When I started the study of China, still as a high school student in the 1970s, I was amazed about the zeal and vigour with which the Communist Party criticized Chinese traditional culture and its Confucian roots. Over decades, the Chinese communist movement had fought against the remnants of feudal society in China. Today, the Chinese government with the same Chinese Communist Party as the vanguard of change is supporting the establishment of a large number of Confucius Institutes in many countries which are intended to spread Chinese language and the knowledge about Chinese civilization across the globe. At the same time, the occasional visitor to China wonders whether it is precisely today that Chinese tradition is withering away under the pressures of globalization, international business and consumerism. However, those who travel more extensively in the country will rapidly notice the plurality of Chinese worlds, in particular across the rural–urban divide. This is also true for most other countries in the world but a remarkable fact in China remains that the dynamism of China’s economic growth is partly rooted in the rural sector, with phenomena such as the rise of township and village enterprises in the 1980s, the large-scale migration to the export bases at the coast, or the creation of an entrepreneurial class at the grass-roots level of Chinese society