A Tide of Civic Pride.(Brief Article)

When I returned to China in the late 1990s after an absence of nearly a decade, I was struck immediately by one change. The use of public space was much different. In Shanghai, where I'd lived in the 1980s, there were far fewer political placards extolling the virtues of the Communist Party and its national policies. Instead, the signs and billboards were carrying different messages. Many were commercial--ads for KFC outlets or Hennessy cognac were everywhere. But I also noticed signs of a different sort, singing the praises of Shanghai. For every billboard calling on all Chinese to strive to make China a great nation, there were two exhorting local urbanites to make their metropolis a first-class city.

The Chinese have long had a broad view of themselves. The country's basic instincts are nationalistic. Recent years have witnessed the emergence of a global perspective. But while China opens itself to the world, an intriguing counter-movement has been taking place: people have steadily become more psychically attached to where they live. Whereas major cities once seemed vast and forbidding, nowadays they're a source of personal identity. One reason for this shift to localism is that many Chinese have grown cynical about a national political ideology that seems more incoherent than ever. Civic pride, a phenomenon that had no place in Maoist China, is filling that void.

The shelves of Shanghai bookstores are now filled with works of local history. Some feature collections of photographs that lovingly detail the fashions and lifestyles of the treaty-port era (1843-1943), during which the city was divided into foreign-run and Chinese-run districts. Before the 1990s the stories of particular urban centers were folded neatly into larger national narratives--and local Shanghai histories insisted that the only significance of the treaty-port era was the humiliation manifest in the city's "semicolonial" status. Now many Chinese-language works approach the past as intrinsically fascinating or important; they no longer reduce it to one piece in a grand patriotic puzzle.

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