to be doing the research when the archives were relatively open, so I could see most of the material. Archive management in China has grown more and more closed since; 1950s files are hard to see today.

For the second half of the book, especially after reform and opening, there were no archives at all. That's the paradox: you'd think the closer the period, the easier to research, and it isn't so. The closer you get, the more completely the archives are shut. There were simple questions I couldn't answer — how many teahouses did Chengdu have? I couldn't see the teahouse registrations. The registrations for the 1950s and the 1940s I could.

But I wanted to write a reasonably complete history of Chengdu teahouses under socialism, not just the 1950s. So the second part depended mainly on fieldwork. I had been doing that kind of observation since the 1990s, while writing Street Culture. I'd be at the Chengdu Municipal Archives reading files, and at midday the archives closed from 11:30 to 2:30 — three hours. Where do you go? The teahouse was the best answer. Quiet, and I could eat lunch there, and it doubled as fieldwork. I have sat in every teahouse near the Chengdu Municipal Archives.

That's how the material built up over the years: chatting with all kinds of owners and customers, watching, taking photographs. And my fieldwork wasn't the usual kind. I never took notes on the spot, never used a tape recorder. I was there as an ordinary tea drinker and I didn't want people to know I was doing research with a purpose, so every evening at home I wrote down what I had seen and heard that day. I never prepared questions either — just ordinary conversation. I think that reflects teahouse life more truly. Once you set questions you may be selecting for certain answers, or even leading people. So gathering what I could in natural talk is how I came to write about so many people: ear-cleaners, shoe-shiners (in Sichuan dialect the word sounds like "hai"), fortune tellers, tea servers, teahouse owners. All of it built on observation on the ground. That made up for the shortage of documents.

The period after reform and opening had one advantage: newspapers began covering teahouses more, especially the evening papers and metro dailies. So the source problem for those years was also settled reasonably well.

The May Fourth Movement Had a Great Many Problems — a Century On, It's Time to Take Stock

Q: When you were a fellow at the National Humanities Center in the United States, you often talked with the well-known macrohistorian David Christian, and the two of you seem to have found common ground. You think large and small history can be in dialogue. What did you two actually talk about? If they are to be in dialogue, where does one start?

Wang: This was all more than a decade ago. Christian's Maps of Time starts at the beginning of the universe; my history is viewed under a microscope. We go to opposite extremes. But even though I work at the micro level, my angle of vision still involves macro thinking, and I want to understand the macro picture, so his work has been very useful for my micro thinking. In Paoge, the material on the West Sichuan Plain is in fact macro description, and so is the discussion of the rise of anthropology and sociology.

Micro and macro are a complementary pair, not absolutes. There is a micro level because there is a macro one, and having a macro level is what makes micro thinking possible. It's a matter of angle. Historical research needs description at various levels and various distances before it becomes complete and interesting. It's like a medical exam: you may need height, weight, blood, cells, and only then do you understand a person fully. A society is like a person; so is a city — it has a life of its own. To understand a city fully you have to look at it from every angle.

Paoge is fairly close to how microhistory is written now. We still can't put it beside the real microhistory of Italy or France. Why not? Because they have systematic Inquisition archives. Religious interrogations of ordinary people in medieval Europe sometimes ran for years, in extraordinary detail. But Paoge has strengths of its own. At the very least it makes this man flesh and blood, and with the special background material added, I do think it's the first genuine work of microhistory in Chinese historical studies.

We used to overstress the macro, so micro research was weak. Now I give more weight to the micro: writing about small people, writing many details, tying an individual's fate closely to a place. Only that way do you write a balanced history.

Q: One of your current projects is "America's Response to the May Fourth Movement," drawing on a great deal of original material from American newspapers. You took it up because people have mostly viewed May Fourth from the inside and rarely from the outside. What questions are you trying to explore? Any preliminary thoughts or conclusions you can share?

Wang: It also has to do with perceptions inside the United States. Wilson had high hopes after the First World War of building a new peace framework, a new international order, but he got little support at home, which set him back badly, and he also had to compromise with Japan and in the end sacrifice China's interests. All of it needs to be studied in the specific context of China and the international situation at the time.

That includes Chinese students in America, who took part in May Fourth as well: how did the American press cover what they did? And China's various political factions. China had a very hard time at Versailles, though not for want of effort. The country was divided — Sun Yat-sen had set up a government in the south. The delegation to Versailles included both northern and southern men, and they fought among themselves. Wang Zhengting represented the south and disagreed with Wellington Koo, the northern government's representative, on many points. And many Western countries at the time regarded the Chinese government as incompetent and corrupt, broken up by warlords, unable to sort out its own affairs. So however wary they were of Japan, they accommodated it, and although they stood with China morally, at the decisive moment they dropped their support for China's interests. Mainstream American papers of the day made the point themselves: for a great country like China, having its own interests depend in the end on other countries to protect and press for them was in itself a sad state of affairs.

We have to think about the internal chaos China was in and the international problems it faced before we can see how much room and strength it really had to press its own rights on the international stage. In studying May Fourth we mostly attend to the student and worker movements at home. The West — including the American press I've mentioned — reported those movements in detail too, but from a different angle. How did they see the students and the workers? How did they report them? We have paid very little attention to this. A hundred years on, these important questions all need answers.

Q: Looking back at that movement a century later, what strikes you most now?

Wang: We used to see mostly the positive side of May Fourth. Looking at it now, the movement had a great many problems. Take the question of who was patriotic and who was not: even at the time of May Fourth there was already considerable bias in it, including a great deal of misunderstanding of how the delegation behaved at the Paris Peace Conference. China's delegation did as much as it could. The problem was not the delegation but China's strength and the limits set by the whole international environment. On many questions, even on the direction China would later take, the American press of the time saw more clearly than China did. So how far did their view reflect the American government's reading of China's situation? How far was their view objective and far-sighted? And how far was American policy toward China driven by self-interest and short sight? How exactly did the radical May Fourth student movement shape China's later political course? These are the questions I'm trying to answer. A century after May Fourth, it is time to take stock of them, difficult though it remains.

Cover image: a still from Let the Bullets Fly, via Douban.