This article addresses the broad question of the sense of community in traditional Chinese villages, through consideration of popular cults found throughout the most highly developed region in Late Imperial China: the Jiangnan Delta. A key clue is a large-scale tenant-farmer revolt in Zhaowen County in 1846. When the uprising was suppressed, not only were twenty human ringleaders executed, but images of four local gods from village temples, who were believed to have sanctioned the rebellion, were also seized by the authorities and exposed for one year at the gates of the Zhaowen County City God temple. All four had three characteristics in common: (1) they were anthropomorphic, with human names; (2) they had living descendants of the same surname; (3) all were associated with stories involving miraculous protection of tax grain transport to the North. The descendants of these gods, all possession-type spirit mediums, or shamans, based in the villages, created the gods in response to the needs of their clients, large-scale landlords who bore responsibility for sea transport of tax grain to the North. In the mid-sixteenth century, fundamental socio-economic changes took place in the Jiangnan Delta. The landlords disappeared from the villages, leaving only the farmers, who were turning to cottage industries for cash to supplement inadequate food crop yields. The spirit mediums responded to the changes and modified their gods for a new set of clients, resulting in the survival of these cults down to the present day.

This paper explores the relationship between local lineage social structure and the workings of tax registration in Qing China, through a case study providing documentary evidence of a level of precision that enables us to go beyond the findings of previous scholarship. In the first instance, it reconstructs a tax dispute where implications of the registration system come into play, based on rare records made by the taxpayers themselves. In doing so, it shows that (a) the registered “acreage” of land was in fact unrelated to any actual land whatsoever; (b) tax collection ceased to be able to rely on knowledge of the terrain and had to depend on knowing the social groups that could be held responsible for payment, while the cohesion and internal differentiation of these social groups was (in turn) underpinned by tax collection and registration; and (c) since the registration system did not permit the government to keep track of actual landholding, property rights had to be secured at the local community level. In conclusion, an attempt is made to speculate on the extent to which this specific case contributes to our knowledge of local social structure, the interactions between localities and the government, and the property regime of Qing China overall.

Relying on Vietnamese internal government documents now available to scholars for consultation in the No. 3 Vietnam National Archive in Hanoi, this article examines the linkage between the escalated Sino-Vietnamese territorial dispute and the increased Vietnamese mistreatment of Chinese residents and experts in northern Vietnam from 1974 to 1978 owing to state-sponsored Vietnamese anti-China/irredentist nationalism. During this period, Vietnamese leaders were seeking to forge national unity, solidify popular loyalty to the state, and mobilize domestic resources to defend the Vietnamese “fatherland” against the threat of Chinese territorial expansion. Specifically, this article demonstrates how these policies encouraged mistreatment of Chinese residents and experts, and created a climate of fear and paranoia within the Chinese community which caused the widespread flight of Chinese from northern Vietnam in 1977–1978.