From Aiming for Economic Performance to Political Performance: Two Distinct Periods of Reproduction of Traditions in a Southeastern Chinese Village

This article highlights the dynamic role of lineage activities and local religion in the unending transitions of industrialization. It presents the key motivations behind the reproduction of traditions since the reform and opening-up in the late 1970s through an ethnographic study in a Hokkien village in Southeastern China, located in a county renowned for its economic miracle due to its light industry and trade. The data used in the article were collected through field studies from 2023 to 2024 and several follow-up in-depth interviews. This article reveals an intriguing fact: At the first stage, the revival of lineage activities and local religion served as a medium for emerging merchants’ construction of identity and social fields after the Communist Revolution, local authorities were less involved due to the influence of the Campaign to destroy the Four Olds in the Mao era. At the second stage, the reproduction of traditions has gradually stood closer to political goals, as Xiism employs tradition as a vehicle for the mixing of nationalism and communist state framework, it becomes a visual indicator of local authority performance. Importantly, this article explains that the reason why the range of participants is narrowing while the reproduction of traditions seems to be reinforced is emerging merchants have taken control of the traditional ceremony participation and made it a cronyism game and such new ‘local elite’ have not reproduced the traditional function of the former ‘gentry’ with their responsibilities for this community, who used to assume the role of localization of governance over the last few centuries before the Communist Revolution. Furthermore, the shift in attention to reproducing traditions from the economic to the political seems to indicate that economic development is no longer the priority, possibly rooted in rapid industrialization lacking the process of forming Weberian modern capitalism.