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 intregrated multiple place identities. [George Ernest Morrison Lecture on Ethnography, 2004, The Contemporary China Centre]