XXXI Международный конгресс ИИСАА. 23–25 июня 2021 г. Т. 1

288 XXXI Международный Конгресс по источниковедению и историографии стран Азии и Африки Секция IX This report will consider recent (2000-) mainland Chinese historiography on the Zheng He missions, analyzing the dialectical relationships of China’s Zheng He historiography with domestic and global power relations, ideologies/worldviews, identities, and tendencies of China’s approach to foreign policy. The research project investigates how this past ‘global moment’ of China is reinterpreted and reevaluated in the present-day context of China’s ascendance to global power status, and in which way it is interlinked with the country’s evolving self-perception as a nation-state and global actor. It focuses on how various strands of globally-oriented nationalisms — including normative/state-promoted, cultural (incl. cultural nativist), exclusionist, and liberal nationalisms—play out in the discourse and strives to reflect on broader tendencies of how the Chinese society rediscovers its pre-modern history in the present-day socio-political context. We also investigate the extent to which critical perspectives on nationhood and identity politics are present in the discourse. Picchiarelli Silvia (“Sapienza” University of Rome, Italy) Some new perspectives on the historiography about Chinese peasant resistance The theme of peasant rebellions is a major one in the contemporary historiography on China as no other country boasts a more enduring tradition of popular upheaval. Nevertheless, most studies on this topic tend to chiefly emphasize the great peasant insurrections of the pre-modern age. These were collective movements, which required coordination among the participants and complex organizational resources. This paper instead considers a different kind of political action, one which is much less evident and apparently less relevant. I realized the existence of this particular form of protest while researching the Chinese peasants’reaction to the rural policies adopted by the Chinese government in the early 1950s. Through a comparative analysis of local archive documents, newspaper articles and inner-Party investigative reports ( Neibu cankao ) relating to some villages in northern China, I discovered that the peasants rarely resorted to violent, large-scale rebellions to express their discontent. Rather, they were more inclined to employ invisible and unorganized resistance strategies, such as under- reporting the harvest, hiding or self-consuming the grain, bribing grassroots cadres or fleeing from the native village, to name but a few. All these tactics are arguably very similar to those identified by the American political scientist James Scott in his study of a Malaysian village and defined as “everyday forms of peasant resistance” (1985). Recently, a renewed interest in this type of rebellion has arisen also among Chinese academics, thus opening up a completely original line of inquiry in the historiography on Chinese peasant rebellions. Remarkable historians, such as Gao Wangling (2006, 2013) and Li Huaiyin (2009), have been among the first to demonstrate the existence of