Jianghu: the children of rivers and lakes and Chinese modernity

Abstract

In Chinese philosophy, literature, and cinema, the concept of jianghu 江湖 has served as a placeholder for a fleeting space at the margins of society. It refers to a precarious and dangerous counter-community inhabited by free individuals. They live in the margins of the established order and know how to navigate rivers and lakes. Despite its capacity to adapt, the world of Jianghu is often depicted as being threatened and replaced by modernization processes. Its dwellers are outcasts who nevertheless inhabit an alternative social order that stands in tension with the normative demands of ordinary modern society. Jianghu inhabitants are committed to a set of jianghu-norms. The chapter traces the normative ambivalence of jianghu characters in the classic Daoist sources to then focus on the fate of jianghu in modern China as depicted in Jia Zhangke’s 2018 film “Ash is Purest White” (江湖兒女).