Prof. Wu Kaming’s new book Reinventing Chinese Tradition: The Cultural Politics of Late Socialism will be published by University of Illnois Press in December 2015. With ethnographic fieldwork, Wu explores how people have reworked the revival of three rural practices–paper-cutting, folk storytelling, and spirit cults–within (and beyond) the socialist legacy in contemporary Yan’an. Moving beyond dominant views of Yan’an folk culture as a tool of revolution or object of market reform, Wu reveals how cultural traditions become battlegrounds where conflicts among the state, market forces, and intellectuals in search of an authentic China play out. At the same time, she shows these emerging new dynamics in the light of the ways rural residents make sense of rapid social change.

More information of the book can be found at http://www.press.uillinois.edu/books/catalog/84ryf6dg9780252039881.html.