Professor Dikötter received a Project Grant from the ESRC in 2003 for a project entitled 'Material Culture and Everyday Life in Modern China'.

 

 

How do people relate to things? Much has been written about social movements in the history of modern China, but next to nothing is known about the revolution which transformed the very texture of everyday life. This project is the first to map the many changes in the material landscape of modern China from the middle of the nineteenth century to the advent of communism in 1949. It shows that far from being homespun, the quotidian was already inextricably linked to global trends by the last decades of the nineteenth century, from the yarn of clothes, the iron of tools or the oil in lamps among ordinary farmers to electric fans and imported phonographs in wealthy households. 'Foreign' has long signified 'superior', if only because exotic goods generally come from distant lands and are thus highly valued. During the last decades of the nineteenth century, however, things local were increasingly rejected in China as signifiers of backwardness, while imported goods were embraced instead as prestige symbols: modernity had to be brought home in order to propel the country into the universe of 'civilised' nations and join a universal march towards progress. Foreign was no longer merely exotic: to buy foreign was to be modern. But contrary to other parts of the world, for instance Africa and Latin America, the material goods and technological innovations associated with foreign modernity were not merely imported for elite consumption, they were copied locally and rapidly made available to much larger sections of the population. A long-standing tradition of manufacturing goods from foreign patterns, the spread of small enterprises in an expanding market and the availability of cheap labour in a rapidly growing population: these different factors facilitated the domestication of foreign goods, as desirable objects from abroad were copied at low cost to address the needs of a large but relatively poor population. A two-tier economy appeared in which wealthy circles bought foreign goods and ordinary people welcomed cheap imitations, from the enamelled washbasin to the metallic flashlight. A nationalist movement of import substitution in the first decades of the twentieth century further encouraged copy culture: economic nationalism eased the transformation of 'foreign goods' into 'national goods' within less than half a century.

 

 

The appropriation of objects initially associated with the foreign increased cultural diversity, contrary to the popular but misguided notion that globalisation leads to cultural uniformity. In clothing, for instance, women of all social backgrounds selected scarves, skirts, blouses, gowns, corsets and tights from a growing range of sartorial possibilities, using them in combinations which were often strikingly original: the use of the one-piece gown with a scarf and coat is but one example. The very staple of food, often seen as the aspect of life least permeable to foreign influence, changed in taste and aspect, as rice, sugar and wheat were increasingly produced industrially, white being the desired colour. The existing culinary repertoire expanded hugely thanks to the use of tins, making available foodstuffs across regions and seasons, for rich and poor alike. The thermos flask allowed tea culture to thrive, while enamelware, richly decorated to appeal to a variety of tastes, was cheaper and stronger than earthenware and porcelain. Local people varied markedly in the actual uses of particular goods, sometimes subverting the purposes for which they were intended. Mass production of the mirror thus reinforced rather than displaced popular conceptions about spiritual forces, as cheap mirrors were placed outside the door to keep malign spirits from entering the house. The slide show also thrived thanks to complex local roots, in particular popular culture, as the performer would either sing or tell a story following the rotating image. As the project demonstrates, the extraordinary complexity of material culture, produced by endless creative acts of appropriation, can hardly be explained in terms of 'hybridity'. Interiors happily mixed landscape paintings, calligraphy scrolls and door leaves with kitsch oil paintings and modern advertisements: old and new continuously interacted in ways which may have seemed incongruous to outsiders but seemed perfectly in tune to local people.

 

 

Ordinary people, moreover, often marvelled at things new, whether the camera or the bicycle, and sometimes even viewed them as magic objects: the attribution of magical qualities to material objects was part of a social cosmology which animated things with spiritual value. A sense of enchantment characterised the relationship between people and goods, one which can still be found when walking through popular markets in many parts of Asia today. Clocks ticked to the delight of myriads of people, while millions were fascinated by electricity. Debunking the myth of a 'hostility toward alien things' which is claimed to have slowed down China's inclusion in a global economy, this project analyses how a very pragmatic attitude towards material goods prevailed, as most consumers bought the new and chucked out the old without misgivings. They not only embraced new commodities, but rapidly started producing them for an export market in the early decades of the twentieth century: cheap goods made in China can be found everywhere today, from Marrakech to New York, just as porcelain made in China pervaded the world several centuries ago. If an intrinsic element of a rapidly changing world is the capacity to innovate, could China be more in tune with modernity than Europe?