Making Sense of Good Life: Local Modernity from a Traditional Industrial-Commercial Region in Southern China

Abstract

Based on anthropological fieldwork in a traditional industrial-commercial community in southern China, this study examines how the state and ordinary citizens imagine, perceive, and live “the good life” in different periods after 1949. It also probes into how local society and daily life is influenced by various factors including state- building, political movement, economic change, traditional culture, and individuals’ choice, and so on. For the state, standards of the good life are more a series of ideologies related to modernity and modernization projects. For the community and the individual, however, ideas of the good life depend on wealth, well-being, and a sense of belonging to the community. The similarity and discrepancy of their respective pursuit make their way on modernity converge, diverge and interweave in different periods. It demonstrates the processes of pursuit of the good life by various agents are dynamic and changeable, and also the heterogeneous and uncertain features of local modernity in contemporary China.