Listening to Ruijin

Listening to Ruijin is a bilingual scholarly volume that brings together one of the most extensive surviving collections of folk song manuscripts from Ruijin, the cultural center of the 1930s Central Soviet Area. Based on fieldwork materials preserved by my family for decades, the book offers rare primary sources that document everyday soundscapes, oral traditions, and the cultural imagination of a pivotal historical era. Developed during my research affiliation at Columbia University's Weatherhead East Asian Institute, this project situates Ruijin folk songs within broader conversations in cultural memory, ethnomusicology, and cross-cultural translation. Through historical analysis and manuscript-based interpretation, the book explores how folk songs functioned as emotional expression, community record, and political storytelling, revealing their role as living archives of local society. By integrating traditional archival compilation, translation-based analysis, and emerging AI-driven digital methodologies, Listening to Ruijin seeks to reconstruct a dialogue between the past and the present. This approach enables the cultural memory of Ruijin to enter the global scholarly discourse and offers new perspectives for the study of intangible cultural heritage and cross-cultural transmission. At the same time, from the standpoint of emotional valuation and cultural continuity, it proposes a new paradigm-and a new point of departure-for cultural research in the era of artificial intelligence. ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿--¿¿--¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿20¿¿80¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿"¿¿¿¿"¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿AI¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿