Professor of International Renown and Her Roots in Rural Jinyun

By Xu Jihong

Professor of International Renown and Her Roots in Rural Jinyun

By Xu Jihong

Professor Zhao Yuezhi will soon come back to her hometown Jinyun in southwestern Zhejiang to attend a forum to be held on October 9 through 12， 2016. At this year's forum， which she founded，experts will focus upon opportunities and challenges in the revival of rural culture. The other day， I had an interview with her on phone and through WeChat， one of the most popular social media in China. “As a member of the overseas Chinese intellectual community， I consider it my duty and feel happy to make such a platform so as to promote rural reconstruction and explore the rural future of the country，” says the professor.

Professor Zhao is Canada Research Chair in the Political Economy of Global Communication and a professor of communication at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver， Canada. An established scholar of international communications， Zhao speaks the Jinyundialect fuently， much to my surprise， given that she left Jinyun 36 years ago. The dialect she remembers and speaks is a little different from its current version which has absorbed a lot of neologies from the standard spoken language thanks to the nationwide presence of modern media.

縉云河陽(yáng)古村：抹不去的兒時(shí)記憶。A view of Heyang， an ancient village in Jinyun

Zhao Yuezhi was born into a farmer's family in Yanshanxia Village， Jinyun County in January 1965. In 1980， she enrolled into Beijing Broadcasting Collage as a top student from Zhejiang at the age of 15 and in 1984 she qualifed as the top examinee to study abroad with scholarships of the Ministry of Education. In 1986 she came to Simon Fraser University in Canada for postgraduate programs. Back then she was not fully aware that the university enjoys international fame for its communication courses. She attained a master degree and a doctoral degree at Simon Frazer University. And she is recipient of several prestigious international awards on communication. In 2014， she became a member on the overseas expert consultation committee under the Overseas Chinese Offce of the State Council. In 2015， she viewed the September 3 Military Parade at Tian'anmen Square as a representative of overseas Chinese scholars.

As an international scholar， Zhao values her hometown as a perfect prototype of what ancient rural China looks like. The forum she launched is named after Yunyang， an ancient village with a history of more than 1，000 years. In July 2015 Jinyun Yunyang Institute of Rural Studies was unveiled under her guidance. A series of events in academics and exchanges has unfolded since then. The professor holds that an urban-rural perspective is a must in the studies of China. A scholar of cultural studies must step out of the tower of ivory and get into villages.

The professor explains that it is high time to examine the urban-rural gap that exists in China. She explains her motivation:“China is now at a junction in its development. My generation has experienced the years of the people's communes and the reform and opening-up to the outside world. Many of us have moved to cities and some of us have moved to the west. If we don't do something about the gap between the rural and the urban of China， the next generation will fnd it harder to come back to do it right again.”

Her latest focus on Jinyun is its sesame cake， a popular breakfast fast food choice in China for at least a thousand years. In recent years， Jinyun Cake has experienced a phenomenal spread and many local cake makers have traveled to cities in about 20 provinces and municipalities to provide consumers with this traditional delicacy. Cake makers have set up shops in Toronto， Sidney， Milan and Dubai. And some overseas Chinese have visited Jinyun to learn about the cake and they are planning to set up their own Jinyun Cake shops in Romania and Chile.

Zhao and her colleague Gong Weiliang， an assistant researcher with Communication University of China， did a three-month feld study of the cake across Jinyun. They visited 59 roadside cake shops and talked with 165 people who made cakes. They talked with 12 government offcials. They conducted telephone interviews with 95 cake makers who were randomly picked. They also visited 125 locals in Jinyun and collected 314 completed questionnaires online and offline. Gong Weiliang said he had never dreamed of eating more than 100 sesame cakes and completing an academic paper and that he had never dreamed that such a small snack could produce such a huge impact in Jiangnan or the south of the Yangtze River Delta.

Altogether， Zhao has produced two reports on the cake. She considers the cake as a case study in the perspective of rural cultural heritage and its industrialization.