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CONTEMPORARY EAST ASIAN
VISUAL CULTURES, SOCIETIES AND POLITICS

Utopia
in Practice
Bishan Project and Rural Reconstruction

Ou Ning
Contemporary East Asian Visual Cultures, Societies
and Politics

Series Editors
Paul Gladston
University of New South Wales
Sydney, NSW, Australia

Frank Vigneron
Chinese University of Hong Kong
Shatin, New Territories, Hong Kong

Yeewan Koon
University of Hong Kong
Pokfulam, Hong Kong Island, Hong Kong

Lynne Howarth-Gladston
Sydney, NSW, Australia

Chunchen Wang
Central Academy of Fine Arts
Beijing, China
Gladston, P. (Ed), Vigneron, F. (Ed), Koon, Y. (Ed), Howarth-Gladston,
L. (Ed), Wang, C. (Ed)
This series brings together diverse perspectives on present-day relationships
between East Asian visual cultures, societies and politics. Its scope extends to
visual cultures produced, disseminated and received/consumed in East Asia –
comprising North and South Korea, Mongolia, Japan, mainland China, Hong
Kong, Macau, and Taiwan – as well as related diasporas world-wide, and to all
aspects of culture expressed through visual images, including across perceived
boundaries between high and popular culture and the use of traditional and
contemporary media. Taken into critical account are cultural, social and politi-
cal ecologies currently shaped by geopolitical borders across the East Asia
region in addition to their varied intersections with an increasingly trans-cul-
tural world. The series emphasizes the importance of visual cultures in the
critical investigation of contemporary socio-political issues relating to, for
example, identity, social inequality, decoloniality and the environment. The
editors welcome contributions from early career and established researchers.

Advisory Board
Prof Jason Kuo, University of Maryland
Prof Chris Lupke, University of Alberta
Prof Paul Manfredi, North Western Lutheran University, Seattle
Prof Ted Snell, University of Western Australia
Dr Hongwei Bao, University of Nottingham
Dr Ting Chang, University of Nottingham
Dr Gerald Cipriani, National University of Ireland
Dr Katie Hill, Sotheby’s Institute, London
Dr Birgit Hopfener, Carleton University
Dr Takako Itoh, Faculty of Art and Design, Toyama University
Dr Darren Jorgensen, University of Western Australia
Dr Beccy Kennedy, Manchester Metropolitan University
Dr Franziska Koch, Heidelberg University
Ms Taliesin Thomas, Director AW Asia, New York
Dr Wei-Hsiu Tung, University of Tainan
Dr Ming Turner, National Cheng Kung University, Taiwan
Dr Meiqin Wang, California State University, Northridge
Dr Yungwen Yao, Ta Tung University
Dr Bo Zheng, City University Hong Kong

More information about this series at

http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/16532
 Ou Ning

Utopia in Practice
Bishan Project and Rural Reconstruction
Ou Ning
Columbia University
Jingzhou, Hubei, China

ISSN 2662-7701     ISSN 2662-771X (electronic)

Contemporary East Asian Visual Cultures, Societies and Politics
ISBN 978-981-15-5790-3    ISBN 978-981-15-5791-0 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-5791-0

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer
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For Tang Xue, Tang Tang, and especially Niu Niu, the Bishan-born baby
 Prologue

Night Show1
A visitor in the dead of night,
a moonlit dance.
Just for that quicksilver performance
all the power goes out.
The backhoe reposes in the riverbed,
the cement mixer rests at the paddy’s edge.
White walls and black tiles, row upon row;
everything is dappled with light and shadow.
Beauty and ugliness is whitewashed,
all sound absorbed.
The world pauses, the audience
holds its breath, waiting—
then the show spills forth.

1
Completed in Chinese on March 28, 2013, in Bishan. The English version was translated
by Austin Woerner in 2019.

vii
 Preface: Eternal Return1

Ou Ning has, without a trace of self-pity and with no arrogance at all, identified
himself and his trajectory with Song Dynasty poet Chen Yuyi, this on his the only
astonishingly recent initial trip to Chen’s native Luoyang. Luoyang is the historic
eastern capital of China, on the Yellow River, in the North China Plain, China’s
largest alluvial plain. Chen’s ancestral home was near Xi’an, China’s historic west-
ern capital. Beijing and Hebei and the far north came much later. Shanghai was
not even on the map. China’s center of power was not coastal. It has become so.
And Ou Ning is both Chinese and coastal. It has become so, above all, in Ou’s
native Guangdong, perhaps the world’s most dynamic economic region. Luoyang’s
Henan has declined in power and influence, not least in the Great Leap Forward
as Guangdong has become by far the most dominant province in China. Dynasties
have come to power in the West, the military northwest also under pressure from
horseback-archer pastoral nomads to its north, while the capitals of one dynasty
after the next (from Shang) have after a few generations been driven east and
moved to Luoyang, less military, center of Confucian learning, the arts, the basis
really of Chinese civilization and historic soft power. Ou in Luoyang could get in
touch with a certain collective unconscious, an early precursor of violent termina-
tion of the Bishan Project: a recurrent motif, a seemingly Chinese eternal return.
This offered some solace to Ou as it did to his predecessors. Poet Chen had to flee
from what is today’s nearby Kaifeng, also in Henan, when Northern Song itself
was crushed by the Jurchen (Manchuria) led Jin, the poet ending up eventually in
the then far southern reaches of Fujian. You think of Sima Qian, castrated in the
Han Dynasty, the imperial scribe (taishiling), astrologer, and author of the Records

1
Written on May 25–28, 2020 in London. Scott Lash is a professor of sociology and cul-
tural studies at Goldsmiths, University of London.

ix
x PREFACE: ETERNAL RETURN

of the Grand Historian. Chen, Sima, and Ou partake of a collective unconscious,

whose temporality is for us Westerners so very Nietzschean, of the Eternal Return,
a temporality that escapes the metanarratives of Judaeo-Christianity and indeed
Enlightenment and Marxist metanarratives, for instead the eternal return of the
same. This is Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, whose Übermensch unlike man was opposed
to the metanarratives of Augustine’s to-come City of God, but instead turned
against the religion of the sky whose predecessor he (Zarathustra, Zoroaster) was
and taught us to love or embrace fate, amor fati, again very Chinese. In this eternal
return, as in Daoist cosmology, there is no creation and there is no redemption.
But only the eternal return of the same which the Übermensch, who is the
Antichrist, is to embrace. All metanarratives work from a priori, normally a tran-
scendental a priori. Ou Ning’s anarchism and his utopia are in contrast thoroughly
a posteriori. They start from the local, the particular; indeed they start from not
the transcendental, but from the immanence of the earth.
Ou’s sensibility of Daoist, Confucian, and of the land lies in Fei
Xiaotong’s sense in From the Soil. For me, yes Confucian, in how I see the
chapter of the letter to his Mum who would not leave their small impov-
erished village in the very south of Guangdong, on the Leizhou Peninsula
in the very southernmost tip of China, the impoverished bit of southwest
Guangdong, known also for gangsters (hei shehui) today, just abutting
Hainan. The peninsula is made up of only small bits of alluvial plain for
intensive farming, made up mostly of basalt and marine terraces. The land
hardly produced enough to eat in Ou’s childhood.
The most wonderful spaces in the Bishan Project were the Bishan
Bookstore set up by the owner of Librairie Avant-Garde, a Nanjing friend
and Christian, Qian Xiaohua, paradigm-setting bookshop/café/social
space, unmatched in London, New York, or Paris. Clearly Ou’s design
sensibility contributed to this. As it did to the School of Tillers. An art,
exhibition, and cinema space, again with books, which was also literally a
school: for locals from this southern corner of Anhui Province, not far
from Huangshan, and for others. The educational dimension was central
to Bishan, modeled on again Christian educationalist James Yen from the
Rural Reconstruction Movement in Republican Era.
Ou Ning’s anarchism has a lot to do with the School of the Tillers (not
close to the WWI or Revolutionary Syndicalism). The School of the Tillers
or Nongjia, where jia is home or family but also refers to the specialized,
diverse knowledge including philosophical schools of pre-Han China,
during the Hundred Schools of Thought that spanned the spring and
autumn periods and Warring States. The Tillers had a base in Shandong,
and had a relation to and contact with Mencius. Yet they were against
Confucian hierarchy, and prescribed that the emperor or king must work
 PREFACE: ETERNAL RETURN xi

alongside the tillers of the earth. In this there was no division of labor or
stratification. This is Ou Ning’s anarchism (of the earth), in contrast to
James C. Scott whose anti-stratification is of not earth but steppe, of the
pastoral horseback-archer nomads, Xiongnu, Tujue, Mongols, Jurchens,
Uighurs, whose tribute-for-peace decimated the treasuries of one dynasty
after another. Ou’s School of Tillers in Bishan, like Xu Xing’s original in
fourth-century BC Warring States, was about education through agricul-
ture, again the influence of rural reconstructionist James Yen. Also, from
Republican Reconstruction, Ou’s anarchist utopia is very much that of
Liang Shuming, the “last Confucian” and Buddhist scholar who set up a
decentralized commune system in 1930s Shandong.
Ou Ning began as a teenage poet and stayed a poet; indeed his literary
and activist magazine Chutzpah! was in part a poetry magazine, with polit-
ical pieces. Anarchist Mai Dian from the post-punk scene in Wuhan, for
example, published there. Ou comes from a Guangzhou intellectual com-
munity, who used to hang out in a legendary Guangzhou bookshop
Libreria Borges. If artists and curators, like also Guangzhou’s Hou Hanru,
born in the early 1960s de facto emigrated to Paris, a number of Ou’s
slightly younger generation were able to thrive in China, the Libreria
Borges embracing architects Doreen Heng Liu and Jiang Jun, film artist
Cao Fei, gallerist and art-philosopher Zhang Wei and Hu Fang. All born
between 1968 and 1978. In fact, it was the Pearl River Delta, very much
Shenzhen and Guangzhou: Ou was a student at Shenzhen University. The
Shenzhen Biennale of Urbanism \ Architecture has taken an important
place from 2005, of which Ou was director in 2009. The architect group
Urbanus included Meng Yan and Liu Xiaodu and had moved down to
Shenzhen OCT (Overseas Chinese Town) from Beijing. Central to all this
was Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas, who had brought his Harvard GSD
students to Shenzhen, whose outcome was the Great Leap Forward in
2002. Koolhaas invited me to help on his bid to do conceptual master plan
for the Shanghai Expo. When I arrived in January 2003, work on the
CCTV building was already commencing. Ou’s Shenzhen was the cutting
edge: of what? Of global China. Of Deng Xiaoping’s 1992 Tour of the
South (nanxun), a major precipice of the gaige kaifang (Reform and
Opening). Of Deng’s Hong Kong connection, and the opening of stock
markets and mortgage markets. So, post-­Tiananmen from the mid-1990s
for 15 years or more there was massive and sudden global opening as
China moved East and became coastal. Ou’s was perhaps the most intense
experience of this dawn of opening and then subsequent closing.
xii PREFACE: ETERNAL RETURN

He, more than anyone else, “got it,” being global and at the same time
Chinese—he was not like many others educated in the US. This was visible
in his intensely urban Guangzhou early documentary film San Yuan Li
(2003), which he co-directed with Cao Fei. Ou and Cao were a couple for
a number of years. Ou produced some of the very best and rawest (again
Guangzhou) films in Cao’s repertoire. Shenzhen was the pilot with its
special economic zone in 1984, some eight years before Deng’s southern
trip. At this point Ou was a 15-year-old poet, living in west Guangdong’s
Leizhou, a backwater, so early on helping organize informal publication
and distribution with his poetry friends. But also, global China was start-
ing to happen in the east of the province.
After finishing university post-Tiananmen, Ou started working in
advertising and designing more generally. And he became very much also
a designer. I first met him in the connection to the Shenzhen and Hong
Kong Bi-City Biennale in 2006–2007. A year or so later his flat in Beijing
was featured in Wallpaper. His dress style was to be imitated. Ou has
always been an organizer, a combinard, who makes things happen. Get It
Louder was a Chinese art and design festival that began in 2005, launched
by Ou and run by him every two years with support from Modern Media.
But somewhere between 2009 and 2012 Ou changed directions. He
stopped working on his space at Modern Media: he became instead very
much a critic of capitalism. He moved from his designer flat in Beijing to
Bishan. Yet the creative juices flowed as he made possible Chutzpah!, the
Bishan incarnation branch of the Nanjing bookshop, winner of many
awards. On my first visit to Bishan in 2015 we had lunch with two young
guys from Nanjing, who were starting up an art and poetry magazine, tak-
ing advice from Ou. There was a shift from design and markets to activism
and a return to poetics. We stayed at Bishan’s Pigs Inn set up by Shanghai
poet Han Yu and her husband. Ou was connecting to Wen Tiejun and
New Rural Reconstruction Movement. Yet everything in Bishan was
incredibly designed.
Ou has been influenced by David Graeber, yet his anarchism along with
Liang Shuming is of an enhanced localism. After Bishan was shut down, I
visited Ou and his wife Tang Xue in Yantai, Shandong. He’d put together
another group of local intellectuals, centered again in a Yantai bookshop.
I stayed on their WeChat group. We visited nearby villages and Ou was
entranced by local seagrass thatched-roof cottages, intended for Shandong
winter snow. Ou’s localism is much more concrete and embedded in the
particular than Marc Augé’s notion of place. This particular is part of Ou’s
 PREFACE: ETERNAL RETURN xiii

fully a posteriori politics/aesthetics. One that starts from the particular in

the here and invents itself as it goes along. This is politics and aesthetics
against any a priori. Rules are by definition a priori: anarchism must be a
posteriori. Power is always exercised through an a priori, whether that of
the state or of capital. The capitalist subject indeed is ingrained in Kant’s
transcendental a priori. Ou instead gives us not a transcendental, but a
cosmology that is immanent, in the earth. He gives us not a transcendental
a priori but this immanent a posteriori.
Ou has written about the Well Field System (jingtianzhi). This is a land
redistribution system of parcels of land, based on a figure of nine squares
like a tic-tac-toe. Here peasant farmers spend most of their time working
their own squares, but all contribute a bit of labor to the middle square
which is owned by the “lord.” Several dynasties in Chinese history con-
structed such a system. It is egalitarian but at the same time is aimed by the
emperor’s central government to break the power of local feudal nobility,
to take away feudal yet decentralized taxation and control of the means of
destruction. We have witnessed such centralization (without redistribu-
tion) in the recent past which has also put an end to the Bishan Project.
The revenge of the a priori. Ou Ning in contrast represents a posteriori
stream of Chinese thought. All of which is rooted in the amor fati of eter-
nal return that unites Daoism with Nietzsche’s Zarathustra. At stake is not
the Judaeo-Christian rectilinear hope of Kant and critical theory. It is
instead the hope of eternal return of the same, anti-apocalyptic, that knows
that one dynasty succeeds another, that apparent despair is not Doomsday.
The word xing stands for happiness and luck in Chinese and is tied to
fortune and fate. Amor fati, embrace fate, is for Ou and the rest of us also
a (genealogical) morality of hope.
London, Scott Lash
 Contents

1 Pastoral Youth  1
My Urbanization   1
Searching for Hometown   4
Letter to My Mother   8

2 Huizhou Fieldwork 19
From Non-place to Place  19
Revisiting Bishan  25

3 Blueprints 29
Anarchism and Ruralism  29
The Possibility of a Rural Revival  36
The Reconstruction of the Agricultural Homeland  39

4 Bishan Harvestival 53
Go to the Countryside!  53

5 Reality and History 73

Beijing’s Climate Politics  73
What Wukan Means?  78
The Cultivators: Rural Reconstructionists in China  87

xv
xvi CONTENTS

6 Yixian International Photo Festival 99

The Interactions  99
In the Field of Hope 107
River Worship 110

7 Deep Plowing113
The Heart’s Home 113
The Unwillingness 126
Reproducing the History of Local Life 129

8 Controversies133
Symbolic Boundaries, Distinction, and Othering 133
The Savior of the Countryside? 137

9 Introspection153
The Organic Intellectuals 153
Informal Life Politics 161

10 The School of Tillers181

Song of the Earth 181
Timekeepers 196
Memoir in Southern Anhui 202
Cultural Production and Local Construction 206

11 New Commons227
Crises and Experiments of Commons 227
The Commons of Common Space 231

12 Handicraft, Design, and Art237

The Handicraft Renaissance 237
The Whole Earth Community 242
The Subject of Public Art 249

13 Food, Ecology, and Education267

The Politics of Eating 267
Children’s Sense of Reality 280
 CONTENTS xvii

14 City and Countryside289

After the Failure of Cities 289
Countryside as Countryside 300
Topophilia and Placemaking 308

15 Utopian Dreams319
You’re Too Shy to Talk About Utopia 319
Autonomy: Utopia or Realpolitik 322
The Discourse of Utopia in the Post-Mao Era 329
Utopian Nostalgia 334

Postscript357

Epilogue369

Glossary371

Appendix A381

Appendix B393

Appendix C417

Bibliography431
 List of Illustrations

Book cover: Bishan Village, 2011. Photo by Ou Ning

01. Location Map: Bishan Village, Biyang Town, Yi County, Huangshan
City, Anhui Province, P. R. of China. Drawing by Xu Yijing and Neil
Mclean Gaddes / San Practices, 2012 394
02. Bishan map by Feng Zhiyin, in There is a Village Named Bishan in
China, children’s picture book curated by Ou Ning, 2016
(unfinished)395
03. The mind map of Bishan Project by Ou Ning for the exhibition “Art
and China after 1989: Theater of the World,” Guggenheim
Museum, 2017-2018. Designed by Xiaoma + Chengzi, 2017 396
04. Zhang River, Bishan Nursing Home and Cloud Gate Pagoda, 1970s.
Courtesy of Cultural Center of Yi County 397
05. Bishan militia, 1970s. Courtesy of Cultural Center of Yi County 398
06. Woman basketball team of Bishan, 1974. Courtesy of Cultural Center
of Yi County 398
07. Bishan Supply and Marketing Cooperative, 1970s. Courtesy of
Cultural Center of Yi County 399
08. Ou Ning, Bishan Commune: How to Start Your Own Utopia,
Moleskine sketchbook, 108 pages, 13 x 21cm, heavy acid-free paper,
2010400
09. Ou Ning, Bishan Commune: How to Start Your Own Utopia,
Moleskine sketchbook, 108 pages, 13 x 21cm, heavy acid-free paper,
2010401
10. Logo of Bishan Commune, designed by Xiaoma + Chengzi, 2011 402
11. Visual design of Bishan Harvestival by Xiaoma + Chengzi, 2011 403
12. Chudifang Dance by Bishan Villagers, Bishan Harvestival. Photo by
Hu Xiaogeng, 2011 403

xix
xx LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

13. “Mutual Aid and Inheritance,” the main exhibition of 2011

Bishan Harvestival. Photo by Hu Xiaogeng, 2011 404
14. “Poetry Course,” the literary activities of 2011 Bishan Harvestival.
Photo by Ou Ning, 2011 404
15. “Screen Nostalgia,” the film screening events of 2011 Bishan
Harvestival. Photo by Hu Xiaogeng, 2011 405
16. The opening program and schedule of 2012 Yixian International
Photo Festival and 2012 Bishan Harvestival. Poster designed by
Xiaoma + Chengzi 406
17. The bronze statue of Wang Dazhi donated by Ou Ning and Zuo Jing
before the opening of 2012 Bishan Harvestival. Photo by Zhu Rui,
2012407
18. The villagers were helping to install the “Coal + Ice” exhibition in
2012 Yixian International Photo Festival. Photo by Sun Yunfan, 2012 407
19. The Bishan Bookstore. Photo by Matjaž Tančič, 2012 408
20. The Bishan Bookstore. Photo by Matjaž Tančič, 2012 408
21. The Bishan Passports, designed by Xiaoma + Chengzi. Photo by Zhu
Rui, 2012 409
22. A guide for how to use “Bishan Hours” in Taipei Fine Arts Museum.
Designed by Xiaoma + Chengzi. 2014 410
23. Shennong, painting by Chen Duxi, 2015 411
24. The Chinese logotype of School of Tillers, designed by Xiaoma +
Chengzi, 2015 411
25. The yard, School of Tillers. Photo by Zhu Rui, 2015 412
26. The library, School of Tillers. Photo by Zhu Rui, 2015 412
27. The gallery, School of Tillers. Photo by Zhu Rui, 2015 413
28. The villagers came to the School of Tiller for the film screening. Photo
by Zhu Rui, 2015 413
29. The villagers at the opening of the School of Tillers, 2015. Photo by
Cao Haili 414
30. The volunteers of School of Tillers, 2015. Photo by Jin Ming 414
31. The “Happiness Pavilion” in construction, January 20, 2016. Photo
by Ou Ning 415
32. The villagers who built the “Happiness Pavilion”: Qian Shi’an, Cheng
Guofu and Chu Chunhe, February 16, 2016. Photo by Ou Ning 416
 Introduction

Utopia in Practice1

The Origins of Bishan Project

Before I filled up a Moleskine notebook2 with the “blueprint” of Bishan
Commune in 2010, I had curated three editions of Get It Louder (2005,
2007, 2010) and the Shenzhen and Hong Kong Bi-City Biennale of
Urbanism\Architecture (2009), all of which are large-scale events with
over sixty exhibitors in the Chinese metropolises of Shenzhen, Guangzhou,
Shanghai, and Beijing. Based in Guangzhou and Beijing at that time, I
made each of the two cities a documentary as part of my urban research—
San Yuan Li (2003), portraying a rural village trapped within Guangdong,
and Meishi Street (2006), delineating a slum in Beijing. I was also invited
to various exhibitions at home and abroad as an artist. All the exhibitions
took place in cities, as they are where cultural resources concentrate, and
so much so that there is already an “excess” of exhibitions. Against this

1
Completed in Chinese on March 13, 2018, in Yantai. The English version was translated
by Stephanie Lu and Li Bing, published as “Bishan Project: Efforts to Build a Utopian
Community,” in Janet Marstine and Svetlana Mintcheva, eds., Curating Under Pressure:
International Perspectives on Negotiating Conflict and Upholding Integrity (London:
Routledge, 2020).
2
The notebook was translated into English and Danish by Mai Corlin, published under the
title of Bishan Commune: How to Start Your Own Utopia (Aarhus: OVO Press and
Antipyrine, 2015).

xxi
xxii INTRODUCTION

backdrop, I decided to do something in villages, a vacuum of public cul-

tural life, embracing my role as both a curator and an artist.
My interest in the countryside originates from my family background.
I was born into a rural family and brought up in the Leizhou Peninsula,
the southern tip of the Chinese mainland. In the first thirty years of my
life, my poor and backward hometown had always been a sore point for
me. I studied hard to get away from the place and tried my best to get it
out of my system. Only after I found my footing in the city and witnessed
the drastic changes brought by urbanization did I realize my passionate
attachment to the countryside. During research and shooting of the docu-
mentaries about urban villages in Guangzhou and slums in Beijing, I came
across a multitude of broke farmers who followed the trend and crowded
into cities to earn a living, but due to their lack of resources and the house-
hold registration system, they are also rejected in cities and confined to the
dilapidated urban enclaves, struggling on the margin of society. My broth-
ers and sisters, shut out by the iron gate of gaokao (college entrance exam)
system, left hometown at young age and devoted their youth to assembly
lines in urban factories. Back at home, the farmland is deserted and house
is empty. Urbanization not only drains labor force in the countryside but
also encroaches its land, degrades its social body, and atomizes the rural
population. The status quo keeps me thinking: as a curator and an artist,
what can I do?
If a curator is a mere exhibition maker (Ausstellungsmacher), and an
artist just signs his or her name on artworks, sends them to exhibitions,
and puts them on markets, then the influence of artists can reach no fur-
ther than the boundaries of the art system. If I want to intervene in and
respond to China’s aggressive urbanization and massive rural decline, I
have to expand the scope of my work and even to augment or change my
identity, for instance, redefining myself as an activist, a participant in social
movements in the broad sense, or as an artivist, a social actor with an artis-
tic approach, or even more radically as an activator, relinquishing my iden-
tity and signature as an artist, reducing myself and delegating powers to
facilitate social movements or changes. Such thoughts are provoked, on
the one hand, by the pressing Chinese urban-rural problems and, on the
other hand, the aphasia of Chinese contemporary art on social issues after
its inclusion into the global art markets. Global attention on China’s con-
temporary art peaked before the 2008 Beijing Olympics. At that time,
curators and artists were occupied in exhibitions of all sorts, intoxicated by
soaring prices for artworks and the illusion of golden time for a rising big
 INTRODUCTION xxiii

power. They turned a blind eye to the enormous social cost of develop-
ment and simmering conflicts for the nation. Art became a spectacle to be
produced and consumed, increasingly irrelevant to social reality.
In 2005, I came across the New Rural Reconstruction Movement led
by Wen Tiejun, which led me to the Rural Reconstruction Movement
initiated by Y. C. James Yen, Liang Shuming, and others in the Republican
Era. After historical research and fieldwork, I came to a better understand-
ing of Chinese intellectuals’ practices in the past and at the present, and
rural experiments in other areas of Asia3 also got on my radar. Meanwhile,
I began to look for my rural base. In 2007, after visiting many villages in
Yunnan, Sichuan, Jiangsu, Hebei, and Henan Provinces, I picked Bishan
Village, Yi County, in Anhui Province to materialize my conceptions on
rural reconstruction. Bishan Village is located in the area historically called
Huizhou, home to famous Huizhou merchants trading across the country
in the Ming and Qing dynasties. Reflux of wealth by the merchants funded
the construction of a number of grandeur Huizhou-style residences and
ancestral halls. With profound Confucius culture heritage, the local resi-
dents are genuine and even-tempered; social conflicts are relatively few.
Despite tourism is its economic pillar (it is close to Mount Huangshan, a
renowned tourist attraction), rural traditions dating back to ancient times
are well preserved. All of these make Bishan almost a peach-blossom-­
paradise-­like place in modern times. I didn’t choose my hometown
Leizhou Peninsula and villages in other provinces because the reality there
was even harsher. Besides interest in rural social improvement on the
ground, I also harbor a personal “utopia” complex, which prompted me
to take a mild place as the launch pad of my experiment.
Although Bishan is not an extremely poor village, it is still an epitome
of rural problems in the times of urbanization. Most young people of its
nearly 3000 population are working in cities in the Yangtze River Delta
region, leaving senior villagers and children behind. A lot of historic resi-
dential houses are left in disrepair. After the neighboring Xidi and Hongcun
Villages made to the list of United Nations World Intangible Culture
Heritage, the villagers in Bishan also benefit from the spillovers of the two
villages and Mount Huangshan’s tourist economy. Selling tea leaves, local
specialties, and antiques; running restaurants; and offering transportation
services to tourists have become the main source of income for the locals.
Only a few people still farm, and even fewer after the government

3
See “The Cultivators: Rural Reconstructionists in China,” Chap. 5.
xxiv INTRODUCTION

expropriated farmland to develop scale farming or to sell to resort hotels

as building land. Water facilities built in the People’s Commune period are
long deserted. Collective consciousness crumbled, with few public activi-
ties except for women’s square dancing, and getting together to play
Mahjong grew rampant. It is not until 2007 that the construction of a
road connecting the county town and the village started, but cars still
couldn’t get into the village. There were no flagstones on the narrow
roads, and no road lamps either. In the same year, two of my poet friends
Zheng Xiaoguang and Han Yu duplicated their Pig’s Inn in Xidi Village in
an old residential building in Bishan. Afterwards, they transformed an old
rapeseed oil factory into a third one. Also in the same year, I paid our first
visit to Bishan, with my friend Zuo Jing, who was born in the Jingde
County of Anhui Province, and decided to initiate the Bishan Project.

Art and Rural Reconstruction

From 2007 to 2010, I started to prepare for the Bishan Project while I was
busy with two Get It Louder exhibitions and the Shenzhen and Hong
Kong Bi-City Biennale of Urbanism\Architecture. In 2010, the Italian
notebook brand Moleskin invited me to its exhibition tour “Detour: The
Moleskine Notebook Experience” in Shanghai, and it gave me a notebook
to doodle and jot down anything as I liked, which was later to be exhib-
ited. I filled it with my research and thoughts since 2005 about China’s
rural problems and worldwide utopian practices, as well as specific ideas of
the Bishan Commune. When the exhibition kicked off, the Bishan “blue-
print” received lots of attention, so I decided to put the Bishan Project on
agenda. I bought an old Huizhou-style residence, empty for years, and
renovated it into the Buffalo Institute as my base for life and work there.
Meanwhile, the preparation for the 2011 Bishan Harvestival also started.
In the early stage of the project, Zuo Jing and I had to resort to our
resources as curators and artists. Although I envisioned the project to be a
complex and multi-disciplinary (e.g., organic agriculture, deep ecology,
rural finance, and progressive education) social collaboration, yet I had to
take art as a launching pad due to my limitations. In 2011, the Bishan
Harvestival took place in the village for the first time. The three-day event
included various activities, including the chudifang show—a folk custom
to celebrate harvest—by the villagers at the opening ceremony; the main
body exhibition “Mutual Aids and Inheritance” featuring the collabora-
tion between local craftsmen and twenty-five artists, designers, architects,
 INTRODUCTION xxv

musicians, and writers; “Huizhou History and Culture” exhibition;

“Handicraft in Yi County” research exhibition; a craft market; early rural
movies screening; contemporary countryside documentaries screening;
“Rural China” seminar; “Poetry Classroom” (for children in the village);
“New Folk” music concert; Huizhou Opera joint performance; and so
on.4 Such public activities had been absent for a long time after the
People’s Commune was canceled in 1980 and production was contracted
to each household. Farmers from the Yi County and neighboring counties
were attracted to the festivities. The Harvestival was the first cultural event
solely funded and organized by ourselves, and the local government pro-
vided only venue and administrative and security support. My plan was to
channel cultural resources at hand to the village, bring the event to public
attention, and achieve publicity. Then more diverse social forces and pro-
fessional teams would be attracted to get on board, so as to achieve the
goal of making it a comprehensive social project.
We expected more on-site practices but wouldn’t give up opportunities
of off-site exhibitions, which popped up from time to time because of our
role in the art system. The social influence attained from such exhibitions
could magnetize or internalize resources and support we needed in the
next step. When preparing for the Bishan Harvestival in 2011, we had our
first museum exhibition of the Bishan Project at the invitation of the
Times Museum in Guangzhou, showcasing artists’ research efforts and
preliminary works. In the same year, the Bishan Project got on another
relatively large-scale display as I was the curator for the International
Design Exhibition, Chengdu Biennale. In the following years, the project
was exhibited in Auckland (New Zealand), Vienna (Austria), Shenzhen,
Taipei, Shanghai, Beijing, Aarhus (Denmark), Florence (Italy), and
recently on the exhibition tour “Theater of the World: Art and China
After 1989” launched by the Guggenheim Museum. Because of the
mostly art-based activities in the village, exhibitions and publicity within
the art system as well as signature aesthetics in visual design (tailor-made
by the outstanding designer partners Xiaoma and Chengzi), the Bishan
Project was later marked as the trailblazer of the so-called trendy “Artistic
Rural Reconstruction.” In my opinion, the label itself is a denomination
of the limits of such attempts, rather than a compliment of their creativity.
Inspired by the Bishan Project, more and more artists and architects
went to the countryside to develop their projects. Nevertheless, “Artistic

4
See Peng Yanhan, ed., 2011 Bishan Harvestival (Bishan: self-published, 2011).
xxvi INTRODUCTION

Rural Reconstruction” is neither about moving from cities to the country-

side to produce market-oriented artwork, nor about implanting out-of-­
the-place contemporary buildings into rural fields and communities, only
to snatch image or literature for urban communication system and to
boost artists’ profile. Otherwise, it is taking advantage of the countryside
instead of helping it. As urban land reserves are diminishing, hot money is
diverted to rural development. Besides, modern rural issues have a moral
cherry on top, so everybody wants a piece of the cake. Governments want
to gloss performance through “building a new socialist countryside,” and
idle capital wants to pocket both money and moral superiority. As a result,
the naturally eye-catching “Artistic Rural Reconstruction” sells like hot-
cakes, and many artists and architects become sought-after “Artistic Rural
Reconstruction” professionals. Rural reconstruction of this kind and the
injection of hot money into the Bed & Breakfast industry are leading to
the “gentrification” of rural areas, turning the countryside into the vaca-
tion backyard of urban middle class. The subjectivity of countryside and
farmers is undermined, and they are abandoned again, becoming specta-
tors at their doorstep.
As the “evil initiator,” the Bishan Project was very controversial in its
later development. In retrospect of the whole project, I still believe in my
vision—art is only the beginning of the Bishan Project, but it did not get
enough time to mature. When conceptualizing the project, I was inspired
by the practices of James Yen, Liang Shuming, and Wen Tiejun. However,
I maintained that there is no “orthodox” in rural reconstruction, as each
practitioner is faced with different historical and present conditions. So,
the key is to proceed in the light of the specific conditions and find the cor-
responding approaches and methods. Taking art as the beginning of the
Bishan Project is the choice after calculating what we had and what we
could do. I am fully aware of the limitations of art, but I am still positive
that art is conducive to the Chinese countryside. The key is to find the
right kind of art. In the time of economic globalization and neoliberalism,
besides marketized and spectaclized art, there are still many artists devoted
to socially engaged art and community art.5 Despite most people are pur-
suing profit, such arts are nurturing people’s soul, empowering and

5
See “The Subject of Public Art,” Chap. 12. I was inspired by the two books: Claire
Bishop, Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship (New York: Verso,
2012), and Nato Thompson, Living as Form: Socially Engaged Art from 1991-2011
(Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2012).
 INTRODUCTION xxvii

enabling the common. The Bishan Project is only interested in such arts
and expecting more non-art forces to join us. Unfortunately, when explor-
ing the synergy between art and countryside, we were frustrated by one
after another setback.

“Force Majeure”
Because of the success and influence of the Bishan Harvestival, the local
government invited Zuo Jing and me to curate the seventh Yixian Photo
Festival that it sponsored. The festival used to be an official event promot-
ing local countryside tourism, with domestic landscape photographers
participating in the last six. We proposed to expand it into an international
photo festival with global participants and gave it a theme—“The
Interactions,” which criticized over-urbanization, promoted rural con-
struction, and advocated urban-rural mutual reinforcement. The festival
invited forty exhibitors6 and was scheduled to held in 2012. It was the
same year as the 18th National Congress of the People’s Republic of
China, when Xi Jinping was elected as the new Party secretary. The date of
the national congress was not determined when we chose the opening day
of the festival, but the two dates turned out to clash in the end. On the day
before the festival’s opening, the local government canceled all exhibitions
and events, including the second Bishan Harvestival, which was solely
organized by ourselves and scheduled to concur with the photo festival.
An order from Beijing said that large-scale activities were not appropriate
during the congress. Only one month later did we learn that another rea-
son for this move was that Orville Schell, the Arthur Ross Director of the
Center on US-China Relations at Asia Society, was also invited to the fes-
tival. His exhibition Coal + Ice once staged in Beijing was placed in the
festival as a sub-exhibition. Beijing national security authorities sent peo-
ple to keep watch on him and required the local government to make
the move.
It was hard to prove whether this was true. Orville had organized and
taken part in many public activities in Beijing, and nothing happened.
Why did trouble find him in the countryside? Was it due to the special
time period? But the focus of the congress’ security efforts should be in
Beijing instead of other places. During the congress, some television

6
See Peng Yanhan, ed., The Interactions: 2012 Yixian International Photo Festival (Yixian:
Yi County People’s Government, 2012).
xxviii INTRODUCTION

entertainment shows were suspended, and some dissidents were banned

to post on Sina Weibo. The day before the festival was aborted, officials
from cultural authorities at Anhui Province and Huangshan City went all
the way to the site, censoring all works to be exhibited in the absence of
curators. After the incident, we scrutinized the photo festival’s curatorial
statement, works on exhibition, and text description by ourselves and
found the problem might lie in the criticism against over-urbanization and
some works exposing grave environment pollution and devastated coun-
tryside. But we were not sure about that. The local government made no
announcement about the cancellation and did not respond to our doubts.
As commissioned curators, we could do nothing but accept the decision
and explanation of “Force Majeure.”
It is not the first time I suffered such an incident. In 1995, I organized
a concert tour for US musician John Zorn and Japanese musician
Yamatsuka Eye in Shenzhen, Guangzhou, Foshan, and Beijing. Afterwards,
I was co-censored by Shenzhen national security and culture authorities.
They confiscated the New Masses, an underground music and culture mag-
azine under my editorship, on the grounds of lacking performance and
publishing licenses. Synonymous with a left-wing political magazine in the
United States between 1926 and 1948, the New Masses mainly introduced
independent music and it once published an article about anarchism
authored by Lenny Kwok, the creator of Hong Kong band Blackbird. It
only had two issues, distributed in various concerts that I organized
for free.
In 2004, that was the next year after San Yuan Li was shown at the
fiftieth Venice Biennale, Guangzhou national security and culture authori-
ties again imposed censorship on my co-author Cao Fei and me. They
declared the independent film and video group U-thèque Organization I
established in 1999 illegal. San Yuan Li was made in the name of U-thèque
Organization, and it was categorized as an illegal documentary because it
laid bare the darkness of a rural village in Guangdong. The screening of
Chinese independent documentaries over the last years along with our free
underground film publications was also outlawed. The incident was also
related to the suppression of Southern Metropolis Daily by Guangdong
authorities. The newspaper was subjected to reprisals as it revealed, in
2002, the real situation of SARS that first broke out in Guangdong and,
in 2003, the fact that Sun Zhigang was beaten to death after he was taken
to a homeless shelter as he didn’t have an identity card with him. This led
to the arrest of chief editor Cheng Yizhong and general manager Yu
 INTRODUCTION xxix

Huafeng. As Southern Metropolis Daily had collaborated with U-thèque

Organization in screening with financial support, I was asked many times
about the details of our partnership during official investigation. Leaving
no stones unturned to frame the newspaper, they would not even let go of
such a remote clue as U-thèque Organization.
Beijing-related authorities mentioned my “historical track records” on
many occasions to the local government when the Bishan Project was
halted, and I was evicted from Bishan Village with all my public activities
in China under surveillance. The 2012 Yixian International Photo Festival
was just the beginning. It cast a shadow over the Bishan Project. The local
government began to keep a distance from the project, neither supporting
it nor holding it back. Our channels of communication with the govern-
ment were blocked. All we could do was to speculate on its intentions and
make attempts of new activities to test how far things could go. In the
spring of 2004, after almost three years’ preparation, the Bishan Bookstore
opened in the village. It was the first branch store of the Nanjing-based
Librairie Avant-Garde in the countryside. In 1997, I gave this French
name and designed the logo for the newly founded bookstore, which was
honored as the most beautiful bookstore in China by CNN in 2013 and
as one of the top ten bookstores in the world by BBC in 2014. The idea
of setting up a bookstore struck me during preparation for the Bishan
Project. Inspired by the xiangcun shuju (Rural Press) that Liang Shuming
established in Zouping, Shandong Province, in the 1930s, I hoped the
Bishan Bookstore, besides selling books, could function as a rural knowl-
edge production base, with reading services to villagers and visitors as well
as publishing capacity. The local government agreed to provide an empty
ancestral hall as the venue for the bookstore in 2011. It honored its words
in 2014 when the store was open to business, and made no interference.
Many people were pessimistic about the future of the Bishan Bookstore,
predicting it would not live long in the countryside. Qian Xiaohua,
founder of the Librairie Avant-Garde, was a Christian, and he told us that
he worked not for money but for the God. Many villagers frequented the
store to read books, and many visitors were very interested in this ancestral-­
hall-­converted space. The books sold well because most of them were
about literary, historical, and rural studies, appealing to the taste of visi-
tors. I organized reading parties featuring books in classical Chinese and
Danish music group YOYOOYOY’s interactional music and art event
“Bevægeligt Akkurat” (Movable Accurate). The Bishan Bookstore soon
gained popularity. Young people returning to hometown for the Spring
xxx INTRODUCTION

Festival and Qingming Festival came to learn more about this place, and
one of them even rented the bookstore to host her wedding ceremony.
People from Yi County town, Huangshan City, and other places came afar
to visit. The bookstore even received tourist groups arriving on buses.
Many county-level governments in neighboring provinces approached
Qian Xiaohua and offered free venues for such rural bookstores. Bishan
used to be one of the many unknown villages, short of tourist resources
and overshadowed by Xidi and Hongcun. Although it got noticed in 2011
with the Bishan Harvestival, yet there were no fixed tourist attractions.
Open every day, the Bishan Bookstore was the first place open to the pub-
lic and many tourists took it as a must-see.

“Night Stars vs. Street Lamps”

It seemed that the local government was pretty happy with the outcome.
Nevertheless, the calm water was ruffled again by the visit of a “China
studies” expeditionary learning program organized by the Department of
Sociology at Nanjing University in the Summer of 2014. They visited the
Bishan Bookstore and invited me to introduce the Bishan Project. The
next day, Zhou Yun, a student from Harvard University, posted an article
online questioning the bookstore and project. She criticized the bookstore
with Pierre Bourdieu’s theories, arguing that the bookstore’s “symbolic
boundary” led to the “distinction” between the urban middle class and
rural villagers, and the attempts of the Bishan Project were “othering” the
local residents. She misinterpreted my words, saying I did not want road
lamps because I was on the side of the urban intellectuals who liked watch-
ing stars in the countryside. I retorted with an article,7 and the controversy
instantly escalated into an online hot button issue engaging more people.
“Night Stars vs. Street Lamps” even became the G-spot of the debate.8 In
fact, I was well aware of the villagers’ longing for street lamps from the
very beginning. In their eyes, street lamps were a symbol of development

7
See “Symbolic Boundary, Distinction, and Othering,” Chap. 8.
8
For summary of the dispute, please see Mai Corlin, “Trojan Horses in the Chinese
Countryside: Ou Ning and the Bishan Commune in Dialogue and Practice,” Field - a jour-
nal of socially engaged art criticism 9 (Winter, 2018). http://field-journal.com/issue-9/
trojan-horses-in-the-chinese-countryside-ou-ning-and-the-bishan-commune-in-dialogue-
and-practice. For full research on the Bishan Project, please refer to the author’s PhD dis-
sertation: Trojan Horses in the Chinese Countryside: The Bishan Commune and the Practice of
Socially Engaged Art in Rural China (PhD diss., China Studies, Aarhus University, 2017).
 INTRODUCTION xxxi

and modernity, and they were ashamed of the darkness at night in Bishan,
especially given that Xidi and Hongcun installed lamps a long time ago.
During the Chinese lunar new year holidays, that was several months
before the Bishan Bookstore opened, the village committee had a mobili-
zation meeting for returning villagers, and I proposed the installation of
street lamps on that exact meeting. Even earlier in the same year, when the
village decided to build a driveway linking the outside and Bishan, Zuo
Jing and I made donations in our own names. The only benefit of the
month-long dispute was that Bishan had street lamps only a few months
later, but it added to the woes of the Bishan Project, which was already in
an awkward situation after the photo festival incident.
The buzz on the Internet drew herds of media to Bishan. In the time
of eyeball economy, it was only natural for the media to jump on the band-
wagon. News reporting and production is always running against time.
When a journalist wants to get his story published before a deadline, an
editor would even sacrifice fact-checking in the eleventh hour. The more
sensationalized the news title and rhetoric, the more eye-catching the
news. As a result, reports on Bishan were ridden with misunderstandings
and distortions, pushing the village into the teeth of the storm. The local
government did not like such disputes and it refused interviews. As one
could imagine, it blamed the hot mess on the project. What was worse, the
attention to a civil rural reconstruction movement inevitably entailed
interrogation of the government’s stance and acts in the issue. The Bishan
Project volunteered loud explanations to the media, while the government
remained silent. Such contrast did no good to the government. Pitting the
Bishan Project against the government was the last thing I wanted to see.
Throughout the project, we actively sought government support and
partnership, because I knew nobody, be it James Yen and Liang Shuming
in the Republican Era or Wen Tiejun at present, could succeed in rural
reconstruction without the government. In essence, rural reconstruction
can’t be separated from politics. Reform practices by grassroots intellectu-
als constitute only an auxiliary or complimentary plan within the current
political regime framework, which has to be under government leadership
and supervision. If we stood against the government, our practice would
be a revolution rather than a reform, which was quite another story.
Although I am an anarchist, I have never dreamt about revolution and
never identified myself as a stiff opponent. In Chinese, anarchism is trans-
lated as “non-government-ism,” which is easily mistaken as “anti-­
government.” In the Chinese context, I prefer to transliterate it as annaqi.
xxxii INTRODUCTION

After the 1989 Tiananmen Square Incident, many dissidents were exiled.
They were much weakened after leaving the country, but the political
regime they opposed beefed up its governing power through the choice of
free market and globalization as well as the advancement of Internet tech-
nologies. For those still living in the country, despite many disappoint-
ments, confrontation will only shrink their political and living space, and
in the end, they will also be forced to leave, becoming powerless about
their home country. Thus, choosing “reconstruction” over “confronta-
tion” is a more rational option. In the post-Cold War period, the “infor-
mal life politics” practices mushroomed in the Arab region and northeastern
Asia. When faced with extreme political and natural disasters, the public
did not seek help from the government, political parties, and charities nor
media. Instead, they relied on themselves to rebuild communities and
life.9 In China, however, even if you are committed to “reconstruction,”
your motives will be questioned and your acts will probably be checked.
The two censorships in 1995 and 2004 are in their nature precautionary
and defensive. My concerts, film screenings, and independent magazines
never advocated political opposition, but authorities still worried that the
communities gathered around New Masses and U-thèque Organization
would become pressure groups. The Bishan Project is a spontaneous non-­
profit project, but they fret over the anarchism in it.
About “non-profit,” the most interesting response came from some
villagers. In the 2011 Bishan Harvestival, they thought Zuojing and I
were two bosses who came here to develop tourism (that was what they
expected). When I told them it was “non-profit,” they were very disap-
pointed and would not understand nor believe there was such a thing as
“non-profit” in the world. In 2013, my entire family moved from Beijing
to Bishan, and I sent my stepson to a local school. As neighbors, the vil-
lagers and I had more daily interactions and they came to understand that
we were not here for the money. Their fervent hopes for economic devel-
opment made me reflect on my reservation about commerce entering vil-
lages. Although the Bishan Bookstore was criticized by Zhou Yun, yet it
was acclaimed by villagers and the government. Benign commerce of this

9
For the concept of “informal life politics,” please see Asef Bayat, Life as Politics: How
Ordinary People Change the Middle East (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009), and
Tessa Morris-Suzuki and Eun Jeong Soh, eds., New Worlds from Below: Grassroots Networking
and Informal Life Politics in Twenty-First Century East Asia (Canberra: The Australian
National University Press, 2017).
 INTRODUCTION xxxiii

kind was very inspirational for me. Art exhibitions were not well received
in the countryside because, on the one hand, art was not something famil-
iar to the local and, on the other hand, the farmers could not see any
practical use of art to their daily life. Besides, temporary exhibitions could
not grow into routine events for the lack of venues and limited duration.
In contrast, the bookstore sold books, and the villagers believed that read-
ing was to learn useful knowledge, which was the only way to change their
fortunes. What was more, it opened every day and attracted tourists. They
could benefit from the traffic by doing some small businesses. The Bishan
Bookstore was an attempt to introduce non-art resources into the village,
and its remarkable social effects encouraged me to push forward similar
experiments.

The Political Erasure

After the “Bishan Controversy” appeased, I bought another empty ances-
tral hall near the Buffalo Institute where I lived. The place was long
deserted and the village committee tried many times to persuade me to
take over it. I accepted the deal only when I came up with the idea to have
another site for business. In 2015, the School of Tillers was opened up. It
applied to the local government for business license as a coffee shop, but
besides selling coffee, it also had an exhibition gallery, a screening hall, a
small library offering different collections of non-sale titles in accordance
with reading themes, a study center, and a zakka selling books, rural cul-
tural and creative products, and villagers’ farm produce. Every evening,
the School of Tillers showed movies and TV plays of the villagers’ choice
on its big screen (e.g., 1955 Huangmei Opera movie Goddess Marriage;
1987 TV series Dream of Red Mansions). It also hosted a series of events,
such as a 3D photo exhibition “Timekeepers,” featuring the portraits and
family spaces of residents of Yi County villages, which were taken by
Slovenia photographer Matjaž Tančič; artist Liu Chuanhong’s narrative
painting exhibition “Memoir in Southern Anhui,” a visual fiction based on
Huizhou villages; lectures and workshops on community art, plants, dye-
ing and weaving, and soil enhancement with micro-organism; “Talk &
Buy” flea market where villagers presented their second-hand goods in
front of a big screen. The School of Tillers helped farmers sell their farm
produce at its zakka with free packaging and publicity. Villagers’ idle
houses were collected and listed on Airbnb as part of the SOT Researchers
xxxiv INTRODUCTION

in Residence Program. The School helped them with management and

customer discovery, and all the income went to the villagers.
All these activities were free. The goal was to create solidarity within the
School of Tillers, in a bid to build it into a community culture center.
However, it was more feasible to register as a commercial entity than oper-
ate as a non-profit organization. On the one hand, a license could help the
villagers increase economic income, and on the other hand, it would seem
less like a social movement, thus reassuring the government. It is very dif-
ficult to register an NGO or NPO in China, and that is one of the reasons
why the Bishan Commune was neither NGO nor NPO from its inception.
Another reason is my faith in anarchism. I am not in favor of any organiza-
tion or institution, including NGO and NPO, which is increasingly hier-
archical, bureaucratic, and corporatized. The commercial registration of
the School is an adaptive strategy, with the aim of forming a community
instead of a corporate or organization. After running through all the legal
procedures, I successfully got the business license. The only trouble was
that I was ignored by the local culture authorities when applying for an
exhibition permit. It was same with the situation after the photo festival
incident. The authorities did not nod, and they did not reject either. My
strategy was to sound the government out with action—executing my
plans first without approval and then waiting for reactions from the
authorities.
Right before the Chinese lunar new year of 2016, I heard it from the
grapevine that the Anhui authorities were going to rectify the Bishan
Project. Local culture authorities later came to check the books sold at the
Bishan Bookstore and School of Tillers, ordering to remove off shelves the
Bishan Commune: How to Start Your Own Utopia published in Denmark.
Security authorities required the Airbnb listings managed by the School to
have guests registered. Market regulation authorities confiscated villagers’
produce for lack of production dates and quality certificates, and the goods
were only returned later at the protest of villagers. One day after the lunar
new year, my new-born baby woke up at midnight because the room was
too cold and weirdly there was no electricity. When checking the electric-
ity boxes in the morning, I found the electricity cables in the Buffalo
Institute and School of Tillers were cut off, so were the water pipes. On
the same day, the “Happiness Pavilion,” a bamboo-structured tea cottage
built by villager Qian Shi’an and me, were burnt down. The “Bishan Craft
Cooperative” that Zuo Jing was renovating was half-demolished, as it was
said to have “ruined overall countryside landscape and appearance.” As it
 INTRODUCTION xxxv

was freezing cold at that time, my family had to crash in the Pig’s Inn, but
the next day local security authorities warned that it was the order from
Beijing that we could not stay there anymore and had to leave the village.
We were left with no choice but to buy air tickets to Shenzhen, and we
stayed in a hotel in Huangshan City for the next-day flight.10
At that point, the Bishan Project was clamped down, violently. Later,
they removed the statue of Wang Dazhi that we donated. (Wang was born
in the Bishan village. He worked with Tao Xingzhi on rural education in
the Nanjing Xiaozhuang Normal School at an early age. Later he became
one of the initiators of the Xin’an Children Touring Troupe. Zuo Jing and
I regarded him as a Rural Sage in rural reconstruction.) The signs of SOT
Researchers in Residence Program were taken down from the front of
Airbnb houses. The Buffalo Institute and School of Tillers were empty. All
traces of the Bishan Project were erased. Zuo Jing’s Bishan Craft
Cooperative soon reopened after it declared that it had nothing to do with
the Bishan Project, but I was forbidden to conduct any public activities in
Bishan. I could not believe it was Beijing’s order until my public speech
about “Well-field System and Utopia” was canceled by a phone call from
Beijing. I realized I was on Beijing’s blacklist. Later, I got to learn that,
before the electricity and water outage, Yi County sent an ad hoc village
Party secretary to Bishan. The secretary held several meetings for Party
members, persuading and mobilizing them to abolish the Bishan Project.
At meetings, the new secretary collected a lot of my public statements on
“non-government-ism” and “utopia,” and he defined the nature of the
problem as “avoiding the leadership of the Party.” Shortly after I was
forced to leave, the new secretary had all footpaths in the village paved
with flagstones.

Anarchism and Utopianism

Anarchism and utopianism only occur in my mind and words, and I have
never put them into practice in the Bishan Project. I am fully aware that in
China’s political reality, they are forbidden and cannot be put into action.
Even against the global backdrop, anarchism is dismissed as an innocent

10
I decided to keep silent about the incident and refused interviews, yet some media still
got word and made a report. See Calum Macleod, “Crushed Dreams of Utopia in Rural
China,” Times, May 2, 2016. The report was then quoted by Amy Qin, “Architects See
Potential in China’s Countryside,” New York Times, June 17, 2016.
xxxvi INTRODUCTION

and romantic thought, marginalized even in academia. Worse still, utopia

is mocked as a naïve delusion. Although the Occupy Wall Street move-
ment is championed by anarchists, given its considerable impact, their
efforts are still not recognized by the mainstream of society. The Invisible
Committee is constantly published, but its influence is confined to a small
audience. The committee’s spiritual mentor is Guy Debord, whose proph-
ecies before the May 1968 events in France were looked up to by only a
few radicals (especially in the art community) as legends. The Back-to-the-­
Land Movement that first broke out in North America last century
spawned a large number of hippie communes, but they are nowhere to be
found today. Indeed, some of the communes have evolved into the cur-
rent intentional communities and ECO villages, but they are still periph-
eral to the mainstream. Even more unfortunate for the nineteenth-century
classic anarchist Peter Kropotkin and utopia practitioner Robert Owen,
their books are shelved and forgotten. In contrary to the disregard and
disdain by the mainstream, I am obsessed with the concepts because of
serendipities.
My attachment to anarchism started in 1994. Lenny Kwok sent me an
independent magazine he published called Blackbird Communique. In the
magazine, I read about his life in the countryside of Lantau Island, Hong
Kong, where he spent his time practicing guitar, composing songs, writing
articles, fixing computers for friends, writing letters for villagers, typeset-
ting for poor students, and producing records financed by a few music
fans, among other things. He paid “mutual help in the mortal world”
instead of selling himself.11 In further reading about different schools of
anarchism, I selectively rejected violent branches and grew more attached
to the warm social ideals it depicted. I believe that the tradition of huan-
gong (labor exchange) and gift economy in the Chinese countryside is in
consistent with the anarchist mutual-aid spirit. They represent a way of
cooperation and life in the childhood of humanity when there was no cur-
rency, corporates, political parties, political agents, governments, or
nations. Anarchism is unlikely to be realized at a national level, but it may
come into shape in small human communities. When turning my atten-
tion to villages like Bishan, I did have the aspiration to put anarchism into
practice at heart, but I was not optimistic about the outcome. Stemming

11
About Lenny Kwok and Blackbird Communique, please see Ou Ning, “The Revolutionary
Imagination and Its Cultural Praxis,” in Jessie Chang, Christina Li and Kinwah Jaspar Lau,
eds., CHiE! Culture Sieges Politics (Hong Kong: Para/Site, 2008).
 INTRODUCTION xxxvii

from my long-term personal interest, anarchism and utopianism have

become my devoted field of study, as well as my thinking resources for
discourse production. Even after the Bishan Project was called off, my pas-
sion did not wane.
About anarchism and utopianism, my most explicit article is “Autonomy:
Utopia or Realpolitik,”12 which was written in 2012 for the publication of
an exhibition curated by Hou Hanru in Guangzhou, and was later incor-
porated into Bishan Commune: How to Start Your Own Utopia published
in Denmark. Besides, my discussions on the topic can also be found in my
narrative articles and interview scripts.13 Between 2013 and 2015, in
between lectures and exhibitions abroad, I spontaneously conducted field
study on “Practical Utopia.” I filled up my second Moleskine with the
research, and I named it Bishan Commune: How to Continue Your Own
Utopia (2014–2015). When back in China, I posted long articles in my
own magazines and mainstream Internet media on the intentional com-
munities movement in New Zealand, anarchist community Fristaden
Christiania in Copenhagen, and the hippie movement in Australia. The
writings elaborated on the concepts and methods I learned, including co-­
housing, consensus decision-making, permaculture, and community cur-
rency.14 Between 2016 and 2017, during my teaching at Columbia
University Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation, I
finished reading Erik Reece’s new book Utopia Drive,15 and followed his
route, visiting the Oneida Community in the upstate of New York, Shaker
Village of Pleasant Hill in Kentucky, and New Harmony in Indiana. After
the United States, I took a trip to the site of Robert Owen’s New Lanark
in Britain.

12
See “Autonomy: Utopia or Realpolitik,” Chap. 15.
13
See Chaps. 3, 9, 11, and 15.
14
See Ou Ning, “Looking for Utopia,” in Ou Ning, ed., V-ECO mook #1: Go Bush! -
Alternative Life in New Zealand (Beijing: China Youth Publishing Group, 2013); Ou Ning,
“Life and Death of Fristaden Christiania,” Paper, November 5, 2014; Ou Ning, “Legend of
a Collective Escape from a Dirty World,” iPress, October 4, 2015 (Tencent self-censored and
closed iPress completely during the coronavirus epidemic in 2020). My fieldwork on histori-
cal sites and living communities of communitarian experiment and rural reconstruction in
different corners of the world from the nineteenth century through today will be resulted as
a new book Utopian Field. For a brief summary of this research project, please see “Utopian
Nostalgia,” Chap. 15.
15
Erik Reece, Utopia Drive: A Road Trip Through America’s Most Radical Idea (New
York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2016).
xxxviii INTRODUCTION

In 2013, I met with David Graeber, who came up with the slogan “We
are the 99%,” in London, and in 2014, I met with Prof. James C. Scott of
Yale University in New Haven. I have read major monographs the two
authored. In Debt,16 David Graeber described China’s nongjia (School of
Tillers) in the pre-Qin period as the first anarchism in the world, and that
is where the name of School of Tillers in Bishan came from. I was also
inspired to further study utopia in ancient China (“Great Unity” in
Confucianism and “Peach Blossom Spring” in Taoism), enriching the dis-
course of my self-invented “Ruralism” and “Contemporary Agrarianism.”
Another two books by Graeber—Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology17
and The Democracy Project18—gave me a glimpse of anarchism’s contem-
porary developments in theory and practice. As for James C. Scott, his
book Seeing Like a State19 denounced state-making large-scale utopian
projects in “High-Modernism.” The Art of Not Being Governed20 exam-
ined the history of shifting farming tribes in southeastern Asia escaping
the centralized state and conducting self-barbarianization. The two books
enlightened me on metis or on-the-ground knowledge and reassured that
the construction of an ideal society on a small scale was harmless. In 2013,
I paid a visit to the Community Oriented Mutual Economy Project made
by the Hong Kong St. James’ Settlement. In the following year, I met
with Paul Glover, the inventor of Ithaca Hours, in Philadelphia. Later I
designed and printed Bishan Hours. It would be rash to circulate it in
Bishan, so I chose to use it as a pay to volunteers for the exhibition at the
Taipei Fine Arts Museum. They could use the Hours to exchange for all
the publication in the Bishan Project. I used to believe perhaps “artists”
were privileged to break rules, and to be immune from punishment. For
example, in the first Moleskine, I excerpted the synopsis of how to build a
personal mini country from a thin book called How to Start Your Own
Country21 by Erwin S. Strauss. I whimsically designed a flag and passport

16
David Graeber, Debt: The First 5000 Years (New York: Melville House, 2012).
17
David Graeber, Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology (Chicago: Prickly Paradigm
Press, 2004).
18
David Graeber, The Democracy Project: A History, A Crisis, A Movement (New York:
Spiegel & Grau, 2013).
19
James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human
Condition Have Failed (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999).
20
James C. Scott, The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast
Asia (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010).
21
Erwin S. Strauss, How to Start Your Own Country (Colorado: Paladin Press, 1979).
 INTRODUCTION xxxix

for the Bishan Commune (influenced by NSK, a new Slovenian art collec-
tive I came across a long time ago), and later the “Agritopia Dress.” What
I did not expect was that once these behaviors were widespread, they were
considered out of line and, along with the unpopular statements and arti-
cles, constituted evidence to crash the Bishan Project.
In modern China, only Mao Zedong has achieved his “utopia.”22 In his
youth, Mao Zedong was influenced by the Atarashiki-mura movement put
forward by Japanese Writer Saneatsu Mushanokō ji. After coming into
power, he combined Atarashiki-mura with Russian Kolkhoz and Zhang
Lu’s wudoumidao (Way of the Five Pecks of Rice) and launched the
nationwide People’s Commune movement. This twenty-year-long “uto-
pian” movement thrust the Chinese countryside into utter disasters. Many
Chinese left-wing intellectuals are now re-studying and re-evaluating the
People’s Commune. They argue that the large number of water facilities
built that time should be protected or reused as agricultural heritage. It is
held that in the current context of agricultural capitalism encroaching
countryside, the People’s Commune can enhance farmers’ bargaining
power and risk resistance as well as production and marketing capacity.
Nevertheless, I still cannot accept the People’s Commune with all my
heart. In my eyes, the People’ Commune is a political movement first and
foremost. It forced the concentration of means of production and labor in
the countryside and resorted to semi-military management to increase
agricultural output. The ultimate goal was to fuel the urgent industrializa-
tion and to cope with the delicate relations with Russia. It robbed farmers
of agricultural surplus, destroyed rural family and social structures, and
caused massive famine, cornering farmers into a situation where they could
not even save themselves. The word gongshe (commune) in Chinese bears
so much negative historical meaning, and this is why I did not use it to
describe the Bishan Commune. Instead, I prefer gongtongti, which indi-
cated communities and social groups. For its visual symbol, I chose the
natural and prosperous green over the revolutionary red.
The Bishan Project often reminds people of “Chinese Educated Urban
Youth Going and Working in the Countryside and Mountain Areas” in
the Mao era. However, the latter was started by the state, sending urban
youth to the countryside to defuse the social crisis of no education or
employment for the young in the cities. Whereas the Bishan Project was

22
For China’s utopian practices and imagination in the Mao era and afterwards, please see
“The Discourse of Utopia in the Post-Mao Era,” Chap. 15.
xl INTRODUCTION

completely spontaneous, shifting from cities with strong economy and

employment to tackle the harsh reality of rural hollowing and decline.
Oftentimes, the Bishan Project is also misunderstood as the modern
Chinese version of the Back-to-the-land Movement in North America in
the 1960s and 1970s. Back then, the western hippies went to the country-
side to escape economic crisis and seek a low-cost collective life. In con-
trast, the Chinese in favor of “anti-urbanization” are predominantly the
urban middle class. They give up their stable income in cities as they can-
not stand the poisoning air and population overload. When in the coun-
tryside, the urbanites without income have to live off their savings. My
family did not move to the village for an escape (both urban and rural
areas have their own problems), but we were also financially unsustainable.
The Bishan Project not only brought no income to my family but also
raised my spending. If I could not make ends meet through other means
or projects, and the project itself could not raise more funds, sooner or
later it would lose steam. From a financial perspective, it is fair enough to
say “utopia” is naïve and childish.

A “Facilitator” Approach
In the few months before the Bishan Project was banned, I was secretly
preparing a third exhibition in the School of Tillers. Qian Shi’an in his
seventies was a very talented villager. He named his house and yard
“Hillside Gardens,” which was the first Airbnb listing in the Researchers
in Residence Program. Living by himself, he designed a bridge with flow-
ing water underneath and a pond in his yard, where various trees and flow-
ers were prosperous (some plants were innovatively grafted by him). He
also made potted landscapes and kept dogs and birds. His place was like a
well-attended garden of a retired literati. He liked poetry and photogra-
phy and was good at many handicrafts. On the mountain, there was a
piece of barren land where he planted trees and bamboos. He often col-
lected strange-looking roots, branches, and bamboo joints and made them
into furniture, articles of daily use, musical instruments, and toys for kids.
I was an apprentice to him learning carpentry, and we were very close. I
proposed to build a special-shaped all-bamboo tea pavilion with tradi-
tional techniques on his mountain land. He could take a rest in the pavil-
ion when working. The School of Tillers would hold an exhibition of
documents and pictures, showcasing his gardening, handicrafts, and pho-
tography as well as how the pavilion was built. Some student interns
 INTRODUCTION xli

majoring in architecture and I offered some reference about the design

and structure of the pavilion, but besides that, all the works to be exhib-
ited were done by Qian himself, a representation of his personal taste. In
this exhibition, I was a facilitator, not a curator or artist in charge of the
content and aesthetics. After two exhibitions by outsider artists in the
School, this time I intended to put two basic principles of socially engaged
art into practice: de-authorization and de-aestheticization. To my luck, I
raised some money from a friend. Qian together with other four villagers
went about the project right away. They started from scratch, blazing a
trail to the mountain and leveling the land. Unfortunately, when the pavil-
ion was about to be completed, with only the roof to be installed, it was
set on fire by the government. As a result, all our efforts for the exhibition
went down the drain.
There are many talented craftsmen in Huizhou villages. At the early
stage of the Bishan Project, Zuo Jing executed a research project called
“Handicraft of Yi County,” which was later compiled to a book.23 The
research got on an exhibition tour to many places and secured financial
support from the Yi County government. Bishan Village also had a few
educated people (I regarded them as farmer-intellectuals). Villager Wang
Shouchang’s ink drawings of Bishan’s historical and current views were
made into postcards for sale at the bookstore, and he was paid royalties.
Yao Lilan was a retired primary school teacher and his photography works
were exhibited in a small showroom converted from a field-side shack by
Pig’s Inn volunteer Jin Ming. There was an amateur Huangmei Opera
troupe in the village, and Wang Chenglong, a young villager who returned
from Beijing to the village because of the Bishan Project, created many
performance opportunities to increase its income. Qian Shi’an was a ver-
satile craftsman. It was a shame that his tea pavilion and exhibition fell
victim to the cancellation of the Bishan Project. I have to admit that the
idea of building the “Happiness Pavilion” has something to do with my
utopian complex. I am a fan of the book Shelter, which was published in
1973 by Lloyd Kahn, who once was the architecture editor of The Whole
Earth Catalog. Shelter collects vernacular architecture all over the world
and interviews many hippie communes and introduces their hand-made
houses. On its first page, the first line reads: “In times past, people built
their own homes, grew their own food, made their own clothes…” I had
tried to produce the “Agritopia Dress” and witnessed college graduate

23
Zuo Jing, ed., Handicraft in Yi County (Beijing: Jingcheng Press, 2014).
xlii INTRODUCTION

village official Zhang Yu grow organic rice. So, I hoped to see how the
villagers build their own houses with local materials and without the help
of modern tools since there was no electricity on the mountain. I per-
suaded Qian to take part in the project (or more exactly, to lead the proj-
ect), and I would learn from him. The pavilion could be taken as socially
engaged art or simply as a shed on a farmer’s own land, so we did not
report it to the government. It was mainly because of me that the pavilion
was burnt.
In fact, the Bishan Project was banned not only because its art events,
thoughts, and statements touched the nerves of Chinese government cul-
tural censorship but, more importantly, because it overstepped the Party’s
leadership in the countryside. The Beijing central government is not
unaware of the problems relating to agriculture, rural areas, and rural pop-
ulation. In fact, rural reform has always been high on the agenda of the
central government, with new policies promoting rural construction com-
ing out every year. It has made great strides forward in infrastructures like
roads and telecommunications and poverty relief and social security sys-
tems. The vast rural land and huge rural population are cornerstones of
Chinese society. No rulers of any generation could afford to ignore rural
issues. During Xi Jinping’s administration, he famously said that “Lucid
Waters and Lush Mountains Are Invaluable Assets,” stressing the impor-
tance not only of economic development based on natural and agricultural
resources but also of environment protection and “ecological civilization.”
Xi attaches great importance to Confucius traditions, advocating jiafeng
(family ethos) and xiangxian (rural sages), and such cultural heritage is
concentrated in the countryside. Nevertheless, his authoritarian thoughts
are rising, with increasingly hardline diplomacy and tightening grip on
Chinese society. After Mao Zedong and Deng Xiaoping’s administrations,
“strongman politics” is back in China again.24 Despite sharing the same
goals with the government, the new rural reconstruction movement initi-
ated by unofficial intellectuals takes dramatically different approaches and
methods. It doesn’t have the political freedom as the rural reconstruction
movement in the Republican Era did. Back in that time of wars and war-
lordism, Liang Shuming could even get authorization from Shandong
warlord Han Fuju to reform the Zouping County. Centralization of state

24
On March 11, 2018, the National People’s Congress adopted the amendment to the
Constitution of the Republic of China, abolishing the two-term limits on president and
enabling Xi Jinping to rule in longer time and even indefinitely.
 INTRODUCTION xliii

power can put a lid on chaos, but gambling the hope of good governance
on one person or political party and blocking the efforts of other social
channels can also lead to a catastrophic deluge.
On the other hand, the Bishan Project also suffered “censorship” from
public opinions. The “Theater of the World: Art and China After 1989”
that opened in the Guggenheim Museum was boycotted and protested
against by a large number of animal activists. For the same matter, some
“public opinions” held up their banner of self-styled “political correct-
ness” and pointed finger at the Bishan Project. Although “public opin-
ions” did not have the power or motive to call off the project, yet the
social controversy they stirred up gave the government another reason to
stop the project. Surely, the criticism from the likes of Zhou Yun was a far
cry from “censorship,” but the pressure it brought was the same. The
social media give a loud voice to “public opinions” and commercial media
augment the voice to stand out in attention marketing. Such social ecol-
ogy creates a level playing field for two sides of debate where eloquence
and stress tolerance are weapons. As a practitioner, I have never wavered
in my principles and opinions because of praises and criticism. After the
Bishan controversy, I did not go out of my way and put on the clothes of
Russian farmers like Leo Tolstoy did. He was bedraggled and hobbled
along into the public with the help of a stick, only to hide his intellectual-
ity and nobility and show his “down-to-earth-ness.” To me, what Tolstoy
did was simply “class transvestitism,” a kind of zhuangbility (a coined
word mixing Chinese and English, which roughly means being preten-
tious) in disguise, because differences in family background, education,
and ability cannot be concealed. On the contrary, the right attitude of
intellectuals working in the countryside is to acknowledge that different
people have different strengths and weaknesses and not to classify people
with labels like the “elite” and “common.” Different people should respect
and learn from each other. Looking down upon or “segregating” farmers
shows nothing but a despicable and ridiculous sense of superiority; how-
ever, looking up to or deifying them displays a hypocrite moral thirst.

Aftershock
Although the six eventful years have taught me a lot, yet I lost the chance
to do further work in the countryside. I am forbidden to conduct any pub-
lic events in Bishan, and my urban renewal and historic preservation project
Kwan-Yen Project in Yantai, Shandong Province, also went through
xliv INTRODUCTION

interference from Beijing. The one-year teaching at Columbia University

allowed me time to review and sort through the Bishan Project. Inspired
by the French anthropologist Marc Augé’s “Place” and “Non-­ place”
theory,25 I defined the Bishan Project as a “placemaking” praxis. With artis-
tic and cultural forces, through community connection and social move-
ment, “placemaking” not only creates a new physical space but also creates
a common spiritual space, turning a village, a block, and even a city into a
“Place” that encapsulates historical memory, identity, and social relations.
It is the opposite of “Non-place” brought by James C. Scott’s “High
Modernism” and Marc Augé’s “Supermodernity.” I extended the Bishan
experience to the urban project in Yantai City. I created a non-profit com-
munity library in Suochengli, the oldest historical neighborhood in Yantai.
The site used to be an empty compound. Architect Dong Gong renovated
the original space at my invitation, and I furnished it with books and maga-
zines related to local history. The library hosts exhibitions and lectures for
residents in the neighborhood on a regular basis. Suochengli Neighborhood
Library bears some resemblance to the Bishan Bookstore and School of
Tillers, but it is more similar to the Working Men’s Institute I saw in the
New Harmony. The Institute is the prototype of American public libraries,
and its primary aim is to spread knowledge among labor workers. My plan
is to place more small libraries in different neighborhoods of Yantai, offer-
ing services to more people just like 7-Eleven convenience stores. I was
asked by Beijing to back out, but luckily they did not say no to the Kwan-
Yen Project.26
After I was forced to leave Bishan, the young volunteers working with
me also left. For some time, tourists decreased, but later villagers’ Bed &
Breakfast hostels increased to over thirty, and the Pig’s Inn and Bishan
Bookstore are still in business. The Alila boutique hotel project that
bought over 200 mu (about 13.3-hectare) farmland is breaking ground.
Some young people come to Bishan to set up their art studios and small
libraries. Others try small-scale organic agriculture and still others run
guesthouses. Ding Mu’er, son of Han Yu, the new manager of Pig’s Inn,
begins to organize art exhibitions and even brews his own craft beer
labeled with “Bishan.” Bishan does not transform into a rural utopia as I
expected. Instead, it becomes a hot tourist destination on Lonely Planet.

25
See Marc Augé, Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity (New
York: Verso, 1995).
26
For more about Kwan-Yen Project, please see “Topophilia and Placemaking,” Chap. 14.
 INTRODUCTION xlv

Just like the Shaker Village of Pleasant Hill in Kentucky and New Lanark
in Scotland, all used-to-be utopias ended up as tourist attractions.
Compared with the real McCoy utopias in the free and radical nineteenth
century, the Bishan Commune is merely a fantasy in my head that has
never materialized. The Bishan Commune I expected is neither an artist
village nor an ivory tower. It is supposed to be a mutual-aid community
where the villagers are the majority, and they live together, construct hand
in hand, and share the results of their joint efforts. Reality shows that it is
not easy to realize such a vision. What is impossible is often called a “uto-
pia,” since the word originally means “nowhere.”

Jingzhou, China Ou Ning

 CHAPTER 1

Pastoral Youth

My Urbanization1
I was born in the small town of Xialiu in Suixi County, Guangdong
Province, at the end of 1969. My father was a tailor and a manmousang2
of a local amateur Cantonese opera troupe. He loved to sing opera in his
free time, especially imitating Chan Siew Fong’s style.3 My hours of cul-
tural exposure mainly consisted of the variety of Cantonese opera that my
father would sing all day long, such as “Shanbo on His Deathbed”4 and
other sorrowful, beautiful arias. I still remember them to this day; they
cause one to feel deeply the melancholy and bitter suffering of this world.
My father once played the leading role in the “Lu Bu Molested Diao
Chan.”5 This Cantonese opera led me to pursue an interest in classical
novels such as Romance of the Three Kingdoms. However, the book was
not available for purchase in Xialiu, so I had to ask my aunt (the only
relative who lived in the city) to buy it for me in Beihai City of Guangxi
Province. Afterwards, I read Journey to the West and Water Margin and
began to pluck passages and poems from these books.

1
Completed in Chinese in 2001 and published in City Pictorial (July 13, 2001).
The English version was translated by Stella Xu in 2019.
2
In Cantonese, manmousang literally means “civilized martial man,” a role known for a
clean-shaven scholar-warrior in Cantonese opera.
3
Chan Siew Fong, born in 1926, is a famous Cantonese opera singer and actor based in
Guangzhou.
4
An aria of Cantonese opera based on the story The Butterfly Lovers, originally sang by
Chan Siew Fong.
5
A Cantonese opera based on the story Romance of the Three Kingdoms.

© The Author(s) 2020 1

O. Ning, Utopia in Practice, Contemporary East Asian Visual
Cultures, Societies and Politics,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-5791-0_1
2 O. NING

In the small place of Xialiu, we could not see the outside world. I could
only absorb the nourishment from local culture to grow. In 1999, when I
curated a special retrospective screening of Ann Hui’s films in U-thèque
Organization, the Cantonese opera often interspersed throughout the
films reminded me of my distant childhood years. After experiencing the
baptism of rock, jazz, and various alternative music, I now have a strong
interest in vernacular operas. When I first started collecting Cantonese
opera records, it was not only for research purposes, but also to return to
my roots through this wonderful opera.
In 1982, I tested into the best junior high school in Suixi County and
enrolled there. The county town was located more than sixty kilometers
from my secluded small hometown, which was very different. One could
subscribe to the popular Yuwen Bao6 at the post office, and the school
library contained copies of various literary magazines. The most potent
novels at the time were Wreaths at the Foot of the Mountain7 and Life,8
which were both later made into films.
The school’s intellectual atmosphere was very strong, so the students
were all immersed in their homework and rarely developed extracurricular
interests. Thus, I couldn’t find anyone to discuss the insights of literature
with me. During junior high, I took reading notes in four big notebooks
and copied the lyrics of many Taiwan Campus Folk Songs.9 These songs,
such as “Grandma’s Penghu Bay” and “Father’s Straw Sandal,” are brim-
ming with local, countryside sentiments, which especially touched me as a
rural youth.
In my second year of junior high school, I joined the Communist Youth
League and began to read How the Steel Was Tempered.10 Since then, I have
been obsessed with the power of the collective and enjoyed the feeling of
the individual being conquered by the magnificent sound of waves from
the collective. All day long, I imagined an era in which my humble self
could be among them. In 1995, when I first listened to the industrial and
neo-classical music by the Slovenian avant-garde group Laibach, the sound
of steel, the beauty of discipline, suddenly connected to the collectivist

6
A weekly paper for learning Chinese language founded by Shanxi Normal College
in 1981.
7
The novel written by Li Cunbao in 1982, and the film directed by Xie Jin, 1984.
8
The novel written by Lu Yao in 1982, and the film directed by Wu Tianming, 1984.
9
A genre of Taiwanese Music with its roots as student songs in the campuses of Taiwanese
universities during the 1970s.
10
A socialist realist novel written by Nikolai Ostrovsky (1904–1936).
 1 PASTORAL YOUTH 3

fanaticism of my youth. For a while after I grew up, I considered myself an

individualist, but sometimes life likes to bring you back to once again
experience the thrill of self-submersion.
In 1997, the Beijing rock band Catcher in the Rye, in their brash yet
sentimental songs, sang with a revolutionary, romantic spirit like that of
the communist Young Pioneers of China. They were the young rebels of
the new era, who did not change their true character in the age of global
information flows. For people in our generation, the first half of our
resumes are all in red, and the second half is varied and difficult to distin-
guish. For me personally, the second half begins in high school.
Because of my excellent grades, I was exempt from the entrance exami-
nation and was admitted to the best middle school in Zhanjiang City. In
my first year of high school, I read A Collection of New Tide Poetry,11
edited by Lao Mu. It was the best selection of Misty Poetry to date, and it
completely changed my life. Although Zhanjiang is a middle-tier city,
quite a few talents were assigned to return there after going to college in
Guangzhou or other provinces. Compared to the county seat, its world
was more expansive.
The 1980s was an unforgettable era. Despite being far from the large
central cities, one could still capture the lingering influences of mainstream
culture. I read Meishu magazine12 to follow the ’85 New Wave art move-
ment, read Dushu magazine13 to follow the debate of “tradition and mod-
ernization” in ideological circles. Through teachers and friends, I could
listen to the tapes of Qu Xiaosong, Tan Dun, Ye Xiaogang, and Guo
Wenjing, who were the contemporary classical composers just graduated
from Central Music Academy. At the cinema (although a bit later than in
a big city), I could watch Zhang Yimou’s Red Sorghum, and at Xinhua
Bookstore, it was not difficult to find a large number of newly published,
foreign translations. One wave after another of waves you have never expe-
rienced before, as if crashing over whole mountains and plains, entering
your heart with irresistible force. It is a blessing to spend one’s search for
knowledge and extremely spirited adolescence in such an era.

11
Self-published in 1985, two volumes, more than 800 pages.
12
A monthly Chinese art magazine founded in 1954, which became a very important
platform for ’85 New Wave art movement in the 1980s.
13
A monthly Chinese literary magazine founded in 1979, which has great influence on
Chinese intellectuals.
Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
Like feendes of hell, the guiltles to betray,
But yee chiefly his kinsmen most vnkinde,
Which gaue consent to make him so away,
That vnto God, with all my heart I pray,
Vengeaunce may light on him that caused all,
Beaufort, I meane, that cursed cardinall.

27.

Which bastard priest of th’house[692] of Lancaster,

Sonne to duke Iohn, surnamed Iohn of Gaunt,
Was first create byshop of Winchester,
For no learning whereof hee might well vaunt,
Ne for vertue, which hee did neuer haunt,
But for his gold and sommes that were not small,
Payde to the pope, was made a cardinall.

28.

Proud Lucifer, which from the heauens on high

Downe to the pit of hell belowe was cast,
And being once an aungell bright in sky,
For his high pride in hell is chained fast
In deepe darknes that euermore shall last,
More hawt of heart was not before his fall,
Then was this proud and pompous cardinall:

29.

Whose life, good Baldwine, paynt out in his pickle,

And blase this Baal and belligod most blinde,
An hypocrite, all faythles, false, and fickle,
A wicked wretch, a kinsman most vnkind,
A deuill incarnat, all deuishly enclinde,
And (to discharge my conscience all at once)
The deuill him gnawe, both body, bloud, and bones.

30.
The spitefull prieste would needes make mee a witch,
As would to God I had beene for his sake,
I would haue claw’d him where hee did not itche,
I would haue playde the lady of the lake,
And as Merline was, cloasde him in a brake,
Ye a meridian to lul him by day light,
And a night mare to ride on him by night.

31.

The fiery feends with feuers hot and frenzy,

The ayery heggs with stench and carren sauoures,
The watry ghostes with gowtes and with dropsy,
The earthy goblines, with aches at all houres,
Furyes and fayryes, with all infernall powers,
I would haue stir’d from the darke dungeon
Of hell centre, as deepe as demagorgon.

32.

Or had I now the skill of dame Erichto,

Whose dreadfull charmes (as Lucan doth expresse)
All feendes did feare, so far forth as prince Pluto,
Was at her call for dread of more distresse,
Then would I send of helhoundes more and lesse
A legion at least, at him to cry and yel,
And with that chyrme, herrie him downe to hell.

33.

Which neede not, for sure I thinke that hee

Who here in earth leades Epicurus’ life,
As farre from God as possible may be,
With whome all sinne and vices are most rife,
Using at will both widdow, mayde, and wife,
But that some deuill his body doth possesse,
His life is such as men can iudge no lesse.
 34.

And God forgieue my wrath and wreakefull minde,

Such is my hate to that most wicked wretch,
Dye when hee shall, in heart I could well finde
Out of the graue his corps agayne to fetch,
And racke his limmes as long as they would stretch,
And take delight to listen euery day
How hee could sing a masse of welaway.

35.

The ile of Man was the apoynted place

To penaunce mee for euer in exile,
Thither in haste they poasted mee apace,
And douting scape, they pind mee in a pyle,
Close by my selfe in care, alas, the while,
There felt I first poore prysoner’s hungry fare,
Much want, thinges skant, and stone walles harde and
bare.

36.

The chaunge was straunge, from sylke and cloth of gold

To rugged fryze my carcas for to cloath,
From prince’s fare, and daynties hot and cold,
To rotten fish, and meates that one would loath,
The diet and dressing were much alike boath,
Bedding and lodging were all alike fine,
Such downe it was as serued well for swyne.

37.

Neyther doe I myne owne case thus complayne,

Which I confesse came partly by desert:
The only cause which doubleth all my payne,
And which most neere goeth now vnto my hearte,
Is that my fault did finally reuert
 To him that was least guilty of the same,
Whose death it was, though I abode the shame.

38.

Whose fatall fall when I doe call to minde,

And how by mee his mischiefe first began,
So ofte I cry on fortune most vnkinde,
And my mishap most vtterly doe banne,
That euer I to such a noble man,
Who from my crime was innocent and cleare,
Should bee a cause to buy his loue so deare.

39.

Oh, to my heart how greeuous is the wounde,

Calling to minde this dismall deadly case:
I would I had beene doluen vnder ground
When hee first saw or looked on my face,
Or tooke delight in any kinde of grace
Seeming in mee, that him did stir or moue
To fancy mee, or set his heart to loue.

40.

Farewell, Greenewych, my pallace of delight,

Where I was wont to see the christall streames
Of royall Thames, most plesaunt to my sight:
And farewell, Kent, right famous in all realmes,
A thousand times I minde you in my dreames,
And when I wake most griefe it is to mee,
That neuer more agayne I shall you see.[693]

41.

In the night time when I should take my rest

I weepe, I wayle, I weat my bed with teares,
And when dead sleape my spirites hath opprest,
Troubled with dreames I fantazy vayne feares,
Myne husband’s voyce then ringeth at mine eares,
Crying for help: “O saue mee from the death,
These vilaynes here doe seeke to stop my breath.”

42.

Yea, and sometimes mee thinkes his drery ghost

Appeares in sight, and shewes mee in what wise
Those fell tyraunts with torments had emboost
His winde and breath, to abuse people’s eyes,
So as no doubt or question should arise
Among rude folke, which litle vnderstand,
But that his death came only by God’s hand.

43.

I playne in vayne, where eares bee none to heare,

But roring seas, and blustring of the winde,
And of redresse am near a whit the neere,
But with waste wordes to feede my mournfull minde,
Wishing full oft the Parcas had vntwinde
My vitall stringes, or Atropose with knife
Had cut the lyne of my most wretched life.

44.

Oh that Neptune, and Æolus also,

Th’one god of seas, the other of weather,
Ere mine arriuall into that ile of woe,
Had sunke the ship wherein I sayled thether,
(The shipmen saued) so as I together
With my good duke, might haue beene deade afore
Fortune had wroken her wrath on vs so sore.

45.

Or els that God, when my first passage was

Into exile along Saynt Albon’s towne,
Had neuer let mee further for to passe,
But in the streete with death had strucke mee downe:
Then had I sped of my desired bowne,
That my poore corps mought there haue lien with his
Both in one graue, and so haue gone to blisse.

46.

But I, alas, the greater is my greefe,

Am past that hope to haue my sepulture
Nere vnto him, which was to mee most leefe,
But in an ile and country most obscure,
To pyne in payne whilst my poore life will dure,
And being dead, all honourlesse to lye
In simple graue, as other poore that dye.

47.

My tale is tolde, and time it is to ceasse

Of troubles past, all which haue had theyr end:
My graue I trust shall purchase mee such peace[694]
In such a world, where no wight doth contend
For higher place, whereto all flesh shall wend:
And so I end, vsing one word for all
As I began, that pryde will haue a fall.

Quod G. F.[695]
 [“Svrely,” sayd one of the company, “this lady hath done much to
moue the hearers to pitye her, and hath very well knit vp her[696]
tragedy according to the beginning: but I meruayl much where shee
learned all this poetry touched in her tale, for in her dayes learning
was not common, but a rare thing, namely in women.” “Yes,” quod
Maister Ferrers, “that might shee very well learne of the duke her
husband, who was a prince so excellently learned, as the like of his
degree was no where to bee founde. And not only so, but was also a
patron to poets and orators, much like as Mecenas was in the time of
Augustus Cæsar. This duke was founder of the diuinity schole in
Oxford, whereas he caused Aristotle’s workes to bee translated out
of Greeke into Latin, and caused many other thinges to bee done for
aduauncement of learning, hauing alwayes learned men nere about
him, no meruayl therefore though the duchesse brought some pece
away.” “Mee-thinke,” quod another, “shee passeth boundes of a
ladye’s modesty, to inuey so cruelly against the cardinall Beaufort.”
“Not a whit,” quod another, “hauing such cause as shee had, and
somwhat ye must beare with women’s passions. Therefore leaue
wee her to eternall rest, and let vs heare what Maister Ferrers will
say for the duke her husband, whose case was the more lamentable,
in that hee suffered without cause. And surely though the cardinall
against nature was the duke’s mortall foe, yet the chiefe causers of
his confusion was the queene and William Delapoole, earle of
Suffolke, and afterwardes duke, whose counsayle was chiefly
followed in the contriuing of this noble man’s destruction. Shee
through ambition to haue soueraynty and rule, and hee through
flattery to purchase honour and promotion, which as hee in short
time obtayned, so in as short time he lost agayne, and his life withall
by the iust iudgement of God, receiuing such measure as he before
met to this good prince. This drift of his turned to the vtter
ouerthrowe of the king himselfe, the queene his wife, and Edward
theyr son a most goodly prince, and to the subuersion of the whole
house of Lancaster, as you may see at large in the cronicles: but
now let vs heare what the duke will say.”]
 Howe Hvmfrey Plantagenet Duke of
Glocester Protector of England,
during the minority of his nephue
King Henry the sixt, (commonly called
the good Duke) by practise of
enemyes was brought to confusion.
1.

As highest hilles with tempestes beene most touched,

And tops of trees most subiect vnto winde,
And as great towers with stone strongly cowched,
Haue heauy falles when they be vndermynde,
Euen so by proofe in worldly thinges wee finde,
That such as clime the top of high degree
From perill of falling neuer can bee free.

2.

To proue this true, good Baldwine, hearken hyther,

See, and behold mee vnhappy Humfrey,[697]
England’s protector and duke of Glocester,
Who in the time of the sixt king Henry,
Ruled this realme yeares moe then twenty:
Note well the cause of my decay and fall,
And make a myrour for magistrates all.[698]

3.
In theyr moste weale to beware of vnhap,[699]
And not to sleepe in slumbring sickernes,
Whilst fortune false doth lul them in her lap
Drowned in dreames of brittle blessednesse,
But then to feare her freakes and ficklenesse
Accompting still the higher they ascend,
More nigh to bee to daunger in the end.

4.

And that vayne trust in bloud or royall race,

Abuse them not with careles assuraunce[700]
To trust fortune,[701] but waying well my case,
When shee most smyleth to haue in remembraunce[702]
My sodayne fall, who in all apparaunce[703]
Hauing most stayes which man[704] in state
mayntayne,
Haue found the same vntrusty and most vayne.

5.

Better then I none may the same affirme,[705]

Who trusting all in height of high estate,
Led by the eares with false flatterie’s chyrme,[706]
Which neuer prince could banish from his gate,
Did litle thinke on such a sodayne mate,
Not heeding, lesse breeding, all vnaware,
By foes least feared was trapt in a snare.

6.

If noble byrth or high autority,

Nombre of friendes, kinred, or alliaunce,
If wisedome, learning, [or] worldly pollicy,
Mought haue beene stayers to fortune’s variaunce,
None stoode more strong, in worldly countenaunce,
 For all these helpes had I to auayle mee,
And yet in fine, all the same did fayle mee.[707]

7.

Of king Henry the fourth,[708] fourth sonne I was,

Brother to Henry, the fift of that name,[709]
And uncle to Henry the sixt,[710] but, alas,
What cause had I to presume on[711] the same?
Or for vayne glory, aduauncing my[712] fame
My selfe to call in recordes and writinges,
The sonne, brother, and vncle vnto kinges.

8.

This was my boast, which lastly was my bane,

Yet not this boast was it that brought me downe:
The very cause which made my weale to wane
So neere of kin that I was to the crowne,
That was the rock that made my ship to drowne
A rule there is not fayling, but most sure,
Kingdome no kin doth know, ne can indure.

9.

For after my brother, the fift Henry,[713]

Wan by conquest the royall realme of Fraunce,
And of two kingdoms made one monarchy
Before his death, for better obaysaunce
To his yong sonne, not ripe to gouernaunce,
Protector of England I was by testament,
And Iohn my brother in Fraunce made regent.

10.

To whome if God had lent a longer life,

Our house to haue[714] kept from stormes of inward strife,
Or it had beene the Lord Almightie’s will
Plantagenet[te’s name] in state had standen still:
But deadly discord, which kingdomes great doth spill[715]
Bred by desire of high domination,
Brought our whole house to playne desolation.

11.

It is for truth in an history founde,

That Henry Plantagenet, first of our name,
Who called was king Henry the second,
Sonne of dame Mawde, the empresse of high fame,
Would oft report that his auncient grandame,
Though seeming in shape a woman naturall,
Was a feend of the kind that (Succubæ) some call.

12.

Which old fable, so long time told before,

When this kinge’s sonnes against him did rebell,
Hee cald to minde, and being greeued sore,
“Loe! now,” quod hee, “I see and proue full well
The story true, which folk of old did tell,
That from the deuill[716] descended all our race,
And now my children verify[717] the case.”

13.

Whereof to leaue a long memoriall

In minde of man euermore[718] to rest,
A picture hee made and hung it in his hall
Of a pellicane sitting on his nest,
With four yong byrdes, three pecking at his brest,
With bloudy beakes, and furder did deuise,
The yongest byrde to pecke the father’s eyes.

14.
Meaning hereby his rebell children three,
Henry and Richard, [who] bet him on the breast:
(Ieffrey onely from that offence was free)
Henry dyed of England’s crowne possest:
Richard liued his father to molest,
Iohn the yongest pect [still] his father’s eye,
Whose deedes vnkind the sooner made him dye.

15.

This king (some write) in his sicknes last

Sayde, as it were by way of prophecye,
How that the deuill a darnell grayne had cast
Among his kin, to encrease enmity,
Which should remayne in theyr posterity
Till mischiefe and murder had spent them all,
Not leauing one to pisse against the wall.

16.

And yet from him in order did succeede

In England here of crowned kinges, fourteene
Of that surname, and of that line and seede,
With dukes and earles, and many a noble queene,
The numbre such as all the world would weene,
So many ympes could neuer so be spent,
But some heyr male should bee of that discent.

17.

Which to bee true if any stand in doubt,

Because I meane not further to digresse,
Let him peruse the storyes[719] throughout
Of English kinges whom practise did oppresse,
And hee shall finde the cause of theyr distresse
From first to last, vnkindly to begin
Alwayes by those that next were of the kin.
 18.

Was not Richard, of whom I spake before,

A rebell playne vntill his father dyed,
And Iohn likewise an enmy euermore
To Richard agayne, and for a rebell tryed?
After whose death, it cannot bee denied,
Agaynst all right this Iohn most cruelly,
His brother’s children caused for to dye.

19.

Arthur and Isabell (I meane) that were

Ieffrey’s children, then duke of Britayne,
Henrye’s thyrd sonne, by one degree more neere
Then was this Iohn, as storyes shew most playne,
Which two children were famisht or els slayne
By Iohn theyr eame, cald Saunzterre by name,
Of whose foule act all countreys speake great shame.

20.

Edward and Richard, second both by name,

Kinges of this land, fell downe by fatall fate:
What was the cause that princes of such fame
Did leese at last theyr honour, life, and state?
Nothing at all, but discord and debate,
Which when it haps in kinred, or in bloud,
Erynnis rage was neuer halfe so wood.

21.

Be sure therefore, ye kinges and princes all,

That concord in kingdomes is chiefe assuraunce,
And that your families doe neuer fall,
But where discord doth leade the doubtfull daunce
With busy brawles, and turnes of variaunce:
Where malice is minstrel, the pype ill report,
 The maske mischiefe, and so endes the sport.

22.

But now to come to my purpose agayne,

Whilst I my charge applyed in England,
My brother in Fraunce long time did remayne,
Cardinal Beauford tooke proudly in hand,
In causes publique agaynst mee to stand,
Who of great malice, so much as hee might,
Sought in all thinges to doe mee despite.

23.

Which prowde prelate to mee was bastard eame,

Sonne to duke Iohn of Gaunt as they did fayne,
Who being made high chauncellour of the realme,
Not like a priest, but like a prince did raigne,
Nothing wanting which might his pryde maynteine,
Bishop besides of Winchester hee was,
And cardinall of Rome which angels brought to passe.

24.

Not God’s angels, but angels of old gold,

Lift him aloft in whome no cause there was
By iust desert so high to bee extold,
(Riches except) whereby this golden asse
At home and abroad all matters brought to passe,
Namely at Rome, hauing no meane but that
To purchase there his crimzin cardinall hat.

25.

Which thing the king my father him forbad

Playnly saying, that hee could not abide
Within his realme a subiect to bee had
His prince’s peere, yet such was this man’s pride,
That hee forthwith, after my father died,
(The king then young) obtayned of the pope
That honour high, which erst hee could not hope.

26.

Whose prowde attemptes because that I withstood,

My bounde duty the better to acquite,
This holy father waxed welnere wood,
Of meere malice deuising day and night
To worke to mee dishonour and despite,
Whereby there fell betweene vs such a iarre,
As in this land was like a ciuill warre.

27.

My brother Iohn, which lay this while in Fraunce,

Heard of this hurle, and past the seas in hast,
By whose traueil this troublesome distaunce
Ceassed a while, but nethelesse[720] in wast:
For rooted hate will hardly bee displast
Out of high hartes, and namely where debate,
Happeneth amongst great persons of estate.

28.

For like as a match doth lye and smolder

Long time before it commeth to the trayne:
But yet when fire hath caught in the poulder,
No arte is able the flames to restrayne:
Euen so the sparkes of enuy and disdayne,
Out of the smoke burst forth in such a flame,
That Fraunce and England yet may rue the same.

29.

So when of two realmes the regiment royall,

Betweene brothers was parted equally,
One placed in Fraunce for affayres martiall,
And I at home for ciuill pollicy:
To serue the state, wee both did so apply,
As honour and fame to both did encrease,
To him for the warre, to mee for the peace.

30.

Whence enuy sprang, and specially because

This proud prelate could not abide a peere
Within the land to rule the state by lawes,
Wherefore sifting my life and actes most neere,
Hee neuer ceast, vntill, as you shall heare,
By practise foule of him and his allies,
My death was wrought in most vnworthy wise.

31.

And first hee sought my doings to defame,

By rumours false, which hee and his did sowe:
Letters and billes to my reproach and shame
Hee did deuise, and all about bestowe,
Whereby my troth in doubt should daily growe,
In England first, and afterward in Fraunce,
Mouing all meanes to bring mee to mischaunce.

32.

One quarell was, that where by common lawe

Murder and theft beene punisht all alike,
So as manslears, which bloudy blades doe drawe,
Suffer no more then hee that doth but pike,
Mee thought the same no order pollitike,
In setting paynes to make no difference,
Betweene the lesser and greater offence.

33.
I being seene somewhat in ciuill lawe,
The rules thereof reputed much better:[721]
Wherefore to keepe offenders more in awe,
Like as the fault was smaller or greater,
So set I paynes more easier or bitter,
Waying the quality of euery offence,
And so according pronounced sentence.

34.

Amongst my other Delicta Iuuentutis,

Whilst rage of youth my reason did subdue,
I must confesse as the very truth is,
Driuen by desire, fond fancies to ensue,
A thing I did whereof great trouble grewe,
Abusing one, to my no small rebuke,
Which wife was than to Iohn, of Brabant duke.

35.

Called shee was lady Iaquet the fayre,

Delightfull in loue like Helene of Troy:
To the duke of Bauier sole daughter and heyre,
Her did I marry to my great annoy:[722]
Yet for a time, this dame I did enioy,
With her whole landes, witholding them by force,
Till Martin the pope, betweene vs made diuorce.

36.

Yet all these blastes not able were to moue

The anchor strong, whereby my ship did stay,
Some other shift to seeke him did behoue,
Whereto ere long ill fortune made the way,
Which finally was cause of my decay
And cruell death, contriued by my foes,
Which fell out thus, as now I shall disclose.
 37.

Elianor my wife, my duches only deare,

I knowe not howe, but as the nature is
Of women all, aye curious to enquire
Of thinges to come (though I confesse in this
Her fault not small) and that shee did amisse,
By witche’s skill, which sorcery some call,
Would knowe of thinges which after should befall.

38.

And for that cause made her selfe acquainted

With mother Madge, called the witch of Eye,
And with a clerke that after was attaynted,
Bolenbroke hee hight, that learned was that way,
With other moe, which famous were that day,
As well in science called mathematicall,
As also in magique [and] skill supernaturall.

39.

These cunning folkes shee set on worke to knowe

The time how long the king should liue and raygne,
Some by the starres, and some by deuills[723] belowe,
Some by witchcraft sought knowledge to attayne,
With like fancies, friuolous, fond, and vayne,
Whereof though I knewe least of any man,
Yet by that meane my mischiefe first began.

40.

Yet besides this there was a greater thing,

How shee in waxe, by councell of the witch,
An image made, crowned like a king,
With sword in hand, in shape and likenes syche
As was the king, which daily they did pitch
Against a fire, that as the waxe did melt,
 So should his life consume away vnfelt.

41.

My duchesse thus accused of this cryme,

As shee that should such practise first begin,
My part was then to yeelde vnto the time,
Geuing her leaue to deale alone therein:
And since the cause concerned deadly sinne,
Which to the clergie onely doth pertayne,
To deale therein I playnely did refrayne.

42.

And suffered them her person to ascite

Into their courtes, to aunswere and appeare,
Which to my hart was sure the greatest spight
That could be wrought, and touched mee most neare,
To see my wife, and lady leefe and deare,
To my reproch, and playne before my face,
Entreated so, as one of sort most base.

43.

The clergie then examining her cause,

Conuinced[724] her, as guilty in the same,
And sentence gaue, according to their lawes,
That shee and they whom I before did name
Should suffer death, or els some open shame:
Of which penaunce my wife by sentence had
To suffer shame, of both the two, more bad.

44.

And first shee must by dayes together three,

Through London streetes passe all along in sight
Barelegd and barefoote, that all the world might see,
Bearing in hand a burning taper bright,
And not content with this extreme despite,
To worke mee woe in all they may or can,
Exilde shee was into the ile of Man.

45.

This heynous crime and open worldly shame,

Was[725] such rigour shewed vnto my wife,
With[726] a fine fetch further thinges to frame,
And nothing els but a preparatiue
First from office, and finally from life
Mee to depriue, and so passing further,
What lawe could not, to execute by murther.

46.

Which by slie driftes and windlaces aloofe,

They brought about, perswading first the queene,
That in effect it was the kinge’s reproofe,
And her’s also, to bee exempted cleane
From princely rule, or that it should be seene
A king of yeares, still gouerned to bee
Like a pupill, that nothing could foresee.

47.

The daunger more, considering the king

Was without childe, I being his next heyre,
To rule the realme as prince in euery thing
Without restraynt, and all the sway to beare:
With people’s loue, whereby it was to feare
That my haut heart, vnbrideled in desire,
Time would preuent, and to the crowne aspire.

48.

These with such like were put into her heade,

Who of her selfe was thereto soone enclind,