REFORMING THE LOCAL, CONSTRUCTING CHINA: Place Identity in a North China Province

Reform in the People’s Republic of China has seen a dramatic change in the discourse of localism, which has now moved from being a political crime to being a technique for encouraging entrepreneurialism and economic development. One of the oft-cited arguments about the coincidence of economic growth and localism is that this might result in a weakening of central governments and even the agendas of the nation state. An investigation of place identity in Shanxi Province, North China, suggests to the contrary that the impact of new discourses of localism has actually strengthened the nationalist project through creating new and more integrated multiple place identities. During the 1990s in Taiyuan, the capital of Shanxi Province, one of the great economic success stories was the emergence of restaurants and eateries named after the province, its noodles, pancakes and pasta. These new enterprises came in all shapes and sizes: Shanxi Noodle King, Shanxi Pasta World, Shanxi Noodles, to name a few. This phenomenon was all the more remarkable because, while the territory of Shanxi had long been famous for its noodles, pancakes and flour-based food, they had not previously been marketed with specific reference to the name of the province. On the contrary, such foods were more likely to have place descriptors, where these existed at all, to more limited territories, such as towns and counties—for example, the Linfen shuaibing (a very large, thin, flat pancake, cooked folded in layers) or Wenshui jubing (a deep-fried doughy ball with a sweet filling)—and then only because they had become known (largely through sales) outside their area of origin. The emergence of Shanxi noodles (and indeed a provincial cuisine of any kind) in the 1990s was part of the deliberate construction of a provincial identity by the Party–state, designed primarily to assist the cause of economic development. Shanxi was being identified as a new local imaginary that would help mobilise the enthusiasm, productivity and even the resources of its inhabitants. Indeed, both because the province is clearly a higher order of the “local” than the towns and counties that might be thought the more usual level of local identification and because the social construction of a specifically Shanxi identity emphasises the networks that bind its inhabitants, this result is perhaps better described as the emergence of a translocal imaginary. In this process of identity formation, the idea of the local was effectively reformed by the Party–state in two further regards: localism was being openly articulated and becoming politically respectable; and the province was being highlighted as the prime scale of identification.