The Peasant in Postsocialist China : History, Politics, and Capitalism 9781107421059, 9781107039674

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THE PEASANT IN POSTSOCIALIST CHINA

The role of the peasant in society has been fundamental throughout China’s history, posing difficult, much-debated questions for Chinese modernity. Today, as China becomes an economic superpower, the issue continues to loom large. Can the peasantry be integrated into a new Chinese capitalism, or will it form an excluded and marginalized class? Alexander F. Day’s highly original appraisal explores the role of the peasantry throughout Chinese history and its importance within the development of postsocialist-era politics. Examining the various ways in which the peasant is historicized, Day shows how different perceptions of the rural lie at the heart of the divergence of contemporary political stances and of new forms of social and political activism in China. Indispensible reading for all those wishing to understand Chinese history and politics, The Peasant in Postsocialist China is a new point of departure in the debate as to the nature of tomorrow’s China. a l e x a n d e r f . da y is Assistant Professor of History at Occidental College. He grew up in Maine and New Zealand, and has spent over five years in Asia, mostly in China. Professor Day’s research focus is on the rural–urban relationship in China, focusing on the late-imperial period through the twentieth century; his second teaching field is world history. He is a member of the American Historical Association and the Association for Asian Studies.

THE PEASANT IN POSTSOCIALIST CHINA History, Politics, and Capitalism

ALEXANDER F. DAY

cambridge university press Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town, Singapore, São Paulo, Delhi, Mexico City Cambridge University Press The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge cb2 8ru, UK Published in the United States of America by Cambridge University Press, New York www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9781107039674 © Alexander F. Day 2013 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published 2013 Printed and bound in the United Kingdom by the MPG Books Group A catalog record for this publication is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication data Day, Alexander F. The peasant in postsocialist China : history, politics, and capitalism / Alexander F. Day. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn 978-1-107-03967-4 (Hardback) 1. Peasants–China–History. 2. Rural population–China–History. 3. China–Economic policy– 2000– 4. China–Social policy. 5. China–Politics and government–2002– I. Title. hd1537.c5d36 2013 305.50 6330951–dc23 2012050471 isbn 978-1-107-03967-4 Hardback Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

Contents

Acknowledgments

page vi

Introduction Peasants, history, and politics

1

1 The peasantry and social stagnation: the roots of the reform-era liberal narrative

13

2 From peasant to citizen: liberal narratives on peasant dependency

47

3 Capitalism and the peasant: new-left narratives

70

4 “Deconstructing modernization”: Wen Tiejun and “sannong wenti”

92

5 Into the soil: ethnographies of social disintegration

128

6

New rural reconstruction and the attempt to organize the peasantry

154

Conclusion

186

Glossary Bibliography Index

199 208 227

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Acknowledgments

First, I would like to thank my mentor, Gail Hershatter, who has put an enormous amount of energy into this book and the dissertation upon which it was based, reading every draft of the manuscript along the way. Chris Connery has shaped this project in numerous ways, both as a reader and through general discussion. Special gratitude also goes to Arif Dirlik, who has offered support and advice throughout the process of writing this book. Emily Honig, Kang Wenqing, Angelina Chin, and Sun Xiaoping read and commented on drafts. Kang Wenqing was especially helpful during research trips to China. Johanna Isaacson’s editorial help was invaluable. Discussions with Johanna Isaacson, Chris Kortright, Michelle Stewart, Gopal Balakrishnan, and Zina Denevan were instrumental in thinking through many of the larger issues surrounding this project. Alessandro Russo’s comments have been valuable in formulating the problematic of this book. Discussions with Matt Hale have stimulated my thinking about the new rural reconstruction movement. I eagerly await the publication of his work on alternative development projects in rural China. Joel Andreas, Ana Candela, Alex Cook, Jane Hayward, Ho-fung Hung, Rebecca Karl, Fabio Lanza, Jonathan Lassen, Aminda Smith, Saul Thomas, Robert Weil, and Wu Yiching have likewise helped me think about China’s contemporary intellectual scene and politics. Discussions at the 2008 Summer Institute at the Peter Wall Institute for Advanced Studies, University of British Columbia, “The End of the Peasant? Global Capitalism and the Future of Agrarian Society,” broadened my view of the role of the peasant in Chinese historical development: I would particularly like to thank Arif Dirlik, Dong Zhenghua, Abidin Kusno, Melody ChiaWen Lu, Lü Xinyu, Dianne Newell, Alejandro Rojas, To Xuan Phuc, Immanuel Wallerstein, Wang Shaoguang, Wen Tiejun, and Alexander Woodside. vi

Acknowledgments

vii

There are a great many people I should thank in China, too many to mention them all here. Wang Hui advised me during a research year in China and has continued to offer helpful guidance since. The Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, with which I was affiliated during a research year in 2003–4, was very helpful in organizing my work in China. I would also especially like to thank Wen Tiejun, He Xuefeng, Han Deqiang, Liu Laoshi, Tan Tongxue, Li Derui, Lao Yuan, Liu Yuanqi, Fan Jinggang, and Li Guangshou. I would like to thank the anonymous readers arranged by Cambridge University Press for detailed and perceptive comments that significantly transformed the manuscript. Of course, I am responsible for all errors and infelicities of the book. I received generous financial support from the History Department, Humanities Division, Graduate Division, and Institute for Humanities Research at the University of California, Santa Cruz. A Fulbright Fellowship funded a research year in China. The History Department, the Humanities Center, and the Division of Research at Wayne State University and the Eisenberg Institute for Historical Studies at the University of Michigan provided both financial support and intellectual community. Thanks also go to publishers that allowed me to reprint a limited amount of material in this work that has appeared before. Duke University Press allowed me to reprint material from “The End of the Peasant: New Rural Reconstruction in China,” in boundary 2, vol. 35, issue 2, 49–73 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008); Paradigm Publishers allowed me to reprint “History, Capitalism, and the Making of the Postsocialist Chinese Peasant,” in Global Capitalism and the Future of Agrarian Society, edited by Arif Dirlik, Roxann Prazniak, and Alexander Woodside (Boulder: Paradigm Publishers, 2012). And the journal Equilibri allowed me to reprint material from “Lotta di classe nella Cina rurale? (Class struggle in rural China?),” Equilibri: Rivista per lo sviluppo sostenibile 11.1 (April 2007), 57–66. My parents Ed and Caroline have always been an inspiration and sparked intellectual interest from an early age. And, finally, I thank Zina for supporting me through the long years that this project has been brewing. This book is dedicated to them.

Introduction Peasants, history, and politics

If Marx were writing about China today, he might say, “A spectre is haunting the landscape of Chinese capitalism: the spectre of the peasant.” China’s triumphant emergence as a world economic power has been fueled by the labor of displaced agricultural workers who have powered its factories and runaway construction. At the same time, the peasant as embodiment of rural backwardness, deprivation, and political discontent remains central to Chinese state concern – and to the problem of devising a workable long-term economy strategy. Over the last decade China’s troubled integration into global capitalism has been at the forefront of global economic discussions – and all the more so since the beginning of the 2008 economic crisis. The Chinese state understands that its reliance on exports cannot last forever, and in the United States and Europe the drumbeat for currency revaluation is growing louder every day. Yet it is difficult for China to make a quick shift to an economy more reliant on internal demand, not least because an economic rebalancing would require a change in the distribution of political power which continues to sideline the interests of rural citizens, inland residents, and workers. Central to this issue of global importance is the figure of the Chinese peasant, on whom the growth of internal demand will depend. Can the peasant be integrated into a capitalist market economy? Can China make this shift away from its export-oriented growth model? As Hung Ho-fung argues, this is only possible with a “large-scale redistribution of income to the ruralagricultural sector.”1 This is the political question for China in the twenty-first century, and, like the political question of the twentieth century, it revolves around the peasant. In the twentieth century, the peasant featured in political 1

Ho-fung Hung, “America’s Head Servant: The PRC’s Dilemma in the Global Crisis,” New Left Review, no. 60 (2009), 6.

1

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discussions both as a symbol of feudal backwardness, and as a revolutionary force. During the years of collectivization in Mao’s China, peasant labor underwrote industrialization, but peasants themselves were largely viewed by the state as impediments to socialist modernization. In the early 1980s, an unprecedented infusion of state funding into the rural economy together with institutional changes gave rise to unprecedented rural prosperity, and the problem of the peasant was regarded as resolved once and for all – a view, however, that quickly lost traction. From the late 1990s into the early 2000s, an intense debate on the future of the peasant and rural reform erupted into mainstream discourse. This debate on the peasant helped to push the party to refocus on rural reform after years of neglect. The peasant question continually returns no matter how many times state authorities and intellectuals declare that it has been definitively resolved. That the peasant has returned to a central place in contemporary narratives of history, politics, and development is undeniable, but how the figure of the peasant fits into history is still hotly contested. This book argues that political stances within China are closely related to the way various intellectuals view the peasant’s role in history. Put another way, in Chinese political discussions the peasant stands in for a broad range of political concerns. At the turn of the millennium, it was through the emerging debate on the peasant that the politics of the Chinese intellectual sphere returned to questions concerning the rise of social tensions and class contradictions of China’s current social order. Political discussions among intellectuals centered on the peasant because of the material difficulty of integrating the peasant and agriculture into a society increasingly dominated by the market. From the early 1980s until the late 1990s, the household responsibility system promoted by Deng Xiaoping, which contracted production to the household, was viewed as one of the greatest success stories of the postMao reforms. Since the late 1990s, however, the language of public discussion on the peasantry has become one that centers on crisis, expressing the fear that if the situation of the peasants does not improve, then China’s contemporary rise – along with any hopes for social equity, justice, and sustainability – could be imperiled. In 2003 and 2004, moreover, the rural situation came to be discussed as the greatest obstacle to China’s continued economic and social development. With the shift in Communist Party leadership marked by the rise of Hu Jintao and Wen Jiabao, rural crisis became a crucial issue of concern for the Chinese state. Within the public sphere, Zhongguo nongmin diaocha

Introduction: Peasants, history, and politics

3

[China peasant survey],2 a book of reportage that chronicled rural poverty, local government corruption, and failed modernization projects in rural Anhui Province, became a national best-seller in early 2004, continuing to sell in record numbers even as – or perhaps in part because – the state attempted to censor it. How the figure of the peasant, so central to the understanding of Chinese history, shifted from a figure of success to one of crisis within intellectual discourse is the central subject of this book. Undoubtedly, the shifting focus and content of the party’s reform efforts has shaped material changes in rural society. In the five years from 1982 to 1986, the “number one document” – the key Central Committee and State Council policy statement that indicates the most important issue of the year – concerned agriculture. Through the mid 1980s the party focused on rural reform, but after the initial achievements of decollectivization and limited marketization in the countryside, the party moved to focus on the urban sphere. While there was much endogenous economic growth in the rural economy heading into the mid 1990s, the late 1990s were a time of economic and social stagnation in the rural sphere as the party concentrated on the reform of urban State Owned Enterprises. Additionally, in the mid 1990s the state pushed a policy of privatizing the rural-based Township Village Enterprises, which had stimulated rural development. It was not until 2004, a time when popular and intellectual discourse depicted the rural sphere as in crisis, that agriculture again received sustained attention from the party. State-initiated material and policy changes, however, only partially explain the shift in the characterization of rural issues within intellectual discourse. To fully understand this shift we must also attend to the way Chinese intellectuals place the peasant in a wider social formation. We must likewise trace their visions of how to reform or modernize rural society within the long-term trajectory of Chinese history and social development. For Chinese intellectuals throughout the twentieth century, the peasant has played an important role not only in their understanding of politics – what a just or proper society is and how to go about creating it – but also of history. All narratives of historical change or progress entailed either the transformation of the peasant into something new or the understanding of 2

Chen Guidi and Chun Tao, Zhongguo nongmin diaocha [China peasant survey] (Beijing: Renmin wenxue chubanshe, 2004), translated as Chen Guidi and Wu Chuntao, Will the Boat Sink the Water? The Life of China’s Peasants, trans. Hong Zhu (New York: Public Affairs, 2006). Its authors, the husband and wife team Chen Guidi and Wu Chuntao, interviewed peasants, officials, and scholars, to write the book, but after its publication they were subjected to political and legal repression.

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The Peasant in Postsocialist China

the peasant as a revolutionary actor who could take part in the transformation of society. During the first three-quarters of the twentieth century, these two historical visions of the peasant were often combined. As the first chapter of this book explains, an understanding of the peasant as a revolutionary and political actor first developed at the close of the Qing dynasty, in the early twentieth century, in the writings of Liu Shipei, an anti-Manchu revolutionary turned anarchist. Under the leadership of Mao Zedong several decades later, the Chinese Communist Party came to view the peasant as a revolutionary actor central to the Chinese Revolution, and to the historical transformation of China from a feudal to a socialist society. Yet early in the reform era that began in the late 1970s, the historical narrative of the peasant as a revolutionary actor was attacked and discredited by intellectuals and official ideologues alike. This shift in the understanding of the peasant, an essential component of early reformist ideology, marks an attempted – though never uncontested – depoliticization of society.3 A supposedly apolitical and technocratic modernization process displaced the revolutionary politics of class struggle of the Maoist era. Modernization in the reform era meant that divisive politics within society was supposed to cease, and the party was now the only legitimate arena for political debate. A central question at stake in the book, therefore, is this: what happens to our understanding of history, politics, and the peasant when the narrative of the peasant as revolutionary actor is no longer persuasive? In the wake of revolution, what is the significance of the peasant in relation to the conception of history? In China, these deeper historical questions are always close to the surface of discussions on the peasant. Furthermore, contemporary discussions on the peasant are highly contentious because they have begun to confront the ideological foundations of the reform movement, which dramatically weakened the political role of the peasant within society. As intellectuals’ assessments of rural reform shifted from lauding its success in the 1980s and 1990s to fathoming the extent of rural crisis at the turn of the millennium, there were three waves of discussion on the rural situation.4 Appearing early in the reform era, the first wave focused on the 3

4

I take this concept of “depoliticization” from Wang Hui, “Depoliticized Politics, Multiple Components of Hegemony, and the Eclipse of the Sixties,” Inter-Asia Cultural Studies 7, no. 4 (2006). My periodization here is close to Lin Chun’s division of the reform era into three phases. Lin saw the 1980s as the first decade of the reforms, and the period from 1989 to 2003 as the “long second decade” or second phase of the reforms. Lin was hopeful that the leadership that took power in 2003 was

Introduction: Peasants, history, and politics

5

success of the initial reforms that decollectivized rural social life and instituted the household responsibility system in the early 1980s, inaugurating a return to family farming. Yet at the same time that they were celebrating success, 1980s intellectuals tended to blame the peasant for China’s problems. Public and intellectual debates in the 1980s often characterized Chinese peasants as problematic: backward, harboring remnants of feudal thinking, and the root cause of China’s slow development as well as of its violent history. Many intellectuals characterized the Cultural Revolution, for instance, as a result of the peasant mentality of dependency that was still dominant in Chinese society. They postulated that peasants were prone to relying upon and giving enormous power to a strong leader, and that this kind of mentality led to the toleration and encouragement of Maoist excess, a cult of personality, and conspiratorial factionalism. It was only by modernizing the peasant, that is ending consideration of the peasant as a revolutionary actor and fostering peasant independence from the state and the commune system, that the peasant could become a citizen and Chinese society truly modern. Participants in these debates by and large assumed that with the early-1980s decollectivization the rural problem was resolving and that the reform process could move on to focus on urban and industrial spheres. In the 1980s, then, the image of the peasant was bifurcated: a figure of stagnation and dependency as well as an embodiment of successful reform in process. From these discussions grew the second wave of enthusiastic writings on rural China. These focused on Township Village Enterprises (or TVEs), rural enterprises operated by local governments that focused on raising local funds and employing rural surplus labor. By the early 1990s, this sector was growing at a rapid rate, becoming one of the most active in the Chinese economy. In the mid 1990s, however, the privatization and bankruptcy of many TVEs, under the marketization policies dominant in the second phase of the reform era, meant that they no longer contributed to local employment or added to local government finances as they once had. Together with falling agricultural prices and rising costs of agricultural inputs and local taxes, this led in the late 1990s to growing rural dissatisfaction and a huge increase in rural protests, especially anti-tax protests. shifting its policies in a more socially just direction, and that this marked the beginning of a third decade or phase. Lin Chun, The Transformation of Chinese Socialism (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006), p. 5. For a discussion of the factional politics of the shift from the second to the third phase of reforms, see Cheng Li, “China’s Inner-Party Democracy: Toward a System of ‘One Party, Two Factions’?” China Brief 6, no. 24 (2006).

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The Peasant in Postsocialist China

These failures led to a third discussion on the peasant, beginning at the end of the 1990s, in which the peasant and rural China were characterized as sources of crisis. As Li Changping, a rural cadre from central China’s Hubei Province, said in an open letter to Premier Zhu Rongji in early 2000: “The peasants’ lot is really bitter, the countryside is really poor, and agriculture is in crisis.”5 During this third wave of discussion, a critical stance on the rural reforms emerged and shifted the terms of debate, significantly affecting the public conversation as well as government policy. Across the reform era, then, whenever rural policy and the direction of the reforms were at issue, the long-term history of modern China continued to make its appearance together with the figure of the peasant, a figure uneasily integrated into modernization narratives. Was the peasantry going to disappear, be integrated into a new Chinese capitalism, or form an excluded class, marginalized and continually disruptive? A deep historical anxiety arose from the concern that the peasant might not disappear with historical progress and modernization, but instead persist into the foreseeable future. How do we understand history, Chinese intellectuals asked, if the peasant is not viewed as on the path to disappearance? For all the intellectuals whose thought this book addresses, a political stance towards the peasant and rural policies is always bound up with a rethinking of narratives of China’s long-term historical development. Different political stances surfaced at different times in the reform era, and each political stance is marked by the way the rural and the peasant were being discussed at the time of its emergence. The remainder of this Introduction briefly outlines the emergence of different political stances on rural China and introduces the main protagonists of this book and the organization of its chapters. As the role of the peasant in history and society changed across the reform era, so too did the position of intellectuals within society and politics. Most of the intellectuals active in the 1980s discussion saw themselves as serving the reformist project and largely aligned with the reformist party’s ideological and policy line. Their work in policy think tanks and party institutions reinforced the party’s new understanding of the peasant. As the reform era progressed, however, Chinese intellectuals increasingly developed varied political stances, often quite different from 5

The letter, written by Li Changping in early 2000, was sent to Premier Zhu Rongji and later published in Southern Weekend in the Aug. 24, 2000 issue. See Li Changping, Wo xiang zongli shuo shihua [I spoke the truth to the premier], ed. Li Changping (Beijing: Guangming ribao chubanshe, 2002), p. 20.

Introduction: Peasants, history, and politics

7

that of the party-state. This is particularly true following the 1989 Tiananmen demonstrations, when critical intellectuals began to emerge within the universities. These critical intellectuals called into question the limits and faults of the state’s rural policy while making reference to long-term Chinese historical development. This book focuses on writings about the peasant that intervene in discussions about the trajectory and meaning of history, for it is around the issue of the peasant that many intellectuals recently have attempted to rethink China’s historical development and political trajectory.6 The renewed interest in rural problems since the late 1990s has been essential to the growth of a critique of neo-liberalism and developmentalism in China, and in turn to the growth of the Chinese left and leftist activism. A discussion of what “the left” means today in China is central to this book. It is no coincidence that the split between the “liberals” (ziyoupai) and the “new left” (xinzuopai) reached its crescendo as the debate on rural China began to heat up in the late 1990s. Liberals were those who believed that the problems generated by the reforms could only be solved by pushing market reforms further and giving citizens more rights, while new-left intellectuals argued that the market had become too dominant a force within society and that workers and peasants had lost too much power. Liberals and the new left both attempted to confront the increasing inequalities of late-1990s China, but with very different conceptual understandings of the basis of those inequalities. They defined China’s social system in distinct ways, based on different understandings of history, capitalism, and development, which in turn enabled different political stances. This is true also of a third group, the mainstream economists (zhuliu jingji xuezhe), who advised the state’s economic reform process and who increasingly came to be called “neo-liberals” (xin ziyouzhuyizhe) by those on the left as the 1990s unfolded. Chinese intellectuals on the left began to use “neo-liberal” as a term of criticism in the mid to late 1990s, but its meaning is somewhat looser than in the United States. Viewing the Chinese economy as one in transition, those called “neo-liberals” in China often propose increased government investment and continued interference in the economy, seeing the state as playing an important administrative and stabilizing role in the creation of a market economy. Lin Yifu (Justin Lin), once an economic advisor to the Chinese state and now the 6

There is an enormous amount of writing on the peasant in China, of course, and this study makes no claim to comprehensiveness – much will necessarily be left out.

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The Peasant in Postsocialist China

Chief Economist of the World Bank, was born in Taiwan but defected to the mainland in 1979. After receiving a PhD in economics from the University of Chicago in 1986, Lin worked for the PRC State Council researching rural development and has since become the object of much left-leaning criticism for his “neo-liberal” policies. In his construction of a historical and institutional comparison between the Great Leap Forward (1958–61) and the return to household farming during the early reform era, he argued that proper market institutions and better technology would make agriculture more efficient. Both Lin and Wen Tiejun, a left-leaning scholar of rural economic development who is critical of the effects of market reforms on the countryside, have influenced the recent state policy framework of “constructing a New Socialist Countryside” ( jianshe shehuizhuyi xin nongcun), which was announced by the leadership of Hu Jintao and Wen Jiabao in 2005.7 Chinese liberals emerged in the 1980s during the first wave of discussion on rural China, criticizing the excesses of the Maoist era and the Cultural Revolution, which they saw as based on a backward and feudal peasant consciousness. By the 1990s, Chinese liberals developed a more sustained critique of the state, arguing against the interference of power or the state in a proper free market. In order to defend against such interference, liberals posited, the reform process necessitated a strong separation between the state and the market, without which society would become subject to a corrupt marketization of state power. Chinese liberals, therefore, were more critical of the state’s role in the economy than most Chinese neo-liberals tended to be. Qin Hui, an agrarian historian at Tsinghua University and the subject of Chapter 2, began to develop his ideas about peasant society in the nine years he spent in a poor mountainous rural county on the border of Guangxi Province following the Cultural Revolution. After Qin re-entered the educational system at the beginning of the reform era, he looked at the peasant class as defined by dependency on the state, whether imperial or socialist, and developed a critique of utopian “agrarian socialism.” Qin argued that a just society must be premised on transforming peasants into citizens within a society based 7

On the “New Socialist Countryside,” see Anna L. Ahlers and Gunter Schubert, “‘Building a New Socialist Countryside’ – Only a Political Slogan?” Journal of Current Chinese Affairs 38, no. 4 (2009); Elizabeth Perry, “From Mass Campaigns to Managed Campaigns: ‘Constructing a New Socialist Countryside,’” in Sebastian Heilmann and Elizabeth Perry, eds., Mao’s Invisible Hand: The Political Foundations of Adaptive Governance in China (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2011); Stig Thøgersen, “Revisiting a Dramatic Triangle: The State, Villagers, and Social Activists in Chinese Rural Reconstruction Projects,” Journal of Current Chinese Affairs 38, no. 4 (2009).

Introduction: Peasants, history, and politics

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on rights, private property, and a market economy. Significantly, Qin’s thoughts on the peasant have positioned him as one of the most important liberal critics of the unfolding reform process, largely because of his historical narrative’s breadth and universality. The “new left” emerged as a recognizable intellectual grouping in the mid to late 1990s largely through their conversation and debate with Chinese liberals and during the second wave of discussions on the status of the peasant. In contrast to the liberals, the new left increasingly came to see capitalism and market economics as the primary cause of China’s growing social problems and inequality. In general, new-left thinkers are characterized by their critique of capitalism as an anti-market monopoly or hegemony. In their criticism of liberal discourse and its naturalized separation of the economy and state power, they assert that one must not ask how to separate state power from the economy, but rather how to organize power relations so as to make the market as fair and just as possible. For the new left, the question becomes how to organize popular power to counter the power and emergence of capitalist hegemony within society and the market. Chapter 3 examines the work of new-left scholars such as Cui Zhiyuan, Gan Yang, Huang Ping, and others, showing the important role that rural China played in the development of this critical perspective on market reforms. For the early new left, the peasant was a figure of possibility and difference. Rural China provided the left with the basis for arguing that China had the potential to develop in a different way than capitalist development had in the West. The new left initiated a criticism of the deleterious effects of the marketization of society in the 1990s, and by late in the decade, left-leaning scholars of rural China began to have a serious influence upon public and state discourse concerning peasant issues. No scholar played a bigger role in bringing rural crisis into intellectual discourse than Wen Tiejun, an agrarian economist and now Dean of the School of Agricultural and Rural Development at Renmin University in Beijing. At the end of the 1990s, as peasant incomes began to stagnate and rural protests increased, Wen argued that peasants and surplus rural labor, rather than agricultural production, were key to understanding the longterm development strategy of China, as well as its current problems. Wen constructed a new understanding of rural issues through a renarration of recent Chinese history as a series of attempts at industrialization, in which the peasant played an important and often overlooked role. Industrialization only succeeded during the Maoist era, according to Wen, because of the accumulation of rural surplus that the commune

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system made possible. Wen’s foregrounding of the peasant in his discussions of rural issues made it much harder to limit the view of rural issues to one of a problem of rural economic and agricultural development, as most state policy discussion on agriculture in the 1990s had done, or to separate a discussion of the peasant population from one on Chinese social and economic development, as many intellectual discussions on urbanization had done. In his gripping public letter to Premier Zhu Rongji, Li Changping, the rural cadre from Hubei Province mentioned above, brought to public visibility the problems of rural poverty, the burden that local government expenditures placed on peasants, and the stagnation of rural social development. Wen and Li are the subject of Chapter 4. Also responding to a perceived rural crisis, sociologists turned their attention to a critical examination of rural life. Traveling through rural Henan Province in the mid 1990s, Cao Jinqing, Professor of Sociology at East China University of Science and Technology in Shanghai, was one of the first scholars of peasant China to recognize the growing crisis of rural society. Tellingly, however, he could not get his manuscript published at the time, as the public eye was not on the countryside. Furthermore, it was not until after the book was finally published in the year 2000, when it became a best-seller, that Cao began to develop a deeper historical critique of the unfolding of rural reforms. He Xuefeng and other left-leaning rural sociologists also emerged in this discussion on rural crisis to argue that it was a social and community crisis, in which a fractured rural society was unable to protect peasants from the depredations of the market forces unleashed by the reforms. He Xuefeng argued that in-depth rural research was necessary to understand the growing crisis of rural society, but that Western sociology did not provide the concepts necessary for such a study. Through his writings on village community experiments, He has tried to develop a native social science of rural society. These ethnographies of rural disintegration by Chinese sociologists are the subject of Chapter 5. These left-leaning rural scholars are not just researchers, but together constitute a new form of activism for Chinese intellectuals, the subject of Chapter 6. After struggling to influence party policy on rural reforms from within the state, Wen left his job working for the Agriculture Ministry in rural reform experimentation. He has since become the foremost promoter of “New Rural Reconstruction” (xin xiangcun jianshe), a movement to rebuild rural social and economic relations that includes the construction of peasant cooperatives. Li Changping is also a supporter of a new rural cooperative movement, in which peasants take democratic control over their local land resources and economic development. This chapter places

Introduction: Peasants, history, and politics

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this new cooperative movement in the context of twentieth-century Chinese rural cooperative movements responding to global capitalism and to the redundancy of agricultural populations within modernity. It compares this new form of intellectual activism to the liberal advocacy of “rights protection” (weiquan), departing from the dissident-rights perspective that privileges a liberal conception of rights as the proper or standard form of political activism. Much important work has been produced on the building of rights-protection movements in the reform era,8 but not all contemporary social movements fit within this perspective (although the most attention-grabbing ones tend to fall in this category). The left-leaning scholars of rural China discussed in this chapter all search for or experiment with new forms of rural social organization – cooperative, community-based, democratic, and participatory – in order to overcome the rural crisis that emerged in the late 1990s. Likewise, to legitimate their policy proposals and concrete social experiments, they all have resorted to a long-lens historical analysis of the problematic rural–urban relationship in China. At its heart, the troubled attempt to construct historical and political narratives during the reform era lies in the question – and maybe even the impossibility – of integrating a society with a predominant peasant population into a global capitalist economy that devalues agricultural labor. The tension between China’s vast rural society and the capitalist market underlies all discussions on the history of Chinese modernity and politics of social transformation.9 Often to their chagrin, modernizers find that their project cannot succeed without the peasantry. The hope of neo-liberal market modernizers is that China can use capitalist markets without producing serious contradictions and social disruptions and that the peasant population can become modern agricultural producers, rural entrepreneurs and proletarians, consumers, or urban workers. Liberals argue that a combination of markets and political rights will help peasants to become citizens whether they live in cities or not. Those on the left look to a 8

9

Thomas Bernstein and Xiaobo Lü, Taxation without Representation in Contemporary Rural China (Cambridge University Press, 2003); Merle Goldman, From Comrade to Citizen: The Struggle for Political Rights in China (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005); Kevin J. O’Brien and Lianjiang Li, Rightful Resistance in Rural China (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006). It should be noted that the Euro-American world has not integrated agriculture into the global capitalist market in a seamless way either. Liberal economics failed in its attempt to marketize EuroAmerican agriculture, which is integrated only through the use of massive subsidies and state intervention. See, for example, Niek Koning, The Failure of Agrarian Capitalism: Agrarian Politics in the United Kingdom, Germany, the Netherlands and the USA, 1846–1919 (London and New York: Routledge, 1994).

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restrained use of markets and a creative exploration of social institutions and popular power to protect the peasantry from the market economy. Some modernizers try to drag the peasantry along with them into modernity. Some try to rethink modernization itself, and see in the peasant problem and its solutions a path to a modernity different from one measured by the sole criterion of economic efficiency. Modernizers of all kinds, however, are troubled by the figure of the peasant – a figure that is as difficult to incorporate into historical narrative as it is to transform through policy projects. All have difficulty in constructing historical and political narratives that can account for the integration of the peasant into a socially just or politically acceptable Chinese future. Reform-era intellectual debates and the rewriting of history must be read as attempts to address this unresolved and deeply intractable question.

chapter 1

The peasantry and social stagnation: the roots of the reform-era liberal narrative

In April 1989, I stood on Tiananmen Square listening to people, mostly students, fervently speaking about the problems of China and explaining why they had come to the square in protest that night. One repeated refrain was that the reason for China’s lack of democracy lay in the countryside. “China’s peasants,” one young intellectual shouted out without a note of irony, “have ruled China too long. It is now time for democracy.” Others quickly added that the vast peasantry had held China’s development back and was responsible for its volatile twentiethcentury history. I had heard these sorts of comments before the 1989 protest had begun. In the fall of 1988, on the campus of Renmin University, writers from the television series Heshang [River elegy] were to give a public talk. As the hour passed and no speaker arrived, students began to use the opportunity to argue about Chinese history, tradition, and the present political impasse. Students jumped up in front of a packed audience to make statements, while those in their seats or standing in the aisles shouted comments back and forth. Heshang, a six-part television series that ran in 1988, was clearly very popular with a liberal student body during the late 1980s that was trying to figure out what had impeded China’s development and what explained the traumatic events of the Cultural Revolution. The series located China’s historical “stagnation” in the dependency of peasant society on a totalitarian state. Many of the students, influenced by Heshang’s narrative, laid blame on what they saw as Chinese tradition and peasant culture. Crystallized so clearly in Heshang, this narrative of peasant dependency and stagnation as the source of China’s problems was well established by A version of this chapter previously appeared as “History, Capitalism, and the Making of the Postsocialist Chinese Peasant,” in Global Capitalism and the Future of Agrarian Society, ed. Arif Dirlik, Roxann Prazniak, and Alexander Woodside (Boulder: Paradigm Publishers, 2012), pp. 53–76.

13

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The Peasant in Postsocialist China

1989. In fact, reform-era Chinese liberalism found its roots in these narratives of peasant dependency, which were utilized to critique Maoist voluntarism and the Cultural Revolution during the early reform era between 1979 and 1989. The Maoist historical mode of politics – the mutual embedding of politics and historical discourse – entailed a dialectical understanding of peasant social and political tendencies, meaning that the propensity of peasants to act in a certain way had to be interpreted within the context of concrete historical and social conditions. Peasants could incline towards either egalitarian actions or class differentiation. They could act conservatively to protect their interests as small property owners or they could support revolutionary action, depending on circumstances. Beginning in the late 1920s, this Maoist understanding of the peasant, in turn, brought together two contradictory ideas from the beginning of the twentieth century: that the peasant serves as a conservative and backward social force, or as a revolutionary actor. In the process of postsocialist reform beginning in the late 1970s, however, the two poles of this dialectical understanding of the peasantry were reversed and the Maoist historical narrative was replaced by a static interpretation of the peasantry’s role in history. The view of the peasantry as a conservative block to historical progress dominated discussions, social understandings of the peasant lost their prominence, and the economic mode of interpretation became hegemonic. In the 1980s, intellectuals rethought the question of peasant agency, repositioning it from a form of class agency to an agency limited to individual, entrepreneurial peasant households or farmers, reinstating the dual understanding of the peasant adopted from orthodox Marxism and the Maoist era. The figure of the peasant was thus split in two: serving as both a stagnant status group dependent on the state and prone to a dangerous populist politics, and as individual entrepreneurial farmers. This postsocialist revision of Marxist historiography in the early reform era formed the essential departure point for all discussions about the peasant in the contemporary moment. Some scholars are critical of elite intellectual attitudes towards the peasantry during the twentieth century, arguing that social science in China, as in the West, has constructed the peasant as the backward “other” to the intellectual. This argument has been extended to the reform era as well.1 While such anti-peasant attitudes certainly existed across the 1

Myron L. Cohen, “Cultural and Political Inventions in Modern China: The Case of the Chinese ‘Peasant,’” Daedalus 122, no. 2 (1993); Charles W. Hayford, “The Storm over the Peasant: Orientalism

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15

twentieth century, this argument tends to depoliticize the role of the peasant in Chinese liberalism by reducing it to a victimized subject of Chinese intellectual ideology. Discussions of intellectual discrimination against peasants tend to occlude the greater political dynamic at play. Instead of focusing on the discriminatory attitudes of intellectuals, we need to better account for the continual reinvention of the peasant within the political context of the postsocialist era, for the relationship between the peasant and history remains central to any theorization of the evolution of our global condition. The term “postsocialism” does not simply imply “after socialism.” Following Arif Dirlik’s usage, here postsocialism is defined as a discourse within which arguments over the meaning of socialism are combined with a recognition that the global conditions that formed the context to socialism, its antagonistic opposition to capitalism, have changed dramatically.2 As China developed a much more accommodating relationship with global capitalism from the 1970s on, the political and historical theory of socialism as the supersession of capitalism began to lose its legitimacy. Thus if socialist theory attempted to tell a story of revolutionary peasants transforming society in a way that would eventuate their disappearance as a social class by becoming agricultural workers in a new socialist society, how was the position of the peasant reinterpreted in the postsocialist moment? Two linked aspects of the postsocialist re-evaluation of the peasant are highlighted in this chapter. First, in the sphere of ideology, reform-era intellectuals contested the historical agency of the peasant as a revolutionary subject – a central component of Maoist and dialectical understandings of the peasant – and they primarily perceived the peasant in a one-sided manner as backward, ignorant, and the cause of China’s supposed slow economic development. By the mid 1980s, the two poles of the dual nature of the peasant were reversed. Peasants were now understood to act progressively as entrepreneurs based on their status as small property owners, the very foundation of peasant conservatism in the earlier Maoist

2

and Rhetoric in Constructing China,” in Jeffrey Cox and Shelton Stromquist, eds., Contesting the Master Narrative: Essays in Social History (University of Iowa Press, 1998). For the reform era, see John Flower’s discussion on the role of concepts such as “peasant consciousness” (nongmin yishi ) in the 1980s: John Flower, “Peasant Consciousness,” in Pamela Leonard and Deema Kaneff, eds., PostSocialist Peasant? Rural and Urban Constructions of Identity in Eastern Europe, East Asia and the Former Soviet Union (London: Palgrave, 2002). See Arif Dirlik, After the Revolution: Waking to Global Capitalism (Hanover: Wesleyan University Press, 1994), and “Postsocialism? Reflections on ‘Socialism with Chinese Characteristics,’” in Arif Dirlik and Maurice Meisner (eds.), Marxism and the Chinese Experience (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1989), pp. 363–4.

16

The Peasant in Postsocialist China

understanding of the peasant. Likewise, their tendency towards rebellious or revolutionary action was redefined as a form of regressive populism. Second, and more importantly, postsocialism entailed a revaluation of labor in which, increasingly through the market mechanism, the differential “quality” of labor replaced the more egalitarian mode of valuing labor that characterized the Maoist era. In other words, as the technical skill and education of the workforce came to be seen as crucial to postsocialist economic growth, the socialist state promoted a differentiation in pay determined by the quality of work, not just its quantity. Through the reform process, peasants were increasingly incorporated into a growing market system as either low-value labor or, less commonly, as rural entrepreneurs. This change in the valuation of labor was the material foundation for the shift in the ideological understanding of the peasantry’s historical agency, in which the agency of the peasantry to transform society was replaced at best with an individual entrepreneurial agency. CCP theories of the peasant that developed in the 1920s and 1930s as Marxist theory was integrated with Chinese conditions continued as an important point of reference. However, they were significantly altered within this new context, leading to the complete dismissal of a dialectical understanding of the peasant. These two aspects of the postsocialist era have shaped discussions of the peasant down to the present. Not all the political stances discussed in this chapter should be called “liberal.” Many early reform-era theorists saw themselves as returning to a more orthodox Marxism after a misguided period of Maoist voluntarism. Additionally, reform-era Chinese liberalism itself is a complex and changing political formation, despite the fact that Chinese intellectuals were much more politically unified during the 1980s than in the post-1989 period. What I trace in this chapter is the emergence of liberalism from a critique of the Maoist politics of the peasant. This critique of Maoist politics, significantly, was founded upon a particular historical and political understanding of peasant agency and the role of the peasant in historical development and modernity. Because liberal political views of this time are not reducible to a familiar Euro-American definition of the category “liberal,” I will develop a more nuanced understanding of such stances by tracing their emergence. Emergent Chinese liberalism of the 1980s was marked by its deep cultural critique of “traditional” and “feudal” China, linked to an economic and historical critique of Maoism. Spurred by a rejection of a classbased politics and events of the Cultural Revolution, as well as by China’s changing political economy and new relationship to global capitalism,

The peasantry and social stagnation

17

1980s Chinese liberalism emerged in a shift of focus from a social critique of class society to a cultural and economic critique of totalitarianism based on a state–society dichotomy. According to the liberal narrative that emerged in the 1980s, the primary contradiction of the Maoist era had been located between the state and society (often equated with the economy), or the public and the private. This key reform-era critique produced an uneasy ideological relationship between Chinese liberalism and the reformist Communist Party. On the one hand, Chinese liberals tended to reify a state–society dichotomy, seeing themselves as outside the state. On the other hand, even though Chinese liberal intellectuals often saw themselves at odds with the Communist Party, the critique of totalitarianism that they developed mirrored the official Communist Party critique of Maoism in significant, if often unstated, ways. Both the liberal and official critiques of Maoism were based on a fixed evolutionary understanding of historical development that saw society as passing through distinct and determined economic stages – feudalism, capitalism, socialism. Both located the motor of history in the productive forces, not in struggles within class relations of production. Intellectuals considered social contradictions and the class struggles that expressed them, therefore, of secondary historical importance, and, instead, they stressed modernization of the productive forces, especially technology. They saw the Cultural Revolution not as a class-based attack on semi-feudal China or on bureaucratization, but rather as the result of persistent feudal mentalities in need of modernization. Yet as the 1980s developed, Chinese liberals pushed this critique further than the Communist Party would allow, developing it into a call for democracy and pluralism.3 In this process, the figure of the peasant played an important role in shaping the liberal rearticulation of history and politics. If the Maoist articulation of history and politics, which placed emphasis on class struggle and the continuation of contradictions within socialism, was seen by many to have failed during the Cultural Revolution, how was a different relationship between history and politics to be constructed by Chinese intellectuals during the reform era? How did the historical narratives reconstructed in the 1980s enable liberal politics? In the current chapter and in Chapter 2, I examine the use of particular historical categories within liberal discourse of the 1980s and the 1990s. Feudalism, the Asiatic 3

Heshang, for example, was banned and severely criticized, being partially blamed for the 1989 disturbances.

18

The Peasant in Postsocialist China

mode of production, populism, agrarian socialism, and primitive accumulation were all used as pejorative terms, whereas modernization and suzhi (quality) carried positive valences. As an ensemble, these terms constructed and limited the field of liberal Chinese politics. This chapter focuses on three different categories: agrarian socialism, the Asiatic mode of production, and suzhi. Through these concepts reform-era liberal intellectuals re-evaluated the role of the peasant in history and introduced a non-dialectical understanding of peasant social tendencies. The remaining categories will be taken up in the next chapter. These key categories link a particular understanding of history, one based on the progressive development of the productive forces and technology, to a politics of the peasants, who are understood as needing liberation to develop their capitalist tendencies and transform themselves into entrepreneurial farmers. This understanding in turn undergirds contemporary policy decisions on rural China and debates on China throughout the reform era. For liberal intellectuals during the reform era, the categories of feudalism and the Asiatic mode of production were a means to redefine Maoism as a historically mistaken political trajectory, a sidetrack on the path to modernization. Agriculture and the peasantry were critical concepts that provided the material grounding for these categories, which mediated the relationship between history and politics. The category suzhi, in contrast, allowed liberals to redefine peasant agency, depoliticizing it and reducing it to the sphere of individual economic rationality, and in the process ideologically legitimating the shift to a market valuation of labor. The concepts of feudalism, the Asiatic mode of production – at times not clearly distinguished from one another – and suzhi were key to the construction of the liberal historical narrative of the 1980s.

The revolutionary peasant dialectic The target of reform-era liberal intellectuals, the Maoist conception of peasant revolution, was a construction of the early to mid twentieth century. The first real explicit theorization of peasant revolution came in the immediate post-Boxer period from Liu Shipei, an early Chinese anarchist and anti-Manchu activist writing in the last decade of the Qing. Writing from Tokyo in 1907, Liu developed a perspective on the world that gave the peasant a new political potential. Liu introduced a new conception of rural rebellion as a social and cultural peasant revolution

The peasantry and social stagnation

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into Chinese political discourse.4 He defined traditional rural China as a unified, “half-agricultural, half-industrial system” of production.5 But at the time he was writing, he believed that this system was breaking down under the pressure of emerging capitalist monopolies and the modernizing administrative reforms of the Qing dynasty’s last decade, known as the New Policies. According to Liu, these changes divided the unified production system into rural and urban spheres, pushing some of the peasantry out of the countryside to “seek shelter in the cities” while others had to accept wage-labor positions working for capitalists in the countryside, becoming in the process either agricultural or industrial slaves (nongnu/ gongnu).6 The rural–urban division was leading to a division between two classes.7 While peasant rebellions have occurred throughout Chinese history, Liu believed that they took on a new urgency and power in the political and economic context of post-Boxer China. For him, the postBoxer period was a period of peasant revolution. If Liu introduced a positive image of the peasant as a political or revolutionary actor, the early twentieth century also saw intellectuals portraying the peasant negatively as backward, ignorant, and feudal. This negative image reached its peak during the May Fourth period of the late teens and early twenties.8 Furthermore, this negative image was adopted by the young CCP in the 1920s, as the Marxist orthodoxy in Europe held a similar view of peasant conservatism. Peasants, according to General Secretary of the Communist Party and May Fourth intellectual Chen Duxiu, were a feudal and petty-bourgeois class that carried a feudal consciousness which led towards destructive revolts rather than communist revolution: 4

5

6 7

8

Liu’s most direct statement of peasant revolution was published in the 1908 article “Anarchist Revolution and Peasant Revolution,” printed in the journal that he edited with his wife, He Zhen, in Tokyo. Liu Shipei, “Wuzhengfu geming yu nongmin geming” [Anarchist revolution and peasant revolution], in Li Shaogen, ed., Guocui yu xihua: Liu Shipei wenxuan [National essence and Westernization: the collected works of Liu Shipei] (Shanghai yuandong chubanshe, 1996), pp. 277–81. Together, they edited the journal Tianyi bao when they first arrived in Tokyo, then after that journal ended, they edited Hengbao. Arif Dirlik has noted that Chinese anarchists were the first to insist “on the inseparability of the social and the cultural” within revolutionary discourse in China (Arif Dirlik, Anarchism in the Chinese Revolution [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991]), p. 28. Liu Shipei, “Lun nongye yu gongye lianhezhi kexing yu Zhongguo” [On the feasibility of combining agriculture and industry in China], in Guocui yu xihua, p. 282. See also Dirlik, Anarchism in the Chinese Revolution, pp. 105–7. Liu Shipei, “Lun nongye yu gongye,” 282–3. Liu Shipei, “Lun xinzheng wei bingmin zhi gen” [On the New Policies as the cause of the people’s distress], in Guocui yu xihua, p. 208. For the May Fourth negative image of the peasant, see Myron L. Cohen, “Cultural and Political Inventions in Modern China.”

20

The Peasant in Postsocialist China The peasants of any nation in its feudal period will unavoidably carry, in their thoughts, tints of reactionary ideas and superstitions, and, in their actions, will lean toward destruction and unavoidable barbarism. This has been the original form of primitive peasant revolts.9

Beginning in the late 1920s, these dichotomous images of the peasant – on the one hand, primitive, backward, and conservative, and on the other, revolutionary – were transformed into a new dialectical understanding, bringing the contrasting and contradictory views of the peasant of the earlier period into a new dynamic tension. This peasant revolutionary dialectic was constructed by Mao Zedong and other members of the CCP through an investigation of class dynamics in the countryside, unlocking what Mao came to view as the crucial social site of revolutionary intervention.10 According to Mao, peasants were neither simply a unitary petty-bourgeois class to be pushed to the sidelines of the revolution, as Chen Duxiu had argued, nor were they by nature socialist.11 As Mao argued, the vacillation of the quintessential peasant – peasants who owned and cultivated their own land, known as middle peasants – like the bifurcated images of peasant nature, could only be understood by a dialectical analysis that focused on their material interests and subjective attitudes, and only by an analysis that broke the peasantry down into differentiated classes. Peasants could be a conservative hindrance or revolutionary force. What mattered was detailed investigation and a correct revolutionary practice that produced what Philip Huang calls the “dialectic of rural revolution.”12 In this analysis, class was a politicizing category. It allowed the seemingly equivocal attitudes of various sections of the peasantry – most crucially the middle peasants – to be understood so as to facilitate their revolutionary mobilization.13 9

10

11 13

Quoted in Philip Huang, “Mao Tse-Tung and the Middle Peasants, 1925–1928,” Modern China 1, no. 3 (1975), 279. See Mao Zedong, “An Analysis of the Various Classes among the Chinese Peasantry and Their Attitudes Towards Revolution,” in Stuart R. Schram, ed., Mao’s Road to Power: Revolutionary Writings: 1912–1949: Volume II (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1994), “Report on an Investigation of the Peasant Movement in Hunan,” in Central Committee of the Communist Party of China Committee for the Publication of the Selected Works of Mao Tse-tung, ed., Selected Works of Mao Tse-tung (Beijing: Foreign Language Press, 1965), “Report of the Jinggangshan Front Committee to the Central Committee,” in Stuart R. Schram, ed., Mao’s Road to Power: Revolutionary Writings 1912–1949: Volume III (Armonk: M. E. Sharpe, 1995), Report from Xunwu, trans. Roger Thompson (Stanford University Press, 1990), “Xingguo Investigation,” in Stuart R. Schram, ed., Mao’s Road to Power: Revolutionary Writings 1912–1949 (Armonk: M. E. Sharpe, 1995), pp. 594–655. 12 Philip Huang, “Mao Tse-Tung and the Middle Peasants,” 285. Ibid., 292. For more on class as a politicizing category, see Wang Hui, The End of the Revolution: China and the Limits of Modernity (New York: Verso, 2009), p. 10.

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21

During the revolution, therefore, the CCP developed a theory of the peasantry based on its “dual nature” (liangchong xing).14 On the one hand, the peasantry was a conservative petty-bourgeois class of “small producers” (xiao shengchanzhe) that defended its small plots of land; on the other hand, the peasantry was a rebellious, exploited class of rural laborers. How this dual class nature was expressed depended on political and social circumstances. The interests of small landowners could lead to increasing class differentiation as individual households competed to expand their wealth, or peasant fear of landlessness and semi-proletarianization could lead to support for populist egalitarian measures. While the peasantry’s rebellious nature was a key to the Chinese Revolution, constituting “the real motive force of historical development in Chinese feudal society,” according to Mao,15 the party always had to worry about the possibility that, once the rebellion had ended, peasants would return to their conservative and overly egalitarian ways. In party theorization, “peasant consciousness” (nongmin yishi), linked to the petty-bourgeois class position peasants held within society, was a threat to the party’s progressive ideals and had to be subordinated to the leadership of the working class.16 Early in the revolution, as the party tried to build a disciplined revolutionary army under very difficult circumstances, Mao stated, “The source of such incorrect ideas in this Party organization lies, of course, in the fact that [the Red Army’s] basic units are composed largely of peasants and other elements of petty-bourgeois origin.”17 While peasants could comprise a rebellious force, peasant consciousness had to be fashioned into an effective revolutionary weapon by the proletarian party. The success of the revolution depended upon the party’s ability to balance the immediate demands of peasants and the long-term historical trajectory of revolution and socialist transformation. 14

15

16 17

Daniel Kelliher, “Chinese Communist Political Theory and the Rediscovery of the Peasantry,” Modern China 20, no. 4 (1994), 390. For a general discussion of Chinese Communist Party theorizations on the peasantry, also see Xiaorong Han, Chinese Discourses on the Peasant, 1900– 1949 (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2005), and James P. Harrison, The Communists and Chinese Peasant Rebellions, Studies of the East Asian Institute Columbia University (New York: Atheneum, 1969). Quoted in Kelliher, “Chinese Communist Political Theory and the Rediscovery of the Peasantry,” 392. Ibid., 392–3. Quoted in ibid., 394. Original: Mao Zedong, “On Correcting Mistaken Ideas in the Party,” in Central Committee of the Communist Party of China Committee for the Publication of the Selected Works of Mao Tse-tung, ed., Selected Works of Mao Tse-Tung (Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 1965), vol. I, pp. 105–16.

22

The Peasant in Postsocialist China

With the success of the communist revolution in the late 1940s, however, this dialectic was transformed and soon began to break down. In the early post-1949 period, bureaucratization and a focus on modernization often subordinated revolutionary goals of creating an egalitarian society. For bureaucrats intent on industrializing China, the conservative nature of the peasant grew to dominate their thinking. The theory of “New Democracy” (xin minzhuzhuyi) was developed during the revolution beginning in 1940 in part to manage the contradictions of a socialist revolution taking place in a country dominated by the peasantry. It stressed a moderate line in which different classes were united in revolution. In the post-war period of construction, New Democracy was to be a period of transition in which, through industrialization, the productive forces would be built up to the point that Chinese society was ready to become socialist. For rural society this meant that a petty-bourgeois economy of small peasants would continue to exist until the Chinese economy could support the industrialization and socialization of agriculture. During the revolution and early years of construction this policy was designed to maintain the support of middle peasants, peasant families who survived off working their own land, who neither had to rent land or hire much additional labor. Despite its tacit political support, the party always feared that corruption by peasant consciousness would lead to a historical dead end such as “agrarian socialism,” in which peasant demands for egalitarianism in the countryside were seen to slow agricultural growth and modernization, blocking the way forward to industrial development. The category agrarian socialism emerged out of the CCP’s revolutionary experience with the peasantry, although soon after the establishment of the People’s Republic of China in 1949 the term fell into disuse, only to return during the postsocialist period.18 In a 1948 speech at a cadre conference in north China near the end of the civil war, Mao maintained the New Democracy line and argued for the need to be vigilant against agrarian socialism, a form of “reactionary, backward, and retrogressive” thinking based on peasant petty-bourgeois consciousness and leading to “absolute egalitarianism.”19 Agrarian socialism designated an egalitarian socialism that had the potential to develop on the material basis of an agrarian peasant economy. 18

19

According to Bo Yibo, Mao was the first to use this formulation. See Bo Yibo, Ruogan zhongda juece yu shijian de huigu (shang) [Some observations of important decisions and events], 2 vols. (Beijing: Zhonggong dangshi chubanshe, 2008), vol. I, p. 147. Quoted in Stuart R. Schram, The Political Thought of Mao Tse-tung, revised and enlarged edition (New York: Praeger Publishers, 1969), pp. 341–2. See also Bo, Ruogan zhongda juece, vol. I, pp. 147–8.

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23

This would result in historical stagnation, for peasant egalitarianism would preclude the development of the rural economy, the surplus of which was the basis for industrial development. As one journal put it at the time, agrarian socialism was an “attempt to use the standards of the small peasant economy to know and transform the whole world” while avoiding capitalist development – a form of populism.20 New Democracy, by contrast, was to be a historical transition period in which private ownership, particularly in the countryside, would continue alongside a growing state-run economy. Growth in the rural economy would fund industrialization, finally leading to China’s socialization, a process which egalitarianism would disrupt. The precise nature of the peasantry’s historic role at this time of transition from revolution to construction was a matter of debate within the leadership. In April 1951, the Shanxi Provincial Party Committee wrote the Northeast Bureau and the Central Committee, cautioning that, while land reform had unleashed the productive power of the peasantry, this spontaneous energy pushed not “in the direction of modernization and collectivization that we demand, but in the direction of a rich peasantry” and the dispersal of mutual aid organizations.21 They accordingly believed that this spontaneous direction of the small peasant economy toward renewed class differentiation needed to be halted and redirected toward collectivization and a new social form. The Northeast Bureau disagreed with the Shanxi committee, reiterating Mao’s earlier New Democracy line on peasant tendencies that was critical of “agrarian socialism,” which the bureau saw as a more perilous problem than class differentiation. According to Liu Shaoqi, who agreed with the Northeast Bureau, the shift from an individual ownership system in agriculture to collectivized farms would be inaugurated through a revolution in the mode of production, and could only occur once China was 20 21

Bo, Ruogan zhongda juece, vol. I, p. 147. Quoted in Philip A. Kuhn, Origins of the Modern Chinese State (Stanford University Press, 2002), p. 104. See Zhonghua Renmin Gongheguo guojia nongye weiyuanhui bangongting, ed., Nongye jitihua zhongyao wenjian huibian [Collected important documents of agricultural collectivization], 2 vols. (Beijing: Zhonggong zhongyang dangxiao chubanshe, 1982), vol. I; and also, for a general discussion by a contemporary participant, see Bo, Ruogan zhongda juece, vol. I, pp. 130–49. For Bo Yibo, whose book was originally published in 1991, agrarian socialism is a form of populism that has an important but detrimental lineage in twentieth-century Chinese political thought (ibid., 147–8). A discussion on the damage caused by this political lineage ensued after the 1989 Tiananmen demonstrations. See, for example, a series of articles on populism in Zhanlüe yu guanli [Strategy and management] (issue 5, 1994); and Li Zehou and Liu Zaifu, Gaobie geming: Hui wang ershi shiji Zhongguo [Farewell to revolution: looking back at twentieth-century China] (Hong Kong: Tiandi tushu youxian gongsi, 1995).

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industrialized enough to allow for the mechanization of agriculture. Without such preconditions, restricting the spontaneous tendencies of economic development and encouraging agricultural production cooperatives was a form of “mistaken, dangerous, and utopian agrarian socialist thinking.”22 At this point, however, Mao contradicted Liu, supporting the Shanxi Committee. This marked a departure from the New Democracy line, opening up a wider political space for rural cooperativization and collectivization. As Mao shifted to support a more rapid collectivization in the countryside, the critical valence of “agrarian socialism” became a political liability, for the term could easily be used to criticize rural collectivization, as Liu’s comments revealed. It was then edited out of Mao’s 1948 speech as it appeared in the fourth volume of his collected works.23 In the years that followed, as rural policies became more radical, the party was increasingly critical of the peasantry’s petty-bourgeois tendency toward class differentiation; discussions of “agrarian socialism” largely disappeared. As the politics of the CCP became more contentious from the late 1950s, within party propaganda, the split between the two poles of the peasantry’s dual nature grew wider, bringing the dialectical understanding of the peasant to the point of rupture. As the party came to take on a more conservative view of peasants in the post-1949 era, so too did historians. Like the post-1949 state, senior historians such as Guo Moruo, Jian Bozan (1898–1968), Fan Wenlan (1891–1969), Wu Han (1909–69), and Lü Zhenyu – representatives of orthodox Marxism within the discipline of history – were more focused on the conservative nature of peasants than on their revolutionary tendencies. An orthodox position in this context meant that while the dual nature of the peasantry was recognized, its conservative nature was regarded as predominant – economic determinism was stressed over class struggle. Jian Bozan, a Marxist historian from the 1930s and one of the People’s Republic of China (PRC)’s most important historians of the 1950s and early 1960s,24 understood the nature of peasants to be determined by the feudal system in 22

23 24

See Liu Shaoqi, “Zhonggong Shanxi shengwei ‘ba laoqu huzhu zuzhi tigao yibu’ de piyu” [Evaluation of Shanxi Provincial Committee’s “Promotion of Mutual Aid Organizations”], in Zhonghua, Nongye jitihua zhongyao wenjian huibian, p. 33. Also noted in Bo, Ruogan zhongda juece, vol. I, p. 144, and Wang Jun, Mao Zedong yu Zhongguo gongyehua [Mao Zedong and China’s industrialization] (Fuzhou: Fujian jiaoyu chubanshe, 2001), p. 153. Schram, The Political Thought of Mao Tse-tung, p. 341. Jian was the Chair of the History Department at Peking University from the early 1950s until the mid 1960s before he was purged in March of 1966. He committed suicide in 1968. For more detail, see Clifford Edmunds, “The Politics of Historiography: Jian Bozan’s Historicism,” in Merle

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which they were embedded, placing the importance of peasant rebellion within a limited, circumscribed context. Peasant rebellions, argued Jian, did bring about change in the feudal system, but peasants never really challenged the system itself. Instead, the imperial state would often give “concessions” to the peasantry after revolts, ameliorating their conditions. This would lead to the evolutionary development of the productive forces. This became known as the theory of the “policy of concessions” (rangbu zhengce),25 a thesis that came to be a center of controversy in the 1960s, but that was restored to orthodoxy at the beginning of the reform era. Some historians tested the bounds of orthodox historical theory. Zhao Lisheng (1917–2007) argued that China had taken a different path of development from the West. Zhao was one of the earliest historians to focus on peasant wars, beginning in 1953, and together with his wife, Gao Zhaoyi (1914–2006), he published Collected Articles on the History of Chinese Peasant Wars in 1955, the second post-1949 book on peasant wars.26 In that book, Zhao and Gao argued that the Chinese imperial state was particularly strong because of the effect of “communal remnants” from an earlier stage of development.27 The strength of the Chinese state meant that peasant wars produced class coalitions of society, including landlords, against the “absolutist imperial state” (zhuanzhizhuyi huangchao).28 This view of the Chinese state put their work close to the theory of the Asiatic mode of production, which had been dismissed from Marxist political theory in the 1930s.29

25

26

27 28

29

Goldman, Timothy Cheek, and Carol Lee Hamrin, eds., China’s Intellectuals and the State: In Search of a New Relationship (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987). Jian introduced this theory in his 1951 article: Jian Bozan, “Lun Zhongguo gudai de nongmin zhanzheng” [On ancient Chinese peasant wars], in Zhonghua shuju bianjibu, ed., Lishi wentti luncong [Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 2008]. For a clear statement of this position, see Jian, “Dui chuli ruogan lishi wenti de chubu yijian” [Tentative opinions on the handling of several historical problems], in Wang Xuedian, ed., Shixue linian [Historiographical theory] (Chongqing chubanshe, 2001). Note that the volume misdates Jian’s article, which appeared in Guangming Ribao in 1961. Zhao Lisheng, Zhao Lisheng shixue lunzhu zixuanji [A collection of Zhao Lisheng’s historiographical treatises] ( Jinan: Shandong daxue chubanshe, 1996), p. 529. Zhao was named a rightist in 1958, although as Harrison shows, he was often to the left of most of the orthodox historians of the time, such as Jian Bozan or Lü Zhenyu. See Harrison, The Communists and Chinese Peasant Rebellions, p. 245. Harrison, The Communists and Chinese Peasant Rebellions, pp. 109–10. Zhao Lisheng and Gao Zhaoyi, Zhongguo nongmin zhanzheng shi lunwen ji [Collected articles on the history of Chinese peasant wars] (Shanghai: Xin zhishi chubanshe, 1955), p. 14. For more detailed discussions on the use of this category in China, see Timothy Brook, “Introduction,” in Timothy Brook, ed., The Asiatic Mode of Production in China (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1989); Arif Dirlik, Revolution and History: The Origins of Marxist Historiography in China, 1919–1937 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978), pp. 191–9; Joshua Fogel, “The

26

The Peasant in Postsocialist China

The politics of the Great Leap Forward period, however, challenged the dominant position on the peasant, and the peasant revolutionary dialectic began to break down: the image of the peasant bifurcated into either a pure revolutionary actor, or a conservative petty-bourgeois class of small producers that sought individual wealth accumulation and the protection of its private property. Both images continued to exist, but they were increasingly delinked, contradictory, and unrelated. From the late 1950s, younger, more radical historians sharpened their attack on senior historians such as Jian Bozan and Guo Moruo, believing them to be too conservative. In 1958, Zhao Lisheng was branded a “rightist.”30 The relationship between history and politics was simplified, with the former now directly serving the latter. Senior historians worried that the full complexity of history was being elided as contemporary political concerns replaced historical research. Yet the younger, more radical historians were on the rise, and from the period of the Great Leap Forward until the Cultural Revolution the criticism of conservative understandings of the peasant only amplified. Leading into the Cultural Revolution, the revolutionary nature of exploited peasants came to be increasingly naturalized and universalized. Political developments increasingly diverged from the orthodox Marxist line that stressed the conservative nature of the peasantry. In 1963, Qi Benyu (b. 1931), a worker in the clerical office of the Central Committee, wrote an attack on the Taiping (1851–64) leader, Li Xiucheng, for betraying the revolt by writing positively about the Qing. Jian Bozan objected, stating that Li’s text “was hurriedly written in eight days. You cannot say that a whole revolutionary life was all false on these grounds.”31 While Qi’s article was roundly criticized, Mao read it, and soon Qi was promoted to the editorial board of the party’s theoretical journal Red Flag, where Qi continued to attack Jian.32 In December of 1965, Mao gave a speech in Hangzhou praising the work of the young historian Sun Daren (b. 1935), a student of Zhao Lisheng33 who had attacked Jian’s theory of the “policy of concessions.” Mao summarized Sun’s critique, stating: “After peasant wars the landlord

30 31

32 33

Debates over the Asiatic Mode of Production in Soviet Russia, China, and Japan,” The American Historical Review 93, no. 1 (1988). See Harrison, The Communists and Chinese Peasant Rebellions, pp. 243–6. Quoted in Susanne Weigelin-Schwiedrzik, “Back to the Past: Chinese Intellectuals in Search of Historical Legitimacy (1957–1965),” Chinese History and Society 31 (2007), 12. Ibid., 12–13. Qi also wrote further attacks on Jian, published in the People’s Daily in 1966. Sun had been a student of Zhao Lisheng’s at Shandong University. See Zhao, Zhao Lisheng shixue lunzhu zixuanji, p. 536.

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27

class would only counter-attack and seek revenge; there was never any question of concessions.”34 In the speech, Mao praised the younger historians and theorists – Sun, Qi Benyu, and Yao Wenyuan (1931–2005) – who attacked the older generation of orthodox historians. Through this discussion of the peasant in history, the lines of the initial stage of the Cultural Revolution were being drawn.35 By the Cultural Revolution, therefore, the dialectic had largely polarized into two static images of the peasantry: either a heroic revolutionary force or a conservative and selfish petty-bourgeois social bloc. Political and intellectual factions cleaved to one image of the peasant or the other – primarily the revolutionary side – with few adherents maintaining a commitment to a dialectical understanding. Through this process of political factionalization the complex link between history and politics was simplified and instrumentalized. In other words, the dynamism of the revolution had initially allowed for a dialectical view of the peasant, but by the 1970s stagnation had set in and the peasant became an object of propaganda. This process of reification was to have a profound effect on party and intellectual understandings of the peasant in the reform era, and would remain central to the theorization of modernization. The theorization of the peasant in this later era would retain this rigidity but would emphasize the conservative side of peasantry’s nature.

Petty-bourgeois peasant conservatism and the critique of agrarian socialism at the beginning of the reform era A few years after Mao’s death in 1976, the Communist Party, now under the leadership of Deng Xiaoping, instigated sweeping reforms of the Chinese economy and society. A thorough revisioning of the party’s ideological underpinnings was a central part of this process. Intellectuals, many of whom had been targets of the Cultural Revolution but who were now brought back into public life, played an important role. In the early days of the reforms, Chinese intellectuals linked Maoism and feudalism into a narrative of historical stagnation. Instead of advocating class struggle 34

35

Mao Zedong, “Speech at Hangchow,” in Stuart R. Schram, ed., Chairman Mao Talks to the People: Talks and Letters: 1956–1971 (New York: Pantheon Books, 1974), p. 234. In 1968, during the Cultural Revolution, Jian and his wife committed suicide. Wu Han, Guo Moruo, Fan Wenlan, and Lü Zhenyu were criticized during the Cultural Revolution, as was Qi Benyu, who was jailed in 1968. See Harrison, The Communists and Chinese Peasant Rebellions, p. 257; Roderick MacFarquhar and Michael Schoenhals, Mao’s Last Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006), pp. 15–19. See also Weigelin-Schwiedrzik, “Back to the Past,” 13.

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The Peasant in Postsocialist China

to confront the reformation of the capitalist class within the bureaucracy – as the political struggles of the Cultural Revolution had done – they promoted rights, democracy, and modernization to protect people against a feudal totalitarianism that had supposedly been constructed on the social basis of the peasantry during the Maoist era. Although we can find its traces much earlier, this critique of Maoism began in earnest around the time of the Third Plenum of the Eleventh Central Committee in December 1978, which signaled the beginning of Deng Xiaoping’s hegemony and the rise of Hu Yaobang to the position of general secretary of the Central Committee and director of the Propaganda Department. One of Hu’s first tasks, in fact, was to construct the theoretical foundation for the reform era, both providing “a social critique and philosophical refutation of Mao’s leftist radicalism” and furnishing “an acceptable Marxist rationale for the change of course.”36 The ideological formulations produced in this period formed the unstable ground upon which Chinese liberalism grew, with liberals latching onto and amplifying the critique of Maoism and the peasant inherent in the arguments of the more radical reformers. While at first in the late 1970s intellectuals largely returned to the 1950s orthodox Marxist position on the peasantry, emphasizing the economic determination of consciousness and ideology, over time intellectuals transformed the earlier understanding of the dual nature of the peasantry. Contrary to the stress on the revolutionary nature of the peasantry in the 1960s and 1970s, intellectuals stressed the conservative nature of the peasantry’s egalitarian tendencies during the early reform era. This conservative peasantry, in turn, was seen as the social foundation for an autocratic state, for dictatorship, and the cult of personality. Instead of sustaining a “reserve of socialist activism,” peasant consciousness was seen to form the social basis for continued feudal influence, the suppression of which was a precondition for modernization.37 As the reform era developed, peasant historical and political agency was increasingly denied, and the two poles of the peasantry’s dual nature were reversed: egalitarian and revolutionary

36

37

Kalpana Misra, From Post-Maoism to Post-Marxism: The Erosion of Official Ideology in Deng’s China (New York and London: Routledge, 1998), p. 55. Historian Li Shu argued, when he returned to edit Lishi yanjiu at the beginning of the reform era, that feudalism, not the bourgeoisie, was the main block to China’s modernization. Li portrayed the reform era as a continuation of the May Fourth Movement and of the struggle for New Democracy. See Li Shu, “Xiaomie fengjian canyu yingxiang shi Zhongguo xiandaihua de zhongyao tiaojian” [Annihilating the influence of feudal remnants is the important condition of China’s modernization], Lishi yanjiu, no. 1 (1979).

The peasantry and social stagnation

29

tendencies were redefined as conservative, while the petty-bourgeois tendencies of the small property owner were now seen as progressive and entrepreneurial. Instead of revolutionary or political actors, peasants were the objects of reform policies or individual actors within the market. In an important discussion on the Taiping Rebellion in the late 1970s, Li Zehou, a prominent philosopher famous for his studies of Kant and aesthetics and criticism of Maoist voluntarism and populism, argued that Taiping ideology was determined by its material basis in the small producer mode of production. Like the orthodox historians of the 1950s, Li believed this limitation meant that the Taiping could not transcend feudalism.38 Along these lines, in 1979 historian Wang Rongsheng made an influential argument that historical change in feudalism could not be reduced to the dynamic of rural class struggle and that many rural struggles were between the peasantry and the state, and thus not expressions of class struggle. Wang’s criticism of peasant historical studies was meant to show the error of the stress on class struggle during the Cultural Revolution.39 Also in 1979, in a major argument for shifting the emphasis in historical research, Dai Yi criticized the singular focus on class struggle and peasant wars during the later Maoist era, particularly during the Cultural Revolution. Consonant with the party’s ideological shift from class struggle to economic development, Dai stated that this misplaced emphasis was caused by a misunderstanding of Marxism–Leninism and historical materialism that reached an apex during the Cultural Revolution. In contrast, a proper understanding showed that class struggle was only an expression of a deeper contradiction within society, “the contradiction between the productive forces and the relations of production, and the contradiction between the economic base and the superstructure.”40 This article targeted Qi Benyu, the head of the historical group for the party theoretical journal Red Flag at the time of the Cultural Revolution. Peasant wars, Dai said, while an important aspect of China’s feudal society, were not the motive 38

39

40

Li Zehou, “Taiping Tianguo sixiang sanlun” [Thoughts on Taiping ideology], Lishi yanjiu, no. 7 (1978). See also Kwang-Ching Liu, “World View and Peasant Rebellion: Reflections on Post-Mao Historiography,” The Journal of Asian Studies 40, no. 2 (1981), 301; Alex Volkoff and Edgar Wickberg, “New Directions in Chinese Historiography: Reappraising the Taiping: Notes and Comment,” Pacific Affairs 52, no. 3 (1979). Wang Rongsheng, “Zhi you nongmin zhanzheng cai shi fengjian shehui fazhan de zhenzheng dongli ma?” [Is peasant war the only real impetus for the development of feudal society?], Lishi yanjiu, no. 4 (1979), 49–56. Wang wrote under the pseudonym Rong Sheng. Dai Yi, “On Some Theoretical Aspects of the Class Struggle as They Relate to Historical Research,” Chinese Studies in History (1980), 58. For a contemporary analysis of debates on peasant rebellion, see Kwang-Ching Liu, “World View.”

30

The Peasant in Postsocialist China

force of history. Thus according to Dai, productivity, not class struggle, “is the most vital, most revolutionary ingredient.”41 Returning to the debates of the 1950s and 1960s, Dai argued that within feudal society “peasant wars could only strike a definite blow at the old productive relationships, could only change certain links of these [relationships], but could not possibly change the old modes of production completely.”42 These reformist arguments on the peasant were carried further by Wang Xiaoqiang, who argued that peasant egalitarian consciousness prevented peasant rebellions from surpassing feudal social relations and rule during the imperial period. At best, a peasant rebellion would simply lead to a new distribution of land and new feudal rulers.43 The conservative side of the peasantry’s dual nature predominated, and the small peasant “utopian fantasy” (wutuobang shi de kongxiang) could not truly be established.44 Under the leadership and education of the proletariat and its party, however, the progressive side could dominate, although the conservative side would not disappear until its social basis in the small peasant economy (xiaonong jingji) was superseded. Yet as most cadres were from nonproletarian and especially petty-bourgeois backgrounds, peasant consciousness within the party set the stage for the “feudal” methods and incorrect policies of Lin Biao and the Gang of Four, the destruction of internal party democracy, and the ascendancy of an egalitarian agrarian socialism.45 By the reform era, therefore, “agrarian socialism” had become a term used by more radical reformist intellectuals to criticize Maoist rural policies. In a later article, Wang Xiaoqiang went on to argue that agrarian socialism during the Maoist era was a form of populism, linked to peasant consciousness and a “small peasant economy,” and that it short-circuited history by positing that one could skip past capitalist development. The result, according to Wang, was a restoration of a natural, pre-capitalist economy in which all were equally poor. Unlike Russian populism, however, Chinese agrarian socialism was not so directly connected to intellectuals, but was a latent energy that was unleashed in peasant uprisings. The clearest example was the Taiping Rebellion, which, according to Wang, had suppressed private property, the commodity economy, and the family, while it instituted cultural revolution. Scientific socialism, on the 41 42 43

44

Dai, “On Some Theoretical Aspects of the Class Struggle as They Relate to Historical Research,” 60. Ibid., 66. Wang Xiaoqiang, “Nongmin yu fan fengjian” [Peasants and anti-feudalism], Lishi yanjiu, no. 10 (1979), 4. 45 Ibid., 6. Ibid., 9, 11.

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other hand, could only be constructed upon the foundation of a modern commodity economy, which the New Democratic political and economic policy had been intended to provide. While agrarian socialism had a “limited use” during the revolutionary period – notably to mobilize the revolutionary force of the peasantry – once the revolution was successful it became reactionary.46 Furthermore, feudal rule, built upon peasant consciousness, prevented the completion of the two tasks of socialism: the development of the productive forces and the achievement of a democratic revolution.47 Wang, like many of his contemporaries, viewed the reform era as a return to Marx after a detour through a populist voluntarism. In 1979 and 1980 a debate on the importance of class struggle continued briefly, with a few defending class struggle as the “real motive force of history.”48 The discussion, however, was brought to a close as the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) moved clearly to stress the primacy of the productive forces in the development of history. As the positive image of the peasantry as a rebellious exploited class that could push history forward came under attack by intellectuals, they increasingly stressed the negative, conservative side of the peasantry as a dependent class, unable to join together and needing the control of an autocratic ruler. This conservative and overly egalitarian mass of peasants was a central figure in the reform-era explanation of Maoist excess, seen as an extremism rooted in the feudal consciousness of a peasant society. Instead of interpreting bureaucracy as a problem of “capitalist restoration” or the rise of a “new bourgeois class,” as Cultural Revolution theorists had done, this discourse blamed the political separation between the state and the people on the lingering effects of an agrarian mode of production, alternately naming it feudalism or the Asiatic mode of production. The former was a society that could be overcome only through class struggle and the development of the productive forces. The latter, by contrast, was based on a stagnant opposition between state and society that required an outside force for modernization. In most formulations of the reform era, the outside force was to be constituted by the intellectuals, who would advise the state on the proper course of modernization. At a speech at a major party theoretical conference that set the stage for reformist theory in the 1980s, Wang Ruoshui, deputy editor-in-chief of the 46

47 48

Wang Xiaoqiang, “Nongye shehuizhuyi pipan” [The critique of agrarian socialism], Nongye jingji wenti, no. 2 (1980), 9–20. Wang Xiaoqiang, “Nongmin yu fan fengjian,” 12. Kwang-Ching Liu, “World View,” 312–14. A notable defender of the importance of class struggle was Sun Daren.

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The Peasant in Postsocialist China

Renmin Ribao, attacked the Maoist personality cult of the Cultural Revolution, blaming its appeal on the peasantry: The personality cult has deep historical roots in our society. Our country has been primarily dominated by small producers. The small producers’ force of habit is very deep-rooted … Marx in his work The Eighteenth Brumaire … made the following analysis of the small farmers. Due to their dispersed, self-sufficient and mutually isolated nature, they were unable to form a “national bond.” As a result, “they cannot represent themselves, they must be represented. Their representative must … appear as their master, as an authority over them, as an unlimited governmental power that protects them against the other classes and sends them rain and sunshine from above.” This kind of socio-economic condition nurtures monarchical thinking and produces the personality cult.49

The background for Wang’s critical position on the peasantry was a larger attempt to construct a Marxist humanism adequate to critique forms of alienation still existent under socialism. The dependency of the peasant or small producer was portrayed as the social ground for the personality cult, totalitarianism, and political alienation, through which leaders were raised above the masses as saviors. Humanism, in contrast, necessitated the independence of individuals within society.50 This led to some of the most important intellectual debates from the early reform era to the present.51 Similarly, Wang Xizhe argued in 1980 that Mao’s peasant background had led to “a type of reactionary utopian peasant egalitarianism.”52 Wang questioned what he saw as the basis of Mao’s theory of “agrarian socialism” – a concept, notably, of which Mao had been critical, though here Wang names Mao’s development strategy itself “agrarian socialism” – the idea that China’s peasants had a “reserve of socialist activism” that, once activated by the Communist Party, would lead to socialism.53 Instead, Wang argued, without the proper historical foundations – namely a developed industrial economy – this reliance on peasant rebellion led to an autocratic and fascist, not democratic, form of agrarian socialism.54 As Wang stated: 49

50 51

52

53

Quoted in Bill Brugger and David Kelly, Chinese Marxism in the Post-Mao Era (Stanford University Press, 1990), p. 143. Ibid., pp. 142–4. See ibid. The early-1980s debate on humanism resurfaced in the 1990s, and became an important point of origin for the split between the new left and the liberals in China. Wang Xizhe, “Mao Zedong and the Cultural Revolution,” in Anita Chan, Stanley Rosen, and Jonathan Unger, eds., On Socialist Democracy and the Chinese Legal System: The Li Yizhe Debates (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1985), p. 237. 54 Ibid., p. 187. Ibid., p. 188.

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Chinese peasants, who had never seen modern heavy industry, let alone had the opportunity to place themselves in its midst, were the very ones who could not possibly have accumulated a reserve of scientific socialist activism.55

Wang argued, therefore, that the Cultural Revolution was the result of a totalitarian mode of state formed on the basis of peasant consciousness and its corresponding cult of personality.56 At the time, Wang made a somewhat ambiguous association between “agrarian socialism” and the Asiatic mode of production ( yaxiya shengchan fangshi), a category that has rather a different theoretical implication as well as lineage, one to which I will now turn.57

Peasant dependency and the Asiatic state In the early 1980s, the linkage between the peasantry and the populist political errors of the Maoist era was deepened by renewed discussion of the Asiatic mode of production (hereafter AMP). While this AMP discussion clearly concerned the nature of the Chinese state, it also played an important role in reshaping reform-era understandings of the peasant role in history. This focus on the dominance of the Asiatic imperial state shifted attention away from the petty-bourgeois nature of the land-owning peasantry, allowing theoretical concentration on the class nature of the peasantry to be replaced by a growing emphasis on state–society relations. At the same time, this discussion allowed reform-era intellectuals to reverse the polarity of the Maoist peasant dialectic, with egalitarian tendencies revalued as historically and politically conservative, and entrepreneurial behaviors redefined as progressive. It was primarily Wu Dakun, Professor of International Economy at the Renmin University of China and a participant in debates on the AMP in the 1950s, who generated this new discussion through his use of this category to criticize Maoism and the Cultural Revolution.58 The AMP formulation – designating a large-scale agrarian society with a dominant state – had been largely rejected by Chinese Marxists in the early 1930s because it seemed to place China outside of normal world-historical social evolution.59

55 58

59

56 57 Ibid., p. 196. Ibid., pp. 196, 259. Ibid., p. 193. See Chapter 2. Also, Brook, “Introduction,” p. 18. While I focus on the political implications of these arguments, I do not mean to imply that they have no historical value. For a discussion of Wu’s argument, see Brugger and Kelly, Chinese Marxism in the Post-Mao Era, pp. 23–8. Dirlik, Revolution and History, pp. 191–2.

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The Peasant in Postsocialist China

During the reform era, however, with the egalitarian tendency of the peasantry redefined as conservative and disruptive to economic growth, the peasant increasingly was portrayed by intellectuals as the cause of stagnation or blockage within society. The historical category of the AMP, likewise, tended to remove all dynamism from Chinese society; the peasantry and its rebellions were no longer the motive force of history, and they no longer sustained a revolutionary subjectivity. In 1980 and 1981, Wu argued that the AMP meant that history developed along multiple lines, but that the AMP ended up acting as a block to modernization, in particular because of the problem of bureaucracy.60 The economic basis of bureaucracy, Wu cites Lenin as arguing, was the “atomized and scattered state of the small producer …”61 Wu’s application of the category, however, was relatively limited. He argued against broad anti-communist uses of the AMP concept such as that of Karl Wittfogel, who in the 1950s had asserted that dictatorships grew out of societies with large-scale irrigation works.62 For Wu, the use of the AMP formulation to criticize bureaucratic rule should be limited to the period of the Cultural Revolution. Instead of “feudal fascism” – a commonly used term of abuse in the early reform era to criticize the radical Maoists of the Cultural Revolution – the social basis of the Cultural Revolution was a revived “Oriental despotism of ancient Asiatic states.”63 Clear in Wu’s limited usage of the category, moreover, was an attempt to theoretically preempt the potential for a class-based critique to be arrayed against the reform-era leadership. If political alienation during the Maoist era was the result of the capitalist class maintaining power and continuing its exploitation through the bureaucracy, then the reformist leadership was open to exactly the same charge. The peasant played a key role, therefore, in constructing this narrative so as to defend against just such a critique. The historical foundation of bureaucracy, understood by the ultra-left of the Cultural Revolution as the results of a “new 60

61 62

63

Wu Dakun, “Some Questions Concerning Research on the Asiatic Mode of Production,” in Timothy Brook, ed., The Asiatic Mode of Production in China (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1989), pp. 35–46. Ibid., p. 45. Karl Wittfogel, Oriental Despotism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1957). Here Wu walked a fine line between the “scientific” use of the concept to explain “objective historical processes,” as he put it, and its politically conservative, anti-communist use. In other words, despite Wu’s claims to the contrary, his use of the AMP to criticize the Chinese state during the Cultural Revolution could easily become a general critique of communism in the fashion of Wittfogel. Wu Dakun, “The Asiatic Mode of Production in History as Viewed by Political Economy in Its Broad Sense,” in Marxism in China (Nottingham: Spokesman, 1983), pp. 58–9, 74. Wu, “Some Questions Concerning Research on the Asiatic Mode of Production,” 43.

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capitalist class,”64 was here located in the lingering effects of traditional society, whether traditional society was considered “feudal” or along the lines of an AMP; reform-era modernization was rendered as its solution. Again, this formulation was to result in the bifurcated image of rural society, seen both as a cause of stagnation in the past and as a sector whose problems were being solved by Deng-era modernization in the present. Yet whereas under feudalism the peasantry might still play the progressive role of the motor of historical development, under the AMP such an argument is much more difficult to sustain. Nevertheless, Wu attempted to maintain, as Mao had before him, that peasant rebellion was a motor of historical development in China.65 Wu argued that the AMP existed in China before the Qin unification (221–207 BCE). From the Qin on, however, it mutated into what Wu calls a “feng jian” society. “Feng jian” is usually the word used to translate “feudalism,” but Wu argues that Chinese feng jian is different from European feudalism. The Chinese feng jian society is an outgrowth of the AMP and, as such, contains many characteristics of the AMP, especially its centralized state.66 Wu saw two contradictions with the feng jian system: first, between the central state and the “local feng jian forces” – the landlords; and, second, between the owners of land and those that farmed it, producing conflicts between the landlord class and the peasantry. Wu’s discussion tended to stress this second contradiction. This contradiction, argued Wu, led to peasant class rebellion against the landlords, changes in the relations of production, and at times the end of a dynasty, converting peasant class struggle into a motive force of history.67 Yet, even though this motive force existed, the forces of the feng jian society, namely the central state, were too strong for capitalism to develop in China.68 Zhao Lisheng, the scholar of peasant rebellion discussed earlier who was named a rightist in the 1950s, and after that time a professor of history at Lanzhou University, also employed the concept of the AMP. Yet in contrast to Wu Dakun, Zhao used the category to criticize both the Maoist stress on peasant rebellion as an expression of class struggle and the idea that Chinese peasants were petty-bourgeois land owners.69 In fact, Zhao’s formulation marked a shift in emphasis from that of Wang Rongsheng, 64

65 66 69

See Yang Xiguang, “Whither China?” in Klaus Mehnert, ed., Peking and the New Left (Berkeley: University of California Center for Chinese Studies, 1969). Wu, “The Asiatic Mode of Production in History,” pp. 72–3. 67 68 Ibid., pp. 68–74. Ibid., p. 71. Ibid., p. 74. Zhao Lisheng, “The Well-Field System in Relation to the Asiatic Mode of Production,” in Timothy Brook, ed., The Asiatic Mode of Production in China (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1989).

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Dai Yi, Wang Xiaoqiang, and Wang Ruoshui, for whom land ownership was still understood as the primary social basis for the conservative nature of the peasantry, a nature that dominated “peasant consciousness.” On the contrary, Zhao argued that peasants were by nature dependent on the state because of their lack of true land ownership. This is the significance of the AMP as formulated by Zhao: it allowed him to shift the focus from the class character of peasant land ownership to the dominance of the state as an explanation for the nature of peasant behavior. The polarity of the Maoist understanding of peasant tendencies, its dual nature, was fully reversed. Thus Zhao’s historical arguments went further than many others in attacking the previously dominant narrative of peasant rebellion as class struggle, breaking with Marxist historical materialism in the process. As the 1980s progressed, Zhao’s formulation came to the fore. The inertial and defensive side of peasant nature was no longer seen as based on the fact of land ownership or a petty-bourgeois nature, as most Marxists had argued, but on the lack of independent property ownership and the dependent nature of the peasantry in relation to the state. As a capitalist understanding of property ownership as a general progressive value came to command the intellectual and political scene in the 1990s, this became the dominant line on the peasantry and the foundation of postsocialist liberalism. In his criticism of the class-struggle narrative of rural rebellion, Zhao downplayed the existence of the second contradiction mentioned by Wu, that between the peasantry and the landlords. Zhao stressed the oppressive, extractive, and status-based nature of the primitive commune that he discusses under the category of the AMP as an oblique critique of the Maoist commune system.70 Ideologically, Zhao linked the AMP to the Legalist, and not the Confucian, tradition.71 In the early 1970s, radical Maoists had portrayed Legalism as a progressive ideology in comparison to Confucianism, and in the process Legalism and Qin Shi Huangdi, the first Qin emperor, were associated with Mao. By connecting Legalism and an oppressive AMP, Zhao furthered his criticisms of Mao. Implied in this critique of Maoism as a form of AMP is a historical narrative in which a stagnant Chinese society is founded upon the relationship between an oppressive state and a scattered and dependent peasantry. The peasantry 70

71

Ibid. Other theorists also used the category as an oblique critique of the commune system. Ke Changji did the same: see Ke, “Ancient Chinese Society and the Asiatic Mode of Production,” in Timothy Brook, ed., The Asiatic Mode of Production in China (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1989). Brook, “Introduction,” p. 19.

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was thus stripped of its agency in two ways: on the one hand, peasant rebellion lost its progressive political character; on the other hand, such a dependent peasantry could not be considered economically entrepreneurial. Only by breaking with state dependency and its various socio-historical forms – agrarian socialism, feudalism, and the AMP – could the peasant help to produce a new historical trajectory for Chinese society. But on what basis might peasants break from the state to become independent entrepreneurs? This led to the question of peasant “quality” (suzhi) – a new formulation of peasant agency.

Suzhi, peasants, and technocracy It has been pointed out that the discourse of suzhi had its beginnings in propaganda campaigns on birth control in the early 1980s. The term zhiliang (also “quality”) was used in the formulation “population quality” (renkou zhiliang) until the mid 1980s, when the term suzhi became the dominant term for “quality.”72 At its inception, however, this discourse on population quality was closely linked to a discussion on the “quality of labor” (laodong zhiliang), and it is within this context that the emergence of this discourse must be understood.73 From the late 1970s, in other words, the discourse of zhiliang/suzhi was used to understand the position of social groups and individuals within a society in which modernization and development were predicated upon technical change, a change in the quality of labor power. In this sense, zhiliang/suzhi helped to explain the differential value produced by equal quantities of labor power. From the early 1980s, this understanding of value came to imply a particular notion of social and historical development in which the “low quality” of the peasantry explained the supposed stagnation of Chinese historical 72 73

Andrew Kipnis, “Suzhi: A Keyword Approach,” The China Quarterly, no. 186 (2006), 297. Andrew Kipnis has argued that the discourse of suzhi cannot be reduced to neo-liberalism. While he is right that suzhi is used in many different ways, some certainly contradicting what is normally meant by neo-liberalism, my argument here is closer to that of Ann Anagnost (“The Corporeal Politics of Quality (Suzhi ),” Public Culture 16, no. 2 [2004]) and Yan Hairong (“Neoliberal Governmentality and Neohumanism: Organizing Suzhi/Value Flow through Labor Recruitment Networks,” Cultural Anthropology 18, no. 4 [2003], New Masters, New Servants: Migration, Development, and Women Workers in China [Durham: Duke University Press, 2008]), both targets of Kipnis’ criticism. As with any discourse, people may use suzhi for many different purposes depending on their own social position and goals. But I argue that the dominant meaning of suzhi within postsocialist discourse – as it is used to understand the position of the peasant within society and history – is closely linked to the changing notion of the value of labor power at a time in which China was integrating with global capitalism. Without paying close attention to that frame, the predominance of the discourse of suzhi is impossible to understand.

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development. At the same time, the household responsibility system together with population control and increased investment in education opened the potential for raising the quality of the peasantry and the development of a commodity economy. One of the centerpiece ideological debates of the late 1970s concerned the politics of labor value. During the beginning of the reform era, reformist intellectuals argued that one of the primary errors of the Maoist era was its overly egalitarian remuneration policies – policies that resulted in the supposed historical error of “agrarian socialism.” In 1978, Deng Xiaoping argued that remuneration policies should be linked to both “the quantity and quality (zhiliang) of an individual’s work,”74 a policy that was reaffirmed by an important People’s Daily editorial in January of 1979, which called for the implementation of “distribution of rewards according to work done” over “egalitarianism.”75 The central target of this criticism of egalitarianism was the Dazhai Brigade, a rural model of egalitarian remuneration policies nationally lauded for overcoming the split between mental and manual labor from the 1960s and 1970s. In 1980, a propaganda campaign to discredit the Dazhai Brigade laid the ideological foundations for the nationwide implementation of the household responsibility system, in which the household was re-established as the basic unit of agricultural production. This shift in remuneration policy was a reversal of the Mao-period advocacy of eliminating the “three great differences”: those between workers and peasants, between urban and rural areas, and between mental and manual labor, a reversal coupled with the rise in power of a “New Class” of technocratic cadres.76 This shift in focus from quantity to quality of labor was mirrored in the contemporary discourse on population and birth planning.77 Within this new structure of labor value, the contemporary notion of renkou zhiliang (population quality) was validated exactly because modernization meant technical progress – modernization was a shift from labor and population 74

75

76

77

Deng Xiaoping, “Adhere to the Principle ‘To Each According to His Work,’” in Selected Works of Deng Xiaoping, 1975–1982 (Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 1984), pp. 117–18. This policy contradicted the treatment of distribution by Marx and Engels, but is theoretically closer to early-1930s Stalinism. See Misra, From Post-Maoism to Post-Marxism, p. 122. Tang Tsou, Marc Blecher, and Mitch Meisner, “Policy Change at the National Summit and Institutional Transformation at the Local Level: The Case of Tachai and Hsiyang County in the Post-Mao Era,” in Tang Tsou, ed., Select Papers from the Center for Far Eastern Studies (University of Chicago, 1981), p. 291. On the “New Class” see Joel Andreas, Rise of the Red Engineers: The Cultural Revolution and the Origins of China’s New Class (Stanford University Press, 2009), especially Chapter 10. See Anagnost, “The Corporeal Politics of Quality (Suzhi),” 190. See also Bai Yijin, “Zaojiu xinxing nongmin shi jiejue nongmin wenti de zhongyao fangmian,” Nongye jingji wenti, no. 2 (1983), 14.

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39

quantity to quality. Liu Zhenkun argued in 1982 that “human resources” (renli ziyuan) and “population quality” (renkou de zhiliang) increasingly conditioned a nation’s technical development, the strength of the nation, labor productivity, and economic growth.78 Likewise, a 1981 article entitled “Labor power and the quality of labor power” argued that increasing labor productivity “could not be separated from raising the quality of knowledge and skills (zhishi he jishu suzhi) of workers,” a project that necessitated controlling the growth of population quantity.79 In an article entitled “Pay Attention to Raising the Quality of Agricultural Laborers,” Jin Huishen stated that “so-called suzhi principally indicates the production knowledge, labor skills, and scientific culture of the laborer as well as his physique and level of health.”80 Jin went on to argue that, in the pre-reform era, too much attention was paid to raising the quantity of labor power instead of its quality. Subtly equating the Maoist era with pre-liberation traditional agriculture, Jin argued that the origin of this stress was the “‘quantity-quality concept’ of the small peasant economy” (xiaonong jingji de “liang, zhi guannian”), which viewed having more children as “the fountainhead of wealth.”81 In contrast, while the reformist household responsibility system had released the initiative of the peasants, the key to agricultural modernization was raising “the quality of labor power” (laodongli suzhi) and agricultural productivity on the basis of improvements in science.82 The quality of labor power and the quality of the population were therefore intimately related as this discourse on value emerged at the beginning of the postsocialist era. Bai Yijin argued that for the “new historical period to solve the peasant question (nongmin wenti), it had to solve the problem of peasant quality (nongmin zhiliang wenti).”83 But perhaps the most well-known and influential discussion of the “quality of human resources” (renliziyuan suzhi) in rural areas was Furao de pinkun [The poverty of plenty], authored by Wang Xiaoqiang (critic of agrarian socialism discussed earlier) and Bai 78

79

80

81

82 83

Liu Zhenkun, “Jiantan zhiyue renkou zhiliangde yinsu ji gaishan renkou zhiliangde tujing” [The factors conditioning population quality as well as a way to improve population quality], Henan daxue xuebao (shehui kexueban), no. 6 (1982), 94. Tan Yibin, “Laodongli yu laodongli zhiliang” [Labor power and labor power quality], Qiye jingji, no. 3 (1981), 48. Jin Huishen, “Zhongshi tigao nongye laodongzhe de suzhi” [Pay attention to raising the quality of agricultural laborers], Dangdai caijing, no. 4 (1983), 86. Jin Huishen, “Tigao laodongli suzhi shi nongye xiandaihuade zhanlüe zhongdian” [Raising the quality of labor power is the strategic emphasis of agricultural modernization], Nongye jingji wenti, no. 11 (1983), 33. Ibid. Bai Yijin, “Zaojiu xinxing nongmin shi jiejue nongmin wenti de zhongyao fangmian,” 12.

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Nanfeng, an agricultural economics researcher.84 They argued that “China is undergoing the shift from a natural economy towards a commodity economy. In other words, it is changing from an agricultural society to an industrial society.”85 Mirroring Jin Huishen’s earlier historical argument, they stated that the main obstacle to this transformation was the suzhi of the rural and minority population. As with most reformist intellectuals at the time, Wang and Bai believed that the institution of the household responsibility system for agriculture was a turning point in China’s modernization, because it liberated the productive initiative of the peasants. They contrasted the development of the commodity economy during the reform era with the model propagated in the “learn from Dazhai” movement, which they saw as a “simple investment in productive forces” and thus non-transformative quantitative expansion.86 Yet according to Wang and Bai, the agricultural reforms sparked “two kinds of enthusiasm, each with a different social content, one geared towards developing the natural economy and the other geared towards developing the commodity economy.”87 Notable is a return to the formulation of the dual nature of the peasantry and the problems it entailed for socialist construction in the early days of the People’s Republic, although in this new formulation “social content” refers to the technical level and entrepreneurial spirit of the rural population – its suzhi – not the dialectical tendencies of the peasant class character. Within postsocialist discourse suzhi, as value, displaced class as a way to understand social inequality and peasant agency.88 In Wang and Bai’s postsocialist formulation, therefore, a dialectical understanding of the various tendencies of behavior of the 84

85 86 87

88

Wang Xiaoqiang and Bai Nanfeng, Furao de pinkun [The poverty of plenty] (Chengdu: Sichuan renmin chubanshe, 1986); translated as The Poverty of Plenty (Hampshire and London: Macmillan, 1991). Feng Chongyi’s Nongmin yishi yu bainian Zhongguo [Peasant consciousness and China this century] (Hong Kong: Chung Hwa Book Company, 1989), and Zuo chu lunhui: nongmin yishi yu bainian Zhongguo [Breaking out of the cycle: peasant consciousness and China this century] (Changchun: Jilin wenshi chubanshe, 1997) further developed this concept of suzhi. For an interesting discussion of this work, see Flower, “Peasant Consciousness,” pp. 54–9. Feng, a prominent historian and liberal, is Associate Professor of China Studies at the Institute for International Studies of the University of Technology, Sydney. Wang and Bai, The Poverty of Plenty, p. 2. Ibid., p. 93. Ibid., pp. 31–2. The Chinese economy was officially defined as a “planned socialist commodity economy” at the Third Plenum of the Twelfth Central Committee meeting in October 1984. Stuart R. Schram, “Deng Xiaoping’s Quest for ‘Modernization with Chinese Characteristics’ and the Future of Marxism-Leninism,” in Michael Y. M. Kau and Susan H. Marsh, eds., China in the Era of Deng Xiaoping: A Decade of Reform (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1997), p. 417. See Anagnost, “The Corporeal Politics of Quality (Suzhi ).” On the politics of class analysis in contemporary China, see Guo Yingjie, “Farewell to Class, Except the Middle Class: The Politics of Class Analysis in Contemporary China,” The Asia-Pacific Journal (Feb. 26, 2009).

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41

peasantry as a class was replaced by a dichotomy between those who are of high quality and those who are not. In other words, the use of the category suzhi indicated a shift in the way the peasant was to be understood: it was not the interaction of a dynamic peasantry with concrete historical conditions that was crucial, but rather a lack of a quality in the peasant that needed to be introduced from the outside. Even with the success of the reforms, according to Wang and Bai, backward areas could become historically stagnant with the persistence of a natural or subsistence economy. In other words, an increase in the total value produced in such areas was possible, even though the quality or efficiency of production did not rise.89 The crucial difference between areas that progressed towards a modern commodity economy and those that stagnated in a natural, self-sufficient economy was suzhi, or whether they had a high “quality of human resources.”90 Labor, here, was not interpreted as a form of social relation so much as an economic resource. For Wang and Bai, suzhi referred to “the quality of engaging in commodity production and management.”91 One’s suzhi was defined by one’s aptitude at functioning in the commodity economy. Most important was a sense of “entrepreneurial spirit,” reflected in an “openness to new ideas,” a “sense of efficiency,” “initiative and drive,” and “risk taking.” Knowledge and education were essential components of “entrepreneurial spirit,” according to Wang and Bai, as one’s willingness to break with tradition and use new and efficient agricultural techniques would “raise yields.”92 The discourse of suzhi, therefore, not only replaced discussions of class, but was a reformulation of peasant agency as well. If the early reform era saw a strong critique of the idea of the peasantry having revolutionary or historical agency, suzhi as entrepreneurial spirit indicated that particular peasants could have individual agency within the economy. The narrative of the peasant as having “low quality,” that is, as having both a lack of entrepreneurial spirit and a tendency to depend on the state, was most clearly crystallized in the controversial television documentary Heshang [River elegy], produced and shown in China in 1988. Primarily written by reportage writer Su Xiaokang, the series located the cause of the turmoil of twentieth-century Chinese history in the agrarian nature of Chinese society. The series built on work of the early 1980s, especially that of Wang Xiaoqiang, that linked feudalism, peasant consciousness, and Maoist excess. With the airing of the series, the “dual nature” of the 89 91

Wang and Bai, The Poverty of Plenty, pp. 32–3. 92 Ibid., p. 37. Ibid.

90

Ibid., pp. 34, 36.

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peasantry had become almost completely reduced to a static image of conservative dependency. The once positively valued rebellious side of the peasantry was now converted into a negative, chaotic, and disruptive force that at best brought about no historical progress and at worst was the motive force of historical regression.93 In the series, the yellow earth symbolizes China’s agrarian society as defensive, inward-looking, despotic, and authoritarian. It was on a visit to rural Shaanxi during the making of the film, according to Su, that a conception of rural stagnation, the attachment to the land, and the image of the yellow earth came together.94 The West, by contrast, was represented by the blue ocean – an industrial, entrepreneurial, seafaring, outward-looking, aggressive, and pluralistic society, one that led to the liberation of the productive forces. The series concluded that, in the absence of a bourgeoisie, it would be up to the intellectuals to shift China from a yellow civilization to a blue one.95 The theory of the AMP also played an important role in Heshang, although in the series the concept was much closer to that put forward by Karl Wittfogel than to its early 1980s formulations. Here, China is seen as an agrarian society based on water control and unable to change. Resistance to change is attributed to an attachment to the soil. Part four of the six-part series, on “the new era,” focused most closely on the figure of the peasant, asking why an industrial revolution had not taken place in China. China, “a large country made up of peasants with small landholdings,” was compared to Venice, “the earliest birthplace of capitalist civilization” which was “without agriculture.”96 In China, all land was owned by the emperor, and its “system of centralized power, of a ‘great unity’ built on the foundation of an agricultural civilization, became a heavy ball and chain weighing down the economy of ancient China and industrial and commercial activities in particular.”97 The environmentaldeterminist and Malthusian argument of the series is that capitalism had not developed in China because of the stagnant agrarian culture that developed in a society with “too many people crowded onto too little land.”98 This led to China taking its “own path to development” ( yitiao ziji de fazhan daolu), one which the authors of Heshang obviously saw as a disastrous departure from the historical course of modernization. The 93

94 98

See Su Xiaokang and Wang Luxiang, Deathsong of the River: A Reader’s Guide to the Chinese TV Series Heshang (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991), p. 187. 95 96 97 See ibid., p. 279. Ibid., p. 218. Ibid., p. 163. Ibid., p. 164. Ibid., p. 166.

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quintessential example – in fact, the causal foundation – of the culture of China’s agrarian civilization is located in peasant “character” or “quality,” responsible for holding China back: In the vast, backward rural areas, there are common problems in peasant quality (suzhi) such as a weak spirit of enterprise, a very low ability to accept risk, a deep psychology of dependency ( yilai sixiang) and a strong sense of passive acceptance of fate … It’s not the lack of resources, nor the level of GNP, nor the speed [of development], but rather this deficiency in the human quality that is the essence of this so-called notion of “backwardness.” And the decline in the quality of the general population is caused precisely by the rapid increases in its numbers. This truly is an agricultural civilization caught in a vicious cycle.99

Discussions of peasant “quality” in Heshang were adopted from Wang Xiaoqiang and Bai Nanfeng.100 Suzhi, the idea of peasant “dependency” ( yilaixing), and being “fettered” (shufu) to the land, were key formulations.101 This continued dependence of rural populations on the state, according to Heshang, led to the utopianism of the Great Leap Forward and then to famine: “This transition, from economic ‘utopia’ to political crisis, leading ultimately to the historical tragedy of great social turmoil – can we not say that this is the inevitable end of an agricultural civilization?”102 Utopianism signaled that “history cold-heartedly passed” China by.103 Progressive history, in other words, was tied to the technological development of the productive forces and not peasant dynamism or rebellion; any attempt to escape the laws of historical development would invite disaster. As an agrarian civilization, however, China was caught in a cyclical history with no real progress. Commenting on the violence and rebellions that mark a shift from one dynasty to the next, the series stated: “This kind of collapse of the social structure does not possess any ‘revolutionary significance,’ as some theories would have it.” Instead of containing “revolutionary significance,” as Mao maintained, peasant rebellions “have time after time unfeelingly destroyed the accumulated wealth of production.”104 99

100

101

102 104

Ibid., pp. 169–70, translation slightly modified: the original translation translates suzhi as “makeup.” At times almost word-for-word, as Richard Bodman and Pin P. Wan point out in their annotation of the translated script. Ibid., pp. 70, 167. Attachment to the land, considered the “destiny” of Chinese agrarian civilization because of its geographical nature, is the main theme of the second episode of Heshang, “Destiny” (mingyun), written by Wang Luxiang. 103 Su and Wang, Deathsong of the River, p. 171. Ibid. See ibid., pp. 187–8. The series quickly linked this “turmoil” to the violence of the Cultural Revolution. Ibid., p. 189.

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As Jin Guantao, an editor of the important book series Zouxiang weilai congshu [Moving toward the future] and advisor to Heshang, stated in the series, social upheavals brought about “the long-term stagnation of China’s feudal society.”105 Jin’s argument here takes Dai Yi’s position on peasant war to its extreme. While Dai argued that peasant war could not “change the old mode of production completely,” but only transform certain aspects of it, by the late 1980s Jin argued that peasant rebellions had had an almost wholly negative and stagnant effect on the social and economic development of China.106 In the series, China’s cyclical history is naturalized through the metaphor of the flooding of the Yellow River. Here, the “accumulation of sediment” that causes flooding stands in for the role Chinese peasants played within historical turmoil.107 Beginning with his 1986 Fazhan de zhexue [The philosophy of development], Jin attempted to replace a dialectical understanding of historical development with one based in cybernetic and systems theory, leading to the merging of social science with natural science and a technological model of historical development.108 Liberation of the land-fettered population of China consisted not in peasant rebellion but in facing the ocean and opening to the lessons of seafaring Western civilizations and their science – a task for which only China’s intellectuals were suited, for only they could enter into dialogue with the West. In this narrative of stagnation and liberation, the peasant loses all agency, reduced almost to an inert element of nature – the sediment of earth sinking in the Yellow River – that only science can manage.

Conclusion Throughout the early reform era, historical narrative continued to strongly shape understandings of the peasant. While reform-era formulations were rearticulations of earlier orthodox Marxist and CCP understandings of 105 106 107

108

Ibid., p. 198. Dai, “On Some Theoretical Aspects of the Class Struggle as They Relate to Historical Research,” 66. Su and Wang, Deathsong of the River, p. 192. During the 1980s, the idea that Chinese “feudalism” was stagnant was most famously developed by Jin Guantao and Liu Qingfeng, editors of the Zouxiang weilai congshu [Towards the future] book series that published Wang and Bai’s Furao de pinkun, and by contributors to Heshang. See Jin Guantao and Liu Qingfeng, Xingsheng yu weiji – lun Zhongguo feng jian shehui de chaowending jiegou [Ascendancy and crisis – on the superstable structure of Chinese feudal society] (Changsha: Hunan renmin chubanshe, 1983). Hua Shiping, Scientism and Humanism: Two Cultures in Post-Mao China (1978–1989) (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995), p. 80.

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history and politics, under the new conditions of China’s postsocialist modernization, its reconnection with global capitalism, and the reevaluation of labor power that accompanied it, understandings of the role of the peasant in history were dramatically transformed. The revolutionary nature of the peasant, the very characteristic that made peasants part of “the people” during the revolution and the Maoist era, came to be seen as a sign of their dependency on strong dictatorial leaders and their propensity towards a dangerous populism. The dialectical class image of the peasant was slowly replaced by a static understanding in which the peasant lost historical and political agency. Under the growing hegemony of economic analysis and evaluation as the 1980s progressed, the petty-bourgeois nature of the peasantry, based on its ownership of the means of production, shifted from a negative to a positive characteristic. Thus, while the peasant was to have no agency in historical change – and was no longer considered a revolutionary subject – under these new conditions the peasant could become an agricultural entrepreneur. This bifurcated image of stagnation and liberation, then, became the foundation for postsocialist Chinese liberalism, and the Chinese peasant was its foil. During the 1990s, the Marxist and Maoist notion of the dual nature of the peasant continued to be transformed by Chinese intellectuals, reaching its most extreme form, a split between the dependent peasant and the independent citizen farmer, a static dichotomy of bad backward peasant and good entrepreneurial citizen farmer. Peasants were no longer revolutionary subjects, but formed the social foundation of a dangerous populist politics that led China into stagnation. As we will see in the next chapter, for some Chinese liberals, such as Qin Hui, the positive image of peasant potentiality implied that they were no longer peasants; they had the potential to become farmers, for only farmers had the qualities of entrepreneurship and independence necessary to modernity. By the late 1990s, however, liberals increasingly came to see the rural reforms as an incomplete liberation, in need of further development so as to break the fetters tying the peasants to the land, and thus allowing peasants to become citizens. It is within the political–economic context of China’s shift to the marketization of labor power, and increasingly land, that any discussion of the meaning of the categories “peasant” and “farmer” in China – and their adequacy to the present moment – must take place. Yet the displacement of a class understanding of peasants hampers contemporary Chinese discussions on the position of peasants in Chinese society. Earlier Marxist theorization suggested that the petty-bourgeois peasantry has a tendency to

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class differentiation – into poor landless peasants and richer rural landowners – one that does not straightforwardly lead to a modern citizenry. While the lack of full property rights over land is an impediment to class differentiation, such differentiation is underway in the contemporary Chinese countryside – a phenomenon for which the blanket term “farmer” is clearly inadequate.109 109

Qian Forrest Zhang and John A. Donaldson, “The Rise of Agrarian Capitalism with Chinese Characteristics: Agricultural Modernization, Agribusiness and Collective Land Rights,” The China Journal, no. 60 (2008), 25–47.

chapter 2

From peasant to citizen: liberal narratives on peasant dependency

Qin Hui, an agrarian historian at Tsinghua University, tells a story of a near future in which the peasantry disappears and transforms into citizen farmers. In Qin Hui’s vision, the reform era began a process through which the peasantry could finally find liberation from state dependency, although the risky process was replete with potential dead ends and dangerous populist politics. This chapter focuses on the work of Qin Hui in order to trace the development of liberal narratives of peasant dependency and liberation in the 1990s. An investigation of Qin Hui’s political stance in the 1990s shows a more sophisticated modernization narrative about the peasantry than that which emerged in the 1980s. Although the peasant was still a figure of dependency within Qin’s developed historical narrative – in his work, in fact, the peasant was defined by dependency – he stressed a more positive transformative politics in which peasants become citizen farmers, often in conflict with the state. Over the course of the reform era, Chinese liberals increasingly came to define themselves as exterior to the official or state reformist discourse, arguing that the modernization process needed to be deepened. Yet the liberal narrative was also always complicit in many of the reformist party’s formulations, and the role of the peasantry was crucial to both liberal and state narratives, each of which held the peasantry responsible for providing a foundation for an authoritarian state mode. In what follows, I investigate the crucial role of the peasantry in the theory of modernization Qin Hui developed during the 1990s, in order to explicate the key categories of Chinese liberalism: modernization, the peasant/farmer dichotomy, populism, and primitive accumulation. These categories mediated a renewed relationship between history and politics, one that maintained the teleology of orthodox Marxism while replacing its emphasis on social contradiction with a struggle for individual liberation from collectivities, mainly the state. 47

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This shift from an orthodox historical materialism to a modernization narrative – most fully realized by Qin Hui – was based on viewing the peasant as a figure of liberation from traditional and populist collectivities, with reform-era decollectivization forming its political and economic background. Under those conditions, it became easy to see the state and the commune system as fetters on the development of the rural economy. Liberation was imagined as the process of peasants becoming entrepreneurial citizen farmers. Finally, I turn to a discussion of the politics enabled and occluded by this liberal narrative. By positing populism as an irrational politics, the liberal narrative about the peasantry coincided with the depoliticizing tendency of the reformist CCP.

Peasants and the history of modernization Although the narrative Qin Hui developed in the post-Tiananmen period was founded upon categories that became dominant during the 1980s, it was a much more sophisticated liberation narrative than those put forward in that earlier period. While the peasant still remained a negative figure of dependency, in Qin’s 1990s narrative, this figure moved to the center of a story of liberation, in which peasants would break free of dependency and become full citizens. Rather than presenting peasants as the cause of Maoist voluntarism, Qin Hui helped to shift the emphasis. He presented Maoist policies and the commune as the cause of the peasantry being tied to the land; thus, the peasant was seen to be in a position akin to that of a feudal serf. Here, civil society, the market, and human rights were refigured as liberating social forces that were breaking state interference and totalitarianism, and the greatest threat to these emerging freedoms was a populist politics that could derail the modernization process. Qin’s first experience with peasants occurred during the nine years he spent in the countryside in the 1970s as a sent-down youth, when his political transformation from a rebel Red Guard to a liberal began.1 In 1978, Qin left the countryside and began graduate studies at Lanzhou University under Zhao Lisheng, who was discussed in Chapter 1. In his early academic career, Qin studied peasant wars and land-ownership systems, and like Zhao renarrated rural rebellion as a conflict between the state and the peasantry, instead of between classes. According to Qin, “the division between the authorities and the powerless was primary, and the division between those with property (or a lot of property) and those 1

Qin Hui, “Dividing the Big Family Assets,” New Left Review, no. 20 (2003), 83–110.

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without (or those with little) was secondary.”2 Furthermore, he argued, it was only after the disappearance of the authoritarian status society and the emergence of modern civil society that “class” ( jieji) differences appeared. Much of Qin’s early work delved into the history of the socio-political conditions in the Guanzhong region of Shaanxi, where Qin found a peasantry that lacked both a “‘petty-bourgeois’ nature” and intermediate community self-governing structures that could mediate their relationship with the autocratic state, meaning that they were directly dependent upon traditional state authority. Qin theorized this “Guanzhong model” as “feudalism without landlords.”3 Qin maintained that early on he was mostly interested in a detailed investigation of historical problems such as this and not in ideological or political issues, and it was only in the 1990s that he turned to more contentious political matters.4 Yet clearly, even in his early career, Qin’s basic modernization narrative was already taking shape, and from the beginning of his academic work he was moving away from orthodox historical materialism. Qin’s modernization narrative was more complicated than that of Heshang, although there were still broad similarities. For Qin, there were two key aspects to modernization. First, modernization was a shift from community to society.5 A community was a natural collective “based on habitual coercive power,” not on the “sum of the individual wills of its members.” In a community, individuals were dependent on the collective. A society, conversely, was based on the will and thinking of individuals, and was marked by the independence of individuals from each other.6 Modernization, therefore, was a progressive narrative in which individuals broke free from the dominance of the community and willfully joined together to form a society. This transformation was also expressed as a shift

2

3 5

6

Qin Hui, “Qiusuo yu ‘zhuyi’ yu ‘wenti’ jian” [Exploring the space between “ism” and “problem”], in Qin Hui, ed., Qin Hui wenxuan: wenti yu zhuyi [Qin Hui collection: problems and isms] (Changchun chubanshe, 1999), p. 441. 4 Ibid., p. 442. Ibid. Qin references Ferdinand Tönnies in this construction. Ferdinand Tönnies (1855–1936), a German sociologist who co-founded the German Society for Sociology with Max Weber and Georg Simmel, distinguished the types of social organization that Qin Hui discusses. Gemeinschaft (community in English and gongtongti in Qin’s Chinese rendering) was a community in which members’ will was subordinated to a group with strong social bonds; Gesellschaft (society in English and shehui in Chinese), on the other hand, refers to social groups with a purposeful or instrumental goal for the individuals that join them. Qin Hui, “Cong chuantong minjian gongyi zuzhi dao xiandai ‘disan bumen’: ZhongXi gongyi shiye shi bijiao de ruogan wenti” [From traditional non-government welfare organizations to the modern ‘third sector’: several issues on the comparison of Chinese and Western welfare history], in Chuantong shi lun (Shanghai: Fudan daxue chubanshe, 2003), pp. 130–1.

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from fixed statuses to class mobility. A second aspect of modernization was the separation between the public (the state) and the private (civil society based on the individual and an economy based on private property).7 Civil society variously referred to the economy, enterprises, or individuals, while it was founded upon private property and a free market; Qin also employed this term to designate modern society in general. For Qin Hui, the determining factor that qualified one as a peasant was found in the relationship between collectivities and individuals. To break from being a peasant meant to become independent of large collectivities, the most important of which was the state. Peasants were dependent on collectives and were part of organic communities, whereas farmers (zhongtianren or nongchangzhu) were independent producers who were citizens of a society.8 Land ownership became the primary way to distinguish farmers from peasants. Qin had to reference the English words for farmer and peasant to make this distinction clear, as the Chinese terms lacked these distinctions. In fact, for Qin the term “nongmin” (which Qin usually translated as “peasant” and not “farmer”) was sometimes used as a generic category that simply stood in opposition to the category “citizen” (gongmin or shimin). In Qin’s writings, “peasant” was not simply a category pointing to an empirical social group, but often operated as a trope for people dependent on collectives, a position which would be eliminated in the modernization process. In this way, even city people could be understood as “peasants” through their position of dependence on the urban danwei system, the work unit system in which housing, schooling, and food were determined by one’s unit. Beijing and Shanghai, likewise, were “no more than ‘especially big villages’ and nothing more.”9 While in this formulation the peasant was somewhat abstracted from the rural, the main opprobrium of this critique was still directed at rural dwellers. As Qin stated: China’s so-called nongmin problems of past and present have all been peasant problems and not farmer problems, and were not merely about those who cultivated the land … Particularly after 1949, the little citizen status that existed was gradually eliminated, “city people” were more 7

8

9

Qin Hui, “Yi zhiyuan qiu gongyi: Zhongguo disanbumen de chengzhang licheng” [Using aspirations to seek public welfare: the maturation process of China’s third sphere], in Si wu ya, xing you zhi [Thinking without borders, acting with control] (Tianjin renmin chubanshe, 2002), pp. 138–40. The Chinese category “nongmin” can be translated as “peasant” or “farmer” in English, although it is usually translated as “peasant.” In his reverse translation of the category “nongmin” into “peasant,” Qin Hui reinforces the negative connotations often associated with the English term “peasant.” Qin, “Qiusuo yu ‘zhuyi’ yu ‘wenti’ jian,” p. 460.

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peasantization (or non-citizenization) than country people.” [sic: Qin appears to mean “peasantized” and “de-citizenized.” All italicized words in English in the original.]10

Modernization, therefore, consisted of the transformation of “peasant states, agricultural civilizations, and traditional societies” into “citizen states (shimin [gongmin] guojia), industrial civilizations, and modern societies,” a process in which everybody, whether they lived in the city or the countryside, had to be transformed from “peasant to citizen.”11 A farmer’s work, unlike that of a peasant, was an “occupation of a free citizen” (ziyou gongmin de zhiye).12 The difference between a “peasant society” (nongmin shehui) and a “citizen society” (shimin [gongmin] shehui), however, was not distinguished in terms of occupation; instead, it was marked by the difference between a “status community” (shenfenxing gongtongti) and the “standard of individuality” (geren benwei).13 In this teleology, the “peasant” stood in for the premodern, whereas the citizen and, likewise, the city, were the modern:14 In terms of their own rights, peasants need to see both justice and the benefits of reform; in terms of historical development, they need to transform themselves from “peasants” to “farmers.” This is not a question of public versus private ownership, or “privatization into big” versus “privatization into small.” More accurately, it is a process from non-freedom to freedom – in Marx’s words, from the “dependence” to the “independence of Man.”15

Equally, to break with the fixed status of peasant implied a historical break with traditional society; it was through this logic that Qin linked up Maoism with the premodern. Maoist communes also formed part of a 10

11 12

13 14

15

Qin Hui, “Lun xiandai sixiang de gongtong dixian,” [The common baseline of modern thought], 2005, www.china-review.com/fwsq/qh.asp, accessed Dec. 17, 2005. Qin noted that this was the opposite of the situation in the West. In the West, city people were more independent than country people. After 1949, or at least by 1956 in China, city people were less independent than country people. See Qin Hui, “Nongmin wenti: shenme ‘nongmin’? Shenme ‘wenti’?” [Peasant question: what “peasant”? what “question”?], in Qin Hui wenxuan: wenti yu zhuyi (Changchun chubanshe, 1999), p. 23, and “Qiusuo yu ‘zhuyi’ yu ‘wenti’ jian,” p. 460. Qin, “Lun xiandai sixiang de gongtong dixian.” Qin, “Nongmin wenti,” p. 18. For the peasant/farmer dichotomy, also see Qin Hui and Su Wen, Tianyuanshi yu kuangxiangqu – Guanzhong moshi yu qianjindai shehui de zai renshi [Pastorals and rhapsodies: a new understanding of the Guanzhong model and premodern societies] (Beijing: Zhongyang bianyi chubanshe, 1996), pp. 23–4. Qin, “Nongmin wenti,” p. 23. Qin and Su, Tianyuanshi, p. 24. Peasant studies (nongminxue), according to Qin, was a “sociology of the premodern or a study of premodern social transformation.” Qin, “Dividing the Big Family Assets,” 101.

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“great community” (da gongtongti) that had to be broken up in the process of modernization. Since the “peasantry” was defined as “the dependent nature of people living in an agrarian civilization as a member of a community,”16 Maoist society was an “agrarian” one and not “modern civilization.” This formulation was notably similar to that of the early 1980s, in which Maoism was defined as a form of “agrarian socialism” (nongye shehuizhuyi).17 As Qin stated, “pre-reform Chinese society, seriously speaking, did not have a distinction between the peasantry and the citizen, only different rank statuses within a peasant society.”18 Only with the reform era and the institution of a market economy, according to Qin, did China begin to have citizens; only then did the Chinese begin to truly break with traditional society. The category “great community” returns us to the debate on AMP, a category that was used in 1980–1 to critique Maoism with the participation of Qin Hui’s teacher, Zhao Lisheng. According to Timothy Brook, the category “gongtongti (community)” was probably translated into Chinese in the 1930s from the Japanese kyodotai, used in Japanese discussions on the AMP. Zhao used the category when discussing the AMP in the 1980s.19 While Qin’s historical narrative sounds very much like a description of the AMP, he rarely used the term, and often continued to employ the term “feudalism” instead. Yet Qin clearly wanted to move away from a focus on terms like “feudalism” and “Asiatic mode of production.” The concept of “feudalism” in particular was problematic for Qin, who noted it was not simply a matter of its mistaken equivalence between feudal France and the Chinese imperial system, but rather that the whole theory of feudal relations in China, with its focus on the landlord–tenant relationship, was at issue.20 Nonetheless, its equivocal usage by Qin was a sign of his shift away from historical materialism towards a modernization narrative, as well as a shift away from viewing the social nature of production as determinative of 16 17

18 19

20

Qin, “Nongmin wenti,” p. 18. Wang Xiaoqiang, “Nongye shehuizhuyi pipan.” In fact, Qin was to use the “agrarian socialism” formulation in his debates with the new left. See Qin Hui, “‘Li tu bu li xiang’: Zhongguo xiandaihua de dute moshi? Ye tan ‘xiangtu Zhongguo chongjian’ wenti” [“Leaving the land but not the village”: a unique model of Chinese modernization? Also discussing the issue of “reconstructing Chinese native land”], Dongfang, no. 1 (1994). Qin, “Nongmin wenti,” p. 18. Brook, “Introduction,” p. 33, n. 51. For Zhao, see “The Well-Field System in Relation to the Asiatic Mode of Production,” p. 68. Qin, “Qiusuo yu ‘zhuyi’ yu ‘wenti’ jian,” p. 443. Qin largely used “feudal society” ( feng jianshehui ) as a synonym for “premodern society” (qianjindaishehui ) (Qin and Su, Tianyuanshi, p. 25).

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political relations. On the contrary, state power and state ideology became the prime subject of investigation, and the economic sphere receded into the background. Although Qin viewed the rural communes of the Maoist era as a reiteration of the “great community,” he was careful to distinguish the trajectory of “traditional” Chinese society from European feudalism. First, the peasant played a more active and central role in the Chinese case. With the beginning of the reform process, Qin noted, the break from the “great community” first occurred in the countryside, with peasants separating from the commune system to become independent farmers. Here the bifurcated image of the peasant so prevalent in 1980s liberalism was transformed. In Qin’s formulation, the peasantry became an active agent that had made several attempts at breaking with the “great community.” The 1949 revolution was one attempt, only to be reversed when peasants were collectivized by the CCP. The decollectivization that first started in Xiaogang village,21 Anhui Province, according to Qin, began a process of spontaneous acts by peasants, producing in succession household farming, the Township Village Enterprises, and the “peasant worker tide” (mingong chao) in which peasant temporary workers migrated to the cities. The Chinese state acted in response to these spontaneous acts of independence.22 In actively confronting the limits of the “great community,” the peasantry equally approached the horizon of its own existence as a distinct historical phenomenon. Second, according to Qin, premodern Europe was characterized by dependence upon “natural small communities,” whereas in traditional China small communities were underdeveloped due to the dominance of the “great community” of the Chinese state. During European modernization, in which the bond to the small community was broken, citizens formed an alliance with the kingly power against the dominance of the small community.23 During Chinese modernization, by contrast, Qin saw the need for a different alliance, one between the small community and the citizen against the “great community” of the state24 – echoing an argument 21

22 23

24

Xiaogang cun, a village in Anhui Province, was supposedly the first site in which villagers secretly decollectivized in the late 1970s. It became a symbol of liberation for most liberal intellectuals in China. Qin, “Nongmin wenti,” p. 15. Qin Hui, “‘Da gongtongti benwei’ yu chuantong Zhongguo shenhui (xia)” [“The great community standard” and traditional Chinese society], Shehuixue yanjiu, no. 4 (1999), 114, and “Nongmin wenti,” p. 22. Qin, “‘Da gongtongti benwei’,” 114, “Qiusuo yu ‘zhuyi’ yu ‘wenti’ jian,” p. 458.

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by Zhao Lisheng during the 1950s concerning historical rural class coalitions against the “absolutist imperial state.”25 According to Qin, the Township Village Enterprises (TVEs), which grew to be an important part of the Chinese economy by the 1980s, and even rural enterprises that were grounded in family ties, should be thought of as phenomena of “the early stages of modernization with Chinese characteristics,” as they were an instance of the “citizen and small community alliance” that Qin theorized as necessary to China’s modernization.26 The use of the category “great community,” therefore, complicated a unilinear conception of history, marking a difference with European social development. Nonetheless, Qin still viewed the modernization process in a strongly teleological way, pointing towards a convergence upon a singular modernity. Whereas different nations might take slightly different paths to modernity, the end point was the same: a democratic society of individuals with a market economy and private property. At the same time, the urban and the rural were understood to converge as people became independent of the “great community” as autonomous operators within the market; peasants, in other words, would become citizens. There was no place in this schema for alternative modernities, although there was no guarantee of successful modernization, either. Furthermore, this convergence implied a temporal disjunction: China was behind the West and had to catch up in the modernization process – China was denied coevalness with the West, to use Johannes Fabian’s term.27 In this sense, Qin’s position was a continuation of the liberalism of the 1980s: the West remained the measure of modernity, and the peasant was the sign of China’s difference and backwardness. Modernization meant breaking with the time of the peasant and joining the present, the time of the West. Qin’s narrative hence encompassed the contradictions of historicism.28 Historicism can be understood as emphasizing the need to place social, economic, and cultural phenomena within their proper temporal context. Yet it also entails a developmentalism in which phenomena are understood within the context of a unified developmental process. Qin’s attempt to 25 26 27

28

Zhao and Gao, Zhongguo nongmin zhanzheng shi lunwen ji, p. 14. Qin, “Qiusuo yu ‘zhuyi’ yu ‘wenti’ jian,” p. 458. Johannes Fabian, Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983). For a discussion of historicism and its tensions, see Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton University Press, 2000), especially pp. 22–3.

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place the figure of the peasant at the center of his modernization narrative likewise contained these tensions. On the one hand, Qin attempted to accent the historical particularity and complexity of peasant history in China, marking out its difference from European developments. On the other hand, Qin ultimately reinserted Chinese particularity into a Eurocentric universal narrative of modernization: the peasant is the past, the West is the future, politics is the name of the tortuous route between the two. Most importantly, it was the figure of the peasant – the time of the peasant, even – that allowed Qin both to mark out China’s particularity and to give it a place within universal history.

Populism and the politics of modernization Arguing that Marx thought the core of the “democratic revolution” consisted in people gaining an independent character and independent rights, Qin suggested that the political task for Marxists operating within pre-capitalist societies was to liberate peasants from dominant collectivities to become independent producers with property rights and the freedom to circulate commodities. In this narrative, a sophisticated development of the early reform-era critique of Maoism as a form of feudalism or agrarian socialism, Maoism was an attempt to construct communes without taking the intermediate step of creating the condition for a citizen farmer independent of the state, that is of breaking the peasant from the “great community.” According to Qin’s logic, skipping this intermediate step – one that corresponded to capitalism, a market economy, or civil society – was a reactionary populist political mistake that led to the maintenance within socialism of feudal relations based on extra-economic force. The origins of this populist error lay in the tragic political history of China’s twentieth century. As Zhao Lisheng linked the AMP to the Legalist tradition, so Qin linked the traditional Chinese “great community” to Legalism. For both, Legalism functioned as shorthand for the dominance of the state; in fact, Qin suggested that traditional China was “Confucian on the surface and Legalist on the inside (Ru biao Fa li).”29 Reflecting back on his 1980s work, Qin noted that the Guanzhong model of “feudalism without landlords” was related to the development of that area during the Qin Dynasty (221–206 BCE), when the “Legalist great community standard” (Fajia

29

Qin, “‘Da gongtongti benwei,’” 120.

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dagongtongti benwei) dominated.30 Confucianism, for Qin, was the ideology of the small community, based on the rural household. In contrast to Wu Dakun, who argued that the lineage system (Confucianism) and the big state (Legalism) operated in concert,31 Qin separated the two in order to criticize the politics of twentieth-century China as a modernization process gone awry. This allowed Qin to critique the May Fourth Movement of the late 1910s and early 1920s because it focused its criticism on the Confucianism of the small, and especially rural, community and not on Legalism, the ideology of the “great community.” Qin equally saw the Cultural Revolution as an outcome of this misguided criticism of the Confucianism of the small community. Instead of criticizing Confucianism, Qin argued, revolutionary theorists should have made Legalism the main target. In other words, the entire leftist project of the twentieth century, by attacking Confucianism instead of Legalism, aimed in the wrong direction, and this helped create the conditions for disasters such as the Cultural Revolution.32 Here the position of Qin was different from that of 1980s liberalism in a significant way. During the 1980s, at least up until the 1989 protest movement, Chinese liberalism usually identified itself with the May Fourth tradition. As the reform process progressed, however, liberals increasingly came to criticize earlier radicalism and populism, including the influence of these strains of thought upon the 1989 student movement. Qin’s criticism of May Fourth iconoclasm as having missed its target was an extension of other post-1989 critiques of radicalism. They began with a provocative series of interventions at the end of the 1980s by Yü Ying-Shih, a historian at Princeton University.33 According to Yü, Chinese radicalism emerged out of China’s troubled relationship with the West and came to dominate Chinese thought. This radicalism produced the chaotic politics of modern China. 30

31

32

33

Qin, “Qiusuo yu ‘zhuyi’ yu ‘wenti’ jian,” p. 442. For more on Qin’s interpretation of the “Guanzhong model,” see Qin and Su, Tianyuanshi. See Brugger and Kelly’s discussion of this point, Brugger and Kelly, Chinese Marxism in the Post-Mao Era, p. 24. Legalism, of course, regained some ideological power during the Cultural Revolution, and both Zhao and Qin make this linkage in their discussions as a way to criticize the policies of that period. For Zhao, see Brook, “Introduction,” p. 19. For Qin, see “Da gongtong ti benwei dao gongmin shehui.” Yü Ying-Shih, “Dai cong tou, shoushi jiu shan he” [Picking up the pieces for a new start], Ershiyi shiji, no. 2 (1990), “Zai lun Zhongguo xiandai sixiang zhong de jijin yu baoxiu – da Jiang Yihua xiansheng” [Further thoughts on radicalism and conservatism in modern Chinese intellectual history], Ershiyi shiji, no. 10 (1992). Also see Li and Liu, Gaobie geming: Hui wang ershi shiji Zhongguo.

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The debate on radicalism continued with a special issue of Zhanlüe yu Guanli [Strategy and management] concerning populism. While the concept was always close to the surface in the 1980s discussions, it was not so directly discussed until the 1990s. Sun Liping, a Peking University professor and one of China’s most important sociologists, argued that populism – an anti-elitist politics – shaped the Maoist era, reaching its height during the Cultural Revolution, and was expressed in egalitarian policies.34 Hu Weixi, an intellectual historian at Tsinghua University, traced the development of populism in China from the turn of the twentieth century to the present, stressing the rural roots of this form of “utopian socialism.” As a reaction against capitalist modernization’s deleterious effects upon traditional agrarian social values, populism influenced the introduction of Marxism into China, a country with a social base in the small peasant economy. In the post-1949 period, this influence of “agrarian-utopian socialism” led to the historical errors of the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution.35 Both Sun and Hu saw populism as a continuing danger in the reform era.36 Hu’s treatment of populism was an expression of the orthodox Marxist line on this phenomenon as a danger to proper historical development, a formulation that was to be used in response to Yü Ying-Shih’s totalistic critique of radicalism. According to Fudan University historian Jiang Yihua, Yü’s criticism of land reform and the commune system as expressions of radicalism misunderstood the roots of the problem. Jiang reasoned that those failed movements, as well as Mao’s thought in general, were rooted in an agrarian socialist populism that maintained an old, peasant mode of production. As such, there was nothing radical about them, for they were not truly progressive. In fact, Jiang implied, there was too little radicalism in Chinese history, not too much.37 Qin’s political critique of populism and China’s modernization process was developed through a reflection on the history of the Russian Revolution and the various political stances on the transformation of the peasantry contained within it. Out of a discussion on Lenin and on the 34

35

36

37

Sun Liping, “Pingminzhuyi yu Zhongguo gaige” [Populism and the Chinese reforms], Zhanlüe yu guanli, no. 5 (1994), 3. Hu Weixi, “Zhongguo jinxiandai de shehui zhuanxing yu mincuizhuyi” [Modern Chinese social transformation and populism], Zhanlüe yu guanli, no. 5 (1994). See, especially, 24 and 26. For further discussion of Sun and Hu, see Joseph Fewsmith, China Since Tiananmen: The Politics of Transition, Cambridge Modern China Series (Cambridge University Press, 2001), pp. 153–4. This discussion of Jiang comes from Els Van Dongen, “‘Goodbye Radicalism!’ Conceptions of Conservatism Among Chinese Intellectuals During the Early 1990s” (Unpublished PhD thesis, University of Leiden, 2009), p. 157.

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Russian Revolution – an example of failed modernization – Qin abstracted two conceptual models of modernization, which he called, following Lenin, the Prussian and the American paths.38 The Prussian path was oligarchic, a key example being Peter Stolypin’s reforms in Russia after the 1905 revolution. Stolypin’s policy was to liberalize the economy via the power of the state and to break apart the rural community by force. But this oligarchic path, while it did detach the individual from the traditional community and liberalize the economy, also created an unjust society and a populist backlash. In Qin’s modernization narrative, populism was a reaction, even if an understandable one, to the oligarchic form of modernization, one which maintained dependence upon the “commune” or “community” and blocked the process through which individuals become independent members of a society. This dialectic of oligarchic modernization and populism accounted for both Russian and Chinese departures from the proper course of modernization in the twentieth century. The American path, in contrast, avoided this dialectic, allowing peasants free to leave the great community and enter the market and civil society. Qin compared Stolypin’s reforms to the oligarchic modernization path chosen by the CCP after the suppression of the social movements of 1989 and the resumption of market reforms after 1992. Likewise, according to Qin, the Bolsheviks, who originally followed Marx in arguing that the “peasants should have the freedom to leave the commune, the freedom to enter the market,”39 were caught between Stolypin’s oligarchic reforms and the populist reaction. In fact, according to Qin, Lenin’s political confrontation with populism was the primary reason that the Marxist stance on the peasant went astray. Qin summarized Marx’s original dual understanding of the peasant as both revolutionary and conservative in this way: “‘revolution’ implies the liberation of the individual from the fetters of the community,” whereas peasant conservatism “is expressed in its dependence on the shelter of the community”40 – a unity of “fetters and protection,” in other words.41 Moreover, the “dual nature” of the peasantry needed to be understood in its proper historical time, according to Qin. Recreating his teacher Zhao 38

39

40 41

For Qin’s discussion of Lenin and populism, see Qin and Su, Tianyuanshi, pp. 35–41, and Qin, “Dividing the Big Family Assets.” Qin Hui, “Zhongguo zhuangui zhi lu de qianjing” [The prospects of China’s transition road], Zhanlüe yu guanli, no. 56 (2003). Qin, “Qiusuo yu ‘zhuyi’ yu ‘wenti’ jian,” p. 450. Qin and Su, Tianyuanshi, p. 191.

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Lisheng’s transformation of this problem from the 1980s, Qin argued that Marx and Engels’ political logic, in which as property owners peasants were conservative and as laborers they were revolutionary, only operated under capitalist conditions. The former tendency would side with the bourgeoisie to protect property relations and the latter would side with the proletariat to overcome them. Under pre-capitalist conditions, however, such a reading was anachronistic and populist; in fact, under such conditions the tendencies would reverse – with property owners progressively supporting social change and the rural poor conservatively defending their dependency on the community and the state.42 Qin contended that the Soviet nationalization of land was not a truly progressive policy so much as a reaction to specific political conditions. A genuine modernizing policy – the American path – would mean detaching individuals from the traditional community and allowing the free play of market relations. Nationalization signified a historical anachronism – the “resurrection of the peasant commune.”43 Theoretically, Qin saw himself as returning to Marx’s original stance on the peasant.44 In fact, Qin argued that it was exactly through a confrontation with the peasant question that Marxism and Marx’s conceptualization of feudalism and modernization were distorted. Qin counterposed Marx’s concept of feudalism and modernization (liberation of individuals from dependency on the great feudal community) to the “peasants’ concept of feudalism” (in which the good rural masses are exploited by the evil greedy elite). According to Qin, the long confrontation with the peasant in revolutionary practice shifted the Soviets from the orthodox Marxist to the peasant political conception of feudalism and liberation.45 For the Soviet party, an ahistorical populism was the result; peasant consciousness was the cause.

42 43

44

45

Ibid., p. 196. Ibid., p. 40. It should be noted that Qin’s own historicization of imperial Chinese society differed significantly from the social analysis foundational to Lenin’s political argument. Lenin’s politics was grounded in a materialist analysis of feudal Russian society that stresses the importance of rural class differentiation for the development of capitalist society. As we saw above, Qin’s analysis of Chinese society, in contrast, stressed the importance of state–society antagonism while dismissing rural class differentiation as an important factor in historical development. It was exactly his foregrounding of rural class differentiation that allowed Lenin to critique the populists, who posited a rural social unity under attack from the outside by market forces. See Henry Bernstein and Terence Byres, “From Peasant Studies to Agrarian Change,” Journal of Agrarian Change 1, no. 1 (2001), 13. Qin, “Qiusuo yu ‘zhuyi’ yu ‘wenti’ jian,” pp. 449–50. For a more in-depth discussion of Marx, see Qin and Su, Tianyuanshi, pp. 29–34. Qin and Su, Tianyuanshi, pp. 33–41.

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In opposition to both sides of the oligarchy–populism dialectic, Qin argued, stood a social democratic politics. Social democracy created a proper, rational relationship between history and politics, in which status communities would be replaced with societies of individuals. If the Maoist era was a populist aberration, a sidetrack from the main line of modernization, then the reform era was a potential escape route from historical anachronism, although it had its traps, too. And this was where Qin targeted the main force of his critique. For modernization to be successful, it had to avoid the dialectic of oligarchic modernization and populist reaction. Here, in his assault on the Stolypin character of post-1992 reforms in China, Qin’s critique of the top-down reform process was sharpest.46

Primitive accumulation This dialectic of oligarchic modernization and populism shaped liberal views of the contemporary relationship between the state and the economy. Building on early reform-era narratives, 1990s liberals argued that China’s modernization process was incomplete. In the terms posited by Qin Hui, the Legalist “great community” still maintained its dominance and the people their dependency. According to liberal intellectuals during the 1990s, the continuation of a dominant “great community” meant that China’s economic system was characterized by extra-economic force, or “primitive accumulation.” China was not a modern, capitalist society, for the state dominated society, and state domination was a characteristic of a feudal or Asiatic mode of production. In other words, for 1990s Chinese liberalism, the category primitive accumulation played a similar role to that played by feudalism in the 1980s. It enabled a particular politics of reform: the deepening of market reforms. The category of primitive accumulation facilitated the argument that the problems of the reform process were not the result of too much reform, but of too little. Capitalism, defined as accumulation through the market economy as compared to through the use of extra-economic force, was not the cause of inequality, but rather an opening to its solution.

46

Qin, for example, was one of the first to warn of the corrupt form that the new stock market instituted at the time took, calling it a “Prussian–Tsarist model.” See Qin Hui, writing under the pen-name Bian Wu, “Weixian de ‘di yi ji huojian’: Pulushi – shahuang Eguo shi bu neng jiu Zhongguo” [A dangerous “booster rocket” for economic take-off: the Prussian–Tsarist model is no answer for China], Ershiyi shiji, no. 18 (1993). See also discussion of this article in the Introduction to Chaohua Wang, ed. One China, Many Paths (London: Verso, 2003), p. 24.

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In reform-era China there were three general usages of the term “primitive accumulation” ( yuanshi jilei), all of them pointing to extramarket accumulation. First, in the media and by some mainstream economists, it was used as a positive, or at least necessary, stage in the reform era. For the market economy to operate, capital must initially be accumulated by entrepreneurs. Second, it was used by liberals as a negative term for an incorrect and not fully modern model of development – a detour on the road to modernization, and one that might cause a populist reaction. Thus it was used by liberals to critique the way the developing economy was warped by power and corruption so that “true” capitalist markets could not come into existence. Third, within left-leaning postsocialist discourse, it was used to discuss the transfer of wealth from the countryside to the city for the purpose of industrialization beginning in the mid 1950s – “primitive socialist accumulation.” It is less the point of this section to ask which version is correct, or more correctly Marxist, than to mark out the differing politics of these varying conceptions; however, the translation and transformation of Marx’s concept is clearly an issue. How did these different conceptualizations enable different political stances? Within what historical narratives were they enmeshed? And what was excluded by these different definitions? A central figure in promoting the use of the category of primitive accumulation was Wen Tiejun, an agricultural economist and dean at Renmin University, for Wen helped to drive both the first and third formulations of this category from the late 1980s on. As we will see in Chapter 4, Wen’s transformation from a market economist to a leftleaning critic of rural policies was central to the transformation of rural understandings in the late 1990s, and his use of the category primitive accumulation was central to this shift. Through an investigation of the growing private economy in Wenzhou in the late 1980s, Wen introduced the category to draw a distinction between the industrialization process during the Maoist era, during which the state drove the primitive accumulation of industrial capital, and what he called a “process of nongovernmental primitive accumulation of capital” during the reform era.47

47

In the article Wen called the first process “state primitive accumulation of industrial capital” (guojia gongye ziben yuanshijilei ). See Wen Tiejun, “Minjian ziben yuanshi jilei yu zhengfu xingwei: Wenzhou diaocha de lilun tuiduan” [Non-state capital primary accumulation and government action: theoretical conclusions of Wenzhou investigation], in Wen Tiejun, ed., Women daodi yao shenme? [What do we want?] (Beijing: Huaxia chubanshe, 2004), pp. 59–60.

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In Wen’s theoretical formulation, primitive accumulation was largely reduced to the necessary accumulation of capital in the early stages of industrialization, which in Wenzhou came about through the selfexploitation of household labor within a market economy in the reform era. His application of the term to the Wenzhou situation certainly broadened the meaning of the category: “primitive” simply came to be a term implying the early stage of industrialization, and the theoretical distinction between primitive accumulation and capitalist accumulation in a market economy was vague at best. In addition, its role in producing the proletariat by separating them from the means of production was not at issue, and in most Chinese discourse surrounding the category from that time forward, this important aspect of the Marxist concept typically has been elided. This positive usage of the category as necessary for industrialization during both the Maoist era and the reform era, however, was unique to Wen at the time. While early on the category was used in a positive sense by mainstream economists to denote the necessary initial accumulation of capital that would instigate a proper capitalist accumulation process, it took on more importance within intellectual debate in the critique of mainstream economists put forward by He Qinglian – the second usage listed above.48 Qin Hui’s Introduction to He Qinglian’s book Modernization’s Pitfalls focused directly on the category “primitive accumulation,” which He made so much use of in her criticism of the reform process and corruption.49 The book argued that China’s economy was not a true market economy, as it was characterized by the intervention of power or extra-economic force.50 Without democracy and the separation of state power from the economic field, both He and Qin argued, power was “marketized” (quanli de 48

49

50

He Qinglian, who spent seven years working in rural China after the Cultural Revolution, was an editor at the Shenzhen Legal Daily until she was demoted for her criticism of contemporary China’s social problems. She finally left China in 2001, under pressure from the government. The book was originally published in Hong Kong and later in the mainland. The Hong Kong version was titled Zhongguo de xianjing [China’s pitfalls], and contained introductions by both Qin Hui and Zhu Xueqin, a liberal professor of history at Shanghai University; the mainland version was titled Xiandaihua de xianjing [Modernization’s pitfalls] (Beijing: Jinri Zhongguo chubanshe, 1998). Neither Qin Hui’s nor Zhu Xueqin’s introductions to the book were included in the edition printed on the mainland. Qin Hui’s original Introduction, “Shehui gongzheng yu xueshu liangxin” [Social justice and scholarly conscience], cut from the mainland edition of the book, was printed as Qin Hui, “Shehui gongzheng yu xueshu liangxin,” Tianya, no. 4 (1997), 4–9. The same issue also contained a version of He’s Preface to the book, entitled “Xueshu paomo yu guoqing yanjiu” [Scholarly bubbles and studies of national conditions] (Tianya [1997], 10–13). Zhu’s Introduction appeared as “Qiaomenzhe de shengyin” [The sound of a door knocker], Tianya, no. 2 (1998), 130–3. He Qinglian, Xiandaihua de xianjing, p. 5.

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shichanghua) and people in positions of power were able to “plunder” public wealth.51 This plunder, according to both scholars, was a form of primitive accumulation, in which power played a greater role in the allocation of resources than market forces. Qin’s theoretical and historical discussion of primitive accumulation in particular helped clarify the increasingly divergent political stances of the liberals and the new left. As time went on, liberals became more and more critical of the new left, and their criticisms of the mainstream economists became more muted. Left-leaning intellectuals, in contrast, increasingly argued that a market free from the intervention of power was a myth that undermined the attainment of social justice, and that what was needed was democratic restraint or containment of the market. Nonetheless, He and Qin’s use of the category “primitive accumulation” was to become a crucial category for the liberal side of the debate. According to Qin, the conceptual chaos surrounding the use of the term “primitive accumulation” in China, including its use as a positive term, was the result of the common belief in China that Marx saw primitive accumulation as the beginning period of capitalism, and in reform-era China, therefore, primitive accumulation would be the natural beginning for a market economy.52 Qin argued that this was a misreading of Marx: “In reality, Marx never saw ‘primitive accumulation’ as an early period of capitalism; he never even used the formulation ‘capitalist primitive accumulation (zibenzhuyi yuanshi jilei)’.”53 Qin contended that under the rubric of primitive accumulation “all sorts of brutal behavior of a noncapitalist nature” was attributed to capitalism, just as in present-day China, much “pernicious behavior” of a non-market nature was being understood as rooted in the market itself.54 A clear separation needed to be drawn between the capitalist market and non-market forms of accumulation. The difference, according to Qin, between capitalist and primitive accumulation, therefore, was qualitative: “so-called capitalist accumulation is the transformation of surplus value into capital within a market mechanism”; in contrast, primitive accumulation operated outside of the market

51

52 53

54

In Heshang, the commingling of markets and power was criticized and linked to the “long tradition of egalitarianism” in China, although the term “primitive accumulation” was not used. Su and Wang, Deathsong of the River, p. 176. Qin, “Shehui gongzheng yu xueshu liangxin,” 4. Ibid. In her book, He Qinglian explicitly stated that she was referring to the “primitive accumulation of capital” (ziben yuanshi jilei ), not “capitalist primitive accumulation” (zibenzhuyi yuanshi jilei ). He Qinglian, Xiandaihua de xianjing, p. 16. Qin, “Shehui gongzheng yu xueshu liangxin,” 4–5.

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mechanism – it was an “extra-economic force.” “Extra-economic force” was “the premise of social relations before the market economy and civil society.”55 By effecting a strict separation of primitive accumulation from capitalist accumulation, Qin placed the blame for social problems and injustice during the reform era outside of the capitalist system – and thus outside the market mechanism itself. Primitive accumulation was a problem of the intervention of power within the economy, and thus any critique of the reforms should be political and not social – a critique of power took precedence. Qin argued, therefore, that capitalism did not require primitive accumulation, and that social problems during the reform era were the result of primitive accumulation, not the market itself. At the basis of Qin’s liberal argument, therefore, was a distinction between substantive equality (which could be deferred) and formal equality (which was the essential foundation of a just society). Substantive equality, here, pointed to the actual material differences between individuals. Formal equality, on the other hand, suggested that within the process of accumulation itself individuals should have equal rights. Qin admitted that the substantive, as opposed to formal, inequalities of capitalism did need to be addressed, but stressed that these needed to be analytically and politically separated from inequality and injustice arising from primitive accumulation, or the interference of power within the market. In other words, the use of extraeconomic force signaled a formal inequality.56 Capitalist accumulation, operating through the market mechanism, would signal a formal equality in terms of its process, although substantive inequality might result; primitive accumulation, on the other hand, was unjust both formally and substantively. By its very premise, therefore, this argument defined state intervention as unjust and the market economy as just.

Conclusion While Qin Hui developed the modernization narrative of the peasant in much greater detail than the liberal thinkers of the 1980s, the representation of the peasant, in his writings, reached a level of abstraction unseen in the earlier decade – the daily life of the peasant as such almost disappeared. The peasant came to be a negative category used to designate a lack of independence and little more. In emergent liberal discourse in the 1980s and 1990s, this lack of independence was understood to be producing a 55

Ibid., 5.

56

Ibid.

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dangerous populist and even fanatical politics, of which the Cultural Revolution was the key example. In the 1988 television series Heshang, an image of the Red Guards chanting for Mao in Tiananmen Square during the Cultural Revolution was superimposed onto an image of a peasant plowing his fields.57 Even though, of course, most Red Guards were of urban origin, their behavior was portrayed here as the inevitable outgrowth of a peasant society. Modernity, by way of contrast, was defined by the independent character of its citizens. At the same time, the peasant still played a crucial role in Qin’s historical and political narrative of modernization. Both mainstream and liberal discussions of the peasant problem in the 1990s linked history and politics in a way that relegated the peasant to an anachronistic vestige of the past dwelling in the present, in need of urbanization, proletarianization, or transformation into a citizen. Contending that the reforms must be deepened, liberal critics of the reform process used the modernization narrative to link history and politics in a way that left the political field severely narrowed and the image of a just society limited to the introduction of human rights and capitalist democracy. This liberal historical narrative of modernization guided and enabled proper politics while limiting the role of social and state force (defined as populism and authoritarianism) to shape the structure of society. Placing the market and private property beyond the scope of politics, the liberal discourse limited its political critique in ways that often silently supported the postsocialist politics of the reform-era Communist Party, in which a limited state was supposed to play an apolitical role in managing the technical modernization of the productive forces. In Qin Hui’s discussion of contemporary China, the “great community” became an ahistorical trope for the state. Here, Qin’s work focused analysis on the state and power in such a way that a social critique of the political economy of the reform era was all but occluded. While the state went about turning labor power into a commodity, liberal intellectuals such as Qin Hui dismantled a class-based critique of society, and they did so largely by renarrativizing the peasant as a dependent figure in need of liberation. By the 1990s, this modernization narrative had become the dominant framework in which to understand the peasant. With respect to concrete policy concerning the peasants, liberals developed two political 57

Richard Bodman, “From History to Allegory to Art: A Personal Search for Interpretation,” in Deathsong of the River: A Reader’s Guide to the Chinese TV Series Heshang (Ithaca: Cornell University, 1991), p. 34.

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points: first, the civil rights of the peasantry had to be protected; second, peasants had to be liberated from their status position as fixed rural residents without full citizenship and property rights – they had to be unfettered from the land. For Qin, this meant liberating peasants from the community and transforming them into rights-bearing citizens. Protecting the civil rights of peasants was increasingly understood in China as a “rights protection movement” (weiquan yundong). Rights were the primary weapon, according to liberals, with which society could protect itself against the state. As rights-bearing citizens, peasants could gain independence from, and protection against, the state, thus becoming farmers in Qin Hui’s terms. In this argument, liberals depended on a foundational split between spheres of politics and economy. Rights protection, for the liberals, was opposed to a populist form of politics, which simply continued the state’s destructive meddling in modernization. Likewise, property rights became a central point of contention for liberals, who argued that peasants needed to be given property rights in order to protect their land against (usually local) state requisitioning. Defending property rights was foundational to the separation of political power from civil society and the economy. In this narrative, clarifying property rights was less a way of improving the economy per se (as mainstream economists argued) and more a form of individual protection from the state. For Qin Hui and other liberals, the separation of politics and the economy was a question of equal civil rights as a protection against power and primitive accumulation. The liberals’ formal separation of politics and economy, therefore, was expressed as a conceptual separation between equal civil rights and unequal economic ends.58 For the liberals, it was only by separating the “extra-economic” from capitalism (i.e. understanding capitalism as an economic system separate from the interference of political power) that capitalism could be thought of as a formally equal system. When discussed in terms of “procedural justice” (guocheng de gongzheng), Qin Hui argued, justice and efficiency were not in conflict; in fact, “procedural justice is exactly the premise of achieving competition, and, sequentially, is also the premise of efficiency.”59 Without procedural justice, a society would have neither justice nor efficiency, according to Qin. Responding to a new-left critique of “putting efficiency first,” Qin argued that the idea of a “‘conflict between justice and efficiency’ could only possess meaning for developed countries in which procedural justice had been attained and the equality of ends had 58

Qin, “Shehui gongzheng yu xueshu liangxin.”

59

Ibid., 8.

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become society’s focus of attention.”60 In a society that had yet to attain even procedural justice, this contradiction was largely meaningless. In order to establish justice in a society such as China, consequently, the first task was establishing formal, procedural justice. Qin Hui argued by analogy that for China, the question of justice was not centered upon whether to break up the assets of the “house” or not – as Qin put it – but upon how to break up and distribute those assets.61 The second key aspect of the liberal politics of the peasant was the narrative of liberation from the land. Whether the rural commune was linked to feudalism, the AMP, agrarian socialism, or the “great community,” these historical categories made possible a renarration of the rural migrant to the cities as a figure of liberation. In fact, within mainstream and liberal discourse this was sometimes called the “third liberation of the peasants.” The first liberation was from the feudal landlord land ownership system ( feng jian dizhu tudi suoyouzhi) during land reform in the 1950s. The second consisted of peasants liberating themselves from the “rigid commune system” – the idea that this was a self-liberation was constant in mainstream literature, as well as in the more critical liberal writings of Qin Hui. During the present, third liberation, the peasants would willingly “merge into the mighty current of Chinese modernization” by seeking work in the cities.62 In Zhongguo nongmin gong kaocha [A study of Chinese migrant labor], ruralto-urban migrant workers were portrayed as breaking from being “fettered” to the land.63 While in this mainstream text they represented the workers as “surplus labor power” within the economy, not as “citizens” as in Qin Hui’s more critical exposition on civil society, both narratives viewed this liberation as a natural and universal process of modernization.64 60 61 62

63

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Ibid. Ibid., 9. A further discussion of the practice of the weiquan movement will take place in Chapter 6. Yu Hong and Ding Chengcheng, Zhongguo nongmin gong kaocha [A study of Chinese migrant labor] (Beijing: Kunlun chubanshe, 2004), p. 24. Notable for its absence in this formulation was the Maoist era of development and rural communization. Zhongguo nongmin diaocha [China peasant survey] similarly viewed the land reform of the early revolution and the institution of the household responsibility system beginning in the late 1970s as “major agricultural revolutions,” and saw the late1970s reforms as constituting a “second liberation.” See Chen and Chun, Zhongguo nongmin diaocha. Yu and Ding, Zhongguo nongmin gong kaocha, pp. 9, 23–4. Also see Deng Hongxun, “Shixian chengzhenhua wei zhu de zhuanyi, di san ci jiefang nongcun laodongli” [Implementing urbanization as a priority for migration: the third liberation of rural labor power], in Zuochu eryuan jiegou, 43–8; Deng Hongxun and Lu Baifu, “Qianyan” [Forward], in Deng Hongxun and Lu Baifu, eds., Zuochu eryuan jiegou: nongmin jiuye chuangye yanjiu [Departing from the binary structure: peasant unemployment pioneering studies] (Beijing: Zhongguo fazhan chubanshe, 2004), pp. 1–4. In other words, as a part of the productive forces. Qin Hui’s formulation was in reality just the flip side of the coin: citizens on the one side, exploited labor on the other.

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Qin’s politics, moreover, took up the tension inherent in the bifurcated representations of the peasant of the 1980s – the tension between the reformist image of rural society as a solved issue and the view of peasantry as the cause of China’s long-term stagnation and backwardness. In the 1990s liberal narrative, the problem of the modernization of rural China had only been partially solved. Another liberation of the peasantry was necessary to build on decollectivization, giving peasants full rights as citizens, in particular the right to own and sell land and the freedom to leave the countryside altogether. Only these, so the narrative went, would allow peasants to become citizens. While Qin’s representation of Chinese history seems very similar to the stagnation of the AMP, he did locate internal actors able to break with this past: rural entrepreneurs, for example. Thus, unlike the crude formulations of the late 1980s, such as those put forward in Heshang, Qin’s more complex view of politics did create a space for political coalitions and action, although it was rather circumscribed. Yet the abstract formal universality of the Chinese liberal political narrative in the 1990s still relied on China joining the stream of history that began in the “ocean civilizations,” to use Heshang’s terms. In an influential study, Merle Goldman presents the political transformation of post-Mao China as a shift from a country dominated by the “comrade” to one in which the “citizen” is paramount.65 Yet by looking at the historical genesis of the category “citizen” within the reform-era Chinese political discourse, the last two chapters have shown that a transformation from “the people” to “the citizen” is a more telling analytic. The shift from the revolutionary category “the people” to “the citizen” was not accomplished through a direct assault on the category “the people”; instead, the emergence of “the citizen” as the dominant political category of the modernization narrative came about through an attack on the peasant as a revolutionary actor. To this day this history affects the tangled politics of the Chinese peasant. The political consequences of the shift from “the people” to “the citizen,” effected through a critique of the peasant as a backward and feudal category, has been both a narrowing of the concept of “the citizen” in Chinese discourse as well as a marginalization of the peasant in contemporary Chinese society. Within this discourse, peasants only begin to become citizens when they act as property holders protesting against 65

Goldman, From Comrade to Citizen: The Struggle for Political Rights in China (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005).

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taxation by the state or the confiscation of their lands – in other words, when they act as members of society in tension with the state. When they demand state protection from the market or a guaranteed livelihood from the state, however, they no longer act as citizens. Peasant collective action that attempts to counteract the operations of the market economy, therefore, is seen as illegitimate and outside the bounds of citizen action, and is often defined as a dangerous populism. In this sense, recent rights and citizenship discourse in China tends to limit proper politics to political speech and practices that maintain the separation of the political and economic spheres, and to place discussions of economic democracy out of their bounds.

chapter 3

Capitalism and the peasant: new-left narratives

The peasant was not consigned to the dustbin of history. In the 1990s, a more positive view appeared that challenged the liberal understanding of the peasant as a dependent social group destined to disappearance. This new view, in which the peasant and rural China emerged as figures of possibility, was linked to an emerging left-leaning political stance that came to be known as the “new left.” Here, in examining the work of Cui Zhiyuan, Gan Yang, Wang Hui, and others on the left, I will argue that rural China played an important role in the development of this new critical perspective on the reform process. The new left investigated the unique institutions of rural China in order to support the argument that China’s political economy has the potential to develop in a different way than capitalism did in the West, and that market economics and neoliberalism would destroy that possibility. The new-left critique broke with determinist and evolutionary readings of history that viewed either marketization or socialism as inevitable. Instead it stressed the contingent nature of history and the importance of active popular power in shaping society and the direction of development. Politics, the new leftists said, governed history more than history determined politics. This critique, which drew on the work of Karl Polanyi, the mid-twentieth-century economic historian, and Fernand Braudel, the French world historian who separated an understanding of capitalism from markets in his work, is a form of postsocialist discourse on social protection (shehui de ziwo baohu) and justice, a discourse critical of marketization. The first wave of reform-era discussion on rural China that emerged during the 1980s, as we have seen, created a bifurcated and contradictory image of the peasantry, seeing it as both the embodiment of backwardness and stagnancy and the agent of the successful reforms that decollectivized rural social life in the early 1980s. A second wave of enthusiastic writings on rural China came to the fore between the mid 1980s and the mid 1990s. 70

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It focused on the newly energetic institutions of the countryside, including village democratic elections and self-rule. Most attention, however, focused on the TVEs, rural enterprises usually operated by the local government or those well-connected to the government, which focused on raising local funds and employing rural surplus labor. In the early 1990s, this somewhat ambiguous collective sector, which promised rural-based industrialization, was one of the most vibrant and fastest-growing in the Chinese economy. As the rural economy grew between 1991 and 1996, TVE employment rose sharply, while farm employment shrank.1 In fact, even as the urban economy slowed from 1994 on, this rural sector continued its rapid growth for two more years.2 For many Chinese intellectuals, the economic success of the TVEs was a sign that the market economy or society was freeing itself from the grasp of state control.3 For some, however, it foretold a specifically Chinese, or at least alternative, road to development, in which rural industry and agriculture would be integrated.4 The latter view became a positive foundation for much of the new-left critique of a market fundamentalism, the idea that the market was a solution to all problems. The new-left vision of rural integration underpinned advocacy of institutional innovations that could help build a just society. The vitality of the rural TVEs thus formed one of the most important examples of social and institutional experimentation for the early new left. The new left emerged out of the relatively unified intellectual field of the 1980s, which was dominated by liberal political approaches. In fact, most of the participants in the late 1990s debates who were active in the 1980s, regardless of their later political stances, would have been considered liberals in the 1980s. The Chinese intellectual field began to divide as the reforms themselves began to run into trouble in the mid to late 1980s, leading to rising social tensions.5 The emergence of the new-left thinkers, 1

2 3

4

5

Albert Keidel, “China’s Economic Fluctuations: Implications for Its Rural Economy” (Washington: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 2007), p. 86. Ibid., pp. 86–7. Bian Wu, “‘Zhidu chuangxin’ haishi zhidu fujiu: zai wen Cui Zhiyuan xiansheng” [“Institutional innovation” or institutional restoration?], Ershiyi shiji, no. 36 (1996); Qin, “‘Li tu bu li xiang.’” For a more recent take on this, see Yasheng Huang, Capitalism with Chinese Characteristics: Entrepreneurship and the State (Cambridge University Press, 2008). Gan Yang, “Xiangtu Zhongguo chongjian yu Zhongguo wenhua qianjing” [Rebuilding rural China and the prospects of Chinese culture], Ershiyi shiji, no. 16 (1993), “‘Jiangcun jingji’ zai renshi” [Reacquainting with “The economy of a Yangtze village”], Dushu, no. 10 (1996); Cui Zhiyuan, “Zhidu chuangxin yu di er ci sixiang jiefang” [Institutional innovation and a second liberation of thought], Ershiyi shiji, no. 24 (1994). As Yu Bing argued in the Introduction to Sichao: Zhongguo “xinzoupai” ji qi yingxiang, the “enlightenment intellectual world” underwent three successive splits: in the late 1980s the

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who were increasingly critical of rising social tensions that they argued were caused by neo-liberal economic policies, and the liberals, who placed the blame instead on the state and the interference of power in the market, finally split the ranks of intellectuals into two increasingly opposed political stances.6 The term “new left” has been, at best, only grudgingly accepted by those to whom it has been applied.7 Those counted as thinkers of the new left do not put forward a consistent set of ideas, and often have only a loose affinity around their criticism of market fundamentalism. “New left” has since the late 1990s become a term that is hard to avoid, however, and thus I continue to use it here, with the proviso that it should not be taken to mean a unitary and coherent body of thought, but rather an emerging discussion of the possibilities of creating a just and equal society as China joins the capitalist world. In other words, the new left offers the possibility of a postsocialist discourse on social justice. The new left first appeared in Cui Zhiyuan’s 1994 call for continued institutional experimentation without fetishizing the market as a singular solution to social and economic problems.8 Cui’s work was chiefly marked by its stress on the potential for social experimentation, and made prominent use of the example of the TVEs. Whereas for the liberals the view that Maoism had “failed” and that China must consequently follow a universal road to modernization was reinforced by the disintegration of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War, for Cui and the new left the end of the Cold War provided an opportunity to break with the fetishized dichotomy characteristic of Cold War thinking – socialism versus capitalism and planned economy versus market economy. The end of the Cold

6

7

8

neo-authoritarians split from the “enlightenment intellectuals”; in the mid 1990s Chinese nationalists split off from 1980s liberalism; and then in the late 1990s, the “new left” and the “neo-liberals” split the “enlightenment intellectual world” (see Yu Bing, “Zhishi jie de fenlie yu zhenghe” [The splits and unity of the intellectual world], in Gong Yang, ed., Sichao: zhongguo “xinzoupai” ji qi yingxiang [Thought trend: the Chinese “new left” and its influence] (Beijing: Zhongguo shehui kexue chubanshe, 2003). This path-breaking book was the first to make the “new left” its central subject and to publish essays that were openly positive about the Cultural Revolution. For two of the best general introductions to the debates of the 1990s, see Chaohua Wang’s Introduction to Chaohua Wang, One China, Many Paths; and Xudong Zhang, “The Making of the Post-Tiananmen Intellectual Field: A Critical Overview,” in Xudong Zhang, ed., Whither China: Intellectual Politics in Contemporary China (Durham: Duke University Press, 2001). Fewsmith, China Since Tiananmen, is also very useful for understanding these debates, although he conflates the new left with postmodernism. Wang Hui, for example, calls himself and other “new leftists” “critical intellectuals.” Wang Hui, personal discussion, Beijing, Sept. 19, 2003. Cui, “Zhidu chuangxin yu di er ci sixiang jiefang”; and interview with Cui Zhiyuan, Beijing, June 28, 2006.

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War thus did not signify the “End of History” and the triumph of capitalism so much as a potential loosening of the constraints on political thinking. Like most Chinese intellectuals involved in political debates in the 1990s, Cui, a professor at Tsinghua University’s School of Public Policy and Management, had been a liberal in the 1980s. He left China in 1987, to go to the University of Chicago where he received his PhD in Political Science, and then taught at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology for many years before returning to China in 2003. Perhaps it was his distance from Chinese politics in the late 1980s and the 1990s that led Cui to be the most optimistic of the Chinese new left – searching the past, including Maoism, for positive institutional models that can be reconstructed to serve the present. Nonetheless, his attempt to find innovative institutional solutions that could reconcile economic justice with efficiency led him to move to the left on the political spectrum of Chinese intellectuals. Emerging out of this moment of opportunity the new left searched for a way to expand the political and policy choices available. In doing so, adherents developed a more contingent understanding of history than the liberal view, seeing a strong agency and independence in the political sphere. The new-left view was also more capacious than the Chinese orthodox Marxist conception, which viewed history as the development of the productive forces through a series of modes of production. In newleft thinking, the “progressiveness” of a given policy was less directly linked to its position on a determined and teleological historical path. Instead, policies should be judged by experimentation within a laboratory of political and social forces. Throughout the 1990s, the new left became increasingly critical of constraints placed on this potential for building socio-economic and political institutions that could form the basis for a just society. Chief among these constraints was the dominance or hegemony of the market over society, and market ideology over thought. Here the role of Wang Hui, now probably the most prominent new-left thinker, was of particular importance. Wang was an intellectual historian and literary critic, based at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences in the 1990s and at Tsinghua University’s School of Humanities and Social Sciences in the 2000s. But it was a year spent in the countryside in Shaanxi Province, where he was sent for re-education after participating in the 1989 Tiananmen protest movement, that moved Wang to become more critical of the direction of the reforms and their stress on the marketization of society. Wang immediately noticed the marked inequality between rural China and the developing coastal cities, and began to see the rural order as

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falling into a deep social and economic crisis. He began to believe that a more balanced approach to the reform of Chinese institutions was necessary, one that made use of the market but also maintained cooperative and public social institutions not determined by the market. Unlike Cui, Wang placed the preponderance of his focus on the criticism of neo-liberalism and the market. Wang constructed a deep historical foundation for this critical position, ranging from the Song dynasty through the present.9 In doing so, Wang helped to develop a critique of the constricting role of the market within society. By juxtaposing an account of Chinese contemporary intellectual discourse with a critical investigation of China’s relationship to modernity and capitalism, Wang attempted to bring to light the complicity of intellectual discourse with reform-era modernization ideology. While Wang’s critique was more structuralist than that of Cui – global and structural constraints played a bigger role in Wang’s narrative – he maintained a strong advocacy of popular power which could defend itself against the market and of the repoliticization of social life and its experimental power. The contingency of politics was a fundamental theme of his work. In contrast to the liberals, who viewed the state–society relationship as the most important contradiction of Chinese society, Wang and the new left treated the market– society relationship as the prime target of criticism. In refocusing criticism on capitalism, Wang and others associated with the new left developed a particular understanding of capitalism and the market and their relationship to state and popular power. The new left employed Fernand Braudel’s distinction between capitalism and markets in order to criticize liberal and mainstream economist political stances.10 Markets, in the new-left formulation, were a social institution that could be utilized within non-capitalist society; rural Chinese society, for example, had made use of markets for a very long time. Under capitalism, however, markets became distorted by monopolies. Capitalism was hegemonic within a market that, if unchecked, could grow to dominate society itself, shaping all social relationships.11 In the long run, capitalism was destructive 9

10

11

For a discussion of Wang’s historical narrative, see Alexander Day, “Depoliticization and the Chinese Intellectual Scene,” Criticism 53, no. 1 (Winter 2011): 141–51; Viren Murthy, “Modernity Against Modernity: Wang Hui’s Critical History of Chinese Thought,” Modern Intellectual History 3, no. 1 (2006). Fernand Braudel, Civilization and Capitalism, 15th to 18th Century: The Structures of Everyday Life, 3 vols. (New York: Harper and Row, 1979), vol. I, pp. 23–4. Han Deqiang, Samiuersen “Jingjixue” piping: jingzheng jingji xue [A criticism of Samuelson’s “Economics”: the economics of competition] (Beijing: Jingji kexue chubanshe, 2002); interview with Han Deqiang, Beijing, Mar. 23, 2004; Lü Xinyu, “‘Mingong chao’ de wenti yishi,” Dushu,

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to the market because of its distortion of markets.12 A just social democratic system, in which popular power played an important role in determining the shape of society, would make use of markets, but those markets would not come to form monopolies or become hegemonic over society, as they did in capitalism. Among the new-left thinkers, Cui was perhaps the most suspicious of the domination of society by economic forces. Cui has suggested that even with market socialism the market would be too dominant over other social institutions. However, he did believe that it was possible to use a market institution within society without its becoming dominant.13 This narrative of socially disembedded markets and the dominance of capitalism came to be fundamental for a new-left understanding of rural crisis in the 1990s. This line of argument owes much to Karl Polanyi, who asserted that as long as markets remained embedded within society, they could be controlled socially. But markets tended to disembed themselves and dominate society, if society was unable to protect itself against the market.14 Wang closely followed this Braudelian and Polanyian narrative, arguing that with increasing marketization since 1989, society had lost power to the market, something he viewed first hand in the Shaanxi countryside following 1989. According to Wang, the state’s repression of the 1989 movement, and in particular repression of working-class involvement in the movement, allowed for a more rapid marketization of society. Tiananmen, therefore, was not primarily a story of continuing repression of society by the socialist state, but of state power being used to implement the marketization of social relations. The state’s repression of the movement ended the possibility of open dissent from the market reformist path. As Wang stated: In 1989, the social movement attempted to facilitate an organic relationship between state and society via mass participation, but after 1989 mechanisms of interaction between state and market came to substitute for those between state and society. As part of this historical process, the concept

12 13

14

no. 10 (2003); Wang Hui, China’s New Order (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), p. 122, “Shi jingji shi, haishi zhengzhi jingji xue?” [Economic history or political economy?], in Xu Baoqiang and Qu Jingdong, eds., “Fan shichang de zibenzhuyi” [Anti-market capitalism] (Beijing: Zhongyang bianyi chubanshe, 2000); Xu Baoqiang, “Fan shichang de zibenzhuyi” [Anti-market capitalism], in Fan shichang de zibenzhuyi, “Pipan Zhang Wuchang: Ziyou jingji yishi xingtai de chuanbo” [A critique of Zhang Wuchang: the transmission of liberal economic ideology], Tianya, no. 6 (2001). Xu Baoqiang, “Fan shichang de zibenzhuyi ” and “Pipan Zhang Wuchang.” Interview with Cui, Beijing, June 28, 2006. Cui also suggested that even Braudel’s narrative was too structuralist for him. Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time (Boston: Beacon Press, 2001).

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Innovation and experimentation with social and economic institutions – the primary examples of which were located in rural China – were severely curtailed under these new conditions. In Wang Hui’s view, liberals were fixated on an old foe – the state – missing the fact that capitalism and the market should be the new object of critique. Different conceptualizations of capitalism and markets led to different understandings of power and politics, and thus also of different understandings of the role of peasants within history. The left tended to conceptualize politics as the movement of popular power, whereas for the liberals, it was primarily imagined through a discourse of rights and formal democracy. Liberals imagined a capitalism which could and should be kept free of power, and power was seen as a corrupting force on proper markets. For the new left, capitalism was a form of power, power was always already at the center of capitalism, and the market could not be separated from power. Markets themselves were neither natural developments nor self-regulating (ziwo tiaojie), therefore, but the products of particular arrangements of power relations. However, if power relations were not so easily escaped, as the new left argued, then popular power must be constructed in a way that democratized daily life in order to counter the hegemonic force of capitalism within the market and over society. The new left, therefore, tended to view popular power as a crucial force in building a just society, both rural and urban. The question was not one of a simple dichotomy between state power controlling the market or the market being free of interference from state power, but of what kind of popular power, supported by what institutions, could control the market. Wang Hui, for example, asked what type of popular power can produce a just society.16 Cui Zhiyuan, moreover, argued that democracy should not be limited to the political sphere; economic democracy as a form of politics was vital to a just society.17 Cui looked to revolutionary forms such as the Angang 15 16

17

Wang Hui, China’s New Order, p. 119. Wang Hui, “The New Criticism,” in Chaohua Wang, ed., One China, Many Paths (London: Verso, 2003), pp. 64–6; Wen Tiejun, Wang Hui, and Qin Hui, “Zhongguo nengfou zouchu yi tiao dute de daolu” [Can China take a unique path?], Tianya, no. 4 (2003). Cui, “Zhidu chuangxin yu di er ci sixiang jiefang” and Cui Zhiyuan, “Angang xianfa yu hou futezhuyi” [The Angang Constitution and post-Fordism], Dushu, no. 3 (1996).

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Constitution, the constitution of the Anshan Steel Company devised in the 1960s that facilitated worker participation in management, for inspiration.18 The new left, therefore, was critical of the limited and formal character of liberal democracy, and the definition of democracy its thinkers put forward embraced a wider field of possibilities than that advocated by liberals. This new-left political narrative kept open a space for radical peasant intervention into the shape of rural society and for a more extensive experimentation with rural social institutions. The new left’s Polanyian narrative that pitted society against the hegemonic power of capitalism has often been called a form of populism (mincuizhuyi).19 New-left discussions of democracy, however, have not linked it explicitly to “class struggle.” In fact, a direct discussion of class was largely absent from this narrative. Such a discussion would undoubtedly be politically difficult in reform-era China. Even this Polanyian narrative of popular power struggling against market hegemony walks a fine political line between acceptable and unacceptable political discourse during the reform era.

Institutional innovation: TVEs and the emergence of the new left One central point of disagreement in the discussions of the early 1990s through which the distinction between Chinese liberals and the new left appeared, concerned what the recent fall of the Soviet Union meant for the reform movement and the continuation of socialism. Did this event foreshadow that socialism itself was doomed and that capitalism was the only modernization path? Did this suggest that privatization and marketization were the only ways to develop society? And, if the old system seemed to offer few answers, was it possible to construct a new alternative? What would such an alternative be based upon – Chinese traditional culture or an experimentation with social institutions? Through grappling with these questions, the new left emerged as an alternative to the dominant liberal politics of the Chinese intellectual scene. More specifically, the TVEs formed a crucial locus for the emerging new left to discuss the possibility of alternative forms of development that could resist the wholesale marketization of social relations. 18

19

For Cui, the Angang Constitution was a model of economic democracy from the Maoist era. See “Angang xianfa yu hou futezhuyi.” See, for example, Li Zehou, Lishi benti lun [Historical ontology] (Beijing: Sanlian shudian, 2003), p. 225.

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In the early 1990s, China’s rural TVEs served as a positive example of development for the emergence of a left-wing critique of the market and privatization, although not one without its problems. New-left intellectuals took different stances on the TVEs: Gan Yang linked them to traditional Chinese culture; Cui Zhiyuan argued they were a successful example of institutional innovation; Wang Ying called for a new collectivism; Huang Ping voiced skepticism about their long-term potential. The liberal Qin Hui suggested that the attention to the TVEs was misplaced. Gan Yang, a prominent 1980s liberal, came to take a more critical stance towards liberalism during the 1990s, following his exile in the United States because of his participation in the 1989 Tiananmen protests. Critical of 1990s Chinese liberalism, he argued that, beginning in the late 1980s, Chinese liberals had started to become more conservative and critical of radicalism, “emphasizing negative freedom [freedom from] at the cost of democracy.”20 Gan, however, still considered himself to be a liberal, calling himself a member of the “liberal left” (ziyou zuopai).21 In 1992 and 1993, Gan suggested that the end of the Cold War should not be taken to mean that there was only a single path – that of privatization – to social and economic development; instead, he linked an alternative path to traditional Chinese rural culture and the TVEs. Gan argued that “the prospects of China’s post-Cold War social and cultural development must find their grounding in a reflection on the great change of xiangtu Zhongguo.”22 “Xiangtu Zhongguo,” a term that Gan borrowed from Fei Xiaotong, considered China’s first anthropologist,23 is difficult to translate into English.24 Xiangtu means “native land” and is explicitly rural. Xiangtu modifies China (Zhongguo), signifying that China grows out of its soil, its rural life, and rural culture. Chinese culture, Gan argued, was hard to separate from “China’s traditional native land” (chuantong xiangtu 20 21

22 23

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See Gan Yang, “A Critique of Chinese Conservatism in the 1990s,” Social Text, no. 55 (1998), 45. Gan, “Zhongguo ziyou zuopai de youlai” [The origins of China’s liberal left], www.eduww.com/ bbs/dispbbs.asp?boardID=15&ID=48462&page=1, accessed Mar. 15, 2007. Gan, “Xiangtu Zhongguo chongjian yu Zhongguo wenhua qianjing.” “Xiangtu Zhongguo” was the name of Fei Xiaotong’s most famous book on rural China. Fei Xiaotong, Xiangtu Zhongguo (Shanghai guanchashe, 1947) (translated as Fei Xiaotong, From the Soil: The Foundations of Chinese Society, trans. Gary Hamilton and Zheng Wang [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992]). As the translators of Xiangtu Zhongguo point out: “In writings about Fei and his works, the book’s title is usually rendered in English as ‘rural China,’ but this rendering is inexact. Xiang means ‘countryside’ and tu means ‘earth’; but the combination, xiangtu, is a set phrase meaning ‘one’s native soil or home village.’ By using xiangtu to modify Zhongguo (China), Fei is conveying a subtle meaning to his readers: that Chinese society has grown out of its ties to the land.” Translators’ Introduction to From the Soil: The Foundations of Chinese Society, p. vii.

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Zhongguo). Discussions about “cultural China” (wenhua Zhongguo) had to begin, therefore, with the ongoing transformations of rural China. Here we can clearly see in Gan’s work the mark of the “cultural fever” (wenhua re) of 1980s liberalism, in which cultural difference came to take on a dominant importance within intellectual discussions.25 The great change in xiangtu Zhongguo that Gan cited was not just one in the post-1949 socialist system, but a fundamental transformation of the “basic structure of ‘xiangtu Zhongguo.’”26 Following Philip Huang, Gan employed Clifford Geertz’s conception of “agricultural involution” to characterize the nature of rural China over several thousand years.27 This category indicated that even as marginal returns on labor investment dropped, more labor would be invested in agricultural work if there was no alternative outlet for rural surplus labor. But with the rural reforms of 1978 during which Chinese peasants began to break with agricultural involution, according to Gan, “Chinese modernity” (Zhongguo xiandaixing) appeared. This “Chinese modernity,” however, was different from “Western modernity.” Chinese modernity was a “unique Chinese model of development” (dute de Zhongguo fazhan moshi) because it was based not on urbanization but on rural industrialization – the TVEs and the peasants “leaving the land but not the village, entering the factory but not the city” (li tu bu li xiang, jin chang bu jin cheng). Gan maintained that this not only showed that rural China was industrializing, but that it was doing so in a way that grew out of long-term pre-existing rural social relationships. The logic of the TVEs was not profit maximization, but raising local employment and local welfare. The TVEs were thus part of a process of “reconstructing” (chong jian) rural relationships as industrialization took place and Chinese society broke from its involutionary character. Unlike most discussions on the peasant during the 1980s, here the peasant and even the tradition of rural society were credited with a positive role in developing China. Gan argued that some might compare this development to European early industrialization in the countryside, noting that this phase was surpassed in Europe as the economy and society as well

25

26 27

For a discussion of 1980s “cultural fever,” see Jing Wang, High Culture Fever: Politics, Aesthetics, and Ideology in Deng’s China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996); Xudong Zhang, Chinese Modernism in the Early Reforms: Cultural Fever, Avant-Garde Fiction, and the New Chinese Cinema (Durham: Duke University Press, 1997). Gan, “Xiangtu Zhongguo chongjian yu Zhongguo wenhua qianjing.” Clifford Geertz, Agricultural Involution: The Process of Ecological Change in Indonesia (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1963); Philip Huang, The Peasant Family and Rural Development in the Yangzi Delta, 1350–1988 (Stanford University Press, 1990).

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as enterprises and community were split apart, a process within which the economy disembedded itself from community control. In that reading, China’s TVEs could be seen as a sign of backwardness or transition. But Gan – countering the historical determinist view that there is only one developmental path for societies – argued that this “backwardness” could have its advantages, allowing China to produce an alternative to Western modernity. Gan’s work, therefore, suggested an alternative modernity within a globe structured by capitalism, cementing a notion of the centrality of the peasantry as both China’s problem and the site of its potential. In a later article, Gan Yang pointed to Fei Xiaotong’s work as a source of native social science which could be used to construct a Chinese path to rural development. Gan argued that social science was formed within the particular social transformation of a society and that therefore Western social sciences could not simply be transplanted to China. According to Gan, Fei’s work, grounded in native field research on rural social change in China during the 1930s and 1940s, together with that of his teacher at Yanjing University, Wu Wenzao, was the beginning of a native understanding of Chinese social change.28 The community studies approach, developed by Wu and Fei, applied a functionalist approach to the in-depth study of individual communities, specifically the village, viewing them as an integrated whole. In the 1930s and 1940s, Fei became well-known for his studies of village life and his gradualist politics of transforming Chinese society. As Siu-lun Wong argues, functionalism implied to its Chinese adherents that culture was a tool of social coherence that could be changed, but that its integrative function meant that such a change would be slow. For Fei, unlike Mao, the peasantry was largely seen as a unitary class, but it did not form a revolutionary mass. In fact, for Fei it was the progressive gentry, from which he came, that formed the agent of change for society.29 This more gradualist and cultural approach resonated with many Chinese intellectuals in the postrevolutionary period of the 1990s, especially for those intellectuals who wanted China to find a development path different from that of the West. The foundational point in Fei’s work, Gan stated, was that China’s rural economy was not simply agricultural but a combination of agricultural and industrial economic practices. This interpretation echoed the stance Liu Shipei had staked out at the beginning of the twentieth century. In fact, 28 29

Gan, “‘Jiangcun jingji’ zai renshi,” 52. Sui-lun Wong, Sociology and Socialism in Contemporary China (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1979), pp. 27–36.

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the Chinese peasant could not survive in a purely agricultural economy. This understanding formed the rationale for arguing that China should follow a different development path, one in which a divide between agriculture and industry was not effected through a rural–urban bifurcation and industrial concentration in the urban sphere, as in the West. Instead, traditional rural industry could be modernized through dispersed cooperative forms.30 Gan argued that Western social scientists, whether Marxist or otherwise, all viewed rural industry as something that would be wiped out by competition with modern, concentrated industry.31 It was this determinist reading of history, a product of the Cold War that views history as a singular path with no alternatives, that Gan attempted to argue against. Whereas the opposition between a “Western” and a “Chinese” modernity provided one way to break with the historical teleology associated with orthodox Marxism and modernization narratives, others among the emerging left took a different tack from Gan Yang’s perspective. Yet the peasant still played a central and inescapable role. Cui Zhiyuan’s work marked a further shift to the left. The East–West dichotomy of xiangtu Zhongguo, so prominent in Gan’s work, was largely absent in Cui’s work, which focused much more closely on social and economic institutions. Also countering the notion of a single path in history, Cui touched off a debate about the direction of the reforms with a 1994 article in the Hong Kong journal, Twenty-first Century, where Gan Yang’s 1993 article also had been published.32 According to Cui, the first “thought liberation” (sixiang jiefang) had occurred in 1978 when extreme leftism was overturned, but contemporary China needed a second thought liberation, this time from the “institutional fetishism” (zhidu baiwujiao) of the market. For Cui, institutional fetishism entailed a simplification of Western institutions and an occlusion of their actual historical development, leading to their uncritical adoption; in other words, the universalization of institutions was dependent on a forgetting of their particular histories.

30

31

32

Echoes of Mao Zedong’s critique of the “three great differences” – between urban and rural, between mental and manual labor, and between peasant and worker – are obvious here. Because of this, Western social science set “modernity” in opposition to “tradition.” Unlike Marxist and Weberian social science, the Chinese sociology of the 1930s of which Fei was a part was an “antinecessitarian social theory” ( fan biran xing de shehui lilun), believing that centralization was not the only way to modernize industry (Gan, “‘Jiangcun jingji’ zai renshi,” 57). Cui, “Zhidu chuangxin yu di er ci sixiang jiefang.” See also Roberto Unger and Cui Zhiyuan, “Yi E wei jian kan Zhongguo” [Looking at China in comparison to Russia], Er shi yi shiji (1994).

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Cui Zhiyuan’s method of argumentation here was profoundly transnational.33 He brought to light the conflicted and contingent stories of the development of Western institutions, complicating these histories in order to break with a teleological reading of their development. In doing so, he developed an alternative intellectual genealogy, one he later dubbed “pettybourgeois socialism,”34 which he argued had been erased by the binary thinking of the Cold War. The petty-bourgeois socialist tradition, Cui argued, provided resources to draw upon in constructing institutions to prevent capitalist unequal exchange from dominating the market. In particular, Cui saw the present land system as coming close to that put forward by Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, the nineteenth-century French anarchist, in that it did not institute a system of private property implying indefinite control by the owner. Land was owned neither by the individual nor by the state, but by the village collective. This was an experiment that Cui believed was worth developing. By disrupting the assumed narrative of Western capitalist development, Cui attempted to open a space of pettybourgeois socialist experimentation within China. In the 1990s, Cui’s primary example of institutional innovation came from the rural reforms, namely the development of the TVEs. Building on the work of Western analytical Marxists,35 as well as the Chinese anthropologist Fei Xiaotong, Cui noted that the TVEs were an example of smallscale industrialization that departed from Fordist ideas of large-scale 33

34

35

Wang Hui noted that the transnationalization of Chinese intellectual discourses in the 1990s is related to the flow of intellectuals to study abroad in the late 1980s. Wang Hui, “Dangdai Zhongguo de sixiang zhuangkuang yu xiandaixing wenti” [Contemporary Chinese thought and the question of modernity], Tianya, no. 5 (1997), 133–4. According to Cui, “xiao zichanjieji shehuizhuyi” [petty-bourgeois socialism] was a “radical” form of institutional innovation. Cui argued that petty-bourgeois socialism was founded upon a “socialist market economy” in which there is both economic and political democracy. Along with Fernand Braudel, Cui cited Fei Xiaotong, Silvio Gesell, James Joyce, Ferdinand Lassalle, James Meade, John Stuart Mill, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, Charles Sabel, and Roberto M. Unger as “petty-bourgeois socialists.” (Cui Zhiyuan, “Liberal Socialism and the Future of China: A Petty Bourgeoisie Manifesto,” presented at the International Economic Association Round Table, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Jan. 15, 2005, www.bm.ust.hk/~ced/IEA_MEETING_ 22_.html; Cui, “Ruhe renshi jinri Zhongguo: ‘xiaokang shehui’ jiedu” [How to recognize contemporary China], Dushu, no. 4 [2004].) Analytical Marxism is an attempt to use analytical philosophy and also sometimes neo-classical economics to clarify the work of Marx in terms of logical consistency. In general, analytical Marxists argued that Marx did not have a distinctive method; in other words, his method, once clarified, was formally similar to the other social scientific methods. For Cui Zhiyuan, the work of analytical Marxist John Roemer is probably the most influential. See Gerald A. Cohen, Marx’s Theory of History: A Defense (Princeton University Press, 1978); Jon Elster, Making Sense of Marx (Cambridge University Press, 1985); Adam Przeworski, Capitalism and Social Democracy (Cambridge University Press, 1985); John Roemer, A General Theory of Exploitation and Class (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982); John Roemer, ed., Analytical Marxism (Cambridge University Press, 1986).

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production. Instead of being regressive, Cui argued, this return of smallerscale production scattered throughout the countryside actually converged with post-Fordist trends in the West. Cui additionally argued that the TVEs were not private firms, but rather entities that combined distribution according to work and according to share holdings.36 While some argued that this mixed model of sharing profits both according to labor and shares was only a temporary, transitional phenomenon (guodu jieduan) on the way to a “real stock institution” (zhenzheng de gufen zhi) – because “property rights were not clear” (chanquan bu mingque) – Cui suggested that this teleology fetishized both the stock institution and the market economy, obscuring the innovative potential of this institution (hushi ta de chuangxin qianli).37 Cui’s second example of institutional innovation was also rural in origin: village committee elections that had been instituted nationally, beginning in 1988. Cui pointed out that some intellectuals thought this was not true democracy because there were no opposition parties involved, seeing a two-party system to be integral to democracy. Others, according to Cui, equated democracy and the middle class, assuming that democracy was a capitalist institution. He regarded both views as cases of institutional fetishism with no concrete logic. Cui suggested that capitalism and democracy were actually in contradiction, seeing economic democracy as necessary to political democracy. Only in a socialist system, he said, were “economic democracy” ( jingji minzhu) and “political democracy” (zhengzhi minzhu) able to fully meld.38 The system of collectively owned land, Cui argued, in contrast to Qin Hui, made rural democracy feasible, with villagers having potential control over their economic and political life. Village democracy and the mixed system of TVE property rights were thus innovative institutions that linked political and economic democracy. For Cui, therefore, rural society during the early reform era formed a positive model of socialist democracy in which the market was an institution utilized and limited by society. In general, Cui attempted to break with the historical determinist understanding of social development that had been so foundational to 36

37 38

Cui argued that this institution, which grew out of the particular needs of a village in Shandong during the early reforms, was actually very similar to the structure of cooperatives developed by Western cooperative (petty-bourgeois) socialists such as John Stuart Mill and others. Cui, “Zhidu chuangxin yu di er ci sixiang jiefang,” p. 325. Ibid., pp. 324–6. Cui readily admitted that this was not how it worked in practice in nations that claimed to be socialist.

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1980s Chinese reform-era liberalism. Whereas in the liberalism of the 1980s, which was further developed in the work of Qin Hui, the historical determinist reading of Chinese politics was built upon criticism of the rural roots of Maoist anachronism, Cui Zhiyuan found inspiration in those very “anachronistic” aspects of rural society, aspects that were supposed to become extinct in the transition back to a proper historical path. In the mid 1990s Wang Ying, a researcher at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences’ Sociology Institute, supported Cui Zhiyuan’s discussion of the mixed property relations of TVEs and rural collectives with evidence from her research in rural Guangdong, calling for a “new collectivism” (xin jitizhuyi).39 Wang disputed that there were only two paths (liang tiao lu) that China could follow, suggesting that new collectivism was a break from both the old Soviet system and Western capitalism (xifang zibenzhuyi).40 Thus, unlike post-Soviet Russia and Eastern Europe, China was not adopting the Western model, but was creating its own path – and it was the innovative reforms growing out of the rural sphere that showed the way forward.41 Like Cui, Wang argued that this new collectivism was an outgrowth of the old commune system – relying on its collectivized land in order to operate – but that it contained significant differences. Whereas the old form had sacrificed peasant individual interests, the new collectivism, operating in a market system, would link the old collectively owned land to a community based on the peasants’ interests. New collectivism, as a “collective community” ( jiti shequ), would become more important as rural industries begin to develop; Wang argued that this was unlike the situation in Western individualist society. The new collective could arrange public goods needed for industry, such as water, electricity, transportation, and land. In agriculture, the collective could take care of mechanized farming, irrigation and drainage, raising seedlings, protecting plants, and field layout.42 With the spread of village elections, she argued that the new collectives were becoming increasingly democratic.43 Wang explained that after the dissolution of the communes, rural society faced a large urban industrial society and needed capital,

39

40

41 42

Wang Ying, “Xin jitizhuyi yu Zhongguo tese de shichang jingji” [New collectivism and the market economy with Chinese characteristics], Er shi yi shiji, no. 25 (1994). In 1996, Wang published a book on the subject: Xin jitizhuyi: xiangcun shehui de zai zuzhi [New collectivism: rural society’s reorganization] (Beijing: Jingji guanli chubanshe, 1996). Wang Ying, “Xin jitizhuyi yu Zhongguo tese de shichang jingji,” “Xin jitizhuyi yu xiangcun xiandaihua” [New collectivism and rural modernization], Dushu, no. 10 (1996). Wang Ying, “Xin jitizhuyi yu Zhongguo tese de shichang jingji,” p. 11. 43 Ibid., p. 12. Wang Ying, “Xin jitizhuyi yu xiangcun xiandaihua,” p. 61.

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technology, management, and information on a scale that individual peasants could not sustain; only a collective system could face this problem. She suggested that new collectivism stood on two foundations: the old collective system – both its land system and the collective consciousness developed in the Maoist era – and the traditional culture of the “small peasant economy” (xiaonong jingji), both of which helped the peasant to move beyond close family ties and develop a collective community.44 New collectives would use a “common ownership system” (gongyouzhi), which combined collective and private ownership as well as the mixed ownership system that Cui discussed above, with the collective helping to drive the development of private firms.45 In her research in rural sections of Nanhai City, Guangdong, Wang found that the “absolute public” and “absolute private” sectors were gradually disappearing. After the initial reforms and the dissolution of the commune system, people had made money, but the general social environment did not improve. In 1986, therefore, the collectives had been re-energized, developing processing and handicraft industries and transforming the rural environment. She thus argued that neither a completely public economy nor “complete privatization” (quanmian siyouhua) would be able to “save China.” The mixing of individual and public interest seen in Nanhai’s countryside, according to Wang, was a model that fit China’s “national conditions” (guoqing) and illustrated a way for rural China to develop.46 The arguments of Gan Yang and Cui Zhiyuan provoked liberals to claim that their institutional analyses were utopian. Ji Weidong, a professor at Kobe University’s School of Law in Japan, argued that China did not have a problem with fetishizing institutions, but rather with “belittling institutions” (qingshi zhidu). The institutions that Cui claimed were being fetishized, according to Ji, were built upon a Western legal structure that China did not have. The problem in China was not the fetishization of institutions, such as the market, but the lack of a foundation for them in the first place. Returning to the liberal notion popular in the 1980s that China was not modern enough, that its modernization was hindered by its feudal culture, Ji stated: the problem in China … is not that people blindly follow the modernization promoted by elite technology firms, but that the rational structure and social authority of this kind of elite firm cannot be efficiently formed. 44 45 46

Wang Ying, “Xin jitizhuyi yu Zhongguo tese de shichang jingji,” p. 13. Wang Ying, “Xin jitizhuyi yu xiangcun xiandaihua.” Wang Ying, “Xin jitizhuyi yu Zhongguo tese de shichang jingji,” p. 14.

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In a liberal response to Gan Yang, Qin Hui argued that while in its modernization process China would not exactly follow the West, it was a vast oversimplification to say that China was undergoing a special Chinese model of modernization. Qin disputed the significance of the slogan “leaving the land but not the village,” suggesting that many of the people counted as leaving the land but not the village either never had really worked the land or no longer really lived in villages. He added that many other nations have seen similar phenomena, with rural residents working in both agriculture and other industries simultaneously; thus, there was nothing unique about the Chinese experience. Qin noted that while peasants might work in industries to supplement their agricultural salaries, this was by no means a positive phenomenon, as it was harmful to agricultural modernization. Qin also argued that to find cultural value in the model of “leaving the land but not the village” was to romanticize this transitional phenomenon.48 For Qin, the phenomenon of “leaving the land but not the village” primarily concerned the issue of peasant status. During the “agrarian socialist” period – as Qin called the Maoist era – peasants had neither the ability to change their status as “peasants” nor the freedom to change their jobs from agriculture. With the reforms, peasant status was still fixed, but they could leave agricultural employment, thus producing the “leaving the land but not the village” phenomenon of TVEs. Without the fixed “peasant” status, however, such a phenomenon, argued Qin, would largely disappear. The system of agrarian socialism had been an “oddity” (qiyi) that used “extra-economic force” (chao jingji qiangzhi) to keep the rural population fixed in the countryside, and the reforms represented the loosening of this force and thus the disappearance of this oddity. “Leaving the land but not the village” was thus only special to China because this extra-economic force had maintained its peasant status. The disappearance of this oddity would be put into effect when rural dwellers broke with the peasant status to become citizens (gongmin) and farmers (nongchangzhe), signified not by “leaving the land but not the village” (li tu bu li xiang) but by “leaving the village but not the land” 47

48

Ji Wiedong, “Dierci sixiang jiefang haishi wutuobang?” [A second liberation of thoughts or a utopia?], Ershiyi shiji, no. 25 (1994). Qin, “‘Li tu bu li xiang.’”

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(li xiang bu li tu). With China’s excess rural labor power, even this would be impossible without a massive “leaving the land and the village” (li tu li xiang, i.e. urbanization). Thus, unlike Cui Zhiyuan, who placed his discussion of institutions within the framework of social experimentation and a renewal of socialism’s potential, Qin Hui framed his discussion of the TVEs within a teleological liberal modernization narrative. Later, in 1996, Qin Hui began an exchange with Cui Zhiyuan concerning institutional innovation.49 Critical of Cui’s linkage of the TVEs, the commune system, and economic democracy to the Angang Constitution, Qin primarily attempted to tie the new left to the most chaotic periods of Maoist rule,50 arguing in particular that Cui muddled the relationship between “power” (quanli) and “rights” (quanli).51 Qin used his knowledge of postsocialist Eastern Europe to argue that the post-1989 Eastern European experience was more democratic than anything Cui Zhiyuan discussed. Citing Eastern European examples, moreover, Qin criticized Cui’s discussion of economic democracy, suggesting that democratic movements against bureaucracy were ignored in Cui’s picture of democratic movements against privatization.52 According to Qin, the reality was not that Eastern Europe was going the capitalist route of privatization and China was heading in the direction of a “new socialism” (xin shehuizhuyi), but that Eastern Europe was following a “legal principle privatization” ( falixing siyouhua) and China was following a “power elite privatization” (quan gui siyouhua).53 Qin Hui’s real criticism, therefore, was aimed less at Cui Zhiyuan’s actual invocation of a new potential for socialism than at the contemporary political and economic conditions of China; his critique thus largely ended up mischaracterizing Cui as a supporter of contemporary conditions. In his contribution to a 1996 roundtable on rural development convened by Wang Hui, Huang Ping,54 a researcher at the Institute of Sociology at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences who has focused on the rural sphere and was later considered to be a member of the new 49

50 53 54

Qin Hui wrote these articles under the pen name Bian Wu. Bian Wu, “Hui ju wei zhi, chu ju wei mi” [The amazing metamorphosis of neo-leftism in China], Ershiyi shiji, no. 33 (1996); Cui Zhiyuan, “Sanlun zhidu chuangxin yu ‘di er ci sixiang jiefang’ – da Bian Wu” [A third discussion on institutional innovation and “a second liberation of thought” – answering Bian Wu], Ershiyi shiji, no. 34 (1996). See also Bian, “‘Zhidu chuangxin’ haishi zhidu fujiu: zai wen Cui Zhiyuan xiansheng.” 51 52 Bian, “Hui ju wei zhi, chu ju wei mi,” 5. Ibid., 7. Ibid., 11–12. Ibid., 13. After the 1996 roundtable on rural China, Huang Ping was asked to join Wang Hui as an editor of Dushu magazine.

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left, offered a note of caution about the TVEs. The main topic of discussion at the roundtable centered on TVEs as a form of development particular to China, with Gan Yang and Wang Ying developing their earlier arguments.55 A student of Anthony Giddens at the London School of Economics, Huang was less concerned with developing a “Chinese path” to development, compared to people like Gan Yang. Huang put the TVEs into the context of the long-term tension between rural population and land resources in China. Using Philip Huang’s notion of involution, much as Gan Yang had before, Huang Ping argued that the logic of the involutionary “small peasant” (xiaonong) was different from the normal “economic rationality” ( jingji lixing) of profit maximization. For small peasants, maintaining family survival trumped profit maximization and thus they would continue to invest labor even if productivity dropped and marginal returns neared zero so long as their family needed more food. Huang Ping called this a “subsistence logic” (shengcun lixing). Marketization, however, brought a conflict between these two logics. Huang Ping argued that while the TVEs were one outlet for this surplus rural labor, their ability to soak up this labor was limited and that by the mid 1990s the rate of absorption was dropping. In his contribution, therefore, Huang Ping noted the shift from TVEs to migrant labor as an outlet for agricultural labor, since the comparative advantage of the agricultural sector was so low. As time went on, new-left intellectuals came to criticize the TVEs more sharply. From the perspective of 1997, for example, the notion that China could follow its own path to modernization based on the development of the TVEs, when divorced from a discussion of capitalism and the increasing marketization of Chinese society, seemed abstract and ideological to Wang Hui. In his view, both the idea that TVEs showed a new vitality of 55

See the October 1996 issue of Dushu for this roundtable, entitled “Xiangtu Zhongguo de dangdai tujing” [A contemporary view of rural China]. Note the use of Fei Xiaotong’s “Xiangtu Zhongguo” formulation. The Introduction to the roundtable made explicit reference to Fei, who was also the central subject of Gan Yang’s contribution discussed above. The Introduction also noted that rural issues, while basic to the problems of China, were not central to cultural and intellectual discussion at the time of the roundtable (see “Xiangtu Zhongguo de dangdai tujing” [no author], Dushu, no. 10 [1996], 48). This was to change dramatically, half a decade later, with the emergence of the sannong wenti discussion. See Gan, “‘Jiangcun jingji’ zai renshi.” ( Jiangcun jingji is a Chinese translation of Fei Xiaotong’s English-language Peasant Life in China: A Field Study of Country Life in the Yangtze Valley [London: Routledge, 1939]); Guo Yuhua, “Chuantong qinyuan guanxi yu dangdai nongcun de jingji, shehui biange” [Traditional consanguine relations and contemporary rural economic and social change], Dushu, no. 10 (1996); Huang Ping, “Cong xiangzhen qiye dao waichu wu gong” [From TVEs to going out to engage in labor], Dushu, no. 10 (1996); Wang Ying, “Xin jitizhuyi yu xiangcun xiandaihua.”

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traditional rural Chinese society, put forward by people like Gan Yang, and the idea that the TVEs were a form of “new collectivism,” advocated by Wang Ying, ignored problems of the TVEs that were linked to the dictates of the capitalist market, namely the destruction of resources and environment, as well as the lack of labor protection.56 Wang asked, “after entering the market, have the activities of the TVEs as a unique social model (dute shehui moshi) really been unique?”57 In other words, according to Wang, the possibilities for social and institutional innovation were cut short by the capitalist market.

Conclusion If urbanization, “leaving the land and leaving the village” (li tu you li xiang), was often seen as the Western model of development, as it was for Gan Yang, then “leaving the land but not the village” (li tu bu li xiang) was put forward as an alternative Chinese model of development, one that might avoid the destructive process of urbanization and allow rural China to flourish. In contrast to Gan Yang, Cui Zhiyuan and Wang Ying focused less on the cultural form and more on the open-ended social experimentation that they found in the countryside, especially with the TVEs. Though the TVEs received much comment and attention in the early 1990s, with their increasing privatization and bankruptcy in the mid 1990s their social role of absorbing surplus rural labor and allowing for people to “leave the land but not the village” (li tu bu li xiang) weakened, and profit became their primary goal. The marketization of society of which Cui and others warned was limiting the potential for the institutional innovation he so valued. “Leaving the land but not the village” (li tu bu li xiang) as a Chinese model of development, and the TVEs as a form of social experimentation, thus began to lose traction. To many this implied that the only alternative was “li tu you li xiang,” urbanization, increasingly interpreted within mainstream and official economic and sociological discourse as a “liberation of the peasantry,” and legitimating the concentration of industry in the urban environment. On the other hand, as TVEs were privatized and many went bankrupt, the rural economy went into decline in the late 1990s, setting the stage for a rural crisis that became a central issue for Chinese intellectuals and the state alike after the turn of the millennium. 56 57

Wang Hui, “Dangdai Zhongguo de sixiang zhuangkuang yu xiandaixing wenti,” 140–1. Ibid., 141.

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As the marketization of society and growing inequality continued to progress through the 1990s, the new left became increasingly critical of “neo-liberal” policies and the lack of critical intellectual response. The liberals and the new left each accused the other of complicity with the state. The liberals maintained that the new left was complicit with the state’s repression of civil society and the market. The new left, meanwhile, argued that the liberals were complicit with the state’s imposition of a market economy upon society. These judgments by the new left and the liberals were based in different understandings of this separation between the economic and the political. Yet both political positions imagined this relationship in problematic ways. Liberals attempted to dispose of the question of the political – and the twin dangers of state interference and populism – through a separation of the economic sphere from politics. True capitalism was idealized as a largely power-free market – the free circulation of commodities – and contemporary problems were seen as the result of power’s interference in the market (often in the form of “primitive accumulation”). Liberals thus tended to ignore both the politics of production processes itself, which remained beyond the sphere of proper politics and democracy, and the role of power in the construction of the capitalist market. Exploitation and the structuring force of the economic were occluded. In contrast, following the disintegration of the Soviet Union, a Polanyian narrative of utopian market excess became the dominant left-leaning critical stance. The new left tended to take political and power relations as foundational – as covering and determining the field of economics. For the new left, capitalism was not a neutral force, but one that entailed power, a hegemony within the market. As with the liberal narrative, the economics of production and the exploitation of labor often seemed to disappear from new-left narratives, in large part because of the new left’s break from an earlier emphasis on class struggle. The accumulation of wealth was largely understood as a matter of unequal power relations within the market, suggesting that the exploitation of labor was a matter of unequal exchange and that a solution could be found by transforming the balance of power. This was particularly true for the more nationalist tendencies within the new left, for whom unequal relations within the international market were reflected by unequal relations in the national market, ideologically facilitating the reduction of the economic to power relations. On these questions, much of the new left parted ways significantly from Marxism, within which labor exploitation took place despite the sale of labor power at its value.

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Neither the new left nor liberal stances seemed able to navigate the space between production and consumption, between exploitation in production and the inequalities of the market, so vital to understanding the changing social conditions of postsocialist China.58 One posited a solution in subtracting power from the economic sphere, the other in rebalancing power within it. Under the conditions of China’s postsocialist rejoining with global capitalism and the commoditization of labor power, however, neither the Polanyian attempt to socially re-embed the market, nor the reinforcement of formal equality within the market place, seemed sufficient – capitalist integration and the growth of inequality continued apace. By the end of the 1990s, social antagonisms – primarily concerning the peasant – again came to the forefront of public discourse, broadening a new-left investigation into the structural constraints on Chinese development. 58

For a discussion of this problem, see Slavoj Zizek, “The Parallax View,” New Left Review, no. 25 (2004).

chapter 4

“Deconstructing modernization”: Wen Tiejun and “sannong wenti”

The most dramatic shift in the perception of rural issues began in the late 1990s. It was at that time that a third wave of discussion on the countryside commenced with the emergence of a left-leaning stance on rural crisis that shifted the terms of debate, significantly affecting the public conversation as well as government policy. In this discussion, the new-left criticism of market dominance over society converged with a growing perception among scholars of rural China that rural society was in a crisis, producing a critique of the prevailing marketization-and-urbanization model of rural development. The key issue was the devaluation of peasant labor and peasant lives in a reform process that centered on constructing a more integrated market. The most prominent such critic of the direction of rural reforms was Wen Tiejun, an agricultural economist and Dean of the School of Agricultural and Rural Development at Renmin University in Beijing.1 Initially a proponent of rural market reforms, Wen became increasingly critical as he witnessed the human damage caused by the rural economic crisis of the late 1990s. By providing a powerful new vocabulary to discuss rural issues, Wen played a crucial role in provoking debate on the peasantry and rural problems, opening a space for other critics to join the discussion from the left. Earlier in the 1990s, rural problems usually were discussed under the categories of agricultural economics (nongye jingji) and rural development (nongcun fazhan). Wen’s humanist formulation of the concept sannong wenti (nongmin, nongcun, nongye – peasants, rural society, and agriculture) shifted the vocabulary significantly: it re-centered the 1

From the late 1980s, Wen was a researcher at the Agriculture Ministry’s Office of Rural Reform Experimental Zones; he left because of differences in the direction of rural experimentation. After that, he became the chief editor of Zhongguo gaige (nongcunban) [China reform (rural edition)], until it stopped publication. He then moved to Renmin University, where he has been the Dean of the School of Agricultural and Rural Development – now a center of rural reconstruction activity – since the School’s founding in 2004.

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discussion about rural China and Chinese development on the peasantry (nongmin) and “rural surplus labor” (nongye shengyu laodongli ).2 Marketization and privatization intensified during the second phase of the reform era, which began around 1992, although its political conditions were in part created by the suppression of the 1989 protest movement.3 During this phase, the party focused its reform efforts mainly on the urban sphere, and by the late 1990s the rural economy began to stagnate. In order to protect the urban sphere from social disruption as it went through stateowned enterprise (SOE) reform in the late 1990s, a time in which many SOE employees were laid off, the state kept grain prices low and enforced grain planting in the countryside.4 After 1997, increases in rural incomes slowed to a halt and even shrank. This was particularly true in provinces where rural incomes came primarily from agricultural activity.5 Marketization and privatization policies in the 1990s contributed to the weakness of the rural economy, leading to the privatization and bankruptcies of many TVEs in the mid 1990s, especially in the central and western regions of China.6 After 1996, non-farm rural employment declined in three of the next four years and farm employment increased after years of contraction.7 Furthermore, as many TVEs were contracted to produce goods for firms in other Asian countries, the 1997 Asian financial crisis was especially damaging, compounding the already existing rural economic problems.8 This meant both that local governments had to find other sources to maintain revenues, including increasing local taxes and fees charged to peasants, and that there was less rural-based non-farm employment.9 Local government finances were already in distress; the 1994 national fiscal 2

3

4 5 6

7 8 9

The phrase sannong and the three-part formulation “nongye, nongcun, nongmin” (agriculture, rural society, and the peasants) was used sporadically in party discourse throughout the 1990s. In the earlier formulation, importantly, nongmin ( peasant) usually was placed in the last position. For a discussion on estimates of rural surplus labor, see Philip Huang, Gao Yuan, and Yusheng Peng, “Capitalization without Proletarianization in China’s Agricultural Development,” Modern China 38, no. 2 (2012), 139–73. As discussed in Chapter 3, Wang Hui argued that a precondition for the continuation of market reforms was the suppression of the 1989 protests. See Wang Hui, China’s New Order. Keidel, “China’s Economic Fluctuations,” pp. 80–6. Bernstein and Lü, Taxation without Representation, pp. 48–9. Jacob Eyferth, “How Not to Industrialize: Observations from a Village in Sichuan,” in Peter Ho, Jacob Eyferth, and Eduard Vermeer, eds., Rural Development in Transitional China: The New Agriculture (London and Portland: Frank Cass, 2004), pp. 75–6; Susan Whiting, Power and Wealth in Rural China: The Political Economy of Institutional Change (Cambridge University Press, 2001), pp. 289–90. Keidel, “China’s Economic Fluctuations,” pp. 86–7. Eyferth, “How Not to Industrialize,” p. 75. The TVEs had grown to be the most important sector of the rural economy; the gross output value of the TVEs rose from about 25 percent of the rural total in 1978 to almost 70 percent in

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reform, which separated the local and central revenue stream, led to the central state taking a much larger share of revenue, leaving rural local governments increasingly in debt.10 Higher local taxation and fees led to more rural protest,11 and less local employment led to an even greater flow of rural-to-urban migrant labor. With a drop in rural non-farm employment and rural incomes, rural consumption dropped as well. Rural consumption’s contribution to GDP growth was negative in the years 1997 through 1999, and well after that it remained much lower than that of the urban sphere – which increased significantly after 1998.12 By 1999, the gains in rural per capita consumption relative to that of the urban population since 1978 had been erased.13 Meanwhile, agriculture’s share of GDP fell from 30 percent in 1980 to 15 percent in 2001 and 12.6 percent in 2005.14 The urban focus of the reforms in the 1990s has contributed to the dramatically widening inequality between the rural and urban sphere. As of the early 2000s, urban income had grown to three times that of its rural counterpart.15 These changing rural conditions were the background to Wen Tiejun’s transformation from a proponent of market economics to a sharp critic, as he became one in a chorus of increasingly critical voices within the intellectual sphere. For Wen, non-market experimentation and the continued pursuit of equality was necessary to avoid the return of large-scale social conflict and even revolution in rural society. His work was a criticism of the reforms of the 1990s, with their urban and market focus. While the new left broadly saw the first phase of the reforms (1978–89) as socialist in that social goals such as justice, equality, and social welfare still seemed to predominate and the market was deployed as a social instrument, they saw the second phase (beginning in 1992) as a reversal, with the market coming to dominate society. Nowhere was this criticism more clear than in the discussions on rural China that began with Wen’s turn-of-the-century intervention. Central to Wen’s project was the question of what socialism meant over the reform era and what its relation was to the socialism of the pre-reform

10 11 12 14

15

1993. See Yao Shujie and Liu Jirui, “Economic Reforms and Regional Segmentation in Rural China,” Regional Studies 32, no. 8 (1998), 737. Whiting, Power and Wealth in Rural China: The Political Economy of Institutional Change, pp. 280–8. See Bernstein and Lü, Taxation without Representation, pp. 116–65. 13 Keidel, “China’s Economic Fluctuations,” p. 68, fig. 3.17. Ibid., pp. 91–2. Keidel, “China’s Economic Fluctuations,” p. 86; Martin Ravallion and Shaohua Chen, “China’s (Uneven) Progress Against Poverty,” Journal of Development Economics, no. 82 (2007), 15. In 1985 it was about 1.8 to 1. While inequality has grown, it should be noted that over the reform era the absolute poverty rate has declined. For poverty reduction, see Ravallion and Chen, “China’s (Uneven) Progress Against Poverty.”

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era. The perception that China’s peasant population was in crisis led Wen to an exploration of modern Chinese history, and through this he contributed to the fracturing of political positions during the second phase of reforms that was constructed upon newly divergent understandings of history. As “reform and opening” progressed and China increasingly came to be integrated into the global capitalist system, this curtailed the historical narrative that infused socialism with meaning and saw it as the supercession of capitalism. Those who did attempt to maintain a socialist or leftleaning stance were faced with the task of rebuilding a historical narrative of socialism that could point to an alternative future to that of capitalist modernization, as well as explain the contradictions of the “actually existing socialism” of the Maoist era. Under these political conditions new questions arise: how was the relationship between modernization and socialism understood by left-leaning intellectuals in China? What was the role of markets within a socialist society? What kind of historical narrative work was necessary to construct a postsocialist critique of the recent directions of the reform process? Wen contributed to the debates on these questions. The postsocialist forging of a new historical narrative within the writings of the emerging Chinese left was built around an understanding of the rural–urban relationship. Wen Tiejun’s alternative for rural China was constructed in contradistinction to liberal and mainstream-economist narratives of marketization and convergence with the West and global capitalism. Wen explicitly argued that China could not follow the road of modernization taken by the West, a road, in his view, based on colonial exploitation.16

Wen Tiejun and the emergence of “sannong wenti ” In the mid to late 1990s, Wen Tiejun’s perception that rural China and the peasantry were in crisis provoked him to undertake a historical examination of Chinese modernization. It also led him to an exploration of international experiences with modernization that refocused attention on the Third World. These examinations were fueled by Wen’s mounting skepticism toward market-based models of rural development. Early on in his career, Wen had been an advocate of market reforms. From 1985, Wen 16

Wen Tiejun, “Jiegou xiandaihua” [Deconstruction of modernization], in Jiegou xiandaihua – Wen Tiejun yanjiang lu [Deconstruction of modernization – talks by Wen Tiejun] (Guangzhou: Guangdong renmin chubanshe, 2004), pp. 14–15.

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began working in the State Council’s Research Center for Rural Development (Guowuyuan nongcun fazhan yanjiu zhongxin), and from 1987 he was the deputy director of the Office of Rural Reform Experimental Zones (quanguo nongcun gaige shiyanqu bangongshi), running rural policy experiments. Yet from Wen’s perspective, by the mid 1990s the marketizationand-urbanization model of rural development dominant in the 1990s, a model largely imported from the West, no longer seemed to provide a solution to the problems of rural China. The continuing weakness of the TVEs from the mid 1990s on caused the decline of the idea that rural development could follow a different path, often discussed under the formulation “leaving the land but not the village” (litu bu lixiang). Yet as the rural economy worsened in the late 1990s and urban unemployment rose with the reform of state-owned enterprises, some intellectuals questioned whether urbanization would be able to significantly improve the livelihoods of rural residents. The specificity of this argument lay in a discussion of population growth and the urbanization rate, with several key participants on the left arguing that, even if the urbanization rate was to continue at the most favorable rate, the rural population would not actually decline over the next several decades. This crisis atmosphere was propelled in part by China’s impending entry into the World Trade Organization (WTO),17 the 1997 Asian financial crisis,18 the US bombing of the Chinese Belgrade Embassy in 1999,19 rising urban unemployment caused by the reform of the State Owned Enterprises, stagnating rural incomes, and growing rural protests.20 Increasingly skeptical of the power of markets alone to bring about the development of rural China, Wen began to write internal reports (government reports that were not made public) critical of the marketfundamentalist direction of rural reform.21 He began to stress that China’s rural problems were not directly about agriculture; the fundamental issue was the peasantry and rural surplus labor. This insight was brought to the surface by the privatization of many TVEs – especially from 1995 through 17 18

19 20 21

For Chinese debates on entering the WTO, see Fewsmith, China Since Tiananmen, pp. 204–17. For a discussion of the Asian economic crisis, see Bruce Cumings, “The Korean Crisis and the End of ‘Late’ Development,” New Left Review 1, no. 231 (1998). See Fewsmith, China Since Tiananmen, pp. 217–20. Bernstein and Lü, Taxation without Representation, especially chapters 3 and 5. In 1995, Wen wrote an internal report (“Guanyu nongye nongcun zhengce butong yijian fenxi” [An analysis of different opinions on agricultural and rural policy]) critical of the direction of rural reforms in the 1990s. In 1996, he began to air his criticisms in public with the publication of Wen Tiejun, “Di er bu nongcun gaige mianlin de liang ge jiben maodun” [The two basic contradictions that the second step of rural reform faces], Zhanlüe yu guanli, no. 3 (1996), 111–14.

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1997 – which shifted their emphasis from providing local employment to making profits, meaning they no longer soaked up rural surplus labor in the way that they had in the past.22 Because of his disagreement with state policy on the marketization of rural finance and banking in 1997, he left his position as the deputy director of the Office of Rural Reform Experimental Zones in 1998, although he stayed on as a research fellow. Meanwhile, in 1996 he began a PhD dissertation at the Agricultural University of China on the history of rural institutional change since 1949, completing it in 1999.23 In 2001, he became chief editor of the magazine Zhongguo gaige [China Reform], which also began to publish Zhongguo gaige (nongcunban) [China Reform (Rural edition)] beginning in 2002, until it stopped publication in 2004 and Wen moved to Renmin University. Through this exploration, Wen developed the concept of sannong wenti. The sannong, or “three nong,” are nongmin, nongcun, nongye – peasants, rural society, and agriculture. Wenti means problems. Wen had first adopted the concept in the late 1980s while conducting rural experiments for the state. His intervention with the formulation sannong wenti in the debate on rural development at the end of the 1990s shifted the terms of the discussion and helped to put the mainstream economist stance, which held that the rural sphere needed to be further integrated into the market economy, on the defensive. By focusing on the peasantry, Wen questioned the suitability of the American or Western path and marketization for Chinese conditions. In the late 1990s, Wen used the media to promote the formulation sannong wenti, arguing that surplus rural labor and the well-being of the peasantry, not agricultural production, were the keys to understanding the long-term development strategy of China, as well as its current problems. In this formulation, the three aspects of sannong wenti required holistic and systematic treatment. In other words, Wen refused to frame rural issues as a problem of rural economic and agricultural development, in contrast to most state policy discussion on agriculture in the 1990s. Underlying the state’s rural reform strategy was the economic rationale that giving land to households to manage under a market economy would increase economic incentives and, in turn, production. From decollectivization in the 1980s until the debate on rural China erupted at the end of the century, this 22 23

Interview with Wen Tiejun, Beijing, Feb. 23, 2005. This was published as Wen Tiejun, Zhongguo nongcun jiben jingji zhidu yanjiu: ‘sannong’ wenti de shiji fansi [Research into the basic economic structure of rural China: century-end reflections on sannong wenti ] (Beijing: Zhongguo jingji chubanshe, 1999).

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atomization and marketization strategy did not change dramatically, and rural China receded into the background as discussion focused on urban reforms. Wen was also opposed to separating a discussion of the peasant population from one on agricultural and rural social issues, as many intellectual discussions on urbanization had. He constructed these arguments by focusing on rural surplus labor power (nongye shengyu laodongli ), bringing the peasant back to the foreground. Wen forcefully argued that focusing on the peasant transformed rural problems into a national problem, a problem of the complex relationship between the city and the countryside and of the long-term development direction of China. Thus, Wen’s work was as much about China’s future and the future of its population as it was about rural development. In constructing this argument, Wen paid particular attention to long-term structural constraints on China’s development and the attempt to institute a Western model of market institutions under these conditions during the 1990s. According to Wen, China’s sannong wenti was the result of this combination of structural constraints and market economics. In other words, Wen saw market economics as specific to the conditions of an industrializing West, conditions that China did not share.

History and sannong wenti In the mid 1990s, anxiety concerning growing rural problems drove scholars such as Wen Tiejun24 to reconsider the long history of Chinese development. Their historicization of the condition of rural China was founded upon the limits global capitalism placed on China’s industrialization process in the early and mid twentieth century and the attendant necessity of delinking from that world system for development to take place. For many of those on the left, this reflection on modern Chinese history was brought into conversation with world systems analysis, which became an increasingly popular weapon in the critique of Chinese liberal ideology as an abstract universalism. Unlike most Chinese liberals, who, while often talking of China joining the world, tended to treat nations as distinct and comparable units which

24

This discussion comes from Wen’s important article, “‘Sannong wenti’: shiji mo de fansi” [Centuryend reflections on sannong wenti], Dushu, no. 12 (1999), 3–11, translated as “Centenary Reflections on the ‘Three Dimensional Problem’ of Rural China,” Inter-Asia Cultural Studies 2, no. 2 (2001), 287–95.

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were then placed on a universal temporal scale of difference, those on the left were more likely to view the world as a hierarchical structured system. This was particularly obvious in discussions on rural development.25 It was precisely through viewing the world as a structure that the notion of different paths to development was legitimated, for different nations were positioned differently within the world system and thus operated under different conditions. World systems analysis itself, of course, was genealogically related to the Chinese Revolution and Maoism, a connection that is particularly clear in the work of Samir Amin, work that has been quite popular in China among left-leaning thinkers.26 Yet at the same time, many on the left displayed ambivalence about the strategic delinking from a world economy during the Maoist era. This was expressed both in Wen’s reflections on Chinese history and in his contemporary proposals for rural China. Wen Tiejun argued that China underwent four attempts to industrialize from the late Qing on, but only found success beginning in the 1950s, during the third attempt.27 The main problem China faced from the Qing dynasty on, according to Wen, was that it could not plunder foreign resources through colonialism as the West had done in order to begin the industrialization process; it had to accumulate primary capital internally, in the form of agricultural surplus, through a process Wen called “State Capitalist Primitive Accumulation.”28 Thus during the Maoist era, rural society had to give up its surplus instead of reinvesting it in rural development, leaving a large economic gap between urban and rural society, in which the urban sector was actually subsidized by the rural sector. It was the necessary process of primitive accumulation during the Maoist era, produced by institutions that transferred rural surplus to the urban sphere for

25

26

27

28

This is not true of all on the left, of course. Cui Zhiyuan, as discussed in Chapter 3, finds world system theory to be too determinist. Samir Amin was introduced to the Chinese audience in part through a review of his views on globalization by Wang Hui. See Wang Hui, “Zhixu haishi shixu? Aming yu ta dui quanquihua de kanfa” [Creating order or disorder? Amin and his view on globalization], Dushu, no. 7 (1995), 106–12. Wen Tiejun, “Bainian Zhongguo, yibo sizhe” [China’s hundred years: a river with four bends], Dushu, no. 3 (2001), 3–11. In “Shiji mo de fansi,” Wen did not use “State Capitalist Primitive Accumulation,” only “primitive accumulation of capital” (ziben de yuanshi jilei ), although it was used in the translated version “Centenary Reflections on the ‘Three Dimensional Problem’ of Rural China.” Wen did use the category “State Capitalist Primitive Accumulation,” however; interview with Wen, Feb. 25, 2005. Wen first used the concept of “primitive accumulation” ( yuanshi jilei ) in 1988: see Wen, “Minjian ziben yuanshi jilei yu zhengfu xingwei” and also “Guojia siben zaifenpei yu minjian ziben zai jilei.”

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industrialization, that determined the structural relation between the countryside and urban China.29 Thus, unlike Qin Hui, who saw primitive accumulation as unnecessary to capitalist industrialization, Wen argued that “capitalist industrialization per se necessitates primitive accumulation” (zibenzhuyi gongyehua benshen bixu you yuanshi jilei).30 The institutions central to this process during the years of Mao’s leadership included the commune system, state-controlled purchasing and marketing, the rationing of grain, and the dual household registration system, which kept rural residents firmly in the countryside. These institutions reduced the cost and increased the efficiency of transferring the rural surplus into industrialization, thus bringing about the industrialization of China and producing “the property owned by the whole people” – much of which, Wen critically noted, was being privatized in the second phase of the reforms.31 But this industrialization process also left China with a binary system that placed the city and the countryside in an “antagonistic contradiction” with each other, producing the present sannong wenti.32 Wen’s narrative figured socialism as a form of industrialization. In this sense, socialism was not really a rupture that led to communism so much as a different path to an industrialized future. In this postsocialist (and postrevolutionary) refiguring of socialism, the commune system, for example, was primarily a system to facilitate the transformation of rural 29

30

Here Wen can be seen as arguing that there was an “urban bias” to China’s development strategy. In pre-reform-era English-language literature on Chinese development and urbanization, many scholars detected a “rural bias” primarily through a reading of Chinese ideology. See Laurence Ma, “Anti-Urbanism in China,” Proceedings, Association of American Geographers, no. 8 (1976), “Counter-Urbanization and Rural Development: The Strategy of Hsia-Hsiang,” Current Scene 15, no. 8–9 (1977); Rhoads Murphey, “Chinese Urbanization under Mao,” in Brian Berry, ed., Urbanization and Counter-Urbanization (Beverley Hills, CA: Sage Publications, 1976); William Parish, “Urban Policy in Centralized Economies: China,” in George Tolley and Vinod Thomas, eds., The Economics of Urbanization in Urban Policies in Developing Countries (Washington: The World Bank, 1987); Janet Salaff, “The Urban Communes and Anti-City Experiments in Communist China,” China Quarterly 29 (1967). During the reform era, however, there was a reversal and most (English-language) scholars indicated an “urban bias,” in which the rural sector was exploited to benefit urban industrialization. See Kan Wing Chan, Cities with Invisible Walls: Reinterpreting Urbanization in Post-1949 China (Hong Kong: Oxford University Press, 1994); Richard Kirkby, Urbanization in China: Town and Country in a Developing Economy, 1949–2000 AD (London: Croom Helm, 1985); Jean Oi, “Reform and Urban Bias in China,” Journal of Development Studies 29, no. 4 (1993); Dorothy Solinger, Contesting Citizenship in Urban China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999). Barry Naughton and Li Zhang suggested a more complex and mixed picture: Barry Naughton, Growing Out of the Plan: Chinese Economic Reform, 1978–1993 (Cambridge University Press, 1996); Li Zhang, China’s Limited Urbanization under Socialism and Beyond (New York: Nova Science Publishers, 2004). Zhang argued that there was more of a “state bias” than an urban bias (pp. 18, 155–6). 31 32 Wen, “Jiegou xiandaihua,” p. 14. Wen, “Shiji mo de fansi,” 9–10. Ibid., 10.

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surplus into industrial capital by reducing transaction costs. Socialism became the practice of modernization via state capitalism, a developmental system of state capitalist primitive accumulation. Maoism became a variation on the Soviet model of primitive accumulation – a more successful and less violent one perhaps – with many of its distinctive features elided in this account. On the one hand, Wen read the history of the People’s Republic teleologically, seeing it as an effort to delink from the world economy in order to later relink when conditions were ripe, and in the process erasing the history of Maoism as part of a global, anti-capitalist revolution. On the other hand, Wen argued that rural China was not prepared to fully relink with global capitalism because of the contradictory conditions created during the period of delinked socialism. This ambivalence towards the revolutionary goals of the Maoist era is characteristic of current left-leaning politics in China. If socialism was a period of primitive accumulation, the reform era was understood as the post-primitive-accumulation era. Wen saw the transition from Stalinism to rule by Khrushchev in similar terms; once primitive accumulation had been largely completed, the Soviet Union could begin to reinsert itself into the global economy via Khrushchev: The Soviet Union had completed its capital accumulation for industrialization and had met the necessary requirements for socialized great production (shehuihua da shengchan) in order to participate in the international division of labor – this is an irrefutable economic law. On the other hand, countries that had not completed industrial capital accumulation were unable to follow the above [Soviet] strategic transformation.33

According to Wen, a similar transition began to take shape in China during the 1970s, and this explained the reform and opening policies of the Deng Xiaoping era. Postsocialism was marked by a relinking to global capitalism. Over the twentieth century, according to Wen, this process of modernization and industrialization was accompanied by a “painful” iconoclasm and criticism of Chinese culture.34 This cultural critique was structurally related to China’s attempt to develop under the conditions of capitalist underdevelopment, leading to two cultural revolutions. The first was a bourgeois cultural revolution in the form of the New Culture 33

34

Wen Tiejun, “Zhanlüe zhuanbian yu gongyehua, zibenhua de guanxi” [The relationship between strategic transformation and industrialization and capitalization], in Wen Tiejun, ed., Jiegou Xiandaihua – Wen Tiejun yanjiang lu (Guangzhou: Guangdong renmin chubanshe, 2004), p. 24. Wen Tiejun, “Zhongguo de renmin de xiandaihua” [The Chinese people’s modernization], Tianya, no. 3 (2000), 21.

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movement of the 1910s and 1920s, and the second was the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution in the 1960s. The intellectual history of the twentieth century was thus marked by the intertwining of modernization and cultural revolution: it was only by breaking with traditional culture that the industrialization process could proceed. These cultural revolutions were symptoms of attempted industrialization, but since industrialization was now successful, they were safely in the past.35 For Wen, the structural conditions of China’s sannong wenti were the result of a tension between a large peasantry and limited resources, on the one hand, and an industrialization process that had to rely upon the internal accumulation of rural surplus, on the other. Thus, this tension was located both within a context of problems internal to China and the context of global capitalist relations.36 Within this larger global framework, institutional innovation, so central to the debates over development strategy during the 1990s, was reduced by Wen to a result of broad structural transformations – institutional innovation followed from structural changes and was not their prerequisite. The privatization of land and the institution of private property depended upon the proper structural environment and not vice versa.37 Without the proper structural conditions, the privatization of agricultural land would not necessarily make the agricultural economy more profitable; in addition, it would result in a large number of landless peasants and rural unemployment. For Wen, therefore, institutions were not transferable universals that could be imported into any social or national context. Wen’s structuralist perspective contrasts with Cui Zhiyuan’s more flexible constructivist conceptualization of history discussed in Chapter 3 and with Qin Hui’s liberal convergence narrative of modernization discussed in Chapter 2. Each theory linked history and politics differently. For Wen, uneven global structural conditions were a constraint on national conditions ( guoqing). Wen therefore focused his narrative on the historical development of structural conditions. As we saw in Chapter 2, liberals such as Qin Hui tended to link history and politics using an evolutionary narrative of national modernization, which positioned nations as comparable units. In that narrative, backward nations would be able to adopt the institutions of advanced nations, bringing about modernization through convergence. For Cui Zhiyuan, history was a much more open laboratory from which institutions could be adopted, 35 37

36 Ibid. Wen, “Shiji mo de fansi,” 3–11. Wen, “Zhongguo de renmin de xiandaihua,” 24–5.

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tested, and used according to needs and political goals. The connection between history and politics, for Cui, was much less predetermined than it was for Wen. While Wen was much more of a structuralist than Cui – viewing history as an important constraint on institutions – their positions had some key similarities. Implicit in Wen’s position, like that of Cui’s, was an understanding of socialism as an experiment with social institutions in which society, not the market, was dominant – this was a key new-left theme, central to the new-left critique of market fundamentalism. For Wen, however, the structures of global capitalism and national conditions were a much more important factor in constraining such experiments than they were for Cui, who was perhaps the most utopian thinker of the new left. Wen’s view of the world as a structured totality led him to study the experiences of other nations with large rural populations that were confronting the difficulties of modernization. As he was leaving the Office of Rural Reform Experimental Zones and as China was looking to enter the World Trade Organization, he began to link up with the international alternative development scene with the help of NGO contacts and to travel to developing nations, including Mexico, Brazil, Thailand, and India, to learn from their experiences.38 In contrast to the 1980s when, under the liberal consensus, the West, and in particular America, were the measure of modernity, Wen’s position emerged at a time in which America was recognized by many in China as attempting to block China’s re-entry into the world.39 Here Wen’s politics took part in a refocusing upon the experiences of the developing world. Earlier comparisons of China to developed nations led to the argument that China needs more urbanization, marketization, and privatization in order to solve rural issues; however, through comparison of China to developing nations, Wen pointed out that in those cases urbanization, marketization, and privatization had not solved rural problems but had led to rural poverty, slums, and even rural rebellion and guerrilla war.40 He argued that the rise of GDP in countries such as Mexico and Brazil had not solved their peasant issues; instead, they brought into existence slums ( pinminku), powerful social responses such as the Landless Workers’ 38

39

40

Lau Kin Chi, Professor of Cultural Studies at Lingnan University and founder of the China Social Services and Development Research Centre, was particularly helpful to Wen. In the late 1990s, the US was placing tough conditions on China’s entry into the WTO. Earlier, the US had tried to block China from holding the 2000 Olympics. More serious still, in 1999 the US had bombed the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade. Wen, “Jiegou xiandaihua,” pp. 10–12.

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Movement in Brazil (MST), and, in the case of Mexico and other countries, peasant rebellion.41 Out of this investigation, especially from his travels in Brazil and Bangladesh, Wen became more critical of the idea that urbanization was a solution to surplus rural labor and rural crisis.42 Referencing intellectuals of the developing world, Wen contended that Western modernization (xifang ren shixian de xiandaihua)43 was really “the result of a long period of colonization.”44 Wen argued for the deconstruction of colonial modernization – the colonial primitive accumulation that resulted, on the one hand, in capitalist industrialization in the metropole, and, on the other hand, in the death of millions of natives of the Americas and Africa as well as the plundering of resources and environmental destruction on the peripheries. In part, the target of Wen’s discussion was the abstraction “modernization” itself, which functioned as a self-justifying and objective necessity. In most recent Chinese accounts, “modernization” was used without recognition of the social history of colonialism that produced it. By “the deconstruction of modernization” ( jiegou xiandaihua), Wen meant that these historical conditions of modernization must be uncovered. In this way, Wen’s critique had significant similarities to that of Cui Zhiyuan before him: both criticized the fetishization of the modernization model constructed through its abstraction from social context. In Wen’s work, therefore, the return of the peasant was tied to a return of the Third World, and it pointed towards a possible reimagination of a politics of the periphery, a politics of strategic delinking from the full force of the market economy. Contemporary rural crisis and market dominance Wen and others on the left argued that new rural policies were possible during the reform era because the accumulation of agricultural surplus for industrialization, the primary achievement of the Maoist era of socialism, was largely complete. A new rural–urban relationship, therefore, was possible along with new rural institutions, as I will explore in Chapter 6. Yet even though China had accomplished the primitive accumulation necessary to the foundation of industrial society, according to Wen, China still could not shift to the American path of development.45 This was because the contradictions produced by the process of 41 43 44

42 Ibid., p. 10. Interview with Wen, Feb. 23, 2005. Wen also used “Western model” ( xifang moshi ). Wen, “Jiegou xiandaihua,” p. 15. 45 Ibid., p. 13. Wen, “Shiji mo de fansi,” 10.

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delinking from global capitalism intertwined with conditions particular to China’s internal development. Here I will discuss three key problems Wen saw with the notion that the importation of Western market economics was the solution to rural problems. First, the ratio between land and population led to a particular form of land use within a small peasant economy, in which farm land was used as a means of survival rather than as a factor in production. Second, surplus agriculture labor could not find non-agricultural uses. Third, capital flowed out from the countryside. Each of these problems is discussed further below. These three factors – land, labor, and money – as they interact with the historical development of Chinese industrialization that brought about the separation of the rural and urban populations from the 1950s on, produced the contemporary sannong wenti. As Wen argued, the rural sector made sacrifices for the development of the nation during the socialist era, and, in part because of this, it was not in a position to be able to compete within the global capitalist, or even national, market. Sannong wenti was therefore a condition particular to the postsocialist era.46 First, similar to the argument of Huang Ping discussed in Chapter 3, Wen Tiejun argued that in a society with a high population and a small amount of arable land, land became a “subsistence resource” (shengcun ziliao) not just a “production resource” (shengchan ziliao).47 Not only was the supply of land limited, but with urbanization and desertification it was being reduced.48 This issue was a centerpiece of Wen’s critical appraisal of mainstream economist policy and China’s development strategy. Chinese peasants needed to survive somehow, and if privatization of agricultural land pushed them off the land, what were their alternatives? If land was primarily a “subsistence resource,” and not a profit-making resource, then it must be distributed equally among villagers, as it was when the reforms began in the early 1980s. Economic efficiency should be second to equality under these national structural conditions.

46

47 48

Since the sannong wenti formulation came to be popularly and officially employed, its meaning has become more diffuse. It is now often used timelessly to stand for rural issues in general. See, for example, Wu Li and Zheng Yougui, Jiejue “sannong” wenti zhi lu: Zhongguo gongchandang “sannong” sixiang zhengce shi [The road to solving “sannong ” problems: a history of Chinese Communist Party “sannong” thought and policy], ed. Wu Li and Zheng Yougui (Beijing: Zhongguo jingji chubanshe, 2003). Wen, “Shiji mo de fansi,” 8. Wen, “21 shiji de Zhongguo rengran shi xiaonong jingji?” [Will 21st-century China still be a small peasant economy?], Guoji jingji pinglun, no. 6 (2000).

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Second, rural labor power (laodongli), when viewed from an economic standpoint as a commodity, was in surplus.49 Chinese agriculture, according to Wen, could operate with about one hundred million people, while the rural laboring population was about six hundred million. By the late 1990s, at least a hundred million of that population was working in the cities and perhaps another two hundred million in rural secondary and tertiary industries; yet that left a huge surplus population.50 Wen argued that such a large surplus in the countryside meant that it would be impossible to treat labor power as a commodity, for in these conditions, how would the rural population sustain itself within a market economy? If the urban employment market could not absorb the rural unemployed, then who would support them? Wen continued by arguing that a social security system for rural residents would be too expensive for the Chinese state. Without sufficient non-agricultural employment opportunities, as the marginal return on labor investments in agriculture drops towards zero, still labor power continues to be invested.51 Again echoing the work of Huang Ping, we should note that this is a classical involutionary situation, in which productivity drops with rising labor investment.52 Philip Huang, writing in 1990, argued that China’s rural economy was involutionary until the rise of the TVEs.53 From the mid 1980s to the mid 1990s, the TVEs provided an outlet for rural surplus labor, meaning that surplus labor was now less likely to be invested in farming projects that provided little or no marginal returns, as in the involutionary past. As Wen Tiejun pointed out, however, with the bankruptcy and privatization of the TVEs in the mid 1990s, the TVEs no longer functioned primarily to soak up surplus rural labor. The TVEs that survived this process increasingly operated as private firms with an economic logic of profit maximization.54 In other words, the shift to an economic logic of profit maximization for TVEs meant that surplus rural labor no longer had an outlet within rural China; it either had to find employment in the urban sphere or it would be invested in agriculture,

49

50

51 52 53

54

Much of the economic literature on rural China spoke of peasants as “surplus agricultural labor power” (nongye shengyu laodongli ). See He Xuefeng, Xiangcun yanjiu de guoqing yishi [Rural research and national conditions consciousness] (Wuhan: Hubei renmin chubanshe, 2004), p. 81. Wen, “21 shiji de Zhongguo rengran shi xiaonong jingji?” Philip Huang, The Peasant Family and Rural Development in the Yangzi Delta, 1350–1988, p. 11. Ibid., p. 18. Huang’s work can be seen as part of the second wave of reform-era discussions on rural China, discussions that focused on the transformative potential of the TVEs. Interview with Wen Tiejun, Beijing, Feb. 23, 2005.

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lowering productivity and leading to a continuation of the involutionary trend in the Chinese rural economy. This critical discussion of rural population, labor power, and urbanization grounded the turn-of-the-century new-left reflection on the history of Chinese industrialization, as well as the search for alternatives to the market fundamentalist perspective with its attendant social and economic policies. As the market value of labor became the most important way of valuing human activity – the essential transformation of the reform era – peasant logics of economic and social organization were devalued. Here, in the face of the growing dominance of the market, Wen’s humanism came to the fore: peasant life had an intrinsic worth that extended far beyond the market value of its labor power, and society was obliged to create institutions to protect that human value. At the heart of this ideology lay the belief that the market should be restrained by society. Third, with rural economic involution and the dropping economic returns on agricultural production, capital flowed out of the countryside and was not reinvested in production. This outflow was facilitated by market reforms of the rural banking sector in the late 1990s – the very reforms that caused Wen to disagree with state policy and transfer out of his position in the Office of Rural Reform Experimental Zones. According to Wen, the cost of producing agricultural commodities in China was already higher than their price on the international market. Thus the more China developed a single market for capital and integrated with the international agricultural market, the less capital would be invested in Chinese agriculture.55 As with land and labor, the marketization of money, of capital, brought about a deepening of the rural crisis. These three factors echo the discussion of “fictitious commodities” by Karl Polanyi, who, as we saw in the last chapter, was a key source for the new left’s reinterpretation of history.56 For Polanyi, land, labor, and money could not be full commodities, and treating them in such a “utopian” manner would lead to the destruction of both society and nature, engendering a social protective movement in which society reacted against the market to maintain its existence.57 As Wen argued, the “small peasant economy” (xiaonong jingji) was naturally anti-market ( fei shichang de).58 He 55 56 57

Wen, “21 shiji de Zhongguo rengran shi xiaonong jingji?” Polanyi, The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time. 58 Ibid., pp. 75–7. Wen, “21 shiji de Zhongguo rengran shi xiaonong jingji?”

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also often warned of the possibility that if this marketization went too far, a social protective response might get out of hand, even leading to rural rebellion – something that Wen obviously wanted to avoid.59 Wen’s use of the category “small peasant economy” was particularly important, indicating a view that the peasant operates within a different economy from the rest of society. In China, theories of a “small peasant economy” were most explicitly expressed in the work of Fei Xiaotong and in the 1980s in the work of Xu Xinwu. For both, the small peasant economy was not simply an agricultural economy, but combined farming and industry, having a different logic from modern production under the dominance of a market economy.60 For Wen Tiejun, this substantial difference between the “small peasant economy” and the urban market economy meant that if the peasant was to survive modernity, the rural economy could not be fully subsumed within the market economy. Peasant society needed to maintain a certain degree of autonomy or delinking from the market economy. Formalism and substantivism in China? Wen Tiejun and Lin Yifu Wen’s argument, with its Polanyian themes, was largely substantivist. Here the dialectic between universalism and particularism in the Chinese intellectual scene came to the surface, as did the themes of the debates between the substantivists and the formalists in the West in the 1950s and 1960s. The substantivists, most clearly represented by Karl Polanyi, Marshal Sahlins, and Teodor Shanin, drew on the work of Emile Durkheim and A. V. Chayanov61 to argue that actors within agrarian and industrial economies displayed different social and economic logics. Substantivists tended to draw a sharp divide between these two economically distinct societies, based on what they saw as substantial differences in their respective social and cultural behaviors. In contrast, the formalists – whose position for our purposes is most importantly expressed in Transforming 59 60

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Wen, “Jiegou xiandaihua.” For an interesting discussion of this, see Philip Huang, The Peasant Family and Rural Development in the Yangzi Delta, 1350–1988, pp. 5–11. For Xu, see Xu Xinwu, Yapian zhanzheng qian Zhongguo mianfangzhi shougongye de shangpin shengchan yu zibenzhuyi mengya wenti [Commodity production in the cotton handicraft spinning and weaving industry in China before the Opium War and the issue of the sprouts of capitalism] (Nanjing: Jiangsu renmin chubanshe, 1981), “Zhongguo he Riben mianfangzhi ye: zibenzhuyi mengya de bijiao yanjiu” [The cotton spinning and weaving industries of China and Japan: a comparative study of the sprouting of capitalism], Lishi yanjiu, no. 6 (1981). A. V. Chayanov, The Theory of the Peasant Economy (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1996 [1925]).

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Traditional Agriculture by Theodore Schultz62 – argued that a single economic logic was at work within “traditional” and “modern” economies, although institutional differences needed to be taken into account. The formal categories of economics, therefore, could be universally applied. The debate was continued perhaps most famously by James Scott and Samuel Popkin in the 1970s.63 Looking at rural rebellion in Burma and Vietnam, Scott argued that there was a particular system of values in peasant societies, based primarily on a subsistence ethic that shaped peasant decision making and behavior.64 Popkin took issue with Scott’s account, arguing to the contrary that the decision-making processes in peasant society were no different from those in other societies and, thus, that economic theory worked to explain peasant society as it did behavior in modern society.65 In Western peasant studies, as Deborah Bryceson comments, the substantivist/formalist debate “marked the conceptual pivot for the bifurcation of sociologically oriented peasant studies and the smallholder economic development approach.”66 In China, this distinction was sometimes articulated through the categories xiaonong jingji (small peasant economy) and xiao shengchanzhe (small or petty producer). The category “small producer,” in contrast to “small peasant economy,” suggested that one operated within the wider economy linked with the market, but follows a different class logic. Lin Yifu, professor and founding director of the China Center for Economic Research at Peking University, a major economic advisor of the Chinese state, and prominent proponent of mainstream economics in China, in principal took a formalist perspective, arguing that if proper market institutions were put into place, peasants would act as other entrepreneurs do, attempting to maximize economic profit. Peasant society did not need delinking or autonomy, but integration into the market economy. In contemporary China, in fact, Wen’s stance was most often compared to that of Lin Yifu.67 A brief discussion of Lin, consequently, will help make Wen’s political position even clearer. 62 63

64 65 66

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Theodore Schultz, Transforming Traditional Agriculture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1964). For a discussion of this debate see Daniel Little, Understanding Peasant China: Case Studies in the Philosophy of Social Science (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989), especially Chapter 2. James Scott, The Moral Economy of the Peasant (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1976). Samuel Popkin, The Rational Peasant (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979). Deborah Bryceson, “Peasant Theories and Smallholder Policies: Past and Present,” in Deborah Bryceson, ed., Disappearing Peasantries? Rural Labour in Africa, Asia and Latin America (London: Intermediate Technology Publications, 2000), p. 14. See for example, Tan Tongxue, “Xiangcun jianshe de san zhong zhuzhang yu nongcun shehui fazhan daoxiang” [Three propositions on rural reconstruction and the orientation of rural social

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The ideas of “mainstream economists” (zhuliu jingji xuezhe) gained a great deal of influence with the Chinese state from the 1990s on, as they worked to advise the CCP on policy, including rural development issues. Lin Yifu has been a vocal advocate for deepening rural reform,68 in a different – though perhaps complementary – way from the liberals. Unlike the liberals, Lin focused mainly on economics, and he integrated his policy recommendations for rural reform with his overall view of Chinese development strategy. For Lin Yifu, humans were understood in a rather static way. Given the proper universal institutions, higher productivity and efficiency would result. Modernization was the discovery and implementation of these universal institutions, a process of moving from a traditional economy to a modern market-based one. In contrast to Wen Tiejun, who viewed rural society as having a different logic from urban industrial society, meaning that the formal categories and reasoning of market economics do not work in the countryside, Lin’s project was to use these categories to understand the rural economy and to develop new rural policies. Lin’s stance was formalist, therefore, in that he saw economic rationality as a universal. This did not mean, however, that all societies ended up with similar economic systems. Different endowments of resources, institutions, and technologies all shaped economic rationality, giving different societies different comparative advantages. Citing Transforming Traditional Agriculture by Theodore Schultz,69 Lin argued against the substantivist view that “small peasant” rationality was different from the economic rationality of entrepreneurs in an urban market economy; instead, the lack of growth in productivity was seen to be caused by a lack of investment opportunities.70 Lin argued that “traditional small peasants” (chuantong xiaonong ) would be

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development], Sannong Zhongguo no. 6 (2005), 89; Wang Ximing, “Xin nongcun jianshe yu laonian zuzhi de fazhan – yi Jingmen, Honghu, Lankao shiyan wei lei” [New rural reconstruction and the development of old people’s organization – the examples of the Jingmen, Honghu, and Lankao experiments], in Pan Wei and He Xuefeng, eds., Shehuizhuyi xin nongcun jianshe de lilun yu shijian [New socialist countryside construction theory and practice] (Beijing: Zhongguo jingji chubanshe, 2006), pp. 206–13. For this comparison in English-language scholarship, see Lei Guang, “Bringing the City Back In: The Chinese Debate on Rural Problems,” in Martin King Whyte, ed., One Country, Two Societies: Rural-Urban Inequality in Contemporary China (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010). Lin’s dissertation was part of the first wave of discussion on rural China. See Justin Yifu Lin, “The Household Responsibility System in China’s Agricultural Reform: A Study of the Causes and Effects of an Institutional Change” (Unpublished PhD thesis, University of Chicago, Department of Economics, 1986). Schultz was a reader for Lin’s 1986 dissertation at the University of Chicago. Lin Yifu, Zhidu, jishu yu Zhongguo nongye fazhan [Institutions, technology, and Chinese agricultural development] (Shanghai sanlian shudian chubanshe, 1992), p. 3.

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transformed into productive and efficient entrepreneurs given modern technology and the right institutional structure – namely a unified national market for land, labor, inputs, and agricultural commodities. Consistent throughout Lin’s work was this twin stress on instituting a unified market and developing agricultural technology in order to modernize Chinese agriculture. In a historical critique that was foundational to Lin’s theoretical approach, he pointed out that the institutional environment of the Great Leap Forward (1958–61) was largely responsible for the agricultural crisis of 1959 to 1961.71 In contrast, the institutional shift from agricultural collectives to the household responsibility system in the early 1980s resulted in an increase of agricultural production.72 Crucial in this shift were the high costs of supervision under the collective system, which had to rely on supervision in the absence of a strong incentive structure. The household responsibility system, in contrast, was an institution with a self-disciplining incentive structure, resulting in increased production without costly supervision.73 His central argument was built through a comparison of the collective system, especially during the Great Leap Forward, and the household responsibility system. Through this comparison he concluded that appropriate institutions would allow rational economic decisions to lead to economic efficiency, growth, and technological change, transforming China into a modern market economy. In a co-authored work, Lin developed his comparison of the agriculture of the Great Leap Forward and the household responsibility system into a general critique of the Maoist era, arguing that the “leap-forward strategy” ( ganchao zhanlüe) brought economic crisis and that a shift to a “comparative-advantage strategy” (bijiao youshi zhanlüe) was necessary.74 Here, the “leap-forward strategy” referred not so much to the development strategy of the Great Leap Forward period but to the whole Maoist era from 1949 up until the reform movement beginning in 1978.75 Its key 71

72

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This 1990 article, “Jitihua yu Zhongguo 1959–1961 nian de nongye weiji” [Collectivization and the Chinese agricultural crisis of 1959–61], was reprinted in Zhidu, jishu yu Zhongguo nongye fazhan, pp. 16–43. See “Zhongguo de nongcun gaige yu nongye zengzhang” [China’s rural reform and agricultural growth], in Zhidu, jishu yu Zhongguo nongye fazhan, pp. 76–106. See “Zhongguo nongye jiating zeren zhi gaige de lilun yu jingyan yanjiu” [Research into the theory and experience of China’s agricultural household responsibility system reforms], in Zhidu, jishu yu Zhongguo nongye fazhan, pp. 44–75. Justin Yifu Lin, Fang Cai, and Zhou Li, Zhongguo de qiji: fazhan zhanlüe yu jingji gaige (zeng ding ban) [China’s economic miracle: development strategy and economic reform] (Shanghai sanlian shudian chuban: 1999): see chapters 2 and 4. Lin viewed the Great Leap Forward as an “enlarged” version and logical extension of the “leapforward strategy,” ibid., p. 58.

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characteristics were prioritizing heavy industry and a price imbalance between agricultural and industrial goods, which drew capital out of the countryside to be invested in industrialization. In order to institute this system of distorted pricing and to accumulate capital, Lin maintained, a market mechanism could not be used, and economic rationality and decision-making power had to be taken away from individual enterprises and farmers.76 The “leap-forward strategy” was the result of a political and ideological decision of the CCP under international and national conditions including the development theories of newly independent countries after World War Two and the dangers of the Korean War, and limited resources for national accumulation.77 Lin also linked the leap-forward or counter-comparative advantage strategy to the post-World-War-Two global moment, noting the strength of Keynesian economics, Latin American “import-substitution strategy,” and other Third World development strategies, such as that of Nehru in India. All of these models, according to Lin, broke with conventional economics in their distrust of markets – a mistake from Lin’s perspective.78 Clearly there were some similarities with Wen Tiejun’s understanding of the socialist period. Both Lin and Wen viewed socialist-era rural policies, including the commune system and the price scissors between agricultural and industrial goods, as largely determined by the development strategy China adopted in the 1950s. There was a major difference, however. Lin viewed this counter-comparative advantage, leap-forward strategy as a mistake, resulting in retarded development, low urbanization, and slow improvement of living standards.79 From Lin’s formalist perspective, therefore, there was only one path for development: following one’s comparative advantage within the global economy. Wen, conversely, viewed China’s “primitive accumulation” strategy as a necessity structured by the global capitalist environment. One of the effects, moreover, of the uneven global geography of capitalism was that different nations had to operate under different economic logics understood with different economic categories. 76 78

79

77 Ibid., pp. 28–9. Ibid., pp. 30–1. Ibid., pp. 54–62. Here we should note that it was this distrust of markets that made the Keynesian New Deal in the United States a positive event for Karl Polanyi. Writing in the 1940s, Polanyi believed that utopian market economics had been largely vanquished – they had seen their “rise and fall” – World War Two showing the world that an unfettered market only brought social disruption and war. Of course, with the rise to dominance of neo-liberalism in the 1970s, what Polanyi would have seen as a utopian market economics returned in force. Lin is fully enmeshed in this history. See Polanyi, The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time; and, for the neo-liberal turn, David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (Oxford University Press, 2005). Lin, Cai, and Li, Zhongguo de qiji, pp. 67–8.

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According to Lin, the shift from a “leap-forward strategy” to a “comparative-advantage strategy” was responsible for “China’s economic miracle” of the reform era, which was measured against the “very tiny improvements” ( gaishan shenwei) in living standards during the Maoist era.80 Lin viewed the reform process as a shift to a comparative-advantage strategy through the gradual improvement of the institutional environment. A key example for Lin was TVEs. In Lin’s narrative, TVEs appeared in the very particular institutional situation of the transition from a planned to a market economy. TVEs facilitated the “primitive accumulation” ( yuanshi jilei)81 of rural capital by making use of collective funds, cheap surplus rural labor, and cheap land. TVEs were able to take advantage of cheap inputs of land and labor in rural society because peasants could not migrate to the cities and rural land was still collectively owned.82 Since the planned economy had been dominated by heavy industry, TVEs were also able to exploit pent-up consumer demand. For Lin, therefore, contrary to the narrative seen in Chapter 3 of the TVEs being an alternate form of development and rural industrialization, the TVEs were seen as the transitional product of reform in a conversion to a proper market economy. In the beginning of the reform process, TVEs took the collective form because of “ideological and policy restrictions on the private economy.”83 In the mid 1990s, Lin argued, the TVE ownership structure changed as TVEs privatized, becoming even more efficient in response to the changing economic and political environment. In the late 1990s, Lin began to formulate proposals for rural reform that would help China to respond to growing deflationary pressures.84 The overproduction problems China experienced at the time were the result of an increase in the national productive capacity. This overproduction was not soaked up because of weak demand, especially weak demand in the rural economy. For China to sustain more balanced economic growth, according to many mainstream economists, it could not rely so heavily on exports and should build internal demand. Lin, however, saw the lack of rural development as an opportunity for the Chinese state. Unsatisfied effective demand in the countryside, if the proper infrastructure for 80 81

82 84

Ibid., p. 23. Here “primitive accumulation,” contrary to the work of Qin Hui, was used in a positive sense, as a necessary process to begin capitalist production in the reform era. 83 Lin, Cai, and Li, Zhongguo de qi ji, p. 174. Ibid., p. 175. See Justin Lin, Fang Cai, and Zhou Li, The China Miracle: Development Strategy and Economic Reform (Hong Kong: The Chinese University Press, 2003), Chapter 9. The earlier Chinese edition of this text did not contain this argument: see Zhongguo de qi ji.

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consumption was developed, could solve China’s overproduction problems. In order to create the conditions for allowing this demand to be met, Lin proposed that the state target investment in rural infrastructure (electricity, water, transportation, etc.) and integrate the nation’s labor and consumer goods markets, allowing rural residents to buy modern appliances and soak up overproduced goods. In turn, according to Lin, the increased demand would lead to more urban employment and rural-tourban migration.85 This was obviously a long-term strategy, one founded upon Lin’s comparison of the economics of the rural commune during the Maoist era and the household responsibility system that initiated the reform movement. If Lin’s “comparative-advantage-following strategy” was a model that should be universally implemented – showing the erroneous character of the socialist era – then Wen’s political prescription, which did not likewise negate the socialist era, was more difficult to construct. Wen used the categories “xiaonong jingji ” and “nongmin” to facilitate an understanding of rural social life as a sphere in which society was not dominated by the economic rationality of the market economy. Whereas for Lin, “traditional small peasants” (chuantong xiaonong) would disappear through modernization, becoming agricultural entrepreneurs, wage laborers, or urban workers, for Wen the “small peasant economy” would not disappear anytime soon, and in fact it held out promise for an alternative form of rural-based development. Contrary to Lin, Wen argued that the rural economy was not only different because of its institutional environment, but also because of long-term structural conditions. Adopting market institutions, according to Wen, would not transform the rural economy into an efficient market economy, but would bring about the further impoverishment of peasants and the Latin Americanization of China. Wen showed, in Polanyian fashion, that attempting to employ market economic institutions within the small peasant society would lead to its social and economic destruction. In fact, the attempt to do so in the 1990s had exacerbated the rural crisis late in the decade. The formalistinstitutionalist perspective, in Wen’s argument, did not pay enough 85

Note that Lin’s stance here was a major theoretical basis for the major new rural program announced by the state in 2005, the “building of a new socialist countryside” ( jianshe shehuizhuyi xin nongcun). On the “New Socialist Countryside,” see Qu Zhenyuan, Li Xiaoyun, and Wang Xiuqing, eds., Zhongguo shehuizhuyi xinnongcun jianshe yanjiu [Research into the construction of the new socialist countryside in China] (Beijing: Shehui kexue wenzhai chubanshe, 2006); Wang Weiguang, Jianshe shehuizhuyi xin nongcun de lilu yu shijian [The theory and practice of building a new socialist countryside] (Beijing: Zhonggong zhongyang dangxiao chubanshe, 2006).

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attention to the long-term historical and structural constraints that have produced the peasant economy in China, an economic form that will continue to exist for a long time to come. Here, Wen’s critical perspective led to a reflection upon both the global modernization process in general and China’s recent reform efforts. By the beginning of the reform era, in Wen’s formulation, the Maoist industrialization strategy of delinking China from global capitalism had left the country with an uneven binary system that separates the city from the countryside. With these reforms, China entered what Wen called the fourth industrialization period, and decollectivization recreated the smallscale family farm that now faced a market economy within which it could not compete while at the same time the state turned to focus on the urban sphere. While Wen was clearly supportive of the general early-reformist goal of “four modernizations” – the modernization of agriculture, industry, national defense, and science and technology – he questioned the method of implementation. Critical of the direction of the reforms in the second, post-1992, reform phase, he pointed out that in the late 1990s the goal of overall agricultural modernization was replaced by the modernization of agriculture in the developed coastal regions.86 Wen said that even though many developing countries were more marketized and liberalized than China, the “three great differences” (san da chabie), which Wen named as “income difference, urban–rural difference, and regional difference,” were even sharper in China.87 Here Wen’s Polanyian political investments, central to the politics of the 1990s left in a China that had joined the world of global capitalism, become clear. Wen’s was a politics of social protection and social equality. He, like many in China’s contemporary left, was not against markets per se, but against their dominance within the social sphere. The shift in state policy beginning in 2003, which led to greater investments in the rural sphere, obviously brought some hope to Wen and others on the left that the socialist goals of equality and social justice were still operative in the party. Wen suggested that this third phase marked a “momentous revision” (zhongda xiugai) of the four modernizations, with a new stress on “integrated development” (zonghe fazhan) and “sustainable development” (ke chixu fazhan). 86 87

Wen, “Jiegou xiandaihua,” p. 12. Wen’s formulation is different from Mao’s discussion of socialism’s goal of overcoming “three great differences,” which Mao saw as between mental and manual labor, between city and countryside, and between worker and peasant. Ibid., p. 11.

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Sannong wenti goes public Wen Tiejun’s left-leaning critique of rural reform policies, and especially his public intervention with the sannong wenti formulation, helped to open a space for others to criticize the marketization of rural social relations. In an open letter to Premier Zhu Rongji in early 2000, Li Changping, a rural cadre from central China’s Hubei Province, stated that “the peasants’ lot is really bitter, the countryside is really poor, and agriculture is in crisis.”88 At the time Wen had already begun to refocus the rural issue on the peasants and rural surplus labor through the sannong wenti formulation, which reached a wide intellectual audience. Li’s letter also helped to develop Wen’s notion of sannong wenti and pushed it into the public arena in a dramatic way. Popular misgivings about the rural situation, in particular concerning the “burden” of local taxes and fees on the peasantry, had surfaced in the media from the mid 1990s on. But it was Li’s letter, published in a national newspaper, which crystallized these disparate elements into a form that the state could not ignore. His words helped initiate a debate about the causes of the problems of rural China and led to major changes in government policy.89 Li’s letter, together with Wen’s sannong wenti formulation, facilitated a critique of the liberal narrative of the rural migrant as a figure of liberation. The opening of Li’s letter, quoted above, was modeled on Wen Tiejun’s sannong wenti – containing all three “rural” (nong) aspects and placing the peasants up front. Influenced by Wen’s book and article on sannong wenti, Li began to think more systematically about rural issues.90 In this work, Wen and Li brought to the public a critique of the urbanization and marketization model, in which rural migration was marked by the pressure of the market and an agrarian crisis that forced peasants out of the countryside into dangerous and precarious jobs or even urban unemployment. A key distinction between these two narratives was how each framed rural-to-urban migration historically and structurally – as a figure of 88

89

90

The letter, written by Li Changping in early 2000, was sent to Premier Zhu Rongji and later published in Southern Weekend in the Aug. 24, 2000 issue. See Li Changping, Wo xiang zongli shuo shihua, p. 20. In 2004, the state refocused its attention on rural issues after decades of neglect. It began by looking for ways to increase rural incomes, with the abolition of the agricultural tax and grain production price supports as its primary methods. By late 2005, the state called for a major new program, the “building of a new socialist countryside” ( jianshe shehuizhuyi xin nongcun). It is as yet unclear what this will mean for the countryside, but the state is now investing heavily in rural education and infrastructure development. Interview with Li Changping, Guiyang, Jan. 25, 2005.

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liberation under the conditions of a universal modernization or as surplus labor pushed out of rural society, and possibly society in general, by the institution of market fundamentalist policies. Within these debates we see the resurgence of the peasantry not only as a figure of crisis, but also – and these are linked – as a figure that cannot easily be fit within market-economic models. In fact, for those on the left, crisis indicated the possibility that the peasantry would not come to be integrated into the modern economy at all, but would form an excluded population. Li’s letter crystallized this feeling of crisis – a crisis of the peasantry and of liberal economics to explain and solve rural issues – giving legitimacy to arguments that attempted to widen their analytical focus beyond the frame of market economics, which tended to treat individuals universally as market optimizers. Within this turn-of-the-century atmosphere of crisis, a social critique of the limits of economic analysis and policies based upon market economics gathered steam. Li Changping and peasant migration Li’s impassioned letter set out to bring the suffering of peasants to the attention of the central leadership. Speaking of his experience as a rural cadre for seventeen years, Li focused his attention on the internal political and economic workings of village life. The rural problem was primarily couched as a problem of rural leadership, rural policy, and its implementation, firmly located within the rural sphere itself. Li used the sannong formulation to express the gravity of the rural situation: like Wen Tiejun, Li placed nongmin (the peasantry) up front in the tripartite formulation, stressing the difficulty of their lives. Yet, unlike the argument in Wen’s work, in Li’s letter the primary category for understanding the difficulty peasants faced was “burden” ( fudan). “Burden” stood for legal taxes and fees, as well as illegal fees levied on farmers. Li argued that this burden on the peasants had grown tremendously through the 1990s; at the same time, since the mid 1990s townships had also been going deep into debt. Li argued this was caused by an increasingly bloated township government structure. It was this “burden” that made farming precarious or unprofitable and pushed the peasants out of the villages. A discourse on peasant “burden” ( fudan) grew in strength in the mid 1990s, as local governments expanded, TVEs began to fail, especially in the central provinces, and agricultural prices stagnated.91 Li’s letter, however, brought this discussion 91

See Bernstein and Lü, Taxation without Representation.

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to new prominence at a moment when the media was open to public discussions of contentious issues. Li began his exposé of the rural situation by observing the transformation in the way peasants left his township to labor in the cities, noting that more people than ever were leaving the township without having prearranged employment in the cities: “Whereas in the past it was mostly girls or a portion of the surplus labor force that left to work in the cities, now men, women, old and young leave to work in the cities,” causing land to be left fallow.92 Li estimated that 25,000 of his township’s 40,000-strong population had left looking for work, including 15,000 of the 18,000strong township labor force.93 Li’s original analysis did not, for the most part, step outside of the township structure itself or away from the internal burdens on the peasantry. Li did, however, briefly comment that when the growing taxation burden was combined with the lowering of agricultural prices, the household responsibility system, initially responsible for increasing peasant initiative, was transformed into a “shackle” ( jiasuo) around the necks of the peasantry, because of the fees assessed on every villager.94 Yet, in his letter the issue of agricultural prices was marginal to Li’s analysis, and was left as a policy issue. Li simply noted that central governmentmandated procurement prices were ignored at the local level. At the same time, the prescription that Li put forward at the outset focused on changing central government policies in order to reduce the burden on the peasantry. According to Li, “policy (zhengce he celüe) is the party’s life,” but government policy no longer had any “credibility” since it was so often ignored by the local level of government.95 Specifically, to reduce the burden, Li suggested that the size of the township government structure had to be reduced. After the publication of the letter, Lu Xueyi asked Li to join him at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, where he was the director of the Institute of Sociology, and Wen Tiejun asked him to become an editor at Zhongguo gaige magazine. Li joined the magazine’s editorial staff, helping to further develop a left-leaning perspective on rural issues and to bring that view to a wider public audience.96 While Li’s compelling vision of township life established a greater space for debate over the rural situation, his discussion of peasant burdens was particularly open to appropriation by competing political perspectives within the debate on rural China and the reform process. Was the central problem rural governance? Was it simply a policy problem? Were there 92 95

93 Li Changping, Wo xiang zongli shuo shihua, p. 20. Ibid. 96 Ibid., pp. 22–3. Interview with Li, Guiyang, Jan. 25, 2005.

94

Ibid., p. 22.

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deeper structural problems? Were those structural problems caused by the socialist system, the reform process, or the marketization of agricultural products? Could the peasantry be organized or should they be allowed to organize themselves? Those more associated with the left were not the only ones to respond to Wen Tiejun’s sannong wenti formulation or for that matter to Li Changping’s dramatic illustration of rural crisis. Focusing on the rural-to-urban migrant as a figure of liberation, Lu Xueyi attempted to contain the sannong wenti formulation within a liberal modernization narrative by focusing criticism on the separation of rural and urban society as a political construction.97 Lu Xueyi responded to Li Changping’s letter by trying to reinsert Li’s picture of village crisis into his liberation narrative. Quoting Li’s comment that “the peasants’ lot is really bitter, the countryside is really poor, and agriculture is in crisis,” Lu spoke in response in the voice of the average reader who might ask: How is this possible? Didn’t the villages take the lead in the reforms? Weren’t the peasants the first to benefit, with a few areas already becoming rich? Haven’t a few peasants already gotten rich? How can it be now that the “peasants are suffering”?98

Lu attempted to explain this apparent contradiction between the assumption that rural problems were resolved early on in the reform process and Li’s proclamation of suffering by suggesting that the reform process was incomplete; the problem was that the reforms did not go far enough. Lu argued that the “root cause of the ‘peasants’ bitter lot and deep rural poverty’” was the “dual structure” of society created in the 1950s, which divided the city from the countryside.99 Eradicating this divide would allow the peasantry to escape poverty by moving to the cities. According to Lu, this system held back both the development of rural productive forces and the migration of rural surplus labor to the cities. The state used “the dual structure social system of ‘rule the city and the countryside separately, one country two systems,’” to protect the city in times of crisis by shifting the burden onto the rural areas. When the urban economy encountered difficulty, “the state uses political and economic means – through financial, taxation, price, monetary, credit and other policy levers – to protect the cities and the development of state industry,” pushing the burden onto the peasantry.100 97

98

Lu Xueyi, “‘Nongmin zhen ku, nongcun zhen qiong’?” [Is “the peasant’s lot really bitter, the countryside really poor”?], Dushu, no. 1 (2001). 99 100 Ibid., 3. Ibid., 7. Ibid.

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Early on in the reform era, he argued, the problem of supply and demand of agricultural commodities was solved by the contract responsibility system. However, that revealed another problem, surplus rural labor. With the household registration system still in force, peasants were kept out of the cities and rural surplus labor had to find local opportunities. This is how the TVEs were first created. “The peasants had no alternative but to start up local TVEs, following a model of village and township industrialization in which they were to find a way to ‘leave the soil but not to leave the village and to enter the factory without entering the city.’”101 Unlike the earlier advocates of rural industrialization as a Chinese form of modernization, Lu did not view this positively. For Lu, the growth of TVEs actually signaled a missed opportunity in the reform process. Lu suggested that if in the early 1980s the dual registration system had been abandoned, rural surplus labor could have then moved into the cities more freely, promoting urbanization and industrialization, mitigating many contemporary problems.102 Lu noted that China had another chance to end the dual-status system when in the 1990s a new wave of peasants began to flood to the cities. But instead the state again tried to reinforce the system.103 Lu concluded that the dual system had to be ended in what he called “the second liberation of the peasantry.”104 As discussed in Chapter 2, this was a familiar liberal metaphor in Chinese discussions on the peasantry, in which the separation of the peasantry from the land was seen as a liberation. The Marxist influence on this narrative is unmistakable: in breaking from feudalism, peasants become doubly free – free to sell their labor and freed from the land and feudal obligations. As with the intellectuals discussed in Chapter 1 and Qin Hui in Chapter 2, liberals often portrayed their political stance as a return to an orthodox Marxist narrative of historical development. The implication of this narrative, of course, was that Maoist collectives were feudal and not politically progressive, and a departure from the correct historical path. Yet, although Lu viewed China as a country ruled by two very different policies, this was not a substantivist position. For Lu, as for Lin Yifu, rural China was institutionally, not substantially, separated from urban society. In other words, it was not the intrinsic logic of a “small peasant economy” that made rural society different, but the state institutionalization of a separation that distorted the natural convergence and development of society in the modernization process. Only by removing these institutional 101

Ibid., 5.

102

Ibid.

103

Ibid., 8.

104

Ibid.

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barriers and allowing for the migration of labor to the cities would a unitary “citizens’ economy” ( guomin jingji) – as opposed to the continuance of the “small peasant economy” (xiaonong jingji) with a logic different from that of the capitalist market – develop. As Lu stated: “We need to create a unified market of over one billion people. We can no longer continue with divided markets in the city and the countryside and lock 900 million peasants out of the cities.”105 The solution to the problem of surplus rural labor, according to Lu, was to transfer it into the cities – the very solution of which Wen Tiejun was critical.106 Yet Lu did not specify what rural society would be like once this blockage was removed. Nor did he say – and this was a key omission – what the rural population would do in the cities once they left the countryside. Here Lu ignored his own earlier argument about the reasoning behind the government’s shifting of the burden of urban problems onto the rural population. He simply reversed the state-directed process of shifting the costs of the reforms onto the countryside. The question remained: if the rural “surplus labor” population were shifted to the cities, what would happen to urban social stability? Migrants pushed and pulled: the expansion of Wen’s critique Following Lu Xueyi’s article in Dushu was one by Gao Mobo, a writer on rural China who grew up in the countryside in Jiangxi and now lived in Australia.107 Gao’s article, which introduced his English-language book Gao Village, was more controversial than almost any other in Dushu during Wang Hui’s editorship that began in 1996,108 primarily because of its relatively positive appraisal of the commune system and its open questioning of the reasons for that system’s demise. Targeting the mainstream economic advisors to the reformist leadership, in particular Lin Yifu, Gao reframed the rural problem temporally as a problem of the reform movement in general. Gao argued that in the 1970s, before decollectivization and the reform era, rural life began to improve because of socialist

105 106 107 108

Ibid. Wen, “Shiji mo de fansi,” 11. Also see Wen, “Jiegou xiandaihua,” p. 10. Gao Mobo, “Shu xie lishi: ‘Gaojia cun’” [Writing the book: “Gao Village”], Dushu, no. 1 (2001). Personal interview with Wang Hui, Beijing, Sept. 19, 2003. The other article that created a similar stir was Wang Shaoguang’s article on the Chinese health care system: see Wang Shaoguang, “Renmin de jiankang ye shi ying daoli,” Dushu, no. 7 (2003), translated as “People’s Health Matters, Too,” http://chinastudygroup.net/2003/11/peoples-health-matters-too/, accessed Nov. 19, 2010.

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transformation and the increased investment in the countryside of late Maoism.109 Thus, unlike Li Changping, Gao broadened the discussion to include the period before the initial rural reforms of the early 1980s, as well as the long-term development strategy of the People’s Republic of China in general. And unlike Li and most commentators on the rural issue, including many of those associated with the left, Gao did not begin with the assumption that the commune system was not working well. One of Gao’s primary targets of critique, therefore, was the commonly accepted argument – made by Lu Xueyi and Lin Yifu – that the early rural reforms were successful primarily because they both increased the incentive to work and allowed rural surplus labor to be liberated from the rural society. Gao argued that Maoist-era policies used rural surplus labor in productive ways in the countryside, usually on land and irrigation improvements. Gao, therefore, maintained that the recent out-migration of surplus labor did not show that the collective system held back the productive forces at all, for such an argument ignored the organization of rural labor under the commune system and the productive use to which such labor was put. Calling into question the whole discourse of rural surplus labor, he argued that rural labor only became surplus when it was no longer organized in a way that valorized its productive use within rural society. It was this shift in the way that rural labor was socially valorized that mattered. Like the discussion by Wen Tiejun, this was a very Polanyian argument; it was only with the dominance of the market that rural labor came to be valued as in surplus. Gao Mobo thus took Wen Tiejun’s narrative and pushed it much further, to the point of criticizing the whole reform process itself. Yet at the time, only a few commentators followed Gao’s lead, and his controversial article was criticized for its too warm appraisal of the Maoist era; instead Lu Xueyi’s call to dismantle the urban–rural bifurcated structure came to be increasingly repeated. But as the debate on rural crisis became more and more public, some on the left did develop the critique of the liberation narrative further. Lü Xinyu, a professor of journalism at Fudan University in Shanghai, like both Wen Tiejun and Gao Mobo before her, utilized a wide frame – both spatially and temporally – for understanding rural–urban migration in order to cast a critical eye on the liberal narrative that equated the migrant phenomenon with a “liberation” of the peasantry.110 Yet Lü’s Polanyian 109

110

Mobo Gao, Gao Village: A Portrait of Rural Life in Modern China (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 1999). Lü, “‘Mingong chao’ de wenti yishi.”

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discussion framed the issue much more directly than other commentators as a problem endogenous to the long development of global capitalism and its contradictory relationship to labor power. China’s sannong wenti, therefore, was a symptom of this contradictory relationship. Unlike Wen, who tended to avoid direct ideological criticism, Lü took the liberal and mainstream economist narratives as direct targets of ideological critique. According to Lü, the liberal narrative located the origin of sannong wenti in the post-1949 period, the period in which the policy of an urban–rural dichotomy (chengxiang eryuan duili) was put into place. The “migrant worker tide” (mingong chao), therefore, was interpreted as a “liberation of the peasantry,” or as “the liberation of labor power from dictatorship” (laodong li cong zhuanzhi zhong de jiefang).111 This “liberation” was enacted through the household responsibility system, marketization, and privatization. This narrative took modernization to mean urbanization and industrialization, implying that the rural population must be urbanized and all hindrances to this must be removed. According to Lü, the proponents of this view believed that market reforms – allowing the free flow of land, labor, and capital – must be instituted to instigate agricultural industrialization. The most important of these reforms was the privatization of land which would allow for its concentration and, thus, for economies of scale in agriculture. Lü argued that this ideological narrative was founded upon an erasure of history, both Chinese and Western. She pointed out that rural-to-urban migration was not new at all; in fact, it had been going on since the late Qing. Rural surplus labor, Lü argued, was a global problem of the twentieth century, not the result of poor Maoist policies. Lü was careful to note that she was not against the reform of the urban–rural dichotomous structure itself. However, in a rebuttal to Lu Xueyi’s position, she argued that such a reform together with urban migration would not solve the wide urban–rural income gap. On the contrary, she saw the migrant worker tide as a result of the inequality, not its solution. Lü Xinyu also stressed that the tide of migrant workers was not a result of giving the peasants a free choice to migrate, as is implied by the term “liberation”; on the contrary, migration was the only road open for peasants when they could not live on farming. Thus Lü tied this migration to economic compulsion brought about by the marketization of agricultural products. Migration was not a positive sign of modernity, but a negative sign of unequal economic conditions, a sign of the hegemonic position that capital had over rural labor. 111

Ibid., 53.

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Lü’s historical critique pointed to the idealism of the mainstream economist and liberal argument, which often avoided a concrete historical discussion of the socio-economic conditions within which the privatization of land and a free market in agricultural products were supposed to modernize agriculture. Here Wen’s structuralism is brought to a new level. The specific condition that Lü stressed was the global agricultural market. Only by ignoring this global condition could abstract models of rural development be transferred between seemingly independent nations. Lü targeted for criticism “Chinese neoliberalism,” which “takes the agricultural situation of developed capitalist nations as proof that the ‘migrant worker tide’ is historically progressive.”112 Lü’s critical strategy was to view both the outflow of capital from the countryside and the latest wave of rural-to-urban migration within a century-long and global perspective. In other words, she countered the liberal narrative primarily by historicizing these two Polanyian points. Lü pointed out that as early as the 1930s Fei Xiaotong had noted capital was flowing out of the countryside to the coastal cities; as the cities developed, more and more capital flowed out of the countryside and agriculture went further into recession. Citing Wen Tiejun, Lü stated that the present situation seemed similar: agriculture was again unprofitable and capital was flowing out of the countryside. Lü argued, however, that today’s intellectuals were ignoring the relationship between the agricultural crisis and capitalist globalization. The second major problem that Lü pointed to in this liberal narrative was that it ignored the problem of how surplus labor itself would be absorbed. The TVEs would not be able to absorb this surplus labor, according to Lü, because they could no longer compete with the growing number of large-scale and highly capitalized enterprises. This problem was not just a rural problem, as labor was in surplus within both the rural and urban spheres. Lü thus echoed Wen Tiejun’s judgment that urbanization could not solve the rural unemployment problem. According to Lü, the liberal narrative also erased the actual history of capitalist development in the West, even while holding up Western development as a model. The liberal narrative transformed peasant migration into a “liberation” of free choice. Lu instead used a historical comparison with the English enclosure movement to understand this phenomenon in a very different fashion, showing that “the commodification of labor power and land was a product of capitalism, but this did not 112

Ibid., 60.

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spontaneously form through the market mode.”113 Instead, through the enclosure movement the government used law to give feudal lords “liberal property rights” and shift the British peasantry off the land. Citing Karl Polanyi, Lü explicated at length the series of laws that put the enclosures into place, leading to the creation of an “army of capitalist labor power” and finally also to the shifting of surplus labor abroad through colonialism. Here the category “primitive accumulation,” used differently by varying political stances in China, took on its full Marxist significance, not only pointing to the early accumulation of capital through extra-economic means – as it is used by most commentators – but also indicating the creation of a proletariat out of landless rural labor. In this way, Lü linked the production of primary capital with the production of the proletariat. In criticizing the form of modernization in America, the country most often cited in liberal narratives of the disappearance of the peasantry, Lü attacked a central tenet of the liberal narrative. Lü noted that it was often said that in America the peasantry (nongmin) was eclipsed and only farmers (nongyezhe) existed.114 Yet, she argued that this narrative “blots out the huge number of seasonal, migrant agricultural laborers as well as those unemployed living with no hope in the urban slums ( pinminku), who are all the very offspring of peasants who had to say good-bye to their homeland.”115 In particular, Lü observed that African Americans living in urban poverty were ex-slaves who were pushed out of plantations or who later lost agricultural employment due to mechanization. Mechanization meant efficiency and a benefit to capital, but also the loss of agricultural jobs. Lü also noted another important way that America and Europe – models of neo-liberalism to many in China – externalized their agricultural crisis, this time onto China and the Third World in general: through the financial subsidization of their agricultural sector and the dumping of subsidized agricultural products upon the world market. Thus, Lü concluded, “the process of the modernization of American agriculture certainly is not without a rural crisis, it is only that it was transferred to the cities; one only has to look at the social diseases of American cities today, with race problems, unemployment, and crime.”116 Developing Wen’s “deconstruction of modernization,” Lü argued that far from being some sort of positive model, therefore, in America “the old crisis is expressed in a new form. This crisis is actually intrinsic to modernity.”117 113 115

114 Ibid., 58. As we saw in Chapter 3, Qin Hui is well-known for making this distinction. 116 117 Lü, “‘Mingong chao’ de wenti yishi,” 60. Ibid. Ibid.

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In Lü’s critical narrative, the figure of the peasant was no longer seen as a status position as it was in Qin Hui’s liberal narrative, which depicted the peasant as a figure without rights and dependent on the state or “great community.” Rather, the position of the peasant was seen in terms of a class within the global structure of capitalist modernity itself. The peasant, whether as the Chinese nongmin or as an African American slave, was seen as a figure of crisis within capitalism, which continually reproduced a surplus population that had to fight for its own survival. A figure of crisis because it could not be easily assimilated to global capitalism, the peasant, who Wen Tiejun called “China’s internal Third World” (Zhongguo neibu de disan shijie),118 was instead both excluded and socially disruptive. Lü’s account, building on Wen’s work, questioned the very capability of capitalism to include the rural population. Liu Yuanqi, a writer and editor for Foreign Theoretical Trends, made this point directly. He argued that neo-liberalism brought on a global rural crisis in the 1990s, leading to rural uprisings and protests. Influenced by the work of Samir Amin and Mike Davis, Liu contended that capitalism was unable to solve the enormous exclusion produced in this crisis and that the Euro-American form of agricultural modernization, which relied on colonialism and international migration to avoid internal instability and the proliferation of slums, was thus untenable for developing countries.119

Conclusion The figure of the peasantry became central to postsocialist discourse in the late 1990s because among much of the left in contemporary China the peasantry was seen as the most glaring problem for China’s integration with global capitalism and the marketization of social relations. Whereas the rural sphere grew economically through 1996, from 1997 on the rural economy, rural incomes and rural consumption either shrank or its growth fell far behind that of the urban sphere, leading to increased migration to the cities. Although usually left unsaid, at heart the intervention of the postsocialist left was a dispute over whether there was a place for the peasantry – not only as surplus rural labor power but also as a surplus population – within global capitalism. As criticism of rural issues mounted in both mainstream economist and liberal narratives, locating sannong wenti spatially and temporally became 118

119

Wen Tiejun, “Shichanghua yu xiaonong jingji” [Marketization and the small peasant economy], in Jiegou Xiandaihua – Wen Tiejun Yanjiang Lu (Guangzhou: Guangdong renmin chubanshe, 2004), p. 103. Liu Yuanqi, “Xinziyouzhuyi yu fazhan zhong guojia de nongye weiji” [Neo-liberalism and agricultural crisis in developing countries], Waiguo lilun dongtai (2004), 15–19.

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foundational to the development of a left position on rural crisis. Beginning in the late 1990s, after twenty years of reforms, intellectuals increasingly came to locate the reform era within a wider historical frame; this, linked with the mounting feeling of rural crisis expressed by Li Changping’s letter, a growing uneasiness with the direction of the reform movement itself, and Wen Tiejun’s powerful historical renarration, forced others to defend the modernization narrative of marketization and urbanization, once the assumed story behind the reform process. Many critics of the liberal narrative, meanwhile, put the migrant into critical perspective by looking at the forces that pushed peasants out of the countryside. Gao Mobo attempted to expand the debate historically through a re-evaluation of the reform era in comparison to prereform rural society, reversing many of the arguments made through a similar comparison by Lin Yifu. Lü Xinyu widened the frame spatially and temporally, elaborating a critique of the liberal narrative by placing it within the longterm historical pattern of global capitalist development. Postsocialism is a rethinking of socialism under the conditions of a relinking with global capitalism and a shift to the full commoditization of labor power, conditions that have contributed to making postsocialism postrevolutionary. In this context, the postsocialist thinking of Wen Tiejun was not a reflection on the failures of socialism so much as on the contradictions of its success – success, it should be added, at industrialization but not at bringing communist social relations into existence. But success at industrialization and the re-entry into global capitalism likewise brought a rural crisis that Wen has called sannong wenti. What was left attenuated in this rearticulation of socialism was the futurity of socialism as a revolutionary project. Wen himself was very critical of radical and revolutionary approaches, calling for the “deconstruction of revolution” as he calls for the “deconstruction of modernization.”120 Under these conditions, and together with the political limits imposed by the Chinese state, the politics of possibility were transformed into a social protective movement, in which rural community was reconstructed in order to fend off market invasion. Such a reconstruction, however, necessitated a much more in-depth investigation of actual rural conditions. Instead of focusing on the migrant and rural surplus labor – as the works discussed in this chapter have – Cao Jinqing, He Xuefeng, and others looked at the disintegration of rural social and community relations as a key to understanding rural crisis, a subject taken up in the next chapter.

120

Interview with Wen, Feb. 23, 2005.

chapter 5

Into the soil: ethnographies of social disintegration

While Li Changping’s letter dramatically brought rural crisis into public view, from the mid 1990s on, other scholars, through in-depth field research, were finding reasons to become increasingly worried about the state of rural society. This discussion on the disintegration of rural social relations also became a matter of public debate largely because of Li’s letter. This chapter discusses the unfolding debate about rural crisis, paying particular attention to how different scholars, primarily sociologists, located rural crisis culturally, socially, economically, and politically in terms of a disintegration of rural society. Central to the criticism of rural reform of the late 1990s was the question of the social organization of the peasantry and the idea that peasants could not simply be treated as individual economic optimizers within a market. An investigation of social and cultural relations was seen as crucial to understanding the present crisis and finding solutions to it. While this discussion of the disintegration of rural society entered public debate following the publication of Li Changping’s letter, it had been developing since the mid 1990s. Cao Jinqing, Professor of Sociology at East China University of Science and Technology in Shanghai, and a group of young rural sociologists from central China have argued since the mid to late 1990s that rural social relations had been largely broken apart under the twin pressures of socialist transformation during the Maoist era and household responsibility and market reforms since the early 1980s. Yet in their field investigations, these scholars found that modern social relations had not emerged to replace those of traditional society and, because of this, the formal categories of social science and economics developed in the urban and industrial West had led Chinese policy makers to misunderstand rural China as they attempted to implement policies there. In response, these scholars – who generally took a substantivist position on rural society – called for a deepening of rural field research and the construction of a social science that paid close attention to the particular 128

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social makeup and vicissitudes of rural China. On the one hand, this was a turn to a concrete investigation of rural society. On the other hand, this project signaled a developing critique of the discourse of Western economics as mainstream economists applied it to the Chinese rural situation. Through this process many rural sociologists, most of whom were originally liberals, became more critical of the effect that pro-market policies were having on peasants and rural society. The writings of these scholars expressed a search – not wholly successful – for a new language to discuss the deleterious effects of the market on rural society, a language that was not dominated by neo-liberal ideas of marketization and privatization.

Cao Jinqing and the disintegration of rural society In the mid 1990s, Cao Jinqing went on an extensive research trip to the countryside of Henan. Cao wrote a journal which brought the crisis of rural China into some focus, but was unable to get these writings published at the time. Rural issues were not high on the public’s reading agenda. But after the publication of Li Changping’s letter, Cao was soon able to publish his book, Huanghe bian de Zhongguo [China along the Yellow River], and it became a best-seller.1 At the time, Cao attempted to develop a theoretical framework to organize his observations but, he commented, largely failed to do so. This struggle showed through in Cao’s narrative, which was weakly framed by a somewhat equivocal and at times contradictory tradition–modernity trope. In this mid-1990s work, in other words, Cao was unclear as to how to locate the rural crisis he was in the midst of uncovering. At times he portrayed modernity positively as the development of “the concept of citizenship and the individual in society,” in contrast to traditional social relations and ways of thinking.2 At other times, however, Cao seemed to place more blame for rural social problems on the impact of the commodity and market economy on traditional rural social relations. Cao made many offhand remarks to the effect that with Western economics one could not understand Chinese rural society, in the process criticizing mainstream Chinese economists. Thus, Cao seemed to want to disentangle the concept of modernization as a break from traditional society, which he saw as resistant to progress, from the often damaging development of a commodity economy – a contradictory desire 1 2

Personal interview with Cao Jinqing, Shanghai, June 24, 2004. Cao Jinqing, China Along the Yellow River: Reflections on Rural Society, trans. Nicky Harman and Ruhua Huang (London and New York: RoutledgeCurzon, 2005), p. 21.

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that many of the people Cao interviewed in the book expressed as well. In this work, however, he did not offer a way to realize such a project. Though they were not united theoretically, Huanghe bian de Zhongguo brought several elements of rural crisis into focus, such as the disintegration (wajie) of rural social relations; economic modernization and the contradictory reform-era phenomenon of rising prosperity and increasing dissatisfaction; and the antagonistic relationship between the local state and rural society. Cao historicized the disintegration of rural social relations largely within the frame of the post-Mao rural reforms. While decollectivization and the return to individual family farming in conjunction with a market that became increasingly dominant had brought about social disintegration, modern relations had not replaced traditional relations, either. At the same time, Cao said very little about how the Maoist era affected the countryside, tending instead to stress the continuity of the present with traditional Chinese society. Here, Cao’s historical pessimism showed through: As far as China’s agriculture and peasantry, and their relationship with local government, were concerned, historical continuity greatly outweighed the superficial changes in the ideology and political systems of the upper echelons of society, in the Chinese countryside ancient modes of production and similarly ancient social and political relationships persisted. Changes there had been, but they scarcely touched the essential fabric of rural life. The reforms had brought a degree of personal freedom to the peasants, large numbers of whom were now taking the opportunity to seek work in industry and commerce, but whether this could break the historical inertia of rural life remained to be seen.3

The book was primarily constructed out of a dialogue between Cao and rural residents of Henan Province from all levels of society, from peasant farmers to county chiefs, from women attempting to escape rural society to cadres looking for promotions, all trying to get by in a difficult and unforgiving social terrain. Cao’s dialogic style makes it hard to separate his own thoughts from those of his interviewees, but it is clear that Cao empathized with most of his counterparts, even in their contradictions. A dialogue with a county party secretary is particularly revealing. Asked how peasant traditional thinking affected rural administration, the secretary responded by criticizing both traditional “feudal small peasant consciousness” ( feng jian xiaonong yishi) and the “low quality” (suzhi di) of the peasantry, on the one hand, and the negative influence the market was 3

Ibid., p. 17.

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having on traditional social relations, on the other.4 Cao’s summary of the secretary’s statement continued: For thousands of years, villages had naturally come together and held together through ties of kinship. The impact of the cash relationships of the market economy had caused these ties between villagers to disintegrate. The traditional kinship system had not been transformed into contracts entered into freely between equals, but it had undergone other changes. Local criminal gangs had grown up on the basis of clan loyalties; they had spread like wildfire through the villages, tyrannising their residents, and had played havoc with moral standards in the countryside. So far, local government had been strong enough to eradicate this kind of thing, but if its control were to weaken, it would present a very worrying prospect for rural society.5

The evaluation of the economy was somewhat ambiguous, and Cao offered few prescriptions of his own. Bringing into view the contradiction between reform-era rising rural prosperity and increasing dissatisfaction, Cao showed that mounting involvement in the market meant a greater need of cash for inputs and taxes, and to meet social expectations. Yet he also noted that while peasants were now well fed and clothed (wenbao), they were often very short on cash in a society dominated by cash relationships ( jinqian guanxi). “What is in need of study,” according to Cao, “is how the fragmented and narrow small peasant economy (xiaonong jing ji) and the market economy together with modernized agriculture are to relate.”6 What he found was contradictory logics and failed integration. To bring about large-scale family farming, Cao estimated that individual farms would need at least 10 mu of land per capita,7 and that would mean 80 to 90 percent of the farming population would have to leave agriculture.8 But Cao was critical of the idea that urbanization would solve this problem, because, first, it would take at least fifty years to move this number of people out of agricultural production. He also argued that while the state needed to make it easier for peasants to leave the countryside and move to the cities, both large and small, this would only affect a minority of peasants. Here, Cao attempted to separate his ideas from narratives that conceive of ruralto-urban migration as a form of liberation, noting the limitations of that phenomenon as a solution to rural problems. 4

5 7

Cao Jinqing, Huanghe bian de Zhongguo – Yige xuezhe dui xiangcun shehui de guancha yu sikao [China along the Yellow River: a scholar’s observations and thoughts on rural society] (Shanghai wenyi chubanshe, 2000), p. 333. 6 Cao, China Along the Yellow River, p. 47. Cao, Huanghe bian de Zhongguo, p. 498. 8 A mu is equal to one-15th of a hectare of land. Cao, Huanghe bian de Zhongguo, p. 498.

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Instead of peasants fully leaving the land to move into the cities, a more likely scenario was that peasants would find some employment outside of agriculture, but would keep their land for security. As Cao remarked, urban employment was unstable at best. Even though the household responsibility system, which did not allow peasants to sell their land, somewhat contradicts the urbanization process, Cao argued, echoing the pronouncements of his village party secretary interviewee, that land privatization would be a mistake: “‘Retreating’ to collectivization was not a possible way out, and ‘advancing’ to privatization was more risky.”9 Cao asked how the small peasant farmer could reduce the risks of the market, pointing to two options for organizing the peasants: the company plus household model (gongsi jia nonghu) and cooperatization (hezuohua). Both were problematic for him. The company plus household model, in which companies and households are vertically integrated through the signing of contracts – the company providing inputs at a set price and promising to buy the agricultural output at a set price – left the individual peasant household vulnerable since the company could easily break the contract. The formation of peasant cooperatives, in which peasants would share risks through mutual aid and cooperative production, was difficult, Cao argued, because of the nature of the peasantry: peasant consciousness did not facilitate self-organization. In essence, rural cooperatization would have to be “a revolution” ( yichang geming), one that necessitated an outside organizing force. Where, “in this time of person-and-person competition and the rush for self benefit,” would this force come from, asked Cao?10 Here, he showed his Marxist influence, believing that the peasantry could not organize itself, a view that he still maintains,11 and, as we will see shortly, a stance that has drawn criticism.12 Whereas Cao saw that a reorganization of the social relations of the peasantry was needed to overcome the predicament of modernization – the contradiction between social relations and the modern market – he had no answer as to how this would occur. The third problem that appeared in Cao’s narrative was the antagonism between the local state and rural society, a familiar theme in the work of 9 11

12

10 Ibid. Ibid., p. 499. Cao Jinqing, “Shehui zhuanxing guocheng zhong de sannong wenti” [Sannong wenti during the process of societal transition], Sannong Zhongguo, no. 5 (2005), 15–16. See, for example, Yu Jianrong, “Zhongguo nongcun de zhengzhi weiji: biaoxian genyuan, he duice” [The political crisis in rural China: manifestations, origins, and policy prescriptions], www.chinavillage.org/ReadNews.asp?NewsID=3011&newsnameID=26&newsname=%E4%BA%8E%E5%BB %BA%E5%B5%98, accessed Nov. 20, 2003.

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liberal intellectuals. Cao was particularly critical of the structure of local state power relations, which, because of their lack of connection to local society, tended to continually thwart local development. Cadres stayed in positions for a short time and always worried about promotion; there was often little concern, therefore, for the long-term development of the local economy.13 Township cadres were more worried about how they were viewed by county-level party officials than by villagers – and this meant the growth of corruption. Huanghe bian de Zhongguo contained corruption stories, and this certainly contributed to its public success. Yet Cao, while critical of the local state and its structure, often sympathized with the local cadres, unwilling, it seemed, to choose an easy target to blame for rural problems. But his toughest criticism of the local state came in the form of multiple stories of failed state-led development projects in the countryside. Cao’s research showed that these failed most often when the state imposed large-scale projects, such as the building of factories, on the rural population with little dialogue. The development projects that seemed to work best in Cao’s narrative were the ones that were smaller in scale and involved the peasants in decision making. Everywhere he looked in rural China, Cao saw the failure of the modernization project. On the one hand, Cao’s narrative of disintegrating rural social relations under the strains of the market economy was quite Smithian and Marxian – the commercial economy breaks down traditional social relations, making way for a new society – and Cao was obviously influenced by this Marxist view. And we could also note some similarity to the liberal narrative of Qin Hui. Yet, on the other hand, Cao was more ambiguous on how progressive this process was than were Smith or Marx. And in comparison to Qin, who put the blame for the lack of proper modernization squarely on state intervention, Cao was more likely to be critical of the economics of the market and, thus, Western economic theories. For Qin, China did not learn the universal lessons of modernization well enough; for Cao, those lessons were largely not applicable to the national and social conditions of China. In Cao’s work, there was a much greater feeling that modernization itself was in crisis, even though in Huanghe bian de Zhongguo he was unable to develop any sort of alternative or even fully locate the key reasons Western theory could not be applied to Chinese conditions. Cao’s intentions, of course, were less grand: to describe the crisis conditions of rural China and to begin asking questions that might lead in the direction of a 13

Cao, China Along the Yellow River, p. 38.

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new theoretical approach. But Cao’s work, written at the moment the liberal consensus of Chinese intellectuals was in the process of breaking down, was marked by its emergence from the dominant liberal discourse, which viewed the modernization process as the disintegration of traditional social relations of dependency (“the great community,” in Qin Hui’s terms) and the appearance of a society of individuals who related through freely entered contracts within a market – successful only when the border between the state and society was clearly defined and the state’s ability to interfere in society was limited. Since Cao wrote Huanghe bian de Zhongguo, he has engaged in comparative work on modernization to develop a historical framework to understand China’s rural crisis, a framework that was largely missing in his earlier book. A world-historical framework that drew on world systems analysis allowed Cao to move away from a unilinear narrative of modernization and develop a structural understanding of the limits and necessity of long-term Chinese development that was quite similar to that of Wen Tiejun. Cao placed current rural problems in the long-term context of China’s industrialization and the uneven development of the capitalist world system. State-driven internal accumulation of capital meant that agriculture bore the burden of the industrialization process, and this created the tense relationship between the peasantry and the local government, responsible as it was for the extraction of agricultural surplus.14 Cao’s continuing rural field research and reflection on Chinese development pushed him to the left, politically, although he did not use the term itself, as was true of many rural scholars in China. A left-leaning critique of liberalism as an abstract foreign theory and of the hegemony of economic discourse clearly resonated with Cao. While in Huanghe bian de Zhongguo Cao did not provide a solution to rural crisis, he was sure that such a solution would only be found through in-depth rural research and not through abstract economic theory imported from the West. This put Cao in the tradition of Fei Xiaotong15 and the development of nativist social science. Yet Cao was also different from Fei in that he believed that a peasantry with production based on small households did not have the ability to organize on its own.16 In addition, Cao Jinqing did not see 14 15

16

Personal interview with Cao Jinqing, Shanghai, June 24, 2004. Rachel Murphy also mentions this in her Introduction to the English translation of China Along the Yellow River. Rachel Murphy, “Introduction: A Chinese Ethnology of Rural State and Society,” in China Along the Yellow River (London and New York: RoutledgeCurzon, 2005), p. 2. Cao, “Shehui zhuanxing guocheng zhong de sannong wenti,” 15–16. Again, Murphy makes a similar point: Murphy, “Introduction: A Chinese Ethnology of Rural State and Society,” p. 12.

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traditional society as a resource for building rural social relations; in contrast, the central China “xiangtupai,”17 discussed in the next section, tended to view traditional and popular rural forms as resources for rebuilding the fast disintegrating rural social world, although by no means unequivocally so.

Rural governance: the central China “xiangtupai” While Li Changping and Cao Jinqing’s vivid portraits made rural social disintegration visible to a wide audience, the study of rural social organization, of course, had been undertaken by sociologists for some time. The study of village democracy and self-rule (zizhi ) began to be a topic of interest in the mid 1980s, especially after the passage of the “Organic Law on Village Committees” in 1987,18 and flourished into a large field of research by political scientists and sociologists during the 1990s. While the field was intimately connected to liberal political interests, in the post-Tiananmen atmosphere the reforms themselves never developed beyond the villages as many intellectuals had hoped. Many of these studies, some with significant foreign support, focused on the formal workings of village elections. Prominent within this research field was the work of Xu Yong and other researchers at the Center for Chinese Rural Studies at Central China Normal University (hereafter CCRS) in Wuhan, of which he is the director.19 Early on, this research focused on policy and institutions. But in the mid to late 1990s, Xu Yong and center researchers began to focus on implementation, stressing village investigations. They applied the category “governance” (zhili) to rural studies,20 developing the idea of “village governance” (cunzhi) to focus their study of village democracy and administration.21 17

18

19 20

21

This name was put forward in a critique of xiangtupai scholars. See Ying Xing, “Ping cunmin zizhi yanjiu de xin quxiang: yi ‘xuanju shijian yu cunzhuang zhengzhi’ weilei” [An appraisal of a new orientation in the study of village self-rule], Shehui xue yanjiu, no. 1 (2005). But in many ways, discussed in the next section, it is apt. For more on the xiangtupai, see Alexander Day, “The Central China School of Rural Studies: Guest Editor’s Introduction,” Chinese Sociology and Anthropology 41, no. 1 (2008), as well as the translated articles in that issue. See Kevin O’Brien and Lianjiang Li, “Accommodating ‘Democracy’ in a One-Party State: Introducing Village Elections in China,” The China Quarterly, no. 162 (2000); Jean Oi and Scott Rozelle, “Elections and Power: The Locus of Decision-Making in Chinese Villages,” The China Quarterly, no. 162 (2000); Robert Pastor and Qingshan Tan, “The Meaning of China’s Village Elections,” The China Quarterly, no. 162 (2000). The center was founded by Professor Zhang Houan and is run by Xu Yong. Xu Yong, “Governance: zhili de chanshi” [Governance: the elucidation of zhili], Zhengzhi xue yanjiu, no. 1 (1997). Xu Yong, “Lun zhili zhuanxing yu jingzheng – hezuozhuyi: dui zhili de zai sikao” [Transformation of governance and competitive cooperatism], Kaifang shidai, no. 7 (2001).

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Xu Yong’s studies have since primarily focused on the implementation of village elections and self-rule.22 The concept “governance” allowed him to broaden his scope beyond purely formal policy and institutional questions, however, linking rural governance issues with the changing reformera society and the character of rural society. Xu Yong, following the liberal narrative, argued that breaking the peasantry from the “yoke of the land” (tudi shufu) through migration to the cities, and not just rural industrialization, was an important process in solving rural problems; in other words, only leaving the land and the village would open the door for a solution to rural problems in the long term.23 Xu argued that the most important characteristic of the rural commune system during the Maoist era had been that it forced the peasantry to stay in the countryside; in the long run this was impossible to sustain and went against the natural development of society.24 Yet he maintained that focusing on this migration should not lead to the occlusion of rural governance issues. Migration, while necessary, was not a sufficient answer to rural problems. According to Xu, the optimistic view on migration, which contended that it was sufficient to lead to rural development, was mistaken because migration also usually meant the outflow of talent, capital, knowledge, and demand, leading to what Xu called the “‘hollowness’ of rural development” (xiangcun fazhan de “kongxin hua” ). The 1990s shift from a strategy of rural industrialization (rural labor moving from agriculture into rural industry) to urban migration meant that rural talent, so central to the success of rural industry, left the countryside altogether. Rural migration disrupted rural social networks and when rural migrants reached the city they were also marginalized. Thus they were caught in a liminal zone between the city and the countryside. Rural governance and social problems, Xu concluded, were the effects of a necessary migration process. Xu thus said it was necessary to improve rural governance in order to mitigate these problems and not just assume urbanization would solve everything. He made several suggestions. First, the transfer of land use rights must be permitted as people migrate to the 22

23

24

See Xu Yong, Xiangcun zhili yu Zhongguo zhengzhi [Village governance and Chinese politics] (Beijing: Zhongguo shehui kexue chubanshe, 2003). Xu Yong, “Zhengtuo tudi shufu zhi hou de xiangcun kunjing ji yingdui: nongcun renkou liudong yu xiangcun zhili de yixiang xiangguan xing fenxi” [China’s rural dilemma and its solution after casting off the yoke of the land], Journal of Central China Normal University (Humanities and Social Sciences) 39, no. 2 (2000), 5–6. Personal interview with Xu Yong, Wuhan, Aug. 8, 2004.

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cities, allowing a more efficient scale of agricultural production. Second, populations should be managed not by residence status, but by occupation; in other words, if someone found urban employment, they should be given an urban residence status, ending the discrimination against rural migrants. This would help overcome the split between rural and urban society, unifying China’s social structure.25 As many associated researchers deepened their rural investigations into the difficulties of implementing village democracy, they began to shift their research away from village democracy and local government organization to the influence that rural social organization and social disintegration had on governance, in ways similar to the work of Cao Jinqing. In particular, researchers found that “popular organizations” (minjian zuzhi) such as clans or popular religious organizations, which began to flourish in postcommune rural society, influenced elections. Studying village democracy and elections, they argued, necessitated studying actual rural social organization, as opposed to a more formal and procedural framework. This demonstrated that formal village democracy alone would not work in rural society unless the rebuilding of rural “governance” (zhili) was also addressed. In other words, it was through research into village democracy that the full crisis of rural society came to light for these scholars. This led to a divergence of views between Xu Yong, whose more formal approach contended that further marketization and democratization and the reform of rural governance were important to solving the sannong wenti, and younger scholars such as He Xuefeng, who increasingly saw the market as one of the causes of rural crisis and the disintegration of rural social relations. Xu stressed that there was no other way forward for China but modernization, marketization, and urbanization.26 In this divergence, we can see the emergence of a left-leaning critique of the development of rural society under the reform movement similar to that of Cao Jinqing, outlined above. Although He Xuefeng began as a liberal, in-depth rural investigations and discussions with peasants led him to become critical of liberal perspectives on rural society.27 He Xuefeng has since become one of the most outspoken proponents of new rural reconstruction, the attempt to protect rural social relations from utopian marketization and rebuild cultural, communal, and cooperative relations – the subject of the next chapter. Here, I will focus on the understanding of 25 26 27

Xu Yong, “Zhengtuo tudi shufu zhi hou de xiangcun kunjing ji yingdui.” Personal interview with Xu Yong. Personal interview with He Xuefeng, Wuhan, July 31, 2004.

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rural crisis that He Xuefeng and other young scholars in central China developed through detailed rural case studies of village governance and social relations. Most of this group of scholars, including He, were at one time associated with the CCRS, but many now operate out of the Center for Research on Rural Governance (CRRG) at Huazhong University of Science and Technology and contribute to Sannong Zhongguo [Sannong China], a journal founded by He Xuefeng in 2003. Their work is characterized by close attention to national and local conditions, in particular the disintegration of rural social relations, a stress on practice and investigations as the basis for all theory, a critical perspective on marketization, and a belief that traditional and popular organizations are resources for the reorganization of rural society. They have been called the Huazhong “xiangtupai ” school of rural sociology (known as the “central China school of rural studies” in English) by their critics,28 and I use that name here, as it is particularly fitting. The name was taken from the title of He Xuefeng’s first book, Xin xiangtu Zhongguo: zhuanxing qi xiangcun shehui diaocha biji [New rural China: notes on investigations into rural society during the transition period],29 a journal of his rural investigations reminiscent of Cao Jinqing’s Huanghe bian de Zhongguo. The influence of Fei Xiaotong on He Xuefeng was clear as well: He Xuefeng’s title was a reprise of Fei’s Xiangtu Zhongguo, published in 1947, in which Chinese society was portrayed as rooted in rural culture and Chinese development was understood to take a different path from that of the West. Though it is difficult to capture the meaning of the name “xiangtupai ” (xiangtu school) in English, the term makes a strong link between rural village life on the land and Chinese culture. While the xiangtupai and He Xuefeng, like Cao Jinqing before them, became more critical of the deleterious effect pro-market policies were having on rural China, He Xuefeng did not use the term “left” to describe himself. Instead, he said he leaned towards the “national conditions school” ( guoqingpai), implying that it was by paying close attention to national conditions that the solution to rural problems could be found; national conditions were also the foundation for a critical perspective on the liberal argument that there was only one form of modernization and natural social development. .

28 29

See Ying, “Ping cunmin zizhi yanjiu de xin quxiang.” He Xuefeng, Xin xiangtu Zhongguo: zhuanxing qi xiangcun shehui diaocha biji [New rural China: notes on investigations into rural society during the transition period] (Guilin: Guangxi shifan daxue chubanshe, 2003).

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He Xuefeng developed the argument of his initial book through a series of stories on everyday rural life, but his framework and critique were more developed than those of Cao. By 2001–3, when He Xuefeng wrote his book, in contrast to the mid-1990s moment when Cao was writing, a leftleaning critique of modernization theories had become more prevalent. He Xuefeng, too, saw rural society in disintegration, although he directed more criticism at the force of market relations in the countryside and more attention to the need for an active rebuilding of village social relations. Market relations had transformed Fei Xiaotong’s xiangtu Zhongguo, a China based in the soil, into a society “bound to the market” (kun zai shichangshang); thus, China was no longer “xiangtu Zhongguo,” but “new xiangtu Zhongguo.”30 One of Fei’s central concepts, key to understanding rural China and defining xiangtu Zhongguo, was that in rural communities everyone knew each other; it was a shuren shehui (an acquaintance society – or, a society of people familiar with one another). Contemporary society, according to He Xuefeng, was a ban shuren shehui, a society of semi-familiars, and the meaning of the village had changed.31 Whereas some relations were rationalized, opening a space for an institutionalization of village governance (cunzhi), as the xiangtupai ’s studies showed, in many villages social order had disintegrated. After the divergence with Xu Yong, the younger scholars shifted the emphasis of cunzhi to stress the interaction of rural conditions and government reforms, with rural social and cultural relations taking the foreground. According to He Xuefeng, “governance” implied bi-directional action; top-down management and institution building must interact with bottom-up conventions and identities. Governance must take local conditions and resources into account.32 Luo Xingzuo, of the Politics Research Institute of Central China Normal University, said that “village governance is the process of mutual operation of all subjects of power within the village.”33 Wang Ximing argued that the concept of cunzhi referred to “the processes and effects of people’s use of public power to govern rural society … The processes of rural governance refer mainly to villagers’ cooperation with the state, through [official villager committees as well as unofficial organizations such as seniors’ associations] to provide public goods beneficial to raising the level of public welfare.”34 30 33

34

31 32 Ibid., pp. v–vi. Ibid., p. vi. Ibid., pp. 82–3. Luo Xingzuo, “Lun minjian zuzhi zai cunzhuang zhili zhong de canyu ji houguo” [Theorizing the participation of folk organizations in village governance and their results], Zhongguo nongcun guancha (2003), 57. Wang Ximing, “Seniors’ Organizations in China’s New Rural Reconstruction: Experiments in Hubei and Henan,” Inter-Asia Cultural Studies 10, no. 1 (2009).

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In a group response to criticism, xiangtupai members described cunzhi studies as an attempt “to use rural governance as a platform and an avenue through which to read and interpret the transformations and characteristics of rural Chinese society in a period of transition, to research the top-down implementation of government policies, laws, and institutions in the countryside, and, on this basis, to propose theoretical descriptions and practical recommendations regarding the modernization of rural China and China as a whole.”35 The goal was to “enter into an awareness of rural society itself, and to search for the foundations of villager self-government existing and developing within village society.”36 But for many within the xiangtupai the meaning of the category “governance” was transformed following the divergence: instead of implying the top-down implementation of modern institutions in the countryside in order to maintain social order – a depoliticizing concept that mirrors its use in the West – the xiangtupai increasingly used it critically to draw attention to the negative effects of marketization. Pointing to the total social network of relationships or resources available to villagers, a key concept for such studies was “village social bonds or cohesion” (cunzhuang shehui guanlian), introduced by He Xuefeng and Tong Zhihui, a lecturer at the School of Agricultural Economics and Rural Development at Renmin University.37 He and Tong argued that, “although today’s system of villager self-government was designed to improve public order, village order actually has less to do with democracy and more to do with the endogenous factor of village social cohesion.”38 As He noted, villagers drew upon various social resources (both traditional and modern) to respond to situations such as village conflicts, relations with the township government, the assumption of a heavy tax and fee “burden” ( fudan), and village elections.39 Yet in much of central China’s countryside, where he conducted most of his research, village social cohesion was very weak or of a “low level” (shehui guanlian du hen di ),40 meaning that villagers had few social resources upon which to draw. He 35

36 37

38 39

40

Wu Yi et al., “The Path and Subject of Rural Governance Studies: A Response to Ying Xing’s Critique,” Chinese Sociology and Anthropology 41, no. 1 (2008), 58. Ibid., 61. He Xuefeng and Tong Zhihui, “Lun cunzhuang shehui guanlian” [Theorizing village social cohesion], Zhongguo shehui kexue, no. 3 (2002). See also He Xuefeng, Xin xiangtu Zhongguo, 4–7. Tong Zhihui has modified this concept in his more recent work; see Tong Zhihui, Xuanju shijian yu cunzhuang zhengzhi [Election incidents and village politics] (Beijing: Zhongguo shehui kexue chubanshe, 2004), pp. 188–90. Quoted in Wu et al., “The Path and Subject of Rural Governance Studies,” 65. Tong Zhihui has especially studied the relationship between cunzhuang shehui guanlian and village elections. See Tong, Xuanju shijian yu cunzhuang zhengzhi. He Xuefeng, Xin xiangtu Zhongguo, p. 6.

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argued that traditional social relations had been broken down first by the twentieth-century revolutionary movement and political campaigns and then by the invasion of the market and the out-migration of villagers, but that modern social relations (based on interests and the contract) had not replaced them. Instead, society had been atomized. The phenomenon of “low social cohesion” (shehui guanlian du hen di ) was a block to mutual economic projects and made rural governance difficult.41 Village self-rule (cunzhuang zizhi) relied on a village community, and in most areas, He argued, this community no longer existed.42 He Xuefeng further pointed out that whereas during the commune period collective work, organized from above, was possible, after the reforms it became increasingly hard to organize collective projects. Irrigation work, possibly the greatest success of the commune period, was a key example. He argued that during the 1980s agriculture was able to rely on infrastructure created by the labors of the commune period, but by the 1990s the old irrigation system was falling apart and it was impossible to organize peasant labor in an atomized rural society to rebuild it. There were no social resources upon which to draw.43 At the same time, this disintegration led to a whole series of social problems in the countryside, such as low-quality care of the elderly and an increase in suicides.44 Building on their ethnographic focus, the xiangtupai paid particular attention to village and regional variation in their studies, and have undertaken a project to draw up a typology of myriad village models.45 In a study of a village considered to have “a relatively strong degree of social cohesion” ( you jiao qiang de shehui guanlian du), Luo Xingzuo argued that traditional social relations, together with the support of villagers who had spent time outside the village – those who, Luo said, constituted a “third type of power” in the village, in addition to state power and the power internal to village relations – were key resources for the implementation of village public affairs ( gonggong shiwu). If China was to rely on village society to rule itself, “villagizing the administration of public affairs” ( gonggong shiwu guanli de cunzhuanghua), the capacity for village self-rule must be strengthened.46

41 44 45

46

42 43 Ibid., pp. 5–7, 144. Ibid., p. 32. Ibid., pp. 132–6. See, for example, ibid., pp. 144–8. See He Xuefeng, ed., Zhongguo chunzhi moshi shizheng yanjiu congshu, 16 vols. ( Jinan, Shandong: Shangdong renmin chubanshe, 2009), vol. I: He Xuefeng, Cunzhi moshi: ruogan anli yanjiu [Models of rural governance]. Luo Xingzuo, “Lun cunzhuang shili ziyuan – Jiangxi Longcun cunzhi guocheng fenxi” [Theorizing the resources of village governance – an analysis of the process of Jiangxi Long Village governance], Zhongguo nongcun guancha, no. 55 (2004).

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Yet most villages that the xiangtupai studied were not so cohesive and capable of self-rule; rather, they were poorly administered. Tan Tongxue, a graduate of He Xuefeng’s program and now a faculty member in the Department of Anthropology at Sun Yat-Sen University, argued that on the whole rural society was increasingly dominated by informal social organizations; in his terms, rural society was becoming a “gray society” (huishehui). If the aboveboard legal society was a “white society” (baishehui) and the underground and illegal society was a “black society” (heishehui), then “gray society” suggested that weak rural social organization had allowed a range of informal social organizations, from clans to various associations, to proliferate. Under the atomizing conditions of the reform era, weak government control, the privatization of public resource, and the pressures of the market economy, these older forms of solidarity were the foundation for a range of criminal activity.47 Village self-rule, often simply an abstract principle according to Tan, did not solve this issue. In administrative villages, which according to Tan were no longer communities in which everyone knew each other (shuren shehui),48 to get elected one had to have connections, and it was usually members of the gray society that had those connections. As Tan stated, “Once the state retreated from the villages, the powers internal to the village did not integrate, and the system that ensured a basic balance of justice disintegrated. In cases where there was a real vacuum of power and villagers lacked the ability to respond collectively, the gray forces, which had a degree of organization higher than ordinary villagers (though lower than those of a mafia), were able to take over the village.”49 But these older forms of solidarity could also be regularized to bring about good governance. As Luo argued, popular organizations had revived to become important organizations of village power after the social disintegration brought about by the reforms. The stability of rural governance would depend on their systematic incorporation into village governance.50 For the xiangtupai, criticism of marketization sometimes led to a more positive evaluation of “traditional” rural society, and a focus on “peasant values” ( jiazhiguan) became especially important. Through a village case study, for example, Chen Baifeng argued that the forces of marketization brought about a collapse in traditional peasant value systems, leading to 47

48 49 50

Tan Tongxue, “Xiangcun huihua de lujing yu shehui jichu – yi Xiangnan Mouxian jin, yin zhen wei lei” [The route to rural graying and its social basis], Sannong Zhongguo, no. 8 (2006), 97–105. For shuren shehui, see the above discussion of He Xuefeng. Tan Tongxue, “Xiangcun huihua de lujing yu shehui jichu,” 103. Luo, “Lun minjian zuzhi zai cunzhuang zhili zhong de canyu ji houguo.”

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worsening status and conditions for the elderly; in contrast, traditional familial relations looked more positive.51 Traditional social relations, in other words, played a somewhat ambiguous – and certainly not wholly negative – role in social cohesion for the xiangtupai. Because of this, the arguments of the xiangtupai could not be easily assimilated to a modernization narrative. He Xuefeng noted that Cao Jinqing, in his research for Huanghe bian de Zhongguo, found that Chinese peasants were “apt to disperse and not to join together” (shan fen bu shan he), and that it was hard to get peasants to work together for the common good of the community in modern society. Here, He was critical of Cao for taking too abstract a perspective, however, arguing that Cao had taken a concrete problem – the difficulty of getting peasants to work together – and made it abstract by locating the problem in the Marxist concept of the “small peasantry” (xiaonong). He Xuefeng suggested, by contrast, that more detailed rural investigation would provide a less abstract theoretical answer, one more rooted in the reality of the Chinese countryside and more able to explain the diversity of the Chinese peasantry.52 This understanding of the peasantry was primarily cultural. Unlike Cao, He believed that traditional community relations could be a resource for the construction of modern contract relations. But atomization during the reform era had meant that for most villages there was almost no basis in community relations upon which to build those modern relations.53 He Xuefeng understood this atomization through a Polanyian lens as an invasion of rural society by the market and its attendant consumer culture. He stressed the confrontation, therefore, between peasant culture and the culture of the market, arguing that peasants have a “natural driving force to be against consumer culture.”54 Thus while He Xuefeng disagreed with Cao’s use of the category “xiaonong” (small peasantry), with a substantivist theme, he implied that the peasant “way of life” (shenghuo fangshi) was a culture different from urban market society. Whereas the market had brought about atomization, it was the existing “non-market factors” of the peasant way of life, according to He Xuefeng, that could form a base upon which to rebuild community relations.55 Only by maintaining and rebuilding peasant public culture, the “roots” of the 51

52 54

55

Chen Baifeng, “The Influence of Changing Peasant Values on Familial Relations: Liwei Village, Anhui,” Chinese Sociology and Anthropology 41, no. 1 (2008). 53 He Xuefeng, Xin xiangtu Zhongguo, pp. 38, 41, 236. Ibid., pp. 61–3. He Xuefeng, “Xin nongcun jianshe yu Zhongguo daolu” [New rural construction and the Chinese path], www.wyzxwyzx.com/Article/Class19/200608/8853.html, accessed Sept. 26, 2006. Ibid.

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peasantry, would the subjectivity of the peasants and the peasant way of life continue to exist.56 He argued, for example, that old people’s associations (laoren xiehui), established in the 1980s, were successful in areas that had a strong popular-tradition base to draw upon. Building upon these traditional resources, old people’s associations were able to raise social capital and help solve village contradictions; working together with the village administration, they helped to ensure good governance.57 He Xuefeng did mix his cultural understanding of the peasantry, however, with a structural understanding of peasant labor power. In fact, He partially located the necessity of rebuilding rural society in the important economic function played by a rural sphere that was not fully integrated into a market economy. He noted that most rural-to-urban migrant labor was unable to reproduce itself in the cities; in other words, these migrants depended on the rural sphere to reproduce themselves. It was exactly because of the non-market factors of rural society – the fact that some agricultural production went to subsistence and not the market – that rural labor power was so cheap. The rural sphere, not fully marketized, functioned as “a place where the reproduction of labor power was inexpensive and as a reservoir for the regulation of labor power supply and demand.”58 Thus it was important, according to He, to rebuild this rural community that stood on the periphery of the market economy. In this exposition, He Xuefeng did not draw out the class consequences of this structural relationship between the rural and urban. We could note that if migrant labor power was unable to reproduce itself in the cities where it was employed, those laborers were being paid at below their value, but the implications of this were not fully traced in He’s discussion. Instead, He viewed this phenomenon as a “Chinese path” of development. The structural relations brought in by He Xuefeng sat uneasily next to his discussion of the “Chinese path.” For in this discussion, on the one hand, the peasant laborer was a “stabilizer for modernization” – acting as a reserve pool of labor power that could be paid below value under the conditions of global capitalist competition – and, on the other hand, He strove to find a way of rebuilding rural social and cultural relations by drawing on the resources of traditional Chinese rural society so as to benefit and protect the peasant way of life. 56 57

58

Ibid. He Xuefeng, Xin xiangtu Zhongguo, pp. 136–40. He uses the example of Wenzhou as a successful and very active old people’s association. He Xuefeng, “Xin nongcun jianshe yu Zhongguo daolu.”

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The nativization of social science and a left-leaning stance on rural China The close attention paid to the particular, local conditions of rural social life led, for the xiangtupai, to the further development of the argument for the “nativization” (bentuhua) of social sciences. For Wen Tiejun, the nativization of social science categories occurred within the field of economics: land, labor, and capital, he argued, could not be understood as simple commodities as most formal economists asserted. Treating them as simple commodities did not account for either national conditions or the conditions of the “small peasant economy” (xiaonong jing ji), which was not disappearing under the pressure of modernization. If rural China’s “small peasant economy” had a different logic than the market economy, then the formal categories of Western market economics and social science would not necessarily obtain for the study of rural China. Thus Wen’s critique of mainstream market economics was also a critique of reform-era knowledge production. In the context of structural history, the category national conditions ( guoqing), deployed as a critique of the abstract universalism of liberal and mainstream economist knowledge and linked to the conceptualization of the world as a structured capitalist system, played a key role in Wen’s work. In Wen’s work we see a shift in forms of knowledge production, with a renewed referencing of the Third – or developing – World as well as a call to institutional experimentation in the countryside based in deep investigations into national rural conditions. Wen, drawing on Mao, argued that knowledge production must begin with practice and experimentation; it must be continually tested under Chinese conditions. In fact, Wen himself claimed not to be a theorist but an experimenter: “My standpoint takes solid native research as its foundation.”59 This process of testing under national conditions would “nativize” (bentuhua) social science. A discussion of native social science has become a powerful critique of the knowledge production practices of the reform era, in which the West was the measure. Here the postsocialist was also the postcolonial, and the nativization of social science was a criticism of the fetishization of modernization theory. By the time the postsocialist left began to emerge in the late 1990s, the hegemonic position of “the west as measure”60 had lost much of its 59 60

Wen, “Zhongguo de renmin de xiandaihua,” 24. I take this term from Chen Kuan-hsing, “Asia as Method,” presentation at UC Santa Cruz Center for Cultural Studies, Oct. 8, 2004.

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strength. From that time on, Wen Tiejun and other intellectuals associated with the left began to make historical comparisons not just with the West or America, as had been the case throughout the 1980s, but with the rest of the so-called “developing world.” At the turn of the century, under new conditions of globalization, therefore, Chinese postsocialist intellectual work was marked by a new reflection on the spatiality of knowledge production in relation to the structure of global power relations. Developing a native social science meant in part learning from the experience of countries that were in a similar position within the global structure. Yet, Wen’s attempt to produce a native understanding of rural China at times mixed a structuralist understanding of difference with an ahistorical culturalist one, reinscribing an East–West dichotomy. The postcolonial concept of nativization incorporated this contradiction. Wen claimed that Chinese culture took the group as the basis, whereas Western culture was founded upon the individual. According to Wen, the original hunter-gatherer and herder societies of the West produced an individualist society. Because of China’s early development of large-scale irrigation works, it developed in a group society shaped by, and reflected in, Confucianism.61 Wen linked this cultural difference to discussions on the AMP in China in the 1930s, which Wen saw as being unfortunately derailed by accusations of Trotskyism. During the 1930s, according to Wen, a discussion about the Marxist category AMP was “the dawn of hope for the nativization of social science in China.”62 This category, however, had the tendency to freeze Chinese history in culturalist terms, and within Wen’s work this culturalist aspect sat uneasily beside his structuralist understanding of global power relations. Furthermore, this tension was found in much of the postsocialist left within China. At issue was how to write history after the unraveling of grand narratives, such as a universalist Marxism, without either tending towards a culturalist perspective or simply being subsumed within the grand narrative of capitalist development itself. Here, Chinese postsocialism found itself in a very postmodern and postcolonial problematic. For the xiangtupai, nativization of categories went much further, in particular for the social and cultural spheres. While in Chinese postsocialist discourse substantivist arguments have almost always been articulated with postcolonial concerns – incommensurable fields were not only understood in terms of modes of production or economies (peasant versus capitalist), but also in national terms (Western versus Chinese) – this was most clearly 61

Wen, “Zhongguo de renmin de xiandaihua,” 20.

62

Wen, “Shiji mo de fansi,” 4–5.

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expressed in the work of the xiangtupai. The substantivist argument was levied against the hegemony of economic discourse, which sought to apply supposed universal categories of economics to all situations. Whereas economists in China often talked of the need to “clarify property rights,” meaning the privatization of land, He Xuefeng suggested that this argument was the result of two problems. First, economists based their principle of land privatization on Western, First-World economic theory imported into China, but often without paying close enough attention to “China national conditions” (Zhongguo guoqing).63 Second, they inevitably found their Chinese examples in developed regions, which, He argued, hardly even counted as “rural” (nongcun). While conflicts over land rights in the developed regions did garner a lot of media and government attention, this was not really where China’s rural problems (Zhongguo nongcun wenti) were located. In the developed regions, since secondary and tertiary industries were quite developed, land no longer operated as an insurance of peasant basic survival – a “subsistence resource” in Wen Tiejun’s terminology – and could thus be privatized. But He argued that this only constituted 10 percent of rural areas, and for the majority of China’s peasants, mostly in central and western China, land was still a basic insurance resource. If land was privatized in those areas, many would lose their land without being able to find stable employment and would become a “floating population” (liumin).64 Yet He Xuefeng argued that an economic perspective on rural crisis was limited. He noted the contradiction between the fact that today was probably the first time in Chinese history that the problem of peasants having enough food to eat and clothing to wear (wenbao)65 had been solved, and Li Changping’s often-quoted passage that the “peasants’ lot is really bitter, rural society is really poor, and agriculture is in a real crisis.” As He pointed out, rural incomes came from two sources: agricultural and non-agricultural wage labor. He argued that, first, with China’s entry into the WTO in 2001, it was very unlikely that agricultural prices would rise for Chinese farmers, who now had to compete globally. Second, with the vast amount of surplus labor in China, it was improbable that nonagricultural wages for rural or migrant workers would rise. In addition, the consumption needs of the peasantry were continually rising; peasants had “enough food to eat but no money to spend” ( you fan chi, 63 65

64 He Xuefeng, Xin xiangtu Zhongguo, p. 103. Ibid., pp. 103–4. Wenbao is a stage of society in which people have enough food to eat and clothes to wear. It is the stage before xiaokang (well-off ) society.

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wu qian hua).66 Even more important than the income issue, in He’s analysis, was the evaporation of hope in the countryside. This was the real crisis of the countryside. As rural social and cultural conditions disintegrated in the 1990s, peasants had a more and more negative view of rural life.67 It was in the sphere of rural social relations that the xiangtupai located the most important difference with Western social science. Both Cao Jinqing and the xiangtupai showed that neither the transformation of rural China during the socialist era nor the reform era created a modern rural society patterned on the West. Modern social relations, based on the rational individual and the contract, did not come into existence in the countryside. Whereas the formalists, such as Lin Yifu or Lu Xueyi, argued that this was because of the lack of proper institutional support for markets, the xiangtupai suggested that rural Chinese society was a different society from urban capitalist society, and it showed no signs of disappearing. Ignoring this fact led to problems in implementing policy. To develop policy that would bring about “good governance” (shanzhi) and a healthy social order in rural China would take in-depth field research and the nativization of social science. He Xuefeng argued that the goal of rural social science research had to be to guide China’s development. According to He, there were three types of rural social science research, and the question of naturalization was only important to the second type. First, “foundational theoretical research” ( jichu lilun yanjiu) needed no nativization as its goal was focused on social science theory as such, in which case studies were simply used to prove the theory. Second, however, was “policy foundational research” (zhengce jichu yanjiu), which was used to develop concepts for understanding Chinese rural society and necessitated the nativization of social sciences to Chinese conditions. The third level was basic policy research, which studied the development and implementation of policies and depended on the concepts of “policy foundational research” to conduct its studies.68 The stress, again, was on local practice over foreign theory. For the xiangtupai, practice meant rural investigation and experimentation, seeing their approach to rural society as problem-centered, instead of ideology-centered. Our scholarship, therefore, takes field investigation as its foundation, the problems currently facing China’s peasants, rural society, and agriculture (sannong wenti) as its guide, rural governance as its content, and the 66 67

He Xuefeng, Xiangcun yanjiu de guoqing yishi, p. 82. 68 He Xuefeng, Xin xiangtu Zhongguo, pp. 37–8. Ibid., pp. 223–6.

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development of rural society as its goal. In other words, our work is centered on problems, rural governance, and China. This may be one of our main differences from other social science communities, and the reason we embrace knowledge from various disciplines.69

Critical of the idealist and teleological treatment of theory of the 1980s and 1990s, xiangtupai scholars called for “parting with idealistic odes to enlightenment.”70 He Xuefeng suggested that many foreign-trained Chinese scholars decided that land had to be privatized based on their reading of Western theory alone, without having visited the countryside.71 As He argued at a conference on the study of rural Chinese society, Chinese modernization itself was unique and, thus, deserved its own social science.72 This highlights a key site of disagreement within social science circles concerning the study of rural China. In contrast to the xiangtupai, Sun Liping stated at the same conference that “no difference between Chinese and American social science exists; there is only one kind of social science.” In other words, it was only at the level of research issues that a nativization was necessary.73 Ying Xing, of the Institute of Sociology at the China University of Political Science and Law, took Sun’s points even further and was critical of the xiangtupai for “rejecting western theory” ( jujue xifang lilun), suggesting that they ended up recreating, though often in a weaker form, concepts long accepted by social science.74 In rejecting the hegemony of Western theory, Ying argued the xiangtupai began to be both anti-Westernization ( fan xihua) and anti-theory ( fan lilun). Whereas the xiangtupai’s stress on field research was influenced by Fei Xiaotong, Ying argued that they misunderstood Fei’s studies as being simply based in the field, not noting that Fei relied upon the scholarly tradition of Malinowski’s functionalist anthropology. Through modernization, in particular during the reform era, Ying concluded, China was Westernized in many ways. Even rural society was Westernized.75 In other words, contrary to the xiangtupai, Ying argued that rural Chinese society was not substantially different from Western society and that “Orientalism should not 69 71 72

73 74

75

70 Wu et al., “The Path and Subject of Rural Governance Studies,” 69–70. Ibid., 63. He Xuefeng, Xin xiangtu Zhongguo, p. 222. Feng Xiaozhuang, “Yuedu he lijie zhuanxing qi Zhongguo xiangcun shehui: ‘zhuanxing qi xiangcun shehui xingzhi yanjiu’ xueshu yantao hui zhongshu” [Reading and understanding transition-period Chinese rural society], Shehui xue yanjiu (2002), 29. Ibid. Ying Xing in particular targeted his critique at Tong Zhihui’s use of “cunzhuang shehui guanlian” and related concepts; see Ying, “Ping cunmin zizhi yanjiu de xin quxiang,” 216–18. Ibid., 218–19.

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destroy the sound ideas of Occidentalism.” In his view, Fei Xiaotong set out a route back to China “by way of the west,” not through its rejection.76 Thus nativized social science was a mistake, and both anti-Western and anti-theoretical. He Xuefeng and others denied they were against theory. In response to Ying Xing, xiangtupai researchers pointed out that they were against the hegemony of Western theory and its dogmatic use, not Western theory per se. Western social science was not a universal truth and must be tested through field research, which the xiangtupai emphasized.77 Li Changping likewise put an accent on local conditions, noting that Guizhou was different from Guangdong – thus even arguments about national conditions or national experience could become hegemonic.78 It was clear, however, that under the conditions of uneven capitalist development, substantivist arguments about the rural were nationally inflected, leading to a debate about the universality of social science. National conditions and rural conditions often came to be conflated and were at times placed in opposition to Western formalist theory. Yet at the same time, substantivist arguments could act as a block to a structural understanding, as social logics were divided into incommensurable cultural worlds. Peasant society stood in for Chinese society, a society for which its own conceptual set must be constructed. In doing so, furthermore, a structural understanding of the relationship between the urban and the rural was at times occluded.

China peasant survey In January 2004, a fourth major publication – after that of Wen Tiejun, Li Changping, and Cao Jinqing – brought rural crisis into the public sphere, this time reaching an even greater audience. Zhongguo nongmin diaocha [China peasant survey]79 sold several hundred thousand copies in its first two months and then was promptly banned, along with all discussion of the work. But it continued to sell over seven million more copies on the black market. Written by Chen Guidi and Chun Tao (pseudonym for Wu Chuntao), Zhongguo nongmin diaocha surveyed the condition of the peasantry in Anhui Province. It was a gripping tale of rural corruption and 76 77

78 79

Ibid., 219. Wu Yi et al., “Cunzhi yanjiu de lujing yu zhuti – jianda Ying Xing xiansheng de piping” [The route and subject matter of village governance research – attention to a few matters of Mr. Ying Xing’s critique], Kaifang shidai, no. 4 (2005), 88–9. Interview with Li Changping, Guiyang, Jan. 25, 2005. Chen and Chun, Zhongguo nongmin diaocha.

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social disintegration framed within a state–society dichotomy, in which the peasantry was eternally at odds with the Chinese state. Like Li Changping’s letter, Chen and Wu’s narrative was anchored by the category “peasant’s burden” (nongmin de fudan). Yet unlike in Li Changping’s historicization of rural problems, Chen and Wu use the category indiscriminately across Chinese history: the peasant’s burden was eternal. Whereas Li Changping’s and Wen Tiejun’s narratives differentiated the pre-reform era of socialist accumulation for industrialization, a necessary if difficult process, from reform-era corrupt local accumulation, Chen and Wu’s use of the category “burden” blurred this distinction. In effect, this dehistoricization allowed them to reconstruct the liberal state– society narrative of rural crisis as a tale of discrimination and unequal rights.80 In this narrative, from 1949 through to the present, the state played the role of cutting the peasantry off from the market, and it was this separation that caused the peasant’s burden to grow.81 As they stated, the peasants lost their “right to dispose of their commodities” (chanpin de chuzhi quan).82 Likewise, the state’s discriminatory policies blocked the peasants from urban migration. Citing Lu Xueyi, a major influence on the authors, Chen and Wu suggested that the state must remove these discriminatory practices and obstacles to modernization. Throughout history, in other words, it was the state that produced the formal separation between the city and the countryside. This was a narrative, obviously, that had captured the attention of the public in China, and the government as well. The public debate on rural China and the peasantry grew with each publication discussed in this and the last chapter, increasing the pressure on the state to act. In early 2004, as Zhongguo nongmin diaocha was selling on the streets, the Central Committee and the State Council published “Opinions of the CPC Central Committee and the State Council on Some Policies for Promoting an Increase in Peasants’ Income,” also called the “number one document,” as it was the first Central Committee and State Council document of the year. This prominent document indicated a serious shift in government policy towards agriculture and the rural sector after eighteen years of reform focus on the urban sector.83 The document 80

81 83

While they interviewed many scholars of rural China, discussions with Lu Xueyi played a central role in the construction of the narrative. 82 Chen and Chun, Zhongguo nongmin diaocha, pp. 192–4. Ibid., p. 193. The “number one document” tells what the Central Committee and the State Council view as the most important issue for that year. In the five years from 1982 to 1986, the “number one document” concerned agriculture. It was not until 2004 that agriculture again received this attention.

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proclaimed the party’s intention to solve the sannong wenti, with increasing peasant incomes as its main objective.

Conclusion Expressed clearly in the writings on the countryside by the postsocialist left was the conundrum of a postrevolutionary critique of modernization in a postcolonial context. While it brought the issue of a disintegrating rural society to a wider audience, Cao Jinqing’s early work was a failed attempt to save a modernization project from the deleterious effects of marketization. (It failed because modernization itself largely equaled marketization.) And even Cao’s turn towards a global structural critique of modernization was somewhat hesitant. He Xuefeng’s detailed rural investigations likewise painted a picture of market invasion and social collapse in rural China. The critique of the modernization process that He and the xiangtupai developed produced an uneasy relationship with traditional rural society. The postcolonial critique of modernization had the tendency to develop in two problematic directions, often at the same time: towards either its nationalization or the positive reappraisal of traditional social and cultural relations. Thus, on the one hand, even while the xiangtupai emphasized the investigation of local conditions, there was always a tendency towards the nationalization of the rural. The market’s hegemonic status in relation to rural community was isomorphically mirrored in the hegemony of Western capitalism over China. In part, this trope originated in the adoption of both a world systems structural approach to theorizing global conditions and a Polanyian narrative that viewed the market as an invasive force within rural society. Converging with the remains of an earlier Third-World-ism, in the postcolonial context of the postsocialist era, these narratives ended up reinforcing an East–West dichotomy in which the rural stood in for an alternative to Western capitalism. With the end of revolution, on the other hand, there was a tendency towards the re-evaluation of traditional social relations as the foundation for building a strong community that could withstand the depredations of market society. Questionable, here, is the ability to develop a strong critique of modernization and the contemporary rural problems it has caused upon either a national or traditional ground – this is particularly problematic in an era when class analysis has been so discredited. For Cao Jinqing, He Xuefeng, and the xiangtupai, breaking from Qin Hui’s “great

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community” had only opened the small community of rural society to the negative effects of the market. Less clear, however, was how to reconstruct rural community in a way that protected it from the market and brought social justice. The proponents of “new rural reconstruction” (xin xiangcun jianshe) – the subject of the last chapter – provided one possible answer.

chapter 6

New rural reconstruction and the attempt to organize the peasantry

The late 1990s crisis atmosphere was not expressed as a moment of helplessness among Chinese intellectuals who studied rural China; it was, for some, the beginning of a new experimentation. In Wen Tiejun’s words, the critical stance that emerged in the late 1990s was not only a “deconstruction” ( jiegou) but also signaled a “reconstruction” ( jianshe). Within the atmosphere of anxiety, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, a diverse set of rural experiments and activities coalesced into a rural social and cooperative movement, known as “new rural reconstruction” (xin xiangcun jianshe yundong). At the same time, liberal intellectuals and activists became increasingly supportive of a rights protection movement (weiquan yundong). Both of these movements attempted to organize the peasantry, albeit in quite different ways in terms of organizational form, causes, and regional focus. The difference between the two fundamentally revolved around the question of what modern social relations are and how they are to be institutionally structured. These questions reached deep into the heart of contemporary Chinese – as well as global – political debates, and have significantly affected state policy in the latest phase of the reforms, which began with the new leadership in 2003.1 How were peasants to relate to each other, as well as to the market and the state? New rural reconstruction, a comprehensive attempt to transform rural social relations and rebuild rural community culture, was a major intervention by intellectuals and rural activists. They argued that this crisis could not be understood simply as a problem of economics and agricultural production, but as a social crisis that called for the reconstruction of rural social life. The project is best grasped as an attempt to form a Polanyian social protective movement in reaction to the marketization of society and to the perceived lack of an urban solution to the surplus of 1

Hu Jintao became general secretary of the party in 2002 and president of the PRC in 2003, and Wen Jiabao became premier in 2003.

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rural labor. As a critique of developmentalism and the economic mode of analysis, this signified a valuation of culture and cooperative relations as vital to the reorganization of rural social life. Unlike the new rural reconstruction movement, which sees the market and market fundamentalism as the main causes of rural crisis, the rights protection movement views the state and its corrupt local representatives as the major cause of rural unrest. Rural residents protest, according to this view, when the state violates their rights, primarily property rights but also their democratic rights, in village elections and in prohibiting illegal taxation. Intellectuals who support rights protection have mainly intervened through the media, bringing attention to the cause of peasants under assault, but they have also helped out in the legal process. As it primarily concerns property disputes, the rights protection movement has focused its attention on coastal regions and around large cities where more property disputes have occurred as developers in those regions act on their hunger for more land. They have also focused on very sharp disputes that have often led to open conflict and violence. The new rural reconstruction movement, by contrast, has avoided these more violent and visible conflicts in order to focus on longer-term development projects that attempt to transform rural social life. They have focused more on central and, to a lesser extent, western regions, which have seen less urban development and whose rural economy has been less successful compared to coastal regions. In this chapter, I will primarily discuss new rural reconstruction, which has received almost no attention in English-language scholarship.2 The chapter turns first to some aspects of the rights protection movement and to discussions on organizing peasants sparked in part by a renewed state focus on the peasants in 2004. It then advances a longer discussion of new rural reconstruction in general and takes up the experimental theory and practice of building new cooperatives as a new rural reconstruction movement response to the growing hegemony of the market economy.

Organizing the peasantry to defend their rights The “number one document” of the State Council in 2004 was the first number one document since 1986 that targeted the countryside, marking a major shift in state policy after almost twenty years of urban focus. While 2

A version of this material appeared in Alexander Day, “The End of the Peasant? New Rural Reconstruction in China,” boundary 2 35, no. 2 (2008). See also Day, “The Central China School of Rural Studies”; Alexander Day and Matthew A. Hale, “New Rural Reconstruction,” Chinese Sociology and Anthropology 39, no. 4 (2007).

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the document centered on raising peasant incomes, it also stated that peasants needed to be better organized. This major statement coincided with a growing new discussion on organizing the peasantry both among the left and the liberals. Beginning around the time of Li Changping’s letter and the change to the Hu-Wen administration, discussions of reviving peasant associations re-emerged. Li himself stated in his letter that peasant associations (nong hui) could help to protect the peasantry.3 In general, however, the loudest proponents of peasant associations have been those who stressed a rights and representation perspective on peasant issues. Liberals, too, increasingly saw the atomization of rural society as a problem which called into question the stability of society and therefore threw doubt on the possibility of continuing the reform process. Yet, with the modernization narrative and the state–society dichotomy forming the basis of Chinese liberalism, liberals tended towards formalist solutions to the question of the weak social organization of the peasantry, namely the recreation of peasant associations, the development of rights consciousness, and a rights protection movement (weiquan yundong).4 The concept of weiquan, rights protection, was central to the liberal rights-based perspective. This perspective included advocating for popular action in the defense of rights – in particular property rights – within a market economy and democratic polity. The peasant association was seen as an organization that could protect the rights (quanli) and interests (liyi) of the peasantry. Rights and interests were, of course, key categories within liberal political theory, and Chinese liberalism was no different in this respect. While at the economic level individual families were atomized, at the political level social groups could come together to represent themselves. Recently, rights protection, together with the organization of rural cooperatives and cooperative cultural projects of the left-leaning new rural reconstruction movement, have become the main alternatives proposed for dealing with peasant organizations. While these activist alternatives can be seen as contrasting tendencies, they certainly should not be seen as fully incompatible. Rights resistance in rural China has been covered at length in other English-language scholarship, so I will only briefly discuss that aspect of organization here, primarily to make the specificities of new rural reconstruction clearer by way of contrast.5 3 4

5

Li Changping, Wo xiang zongli shuo shihua, p. 26. Weiquan does not only concern peasants; in fact, there is a very lively urban version of the movement. See Goldman, From Comrade to Citizen: The Struggle for Political Rights in China. For rural rights-based resistance, see O’Brien and Li, Rightful Resistance in Rural China and Bernstein and Lü, Taxation without Representation.

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Du Runsheng, one of the party’s top officials responsible for agriculture since the 1950s, called for the establishment of peasant associations (nong xie).6 Earlier, Du had called on Deng Xiaoping to allow for peasant associations in the 1980s, but after the government crackdown on the Tiananmen protests in 1989, the issue was put aside. Du pointed out that peasant associations existed in most countries, but in China, even with its huge peasant population, no such organizations existed. He suggested that the heart of the rural reforms of the early 1980s was the self-organization and self-management of the peasantry, and that they required associations, which would heighten the organization of the peasants within the market society. This would help them become more independent as “free people” (ziyou ren) within a “citizen society” (gongmin shehui).7 In reaction to a recent call for the organization of the peasantry, Qin Hui, the agrarian historian at Tsinghua University discussed in Chapter 2, argued that civic organizations (gongmin zuzhi) such as peasant associations were a necessary basis for a democratic government. It was at the political level of citizens’ organizations that the atomized individuals (yuanzihua de geren) of rural society could come together to face state power.8 Arguing that peasants should be able to represent their own interests, Yu Jianrong, a researcher at the Rural Development Research Institute of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, has been a prominent proponent of recreating peasant associations. Yu, a legal scholar who has written extensively on peasant protests and organization, primarily in Hunan, found in his investigations of peasant protests a power vacuum in rural organization: there was no legal organization that could truly represent peasant interests to the government. The village committees, the only government organization controlled by peasants, were too small in scope to deal with regional economic issues, and the township governments did not represent the interests of the peasants. The easiest way to fill this vacuum, according to Yu, was to allow peasants to form their own legal organization. Yu argued that sannong wenti was not a problem of the peasantry, but of those in power; sannong wenti was a political problem. It was based on the fact that peasants had no legal way to represent their interests and defend 6

7

8

Li Guangshou, “Du Runsheng: rang nongmin jianli ziji de zuzhi” [Du Runsheng: let the peasants establish their own organization], Zhongguo gaige (nongcunban), no. 239 (2004), p. 12. Ibid. On peasant associations, also see Dang Guoying, “Zhongguo xuyao chongjian nonghui” [China must re-establish the peasant association], Lingdao wencui, no. 11 (1999). Qin Hui, “Weishenme yao you nongmin de zuzhi? Qin Hui fangtan lu” [Why is a peasant organization wanted? An interview with Qin Hui], Nanfang Baoye, www.nanfangdaily.com.cn, accessed Oct. 25, 2006.

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their rights. Sannong wenti, therefore, was not a social or economic problem, as Wen Tiejun and the xiangtupai argued, and its solution did not lie in changing or rebuilding social relations among the peasantry, but in representing interests at a political level. In his field investigations, Yu found that peasants formed many organizations to protest the “peasant burden.” These organizations – “shangfang daibiao” (appeals representatives), “jianfu daibiao” (burden reduction representatives), “jianfu weiyuanhui” (burden reduction committees), “jianfu jiancha zu” (burden reduction inspection organizations), and “jianfu weiquan hui” (burden reduction rights protection associations) – were created by the peasants themselves but needed to be legalized and standardized. Yu argued that permitting these organizations to become legal peasant associations would transform the antagonistic relationship with the government into a regularized representation of interests.9 As with Yu’s research, the weiquan movement has focused on recent flash points of protest. These protests were integrated into the liberal narrative, showing that society was attempting to break out from under the heavy foot of the state. A central figure in the “second liberation” of the peasants – from the collective system – during the early reforms was Xiaogang Village in Anhui Province, supposedly the first village secretly to divide the land at the beginning of the reform movement. Xiaogang, therefore, stood as a symbol of self-liberation within the liberal narrative. In 2005, Fan Yafeng, of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences’ National Institute of Law, wrote that the market reforms were built upon the foundation of the grassroots action of the Xiaogang villagers. This would make it possible that the villagers of Taishi, who led a series of dramatic protests against the local government in 2005, attempting to recall the village leadership, would play a similar role for democratization.10 Taishi, the site of much industrial development on the outskirts of Guangzhou, became an emblem of the “rights protection movement.” In the summer of 2005, Taishi villagers began a recall motion to oust their village committee director primarily because of alleged illegal dispossession and corruption in land deals. Even with the selling of huge amounts of land, the village was bankrupt; at the same time, villagers were 9

10

Yu Jianrong, “Wo weishenme zhuzhang chongjian nongmin xiehui” [Why do I propose the reestablishment of peasant associations?], www.nongyou.org, accessed Nov. 2, 2003; interview with Yu Jianrong, Beijing, Feb. 2005. Fan Yafeng, “Taishi keneng jiu shi minzhuhua de Xiaogang” [Taishi might just be the Xiaogang of democratization], Jingji yu shehui guancha, no. 12 (2005), www.chinaelections.org/NewsInfo.asp? NewsID=1371, accessed Dec. 23, 2005.

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getting poorer as they had less and less land on which to farm. Finding their motion continually rejected and activists jailed, villagers began a series of protests. At the village offices, elderly women of the village commenced a round-the-clock watch to ensure that the accounting books were not removed. In the fall, as the recall seemed to be moving forward, riot police arrived, violently dispersed or arrested the protesters, and removed the account books. Taishi was also a site where liberal and legal activists from across China attempted to work with the villagers. Lu Banglie, a villager from Hubei who campaigned in his village against corruption and was finally elected as village chief, also attempted to help the villagers of Taishi, in the end getting badly beaten in the process.11 This incident was widely discussed on the Internet. These types of protests are legion in rural China, although most do not become as famous as the Taishi incident.12 In the mid to late 1990s much rural protest was directed at taxation and fees.13 By the early 2000s, most rural protest involved land disputes, in which the local government either illegally confiscated land for development or did not properly compensate peasants when land was requisitioned. Most of the worst cases were in economically well-off regions, where rapid development was taking place.14 Here peasants were placed within the same formal categories as everyone else in society. Yet the particularity of rural social life largely dropped out of the picture. As the xiangtupai pointed out, policies and institutions 11

12

13

14

Jonathan Watts, “Groundswell of Protest Feared by Party Officials,” The Guardian, Oct. 10, 2005; Jonathan Watts and Benjamin Joffe-Walt, “A Pioneer Who Studied Gandhi,” The Guardian, Oct. 11, 2005. In 2005 there were an estimated 87,000 “public order disturbances.” The figures for 2004 and 1994 respectively were 74,000 and 10,000. Agence France Presse, “Social Unrest in China on the Rise,” Sino Daily, www.sinodaily.com/2006/060119084129.dompnzkd.html, accessed Jan. 24, 2006. However, these figures are very rough. Shortly after the Taishi incident, the Ministry of Public Security announced that it was to begin another “strike hard” campaign against crime and social discontent. See Chris Buckley, “China Vows ‘to Strike Hard’ at Unrest: Forces Affecting Social Stability Will Rise, Official Says,” The National Post, Jan. 26, 2006. Taxes refer primarily to the agricultural tax levied on agricultural production. Fees refer to local fees levied for particular activities, such as schooling, marriage, new construction, road building, and veterinary services. See Bernstein and Lü, Taxation without Representation, especially chapters 3 and 5; Whiting, Power and Wealth in Rural China: The Political Economy of Institutional Change, especially Chapter 7. One of the worst cases took place in Dongzhou Village, Shanwei City, Guangdong Province in 2005. For a broad look at the reporting on this case, see the website East South West North (www. zonaeuropa.com/20051209_1.htm). On December 6, 2005, between two and thirty villagers were shot by riot police in Dongzhou. The villagers were protesting the lack of compensation offered for the construction of a wind-power generation plant. While protest over land dispossession and compensation has become a key flash point in rural China in recent years, adding greatly to the number of protest incidents, the Shanwei incident was notable for the number of dead and for the use of firearms by authorities.

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developed with the best of intentions could produce different outcomes when implemented at the local level. What formalist approaches often ignored was the interaction of local social relations and political institutions – interaction that was captured by the xiangtupai ’s conceptualization of “governance.” Commenting upon the institution of village self-rule (cunmin zizhi), scholars of the xiangtupai noted that “the original purpose of village self-rule was to furnish a new village order and resolve the supply of village public goods, but … in a number of villages, on the contrary, it destroyed the existing village order and the provision of public goods sank into a morass.”15 While Xiaogang village might have operated as a liberal symbol for the liberation of peasants from the collective economy, in 2005 and 2006 rumors of its attempted recollectivization sparked widespread debate, much of it on the Internet.16 As some villagers argued, Xiaogang’s redistribution of the land to households was the first move in the rural reforms, helping lift peasants out of absolute poverty, but the household responsibility system now held the village back from further economic advancement. With a new village leadership appointed by Anhui Province beginning in 2004 and a heightened party focus on solving rural problems, now formulated as sannong wenti, an exploration of recollectivization of the land began.17 Yet this move toward recollectivization led by the new village chief of Xiaogang was not the only form of cooperative production in the Chinese countryside. At the same time, the new rural reconstruction movement was coming together and experimenting with voluntary rural cooperatives.

New rural reconstruction Following the announcement of the “number one document” of the State Council in 2004 – which commented that specialized cooperatives were one way to raise peasant organization18 – Wen Tiejun’s Zhongguo gaige 15 16

17

18

Wu et al., “Cunzhi yanjiu de lujing yu zhuti,” 87. In 2005, villagers and village leaders from Xiaogang reportedly visited Nanjiecun, a leftist village in Henan Province famous for recollectivizing in the 1980s, in order to learn how to recollectivize. A large collection of articles on Xiaogang and its recollectivization “Xiaogang cun ‘chong zou jiti lu’ ji xiangguan zhenglun wenji” [Xiaogang village “again taking the collective road”] is located at http://economy.guoxue.com/sort.php/607, accessed Oct. 3, 2006. See also Eva Cheng, “Growing grassroots initiatives to re-collectivise farming,” Green Left Weekly, Jan. 25, 2006. Wang Gang, “Zhi you jitihua daolu cai shi zhengque fangxiang” [Only the collective road is the correct direction], Zhongguo xinwen zhoukan (Apr. 10, 2006). Han Jun, “Yi hao wenjian jiang tuidong nongmin hezuo jingji zuzhi fazhan jinru xin jieduan” [The number one document will push the development of peasant cooperative economic organization into a new era], Zhongguo gaige (nongcunban), no. 4 (2004), 13.

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(nongcunban) [China reform (rural edition)] ran a special issue on organizing the peasants. In the background of its cover was a picture of a peasant meeting, while in the foreground a group of strong male peasants stood with arms folded. In bold print across the cover, above the standing peasants, were the characters “zuzhi qilai” (organize). This was not the suzhi di (selfish, backward, disruptive, and low-quality) peasantry as they were framed in 1980s discussions, unable to come together. These peasants were the subject of their own organization. The issue carried a series of articles from varying viewpoints on the organization of the peasants, a subject the editors had been hoping to discuss but did not feel they had the political space for until the announcement of the 2004 “number one document.” In explaining the focus of the issue, Xin Wang, the editorin-chief, set the context of rural problems: Facing the increasing marketization of the rural economy and its globalizing trend, the dispersed small peasant (xiaonong) faces a more and more risky and less secure situation. At the same time the social power of village governance is wanting and the development of cooperative organization is sluggish; thus the local level of government has too many difficulties to handle and has become the focus of many contradictions.19

In one article in the issue, Han Jun pointed out that the idea of peasant cooperative organization had been proposed in the 1980s but that, with the 2004 “number one document,” it had reached a new era. Han suggested that existing rural “specialized cooperatives” (zhuanye hezuoshe) were limited in their ability to organize the peasants and help them respond to contemporary problems. One issue facing cooperative organization, according to Han, was that current laws limited the ability of peasant cooperatives to buy and sell certain agricultural goods or act as individual legal entities. Second, the specialized cooperatives were not controlled by the peasants themselves, and this was a historical result of the socialist period, in which marketing and purchasing cooperatives as well as credit cooperatives (nongcun xinyong hezuoshe) had been integrated into the state structure. This, Han stated, meant that peasants did not believe that these cooperatives were their own organizations. Han, therefore, stressed the need for peasant control and democratic management, shared risks and benefits, and the clarification of the difference between true cooperatives and private enterprises and public organizations. Most important was creating a legal space for cooperatives that would 19

Xin Wang, “Zuzhi qilai” [Organize], Zhongguo gaige (nongcunban), no. 4 (2004), 15. Xin noted that the 2003 SARS epidemic made these issues visible.

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help them develop and promote the continued “institutional innovation” of the rural collective economy.20 Seeking an alternative way to organize a peasantry confronted by a powerful market, new rural reconstruction grew to actively sponsor the construction of economic and cultural cooperatives in the new political space opened by the Hu–Wen leadership. The concept of new rural reconstruction was created as the discussion on rural reform shifted from the promotion of rural and agricultural economics to a focus on the peasantry beginning in the late 1990s, as discussed in Chapter 4. Wen Tiejun, an agricultural economist and perhaps the most important intellectual and activist advocate of new rural reconstruction, was a key figure in producing this discursive shift. The new-found discursive dominance of his sannong wenti formulation has meant that it was much harder to consider rural problems as simply a matter of agricultural technical development or urbanization. New rural reconstruction, still in its nascent stage, must also be viewed from a global perspective. New rural reconstruction has strong resonances with the non-Chinese rural social movements of the 1990s that came to prominence in the anti-globalization movement, such as the Zapatistas in Mexico or the Landless Workers’ Movement (MST) in Brazil.21 These social protective movements, within varying social and national contexts, confront a global situation in which an increasing share of the world’s population is being marginalized as a surplus humanity22 – a global crisis in the reproduction of the relationship between labor and the capitalist economy. The rest of this chapter looks at how a particular conceptualization of China’s rural crisis amid an urbanizing world – primarily the conceptualization by Wen Tiejun and others discussed in chapters 4 and 5 – led to the specific proposed solutions and associated social organizing practices of new rural reconstruction. Most of the intellectual and rural activists of the new rural reconstruction movement are not state officials, but they have an entangled relationship with the state, which they deploy in an attempt to both shape government policy and open a political space for experimentation. Here I depart from the dissident-rights perspective of postsocialist activism.23 This movement is not one of intellectual 20

21

22 23

Han Jun, “Yi hao wenjian jiang tuidong nongmin hezuo jingji zuzhi fazhan jinru xin jieduan,” 13–14. See, for example, Nora McKeon, Michael Watts, and Wendy Wolford, “Peasant Associations in Theory and Practice” (Geneva: United Nations Research Institute for Social Development, 2004). Mike Davis, Planet of Slums (London: Verso, 2006 ). Goldman, From Comrade to Citizen: The Struggle for Political Rights in China.

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dissidence against a unified state, but is a powerful critique that operates among a diverse array of actors with varying relationships to the state. New rural reconstruction takes its name from the rural Chinese populist movement of the 1920s and 1930s, the rural reconstruction movement. This movement, like the present one, brought together a wide range of rural reform efforts, which had been building, particularly since 1927, in reaction to Communist Party efforts at rural organization.24 The most important activists of the former movement are now being reassessed in this new moment: this is especially true of Liang Shuming, who promoted a Confucian form of activism in which intellectuals would go to the countryside to rebuild rural society, and who conducted extensive rural experimentation in Shandong Province in the 1930s, and Yan Yangchu,25 whose rural reconstruction ideas developed out of his work in mass education and who experimented with rural reconstruction in Ding County, Hebei Province, in the 1930s.26 Liang believed that a voluntary development process based in the countryside would lead to collective ownership and the blending of rural and urban society. Rural reconstruction meant cultural revival for Liang, who believed that Chinese culture was superior to Western culture and that a Chinese cultural awakening, based on village culture, would be of great value to the world in overcoming the problems of Western-style industrialization with its strong rural–urban split. Many contemporary activists agree, and Liang is particularly influential. Yan Yangchu was a Christian and much less critical of the West, although he still believed that rural industrial development could allow China to bypass the problems of Western industrialization. Both intellectuals have inspired activists in the present-day new rural reconstruction movement, in particular for their populist insistence that intellectuals “go to the people” and that only out of practice and experimentation would China find a route out of national crisis. Ding County, now Dingzhou, was also the site of a contemporary rural reconstruction institution, the Yan Yangchu Rural Reconstruction

24

25

26

Guy Alitto, The Last Confucian: Liang Shu-ming and the Chinese Dilemma of Modernity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979), p. 228. For more on Yan Yangchu (also known as James Yen), see Sidney Gamble, Ting Hsien: A North China Rural Community (Stanford University Press, 1968 [1954]); Charles W. Hayford, To the People: James Yen and Village China (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990). Yan’s rural activities were based in Zaicheng village, Ding County, the site of the Yan Yangchu Rural Reconstruction Institute and the Zaicheng rural cooperative, both founded by locals with the help of Wen Tiejun and development NGOs.

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Institute, founded in the summer of 2003 by Wen Tiejun’s Institute for Research on the Reform of China’s Economic System (Zhongguo jingji tizhi gaige yanjiu hui), which published Zhongguo gaige [China reform] and Zhongguo gaige (nongcunban)27 with support from British and Hong Kong NGOs. About the time Wen moved to Renmin University in 2004, the Yan Institute began to lose its importance. The Liang Shuming Center for Rural Reconstruction on the outskirts of Beijing – currently the most important practical rural reconstruction center operating under Wen’s direction – runs training sessions for peasant activists, especially on setting up rural cooperatives, and helps organize cooperatives and other rural experiments (discussed at length below). These centers were the outcome of the convergence of much rural reconstruction work, in which student activists have been particularly involved. In the mid to late 1990s, student groups came together at various schools, organizing rural investigations and volunteering on rural projects. Many of the active students were of rural origin, and after receiving their college education have decided to work to transform rural society. New rural reconstruction is at once a budding practice of rural experimentation that looks for solutions to rural problems by transforming rural society and the rural–urban relationship, and a critique of Western market economics. It is an attempt to reconstruct the social, economic, and cultural relations of rural society, relations that were repeatedly in crisis across the twentieth century. The theoretical underpinning of new rural reconstruction stems from the reflection on the history of Chinese development and the critique of marketization that Wen Tiejun undertook at the end of the 1990s. If, as the thinkers discussed in chapters 4 and 5 argued, the small peasant economy was not going to disappear soon; if China’s peasantry cannot simply be urbanized, then how was the rural crisis to be solved? If, as Wen so forcefully argued, the marketization of rural society – of land, labor, and money – was a utopian dream that brought great suffering in reality, then what institutions would protect the peasant from the depredations of the market? These are the central questions new rural reconstruction attempts to answer through its experimentation. In this sense, the experimentation of new rural reconstruction can be seen as a new form of li tu bu li xiang (leaving the land but not the village), a recognition that urbanization (li tu you li xiang: leaving the land and leaving the village) fails to answer the fundamental questions posed by 27

Wen stresses that, while he was interested in Yan Yangchu’s work beginning in the 1980s, it was not his idea to build an institute in Dingzhou or name it after Yan. It was local residents and officials who proposed the idea. Discussion with Wen, Dingzhou, July 12, 2004.

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the intersection of capitalism and the peasant economy. New rural reconstruction experimentation, therefore, seeks to build new social relations in the countryside, to organize the peasants in new forms, in order to maintain the social existence of a group largely excluded from the benefits of the market reforms of the 1990s. New rural reconstruction means the rebuilding of rural social life and the organization of the peasantry. Here, the influence of the 1930s rural reconstruction movement, and in particular of Liang Shuming, is clear. Liang argued that to surmount the rural crisis of the 1930s, which he blamed largely on foreign influence, rural social relations would have to be reconstructed and developed to a new level of collective responsibility through education and training under the guidance of enlightened intellectuals.28 As we saw in Chapter 5, Cao Jinqing, an admirer of Liang, argued that radical Maoist reforms in the 1950s brought about the disintegration of traditional rural society, which had been in crisis, both economic and social, for some time. In turn, however, the commune-based rural society was similarly disrupted by the decollectivization and marketization that began the reform era in the 1980s. Collective farming was replaced by individual household farming, but rural public society was not rebuilt.29 As many on the left in China put it, after the new household farming system increased agricultural production, the state largely divested itself of rural public works and social welfare: collectively owned irrigation, public medical care,30 and schooling fell into disrepair and often the local government took on a predatory relationship to the rural population.31 The present as opportunity For those connected to new rural reconstruction projects, to reconstruct rural culture and social relationships primarily meant to build cooperative social relations that transcended the interests of individual household 28 29 30

31

Alitto, The Last Confucian. Personal interview with Cao Jinqing, Shanghai, June 24, 2004. Many argue that the SARS epidemic was made worse by the lack of state attention to rural public health care since the reform era began. See, for example, Wang Shaoguang, “Renmin de jiankang ye shi ying daoli,” translated by the China Study Group as “People’s Health Matters Too.” This article was one of the most controversial published in Dushu in recent years. Also see Arif Dirlik, “Global Modernity, Spatial Reconfigurations, and Global Health: Perspectives from the People’s Republic of China,” boundary 2 33, no. 1 (2006), 99–122. Even after the period of heavy “primitive accumulation,” to use Wen’s phrase, the rural local government often used high taxation and fees as a form of rent seeking. This predatory relationship, particularly egregious during the 1990s, is clearly rendered in Li Changping’s “The Crisis in the Countryside,” in Chaohua Wang, ed., One China, Many Paths (London: Verso, 2003), pp. 198–218.

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productive units and their mediation by the market. It was these relationships that would allow rural villages to protect themselves against the predatory behavior of state actors or market forces. While according to Wen Tiejun and other new rural reconstruction advocates, sannong wenti was a condition particular to the reform era, in which China was once again opened to global capitalism and market relationships developed rapidly, no matter how bad the situation in the countryside was, they recognized the present as an opportunity for rebuilding rural society. For Wen, China had entered a period in which primitive accumulation for industrialization had ceased. Cao Jinqing likewise saw the present as a moment in which agriculture would no longer have to support the state and industrialization.32 For Li Changping, China was now moving into the “post-taxation period” (hou shuifei shidai), in which primitive accumulation from agriculture would end.33 Under the formulation “building a new socialist countryside” ( jianshe shehuizhuyi xin nongcun), the CCP itself proposed in 2006 that it was time for “industry to help agriculture” ( gongye fanbu nongye).34 This recent shift in the political economy of China’s development and the corresponding change in government policy opened a new opportunity for rural society, and it was here that new rural reconstruction was located.35 The cooperatives of new rural 32 33

34

35

Cao, “Shehui zhuanxing guocheng zhong de sannong wenti,” 16. Interview with Li Changping, Guiyang, Jan. 24, 2005. Chen Tao, of the Jingmen Technical College in Hubei, and Wang Ximing, originally from Jingmen and a student at Huazhong Shifan Daxue’s China Rural Issues Research Center and now the director of the Western China Center for Rural Studies at Southwest Jiaotong University, argued that tax reform was an opportunity for the creation of good governance in rural China. Chen Tao and Wang Ximing, “Nongcun shuifei gaige he xiangcunzhili” [Rural tax and fee reform and village governance], Jingmen zhiye teshu xueyuan xuebao 20, no. 1 (2005), 59. This major new government policy on rural China must be seen as a response to a complex series of factors. On the one hand, the CCP was responding to rural unrest that increasingly became visible from the late 1990s on and was damaging to the legitimacy of the CCP. On the other hand, the new leadership of the CCP was clearly moving away from the economic policies of the previous regime that relied so heavily on the export economy and infrastructure investment. Rural development was vital for building internal consumer demand, which could not be sustained by the urban middle class alone. Discussions on sannong wenti by intellectuals such as Wen Tiejun also played a role in the drafting of these new policies. Fanbu indicates that industry was once nurtured by agriculture but must now support it. Stig Thøgersen has recently written on this campaign, focusing on the state–activist–villager relationship. Thøgersen tends to conflate the campaign to “build a new socialist countryside” and new rural reconstruction, the main subject of both this chapter and Day, “The End of the Peasant? New Rural Reconstruction in China.” New rural reconstruction, however, began as an intellectual and activist tendency before the state-led new socialist countryside campaign, and, in fact, it influenced the introduction of the state-led campaign. See Thøgersen, “Revisiting a Dramatic Triangle.” Also see Ahlers and Schubert, “‘Building a New Socialist Countryside’ – Only a Political Slogan?”; Perry, “From Mass Campaigns to Managed Campaigns.” Recently those associated with Wen Tiejun have changed the second term in this category from xiangcun to nongcun. Both can be translated as “rural.” This change brought the terminology more

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reconstruction, however, are dwarfed in competition with specialized cooperatives (zhuanye hezuoshe) and capitalist “dragon-head enterprises” (longtou qiye), both backed by the state as a way to capitalize and modernize agriculture despite resistance to land privatization.36 The new situation called for rural experimentation and institutional innovation, the heart of the emerging new rural reconstruction movement. According to Li, rural social relations and politics in the post-1949 period were defined by the extraction of surplus from agriculture for industrialization; this produced a tense and antagonistic relationship between the party’s local representatives and the peasantry. The present land system, which Li called a “government ownership system” (zhengfu suoyouzhi), was inherited from the period of primitive accumulation. It was “collective” only in name, as the government owned the land and decided the contract rules. This control, over land and the peasantry, had been necessary for the state’s accumulation of surplus. By the turn of the century, however, that reason no longer existed. Li argued that with the end of extraction and the agricultural tax there was a chance to rebuild the social life of the countryside; in particular, the relationship between the local government and the peasantry could improve with peasants gaining control over local resources and aid coming from the central government. While Li did not support the continuation of the present “government ownership system,” neither did he call for land privatization as liberals did. Instead, he proposed a genuine collective system in which villagers would democratically control collectively owned land and decide how to use it. Li, who worked for the NGO Oxfam, tended to emphasize the democratic control of villagers over local, collective resources. Many who called for the privatization of agricultural land, such as Qin Hui, said that it was the only way to protect the land from corrupt government seizure. But Li countered that individual peasant families had little power to protect their property rights. Collectively owned land that was locally controlled, on the other hand, would be easier to protect as the peasants would be more united. Li saw the overall transformation of the structural relationship between the urban and rural spheres as creating an opening for a rural institutional change – that is, for the

36

in line with the CCP’s new formulation – as of late 2005 – for rural work, jianshe shehuizhuyi xin nongcun (building a new socialist countryside), thus creating more political space for the movement to develop. See Philip Huang, “China’s New-Age Small Farms and Their Vertical Integration: Agribusiness or Co-ops?” Modern China 37, no. 2 (March 2011), 107–34. Thanks to Philip Huang for the reference and to Joel Andreas for suggestions on this point.

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development of a third cooperative movement, the first being that of the rural reconstruction movement of the 1930s, and the second that of collectivization during the 1950s.37 Li did not only contest the marketization of land; a critique of the commoditization of labor power was also central to his Polanyian argument. Li saw the labor power of the Chinese people as its greatest resource, but marketization expelled commoditized labor power from the countryside. While the state was able to mobilize rural labor for collective projects in the 1970s and 1980s, by the 1990s the increasing dominance of the market institution had meant that it was difficult to mobilize rural labor power for collective projects and the expense was now much higher, as well. In order to rebuild rural society China had to rely on the cooperative work of the masses – cooperative organization was to be the key.38 If what we are witnessing now is the initial stage of a third rural cooperative movement, as Li Changping argues, perhaps one way to understand twentieth-century Chinese history is as a history of attempts to develop cooperative social relations in order to protect and transform a rural society in crisis, a crisis always related to rural China’s troubled subsumption by global capitalism and the commoditization of labor power. As Wen Tiejun has commented, the present cooperative movement has a greater chance of success than that of the 1930s, because in the meantime rural China underwent land reform and China has already successfully industrialized. Thus, revolution has made reconstruction possible. The present movement did not validate that of the 1930s as the correct political path, according to Wen. As Wen noted, of course, it was precisely through collectivization in the 1950s that China was able to industrialize. In other words, it was rural cooperative relations, whether imposed by the state or not, that gave China some breathing space within global capitalism. On the other hand, the collectivization of the 1950s might be seen as somewhat of an aberration in the history of twentiethcentury rural cooperative movements. First, it was largely pushed by the state. Second, it paid little attention to local circumstances. And third, it was chiefly instituted to facilitate the extraction of surplus to aid the industrialization process. Perhaps the present, as Cao, Li, and Wen among others suggested, offered the best opportunity for rural cooperative social relations to succeed. 37 38

Interview with Li Changping, Guiyang, Jan. 24, 2005. Interview with Li Changping, Guiyang, Jan. 25, 2005.

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Then again, tying the cooperative movements of the mid and late twentieth century to the rural reconstruction movement of the 1930s sustained the dichotomy between traditional culture and Western modernization within rural reconstruction discourse. Critical of the assumption that modernization equals urbanization, Li Yuanxing,39 for example, characterized new rural reconstruction as the latest stage of a century of attempts at finding an alternative modernization path based on rural China instead of urban China.40 The rural Chinese path (xiangtu Zhongguo de lujing) was native to China and traditional culture, whereas the urban route was a Western import and came at the price of sacrificing the peasantry as well as the environment. Modernization, according to Li, was a Western theory which took as its object the non-West and should be understood as “Westernization.” It gained legitimacy through its linkage to nationalism in a globalizing world of competition between nation-states, valuing the strength of the nation before the “people’s livelihood” (minsheng). This point echoed the arguments of Liang Shuming eighty years earlier. At that time, prominent liberals responded to Liang by saying that his rural-centered development plan would create a weak Chinese nation on the international stage.41 But Li Yuanxing pointed out, just as Liang had earlier, that in the end the urban-centered industrialization strategy was unsustainable and destructive. Li saw the rural Chinese path as a reflection of the problems of the urban modernization path in relation to “national conditions.” This reflection, according to Li, led to a century of alternative rural modernization experiments, from Yan Yangchu’s rural reconstruction to contemporary new rural reconstruction. (Li, like many new rural reconstruction advocates, was silent on the Maoist era.) This alternative modernization path meant putting the people’s livelihood first; here Li explicitly tied the alternative he advocated to the guiding formulation of the Hu-Wen government development and governance strategy, “taking people as the root” ( yi ren wei ben). Li’s conscious assimilation of his proposal to the dominant Hu-Wen formulation was replicated throughout much of rural reconstruction discourse, an attempt, no doubt, both to create political space for the movement and to influence government policy. 39 40

41

Li is a professor of sociology at Anhui University. Li Yuanxing, “Xiangtu Zhongguo vs chengshi Zhongguo – dangdai Zhongguo xiandaihua lujing xuanze chuyi” [Rural China vs. urban China – a modest proposal for contemporary China’s choice of modernization path], Sannong Zhongguo, no. 3 (2004), 79–85. See Alitto, The Last Confucian, p. 270.

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Culture, used in several senses, became an important category in the theory and practice of new rural reconstruction. First, it was used as a mobilization tool – activists often used cultural troupes (wenyidui) in order to build group cohesion before developing larger projects. Second, it was often used to designate rural social relations and organization, which were not reducible to economic categories; this included productive relations as well as projects such as women’s associations and old people’s associations. He Xuefeng and Li Yuanxing went further, however, using the term culture to argue that the value system of rural China itself must be rebuilt. This value system stood in opposition to that of Western-style development, with its focus on economics. Thus, He Xuefeng stressed that rural reconstruction was not simply a solution to the problems of the rural economy, and that a focus on the rural economics concealed the importance of the social and cultural problems of rural China. This separated him from Wen Tiejun, for whom rural economic cooperatives had been the prime focus since the turn of the millennium. He Xuefeng argued that traditional rural social organization was shattered by the revolution and market reforms and “the provision of basic, rural public goods has increasingly become a problem.”42 The central area of concern was rural social relations and the public sphere. Thus, while the government decided to significantly increase its rural investment beginning in 2003, He cautioned that such investment should not go to individual households but to the building of public goods, the construction of the rural cooperative economy, and the support of rural cultural projects, all of which had been marginalized by the market economy.43 Rural reconstruction, according to He, could organize public projects, such as old people’s associations, through which a new culture that values relationships among people and between people and nature could be established.44 Liu Laoshi, one of the most active organizers of the movement, also stressed that the movement should not raise the expectations of peasants that it could considerably increase their incomes.45 Instead, the movement 42 43

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He Xuefeng, Xiangcun yanjiu de guoqing yishi, p. 82. Ibid., p. 83. He states, “Under the present sannong wenti, we need to find a way forward that can be built upon the realization that peasant incomes over the future ten years or so will not be raised significantly” (ibid., p. 81). This exploration, for He, is what new rural reconstruction is all about. He Xuefeng, “Xin nongcun jianshe yu Zhongguo daolu.” Liu, also known as Liu Xiangbo, was the program coordinator for the Center for Rural Reconstruction at Renmin University’s School of Agricultural Economics and Rural Development under Wen Tiejun until he tragically died in a car accident in March of 2011. Liu was particularly active in organizing student rural activism and was a founder of the Liang Shuming Center for Rural Reconstruction mentioned above. For more information on Liu

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should focus on fostering the culture of cooperation.46 Jiang Bailin, who was active in organizing peasant cooperatives in the northeast, made a similar argument. In the cooperatives he helped to organize, members held study sessions on government documents as well as on the worldwide history of cooperatives – discussing Owen’s cooperatives alongside new tax regulations and the price of pig feed. Much in the fashion of Yan Yangchu and Liang Shuming during the 1930s rural reconstruction movement, in these cooperatives education became a cooperative process directly related to rural life and the process of development. Yet the culture of cooperation was one of the difficulties of building cooperatives, according to many rural activists, who said that the household responsibility system, the basis of reform-era agriculture, had atomized rural society. “Rendering rural society knowledgeable” and the “ruralization of knowledge” Guo Houliang, whose position was close to that of Lu Xueyi, who stressed urbanization as a strategy, suggested that Li Changping’s famous statement that “the peasants’ lot is really bitter, the countryside is really poor, and agriculture is in crisis”47 was too pessimistic and should be reformulated as the prescription “the industrialization of agriculture, the urbanization of rural society, and rendering the peasants knowledgeable” (nongye gongyehua, nongcun chengshihua, nongmin zhishihua).48 For Guo, the transformation of peasants into knowledgeable citizens was necessary to overcome their low quality (suzhi di).49 They were considered to have a low quality

46

47

48

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see Friends of Liu Laoshi, “The Achievements of Comrade Liu Xiangbo (1968–2011),” China Study Group, http://chinastudygroup.net/2011/04/liu-xiangbo/, accessed Feb. 5, 2012. It was in part this focus on culture that led many within the movement to a new appreciation for Liang Shuming. Personal interview, Liu Laoshi, Beijing, July, 2006; Liu Laoshi, “Nongcun de jingshen wenhua chongjian” [Rebuilding the rural spirit and culture], www.wyzxsx.com, accessed Aug. 10, 2006, “Xin nongcun jianshe zhong de wenhua chongjian” [Rebuilding culture within new rural reconstruction], http://ows.cul-studies.com/Article/country/200605/3934.html, accessed Aug. 10, 2006. As discussed in Chapter 4, the letter, written by Li Changping in early 2000, was sent to Premier Zhu Rongji and later published in Southern Weekend in the Aug. 24, 2000 issue. See Li Changping, Wo xiang zongli shuo shihua, 20. Guo did admit that there were problems in the countryside, and he also restated sannong wenti as “the structure of agricultural production is not reasonable, the development pace of rural urbanization is not fast, and the peasant’s burden is too heavy” (nongye chanye jiegou bu heli, nongcun chengzhenhua fazhan sudu bu kuai, nongmin fudan guozhong). Guo Houliang, “Nongye gongyehua, nongcun chengshihua, nongmin zhishihua” [The industrialization of agriculture, urbanization of the countryside, and rendering the peasant knowledgeable], www.wyzxsx.com/ Article/Class19/200601/4282.html, accessed Dec. 15, 2006. As discussed in Chapter 3, the low quality (suzhi di ) of the peasants was a common formulation in discussions of the peasants from the 1980s and 1990s. This discourse grew out of the general antipeasant discussions of the 1980s and the transformation of the way labor was valued.

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and a lack of leadership ability (meiyou lingdao nengli) because, according to Guo, it was the peasants who had the least knowledge in China. In response, Guo suggested that the state undertake more technological propaganda and education. The transformation of peasants into modern knowledgeable citizens (xiandai zhishi gongmin) was vital for “ending the ignorance and backwardness of rural society” ( jieshu nongcun de yumei he luohou).50 While Guo argued for “rendering peasants knowledgeable” – indicating that the peasantry, but not knowledge or education itself, needed to be transformed – Qiu Jiansheng, a rural activist who worked at the Yan Yangchu Rural Reconstruction Institute in Zhaicheng, argued that not only did peasants need “to be rendered knowledgeable” but knowledge needed “ruralization” (zhishi nongcunhua) – suggesting a two-way transformation.51 Qiu linked new rural reconstruction not only to the tradition of rural reconstruction of the 1920s and 1930s, but also further back to the need to create a “new people” (xinmin) through “new learning” associated with the nationalist thought of Liang Qichao.52 But creating a new people would not simply mean creating urban citizens and quickening the pace of urbanization; nor would it mean bringing technical and scientific knowledge to the rural sphere; it meant rebuilding rural civilization (chongjian nongcun wenming) in an integrated way, combining production, cultural, hygienic, citizenship, environmental, and legal education.53 Knowledge and learning would be transformed as it was integrated into everyday rural life. In Zhaicheng, where Qiu worked, continuing education classes were organized in which peasants studied various subjects important to their daily life.54 Yin Yongchun, a Peking University graduate who voluntarily moved to the Anhui countryside to set up a free school for peasants and a fellow traveler in new rural reconstruction circles, stressed that recent education in China was oriented towards urban needs, yet most 50 51

52 53

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Guo Houliang, “Nongye gongyehua, nongcun chengshihua, nongmin zhishihua.” Qiu Jiansheng, “‘Zhishi nongcunhua, nongcun zhishihua’ – Zhaicheng shiyan qu de yilu he xiwang” [“The ruralization of knowledge and rendering rural society knowledgeable”: Zhaicheng experimental district qualms and hopes], Kaifang shidai, no. 6 (2005). This article discussed Qiu’s work at the Yan Yangchu Rural Reconstruction Institute in Zhaicheng Village, Dingzhou, Hebei Province. Ibid., 35. Ibid., 37–8. It should be noted that Qiu also discussed this in terms of suzhi (quality), although he talked only of raising the level of suzhi for the people of the country as a whole (guomin de zhengti suzhi ). Ibid., 39.

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peasants would not and could not permanently move to the cities. His school attempted to teach knowledge suitable for the transformation of rural life.55 For Qiu, following in the populist tradition of the original rural reconstruction movement, this meant that intellectuals must first go to the countryside and live there, working with peasants both to teach the peasants and to develop rural-oriented forms of knowledge.56 Yet a tension between the intellectual and the peasant, between mental and manual labor, still existed in new rural reconstruction discourse. While in Wen’s work the above populist strain was clearly operative, with society portrayed as needing to protect itself from inequality created by the market, the early twentieth-century anarchist and Maoist discussions about creating a “new human” that animated politics across China’s twentieth century were somewhat diminished. For example, as mentioned in Chapter 4, Wen defined the “three great differences” (san da chabie) as “income difference, urban–rural difference, and regional difference.” This formulation was different from Mao’s discussion of socialism’s goal of overcoming “three great differences,” which Mao saw as between mental and manual labor, between city and countryside, and between worker and peasant. In particular, discussion of mental and manual labor disappeared in Wen’s account. Activists like Qiu and Yin were fighting against a strong current of the reform movement itself, the widening gap between mental and manual labor. From early on, a key shift signaling the reform movement was the valorization of the mental and manual labor difference. As we saw in our discussion of Heshang in Chapter 1, mental labor during the reform era was valued more highly than manual labor, and this distinction has grown stronger ever since. Thus with the reform movement there was an explicit rejection of the Maoist goal of overcoming the difference between mental and manual labor.57 While the work of Wen Tiejun and the basic goals of 55

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Interview with Yin Yongchun, Beijing, Dec. 29, 2003; Yin Yongchun, “Nongcun xuyao shenme yang de jiaoyu?” [What kind of education does the countryside need?], presentation at Wuyouzhixiang (Utopia bookstore), Beijing, Dec. 29, 2003. Qiu, “‘Zhishi nongcunhua, nongcun zhishihua,’” 42. Wen, “Jiegou xiandaihua,” 11. The “four modernizations” relied heavily on technology in order to develop the productive forces, and integrating intellectuals with the party’s reformist goals was central to this project. This can also be understood as an elite political strategy that grew out of a reaction to the Cultural Revolution, within which political and cultural elites who had been in conflict during the Cultural Revolution developed common interests in the 1970s, leading to the reform movement. See Joel Andreas, “Battling Over Political and Cultural Power During the Chinese Cultural Revolution,” Theory and Society 31, no. 4 (2002).

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new rural reconstruction were mostly aligned with the first phase of the reform movement, new rural reconstruction sustained tendencies that strained against this foundational realignment of the reform movement itself, the shift in valorization of mental and manual labor.

The new cooperative movement In the first years of the twenty-first century, peasant and intellectual activists initiated many attempts to create peasant cooperatives. Much of this activity initially had little or no connection to the new rural reconstruction movement. But several key experiments that began independently came under the rubric of the tendency as they developed, gaining national support and recognition as models of rural development. There are a lot of questions about how this new cooperative movement will work out in practice. Will these cooperatives form a Polanyian society that sets itself against the market? Will they be able to build new rural social relations? Will they allow the rural economy to thrive? It is too early to tell, and it would take an in-depth ethnographic study – a project very different from this one – to begin to answer these questions.58 One of the most discussed cooperative models was that of Lishu County in Jilin Province.59 The Lishu cooperatives were developed independently under the guidance of Jiang Bailin, a bank employee. In the mid 1990s, he took part in a major reform in rural banking and a push toward government divestment and privatization. This attempt to make the rural credit cooperatives into peasant-shareholding organizations was not successful, however, as peasants did not buy into the cooperatives, meaning the government still had to fund them. At the same time, the credit cooperatives did not usually loan money to peasants, either, as there was little to guarantee repayment and little profit to be made. In 2000, Jiang decided to experiment with peasant-run cooperatives in order to guarantee the loans. Jiang saw peasant–producer cooperatives as the missing institution in the new, post-reform countryside. By 2004, Jiang had helped to establish nine “new cooperatives” (xin hezuoshe), as he called them, in Lishu County. The Taiping Town cooperative, established in 2001, was one of the most successful and comprehensive. When I visited the cooperative in 58

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Matthew Hale, a graduate student in Anthropology at the University of Washington, is currently completing a dissertation on this subject. I visited the Lishu cooperatives in the summer of 2004, together with Robert Weil. For Weil’s account see “Conditions of the Working Classes in China,” Monthly Review 58, no. 2 (2006).

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2004 it had thirty-six member families; by October of 2005 member households reached 330.60 It began as a purchasing-marketing cooperative, with eight member families raising and selling pigs. Jiang Bailin arranged for them to receive loans for pig feed that were collectively guaranteed by the members of the co-op. This collective purchasing also meant a significant drop in the price of feed, and most of the savings were reinvested in credit union shares. Collectively selling the pigs also helped increase the price, and this profit was retained by the members. As members bought more shares in the credit union, the amount loaned to them increased as well. The pigs were raised together, although individually owned, in a building equipped with a bio-gas facility that provided energy for member households. The government itself operates a large number of specialized cooperatives both for credit and for purchasing and sales, but these are top-down organizations with no democratic management. Jiang stressed that his cooperatives were different in two senses: they were voluntary and democratically run – organized and managed by peasants themselves – and they were comprehensive. Jiang’s “new cooperatives” attempted to combine credit co-ops, production co-ops, and purchasing and sales co-ops in one organization. This comprehensiveness made these cooperatives more of a process than a static form and allowed the cooperatives to develop along with the rural community. Qiu Jiansheng, who helped to establish a cooperative in Zhaicheng, Dingzhou, in collaboration with the Yan Yangchu Rural Reconstruction Institute, stressed that new rural reconstruction cooperatives were not like specialized cooperatives created under other auspices. Specialized cooperatives were simple economic cooperatives and members have an economic relationship with each other, whereas the Zhaicheng cooperative combined a concern for the socially weak, concern for the community, group study, group medical assistance, and cultural activities; in other words, these new rural reconstruction cooperatives attempted to build social relationships that could transcend economic mediation.61 When I visited the Taiping Town cooperative in 2004, it was building a feed-processing plant, since completed, that uses locally grown inputs. The plant was intended to produce pig feed that could supply up to a thousand 60

61

Xie Yongmo, “Taiping Baixin Nongmin Hezuoshe Gaikuang” [The general situation of the Taiping commoner trust peasant cooperative], in Wen Tiejun, ed., Xin nongcun jianshe shijian zhanshi [An exhibition of new rural reconstruction practice] (Beijing chubanshe, 2006), p. 151. Qiu, “‘Zhishi nongcunhua, nongcun zhishihua,’” 38–40.

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households. Members would receive cheap feed, and the rest would be sold at market value. The operation of the plant encouraged a rapid growth in cooperative membership. The cooperative planned to hire a manager for the feed plant, with some members giving up farming altogether to work in the plant for a wage. This locally driven industrialization, therefore, shifted some farm laborers into non-agricultural work, bringing about the transformation of village society and slowly overcoming the rural–urban divide. This development utilized cooperative social relations to help further integrate local society; the “interaction of industry and agriculture” ( gong nong hudong) meant that the local need for agricultural inputs drove local industrialization, and that industrialization, in turn, helped to develop local agriculture.62 In other areas, peasant production associations were also springing up. An article in the 2004 Zhongguo gaige (nongcunban) issue on peasant organization discussed a hop-and-barley-growing association in a Gansu township. The region had a state hop farm in the 1970s, but it was not until the 1990s that individual family farms began to grow hops. When the township set up a TVE to process raw material for beer in 1998, the relationship between individual farms and the plant was unstable and it was often difficult to get enough raw materials of the right quality. What was missing was a way to organize the relationship between individual households and the enterprise. So the enterprise helped set up a beer raw materials association. The association was at first directed by local cadres, though over time it became more independent and by 2001 its leadership was directly elected by its peasant households, which numbered over 600. As the article stated, this signaled a shift from “official” (guanban) to “nonofficial” (minban) management. The enterprise provided members with technical help and invested in the manufacture of fertilizer and other inputs, while the peasant-run association guaranteed the sale of raw materials to the enterprise.63 While the association was controlled by the peasants, it was not a comprehensive cooperative in Jiang’s sense of the term. Unlike the initial establishment of cooperatives in Lishu County, which came to the attention of rural reconstruction activists only after they had been founded, the cooperatives of Lankao County, Henan Province, were always under the direction of new rural reconstruction 62 63

Xie, “Taiping Baixin Nongmin Hezuoshe Gaikuang,” p. 152. Wang Zhengming and Tong Zhihui, “Fu yiwan nongmin de pijiu yuanliao xiehui” [A brewing raw materials association of well-off peasants], Zhongguo gaige (nongcunban), no. 4 (2004), 16–17.

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activists, in particular He Huili, an assistant professor at the Agricultural University of China and a tireless advocate of rural reconstruction.64 One of the strengths of new rural reconstruction has been Wen Tiejun’s ability to incorporate the innovative work of others within the movement. By the time the cooperatives were established in Lankao, Jiang’s Lishu cooperatives had become a model for rural reconstruction activists.65 The Lankao cooperative experiments began when He Huili temporarily worked in Lankao County as a deputy director responsible for agriculture, and it is only with the consent and support of local governments that this sort of experimentation is possible, a major limitation on their spread. With the assistance of student and rural reconstruction activists, she guided peasants in six villages to found five cultural troupes, four cooperatives, and two old people’s associations. In He Huili’s experience, the cultural troupes were vital in developing cooperative relationships that formed the basis for economic cooperatives. Echoing He Xuefeng and others, she saw the culture of cooperation and not just economic cooperatives as crucial to the reconstruction of rural society. In Chenzhai Village in Lankao, for example, a women’s cultural troupe was established first, and its members later formed the core for the establishment of an economic cooperative in Chenzhai in 2004. The cooperative, which by 2005 had thirty-two members, consisted of a vegetable and fruit small group, a financial aid center, and a pig-raising small group, which invested in building a store to market pig feed. Her explanation of co-op-building emphasized its processual character: “Because we cannot coerce people, we need to use guidance and education, first allowing a portion of peasants to freely proceed to economic, social, and cultural cooperation, and hopefully in the end a village with complete cooperation and real self-rule is achieved.”66 A larger cooperative in He Village, also in Lankao, was established after rural reconstruction student activists from Henan University conducted training sessions and set up an information and consultation center. 64

65

66

The information on the Lankao cooperatives comes from discussions with He Huili and other activists as well as from He Huili, “Xin xiangcun jianshe shiyan zai Lankao” [New rural reconstruction experiments in Lankao], in Xin nongcun jianshe shijian zhanshi [An exhibition of new rural reconstruction practice], pp. 84–102. I visited Lankao in the summer of 2009 with a group organized by a Peter Wall Institute for Advanced Studies Summer Institute for Research entitled “The End of the Peasant? Global Capitalism and the Future of Agrarian Society.” See www.wsir. pwias.ubc.ca/2008/. Jiang Bailin led a training session on cooperatives at the Yan Yangchu Rural Reconstruction Institute in Zaicheng in the spring of 2004, with Zaicheng peasants who founded a cooperative at the time. He Huili, “Xin xiangcun jianshe shiyan zai Lankao,” p. 90.

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Through their activity they met Wang Dexian, a peasant from the village, and he went to a training session at the Yan Yangchu Institute in Zaicheng on cooperatives. After he returned, he and a group of rural reconstruction activists held a conference on cooperative economics in He Village, which included the participation of members of a cooperative from Shandong. Shortly afterwards, in September of 2004, the He Village Cooperative was formed with fifty households, and has since grown to more than eighty-eight households. Its projects included an information center and library, mutual financial aid (helping at least twenty families as of 2006), a planting group, and a breeding group. As a group they completed plowing, growing wheat, and purchasing fertilizer and other inputs at reduced prices. They also did public service work, including repair of about three kilometers of village roads. In contrast to the experience of the Chenzhai cooperative, in He Village a cultural group was a spin-off project, not its founding core. While much of this organizing work was done by outside intellectuals and student volunteers, local village party cadres were often involved. A cooperative in Nanmazhuang Village, Lankao, was established after village members, sent by the village party secretary, participated in the He Village cooperative conference. With the help of Jiang Bailin, Wen Tiejun and others, Nanmazhuang’s cooperative began raising pigs, growing wheat and rice, offering financial mutual aid, and setting up a dance troupe to spread cooperative culture. The cooperative organized the production of environmentally friendly rice, which was then directly marketed in Beijing with the help of He Huili.67 The lessons of these experiments are spreading, both through the activity of the rural reconstruction activists and their training sessions and through direct links between peasants themselves. The cooperative movement itself also created a good deal of media attention and support. It still operates, however, on a very small scale.68 New rural reconstruction activists realize that cooperatives will not develop on their own within the competitive environment of the market economy. Outside support is particularly important at the early stage, in terms both of education and technical information and of investment capital. Jiang and his brothers, for example, individually invested large sums of money in the Lishu

67

68

Li Guangshou, “Ai dami de ren, lianhe qilai: He Huili yu ta de chengxiang hezuo lixiang” [Rice lovers, unite: He Huili and her dream of urban–rural cooperation], Shimin (2006), 46–51. Activists give different numbers of rural cooperatives that they consider part of the movement, but the number was around sixty or so nationwide in 2009.

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cooperatives. Many activists are hoping that the model will attract the attention of government officials and then government support.69 Jiang saw the “new cooperatives” as the best model for dealing with the sannong wenti. The cooperatives helped peasants increase agricultural productivity (nongye). They increased rural (nongcun) purchasing power. And most importantly, they raised the level of peasant (nongmin) organization. According to advocates of rural reconstruction, without overcoming the atomization produced by the household responsibility system, rural industrialization and development would be impossible. This conviction differentiates their analysis from mainstream economic approaches to rural problems, which tended to argue for increased marketization of relationships, specialization of production, privatization of land, and the development of rights consciousness – maintaining the household or individual farmer as the basic unit of rural society and reinforcing that unit through the heightened mediation of relations by the market and the institution of private property. According to Jiang, the argument that land privatization and its concentration in the hands of rural capitalists, who would then hire rural surplus labor as wage workers, was the only way to develop rural social organization, and the scale of farming in China was abstract and only paid attention to economic factors. Jiang believed that this course of development was neither politically possible for the central government, because of the instability it would provoke, nor acceptable to peasants themselves. Yet he agreed that the issue of scale of production was important. The new cooperatives offered another route to rural development: instead of privatization (siyouhua), which would bring economic development, cooperativization (hezuohua) and the interaction of industry and agriculture (gong nong hudong) that it engendered would link economic development and social security. As He Huili said, “We need a new round of rural reconstruction, which would attempt to use certain types of organization and institutions to bring about the association of rural surplus labor and the mobilization of laborers’ enthusiasm, turning it into the social capital of rural reconstruction, and in the end efficiently promoting rural social development.”70

69

70

Activists argued that cooperatives should be given tax breaks and loans. Many of the early new cooperatives had to register as companies, if they registered at all. In the 1950s, the state used Supply and Marketing Co-ops and Credit Co-ops to entice peasants into Mutual Aid Teams and Agricultural Production Co-ops. See Vivienne Shue, Peasant China in Transition: The Dynamics of Development Towards Socialism, 1949–1956 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980), pp. 196–7. He Huili, “Xin xiangcun jianshe shiyan zai Lankao,” p. 90.

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For Jiang, therefore, the new cooperatives not only offered a different model of development but were also conceptualized as a form of social protection for “weak social groups” (ruoshi qunti). Ruoshi qunti is a term that began to be used in the 1990s to name social groups that were weak in economic, educational, and political terms – that is, in terms of economic, cultural, and social capital. It is often translated as “marginalized groups.” By the late 1990s, it became a popular term to designate those who have been socially excluded from the reform process. One central concept of new rural reconstruction was that peasants were a weak social group within the market. Peasant organization, or, as Qiu Jiansheng called it, “uniting the weak” (ruozhe de lianhe),71 was a method to strengthen the position of the peasant ruoshi qunti in the face of the market. Cooperatives gave peasant members the group strength to get loans for rural industrialization projects and to demand both cheaper prices in purchasing inputs and higher prices in selling products. In addition, mutual aid (huzhu) among cooperative members strengthened their ability to withstand market forces. And as Li Changping emphasized, peasants united into locally controlled cooperatives had the power to resist illegal land seizures.72 The Taiping cooperative in Lishu County facilitated the spread of technical knowledge and collectively supplied inoculations for pigs, yet they still got sick and died. Early on in the cooperative, one member (one of the original eight) had all forty of his pigs die, meaning he had no resources to start again. The other members did very well and loaned him enough to restart; he was quickly able to repay the loan and turn a profit. The cooperative movement, therefore, is a form of social protection of weak and atomized social groups against the privatization and marketization of society. Yet Jiang and others stressed that the cooperatives were institutions that work together with market exchange and did not replace it. Jiang argued that the market grew out of rural society in the early 1980s with the household responsibility system. But that market grew too strong for individual households to operate within, and many farming families no longer made a profit at farming. Jiang argued that all societies relied on capital and labor: in capitalism, capital was in command; in socialism, labor was in command. But what needed to be worked out was how labor could command capital without smothering it. New cooperatives within the context of a market economy were an institution that would allow peasants (as ruoshi qunti) to bring capital under their command in a 71 72

Qiu, “‘Zhishi nongcunhua, nongcun zhishihua,’” 38. Interview with Li, Jan. 25, 2005.

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democratic fashion. In the long run this would allow capital to be used more efficiently in the countryside, Jiang argued. Under the ruoshi qunti formulation, exploitation was understood as the result of unfair competition between weak peasant producers and big capital. Jiang extended this concept to argue that global competition was not only between products on the market, but also between forms of organization. Competition with big agriculture in the US brought about by China’s entry into the WTO in 2001 was a challenge to Chinese agriculture. But he argued that Chinese agriculture could not compete if organized through the privatization of land and the development of individual capitalists; only cooperative organization would allow Chinese peasants to survive global competition. In a politically savvy argument, the ruoshi qunti formulation helped to place rural reconstruction within the discourse of market socialism: it was a critique of utopian marketization, not of the economic use of markets per se; it was an attempt to put the market under the command of society in a nation in which marketization has gone too far. A further development in the movement was inter-cooperative cooperation. Within both the Lankao and Lishu cooperatives there was some county-wide cooperation, but beginning in the spring of 2006 this was taken a step further: seven of the more successful cooperatives, including some Lankao and Lishu cooperatives, came together to form a mutual aid and marketing cooperative alliance (guoren lüse lianmeng). This alliance aimed to organize urban consumer cooperatives to market cooperativegrown agricultural products, in particular environmentally friendly products such as Nanmazhuang’s rice, attempting to cut out the marketing middlemen.73 It was only through cooperatives in alliance, promoters suggested, that the atomized peasant producers could enter the “mighty market economy” with any strength.74

Conclusion New rural reconstruction is a response to and critique of much of the discourse of the 1990s, which sought a solution to the problems of the peasant population in marketization and urbanization. Yet the 73

74

The alliance works out of an office at the recently founded Liang Shuming Center for Rural Reconstruction on the outskirts of Beijing. See Bai Jiechun, “Guoren lüse lianmeng: quanguo nongmin hezuozuzhi xiang shencengci yanshen” [Guoren Green Alliance: nationwide peasant cooperatives extend to a higher level], Xinhuashe, www.cqagri.gov.cn/detail.asp?pubID=179793&page=1, accessed June 15, 2006.

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phenomenon of urbanization in China is much more complex than the dichotomy between rural reconstruction (li tu bu li xiang) and urbanization (li tu you li xiang) at first implies. Its difficulty is compounded by the fact that the rural–urban divide in China is not readily translatable into English: terms like nongmin and chengshihua (or chengzhenhua) are often too easily rendered as “peasant” and “urbanization.” Chengzhenhua in Chinese, for example, does not necessarily imply the movement of the rural population into pre-existing cities; conversely, it can imply the inplace transformation of rural villages and townships, what Gregory Guldin calls “townization.”75 Guldin, following Chinese anthropologists such as Fei Xiaotong and his student Ma Rong,76 argues that “urbanization” is occurring all along the rural–urban continuum.77 According to Guldin, “townization” is marked by a process of increasing flows of information, goods, capital, and people between the rural and urban spheres that brings about their blending.78 New rural reconstruction (and the old as well, as Liang Shuming argued in the 1930s) and the new cooperatives such as the Taiping cooperative can be seen as a blending of the rural and urban, an alternative form of “townization.” Li Changping, for example, is not against urbanization per se. The problem is, according to him, that urbanization has usually been undertaken on the backs of the peasants. The high urbanization rate of the 1990s coincided with the increasing bankruptcy of the rural economy. There will be urbanization, Li stresses, and it should be up to individuals whether they will live in the countryside or the city. But urbanization should not equal rural bankruptcy, nor should rural problems simply be transferred to the urban sphere in the form of slums.79 Unlike the almost evolutionary process that Guldin describes, however, I argue that we should see new rural reconstruction as an active rural social protection movement against the complete marketization of social life through the building of new social and cultural relations of cooperation in the countryside. As Li Changping 75

76

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Gregory Guldin, What’s a Peasant to Do? Village Becoming Town in Southern China (Boulder: Westview Press, 2001). See Fei Xiaotong, Xiaochengzhen siji [Four articles on small towns] (Beijing: Xinhua chubanshe, 1985); Ma Rong, “The Development of Small Towns and Their Role in the Modernization of China,” in Gregory Guldin, ed., Urbanizing China (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1992), pp. 119–53. Yet, this process may actually hide the fact stressed by Fei Xiaotong that Chinese villages were never solely founded upon agriculture in the first place, but always upon a combination of agriculture and local industrious activity. 79 Guldin, What’s a Peasant to Do?, pp. 14–16. Interview with Li, Jan. 25, 2005.

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argues, rural development has to accompany urbanization; the two processes should not be opposed to each other.80 Here new rural reconstruction links up to Chinese cooperative movements from across the twentieth century, which, through social mobilization and subjective transformation accompanying social transformation, attempted to create a new society and a new people. Whereas in the rights protection movement peasants are turned into citizens through the inculcation of a “rights consciousness,” the relation between these new citizens is socially mediated by the market – they remain largely socially atomized, although they might come together politically to defend their interests. Within new rural reconstruction, there is an attempt to overcome the mediation of the market with cooperative relations. In this sense, new rural reconstruction “townization” can be seen as an experiment that furthers the ideas and practices of early twentieth-century populisms and anarchisms81 as well as some aspects of Maoism,82 all of which saw the construction of a rural society that integrated agriculture and industrious manufacturing activity through cooperative relations as a goal of social transformation. For Guldin, however, the increase in urban–rural flows foretells the end of “peasant China.” Several Chinese anthropologists, most prominent among them Li Peilin, have argued that we are presently witnessing the “end of the peasantry” (nongmin de zhong jie) in China as well.83 Others, such as Wen Tiejun and new rural reconstruction intellectuals and activists, dispute this, however. New rural reconstruction is an expression of the return of the peasant as a political object and, possibly more importantly, a political subject or actor that seemingly refuses to disappear. The issue is partially a matter of defining the category nongmin (peasant/farmer). Does nongmin simply designate participating in small household farming, as is implicit in Wen’s argument, or is it defined by lack of involvement in the flows between the city and country, as Guldin implies? It is also an issue of regional focus: the anthropological fieldwork for Li’s study was based in economically well-off coastal regions, as was much of Guldin’s fieldwork;84 80 82

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81 Ibid. See Dirlik, Anarchism in the Chinese Revolution. Namely the overcoming of the “three great differences” (san da chabie): between worker and peasant, urban and rural, and mental and manual labor. See Li Peilin, Cunzhuang de zhong jie: Yangchengcun de gushi [The end of the village: the story of Yangcheng village] (Beijing: Shangwu yinshuguan, 2004). Li’s Chinese translation of Henri Mendras, La fin des paysans [The vanishing peasant] (Paris: Sedeis, 1967) appeared as Nongmin de zhong jie (Beijing: Zhongguo shehui kexue chubanshe, 1991). This is also the regional focus of Chinese liberals and the weiquan yundong.

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the focus of the new rural reconstruction tendency, on the other hand, has been on inland or central provinces where rural incomes have stagnated since the late 1990s. Yet these different positions, although partially based in both definitional and regional focus, have led to different forms of political practice and policy suggestions. Those involved in new rural reconstruction believe that rural society, although it certainly will be transformed, will not disappear; thus, their experimentation is directed towards finding ways to build a vibrant and prosperous rural society and culture. China’s new rural reconstruction tendency is part of a social protective movement responding to the marketization of social relations and the exclusion of the “surplus rural population” (nongye shengyu renkou) – marginalization to the edge of survival within a modernizing society, to an internal “Third World,” as Wen Tiejun calls it. This separates new rural reconstruction from liberal conceptions of peasant associations, within which the associations are primarily seen as a way for peasants to be better integrated into a market economy – the issue of a surplus population largely disappears from the liberal narrative and the market is seen as a progressive solution to social problems. In China, while there have been calls for rebuilding peasant associations, most new rural reconstruction activists and intellectuals have put their focus elsewhere, in part out of political caution and in part because of a difference of theoretical and practical emphasis. Both the new rural reconstruction movement and the rights protection movement attempt to channel and express recent peasant disquiet and discontent with their economic, cultural, and social position. For liberals, the development of rights is necessary to counteract the power of the state and its intervention in society. This is expressed in the conflicts between peasants and the local rural government. Here the market is viewed as a natural outgrowth of society itself; the story of the spontaneous “liberation” of the peasants of Xiaogang village from the collective system is foundational to this narrative. This liberation, however, is incomplete, and the Taishi villagers show that this social force, in which peasants strive to become citizens, continues. Most new rural reconstruction activists, however, are more likely to view the conflict as one between the market and society. In this narrative, the market is often portrayed as a force external to society – one that can be a useful social tool, but which, if it comes to dominate society, can become a destructive force. It is this market force that has pushed many peasants out of the countryside to work temporarily in the cities as well as induced some Xiaogang villagers to consider

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recollectivization. And the depredations of this market force have also opened a space for new rural reconstruction cooperative experiments. When viewed from a global perspective – as it is by Wen and other intellectuals involved in the movement – China’s new rural reconstruction movement, like the peasant organizations that sparked much of the antiglobalization movement of the 1990s,85 expresses a profound anxiety about the ability of global capitalism, particularly in its neo-liberal mode, to include the majority of the world’s population, and the concern that the global slums, urban and rural, will simply continue to grow as warehouses of the excluded.86 The reaction against utopian attempts at the marketization of social life takes the shape of diverse social protective movements similar to those described by Karl Polanyi in The Great Transformation, and within these movements the construction of new social relations of cooperation also point to a world beyond exclusion. 85

86

The Zapatistas of Mexico, Brazil’s Movement of Landless Rural Workers discussed in Nora MeKeon, Michael Watts, and Wendy Wolford’s study, and the Karnataka State Farmers’ Association were key in the founding of People’s Global Action, one of the most important early network organizations that initiated the global days of action in the 1990s that came to be known as the anti-globalization movement. See also Marc Edelman, “Bringing the Moral Economy Back In … to the Study of 21st-Century Transnational Peasant Movements,” American Anthropologist 107, no. 3 (2005). In 2004, new rural reconstruction activists took part in the World Social Forum in Mumbai, India. See Davis, Planet of Slums.

Conclusion

Shortly after the beginning of the new millennium, the world’s urban population surpassed its rural population for the first time – a worldhistorical milestone.1 This global urbanization process has not been smooth, but fraught with violence and powerful social response; we cannot assume its unabated advance, nor should such an assumption block the search for alternatives. At the same time, the number of workers employed in manufacturing jobs has also declined as a percentage of the world population.2 This situation has helped to create what Mike Davis calls “the planet of the slums,” a vast underclass of underemployed or surplus population.3 Home to the world’s largest rural population, China is a key site through which to investigate this transformation and how people understand it. Through its legal separation of the rural from the urban China has been able to avoid the appearance of the type of urban slums that one sees in Latin America, Africa, or other parts of Asia. However, until well into the reform era its rural population had not dropped greatly as a percentage of its overall population. The rural population is increasingly being treated as a surplus and problematic population. There remains the question of whether – and if so, how – the peasant can be made to fit into a modern China that is integrated with global capitalism, or whether there is some political alternative. Furthermore, as the rural–urban relationship is being transformed, the social science categories used to understand this changing relationship are also being thrown into question. What is a “peasant” at the beginning of the twenty-first century? What form will the integration of the peasant take? Who gets to decide how or whether integration proceeds? As the previous chapters show, this is not simply a question of empirical 1 2 3

Davis, Planet of Slums, p. 1. Endnotes, “Crisis in the Class Relation,” Endnotes, no. 2 (2010), 17. Davis, Planet of Slums.

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adequacy; it is a political question that is shaped by present concerns, as well as by the way the past–present–future relationship is imagined. It is here that we must begin to locate the contradictions and horizon of postsocialist politics, for both the Chinese new left and liberals. While the peasant plays a crucial role in the historical narratives of both political stances in their varied forms, the constructions of the peasant by those narratives differ in important ways. The postsocialist new-left critique of market-dominated integration has led to a Polanyian narrative of market invasion and social response. In that narrative, a peasant world with a substantially different social and economic logic is confronted by the market as an outside force of destruction, one that wears away at peasants’ livelihood and degrades their cultural life. It is to the new left’s credit that the issue of rural–urban economic inequality has been brought so forcefully to the attention of the public, leading to the active practice of new rural reconstruction and new rural cooperatives. This narrative, however, can lead problematically to a more positive reevaluation of traditional peasant social forms, as can be seen in some of the writings of the xiangtupai, or it can lead to a nationalization of the problem in which China metaphorically plays the role of the global peasant or proletariat as the West takes on the persona of the global capitalist. This Third-Worldist argument is encouraged by global structural and world systems analysis. Yet in the end, this Polanyian-based narrative does not directly confront China’s changing class dynamics. Often, as a political analysis takes center stage, the economic sphere is downgraded or largely occluded. The narrative of postsocialist liberals also degrades the economic, placing abstract political equality before economic equality. In fact, Chinese liberals largely attempt to isolate the economic from political – and not just state – intervention. The peasant comes to be defined as a dependent figure that must disappear as it is turned into a modern citizen. This modernization narrative, however, is a weak response to dilemmas of the economic integration of the peasant population into a globalizing China, for its abstract image of a capitalist market and its prohibition on populist politics offer few intellectual tools for the construction of a politics adequate to the contemporary moment. The politics of the new left and the liberals were both caught within the contradictions of the postsocialist moment, in which China re-entered global capitalism just as a classoriented critique of capitalism was increasingly delegitimized. In other words, the limits of postsocialist politics and discussions of the peasant were fashioned under the strictures of the reform-era politics that

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followed the Cultural Revolution and also delimited by the material conditions of China’s reintegration with global capitalism. Thus the discursive marginalization of the peasant cannot be understood simply through reference to intellectual constructions of the peasant, for they register a deeper political and economic transformation of Chinese society. More specifically, the contradictions of China’s postsocialist linkage with global capitalism and the revaluation of labor power that it entailed have created problematic conditions for the reproduction of the capital–labor relation, that is, the reproduction of workers as producers within the global capitalist economy.4 Rural labor power, including that of rural migrants who work in the urban economy, is usually not paid at its full reproduction costs; the rural sphere must subsidize the reproduction of migrant laborers, raising its young and housing and feeding its elderly, for example. A necessary component of the postsocialist reforms, this devaluation of rural labor power was legitimated through the discourse on suzhi or the quality of the rural population.5 Furthermore, despite China’s rapid urbanization, rural labor is still in surplus from the perspective of the needs of the economy. The peasantry is thus marginalized, and the mode of subsumption of the peasantry within the market economy remains highly unequal and partial. As a surplus population, its future inclusion is premised upon a continued rapid economic growth that is anything but assured. These conditions have dramatically shaped the postsocialist discussion on the peasant, conveying unease about China’s historical trajectory and position in the world. Yet under these conditions, discussions of the peasant at the end of the 1990s displaced a potential broader discussion of class, making the peasant the primary topic on which political discussion re-emerged.6 Whether peasants were talked about as a vulnerable or weak social group (ruoshi qunti), as state dependents who needed to be transformed into citizens, or as a group with a separate cultural and economic logic, what was usually left only partially articulated was how they fit within contemporary class 4

5

6

For a theoretical discussion on the reproduction of the capital–labor relation and surplus population in a global context, see Endnotes, “Crisis in the Class Relation”; Endnotes and Aaron Benanav, “Misery and Debt,” Endnotes, no. 2 (2010). For an ethnographic narrative of how this process affected women migrant domestic workers, see Yan, New Masters, New Servants. The peasant is not the only guise under which the occluded discussion of class takes place; for example, class exists under the surface in discussions of a xiaokang shehui (reasonably well-off society), the emerging elite, the social position of intellectuals, and migrant and laid-off workers. But the peasant discussion seems to be the one which pervades the public and political sphere and is considered a point of social crisis.

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dynamics. It is quite possible, however, that what we are witnessing with the return of the peasant in intellectual, public, and political discourse, as well as with the growth of rural activism, is the coalescence of new critical politics of social justice. The category of the peasant is a key site of contention, therefore, as central to an understanding of contemporary Chinese intellectual politics as it is to the continued development or “rise” of the Chinese economy. Yet under these material and intellectual conditions, does “the peasant” remain a useful category of analysis? If we are to understand and respond to China’s contemporary transformation, how should we theorize the rural–urban relationship or divide? Gregory Guldin, writing about southern China in the early 1990s, defines the peasant in relation to rural–urban flows. As these flows increase and villages become towns, the peasant, involved mainly in self-sufficient agriculture, begins to disappear. Guldin argues that the TVEs were “key” to the shift of rural labor out of agriculture and to the process of villages becoming towns which were thoroughly enmeshed in rural–urban flows.7 As Guldin concludes: It seems safe to assume that China is undergoing a vast process of village transformation, whereby the new pressures and trends of contact with the outside, changing lifestyles and economy, and unprecedented rural–urban flows of information, goods, capital, and people are rapidly turning the venerable “peasant China” of ten millennia into a “townized” 21st-century nation-state.8

In this process of “townization,” according to Guldin, “the world is witnessing a significant new path of human settlement and development.”9 Guldin conducted much of his research at a time in which the TVEs were doing very well, even in the central agricultural provinces, and in which many Chinese commentators also believed a Chinese form of development could be based on TVE success. However, with the failure of many TVEs in the mid to late 1990s, especially those in the central and western provinces, this process of increasing flows changed for many of China’s primary agricultural regions. In the regions hardest hit by these late-1990s rural crises, the flow of capital, labor, and goods between the rural and the urban spheres was largely transformed into the outflow of labor power, and rural society was “hollowed out” even as it remained the 7 8

9

Guldin, What’s a Peasant to Do?, p. 5. Ibid., p. 6. Questionable here, of course, is whether there was a “peasant China” that continued with little change for ten millennia. Ibid., p. 14.

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site of peasant reproduction: it bore much of the costs but gained few of the rewards of the new economy. Meanwhile, in the fifteen years from the early 1990s, the total number of manufacturing jobs in China did not increase.10 As chronicled in the present study, this shift led to the most recent discussion on the peasantry, focusing on rural crisis, in which many scholars of rural China took on a more critical stance vis-à-vis China’s development strategy. The fear of many rural scholars in China, such as Wen Tiejun and He Xuefeng, was that China’s urbanization was becoming like that of much of the rest of the world, a process in which people left the countryside to live in the slums of mega-cities. What is clear is that a more thorough theorization of how the peasant population is enmeshed in local and global flows is needed. Such theorization should additionally stimulate further thought on what the changing rural–urban relationship means for forging a new link between history and politics in China. Do we need new historical and political narratives to confront this situation? If so, how will these new narratives relate to those of the past, such as the dialectical approach to the peasant? There are several key problems that emerge from the discussion on how the peasant has developed in the reform era. Here I will mark out six issues: the factors that shape the rural–urban flow of migrants; the failed integration of agriculture with capitalism and the benefits and disadvantages of rural China maintaining a degree of autonomy from capitalist markets; how to understand the migrant population; whether the category “peasant” is useful to contemporary political analysis of Chinese society; political narratives and the repoliticization of Chinese society; and, lastly, the response of the state to rural crisis. First, whether this is a sign that the peasant is disappearing or not, discussions on the rural–urban relationship lead to the question of which factors shape the flow of migrant labor power, and to consideration of the position of the peasant/migrant within a broader social structure. In general, Chinese liberals viewed the increasing flow of migrant labor power as the result of a modernization process, in which liberated migrants naturally flowed to the cities once the restrictions on their movement had been removed. It was the pull of the cities, of modernity, which drove this process, within which peasants would become citizens. 10

Erin Lett and Judith Banister, “China’s Manufacturing Employment and Compensation Costs: 2002–06,” Monthly Labor Review 132, no. 4 (2009), 31; see also Endnotes and Benanav, “Misery and Debt,” p. 48.

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Those on the left, however, emphasized the push factors: rural poverty and the lack of village-based employment. This necessarily leads to a discussion of capital as a structuring agent of this process – a discussion that has just begun. It is unclear whether the category “peasant” is adequate to an understanding of these flows structured by global capitalism, however inflected by local and national conditions. The rural migrant issue, under the conditions of China’s relinking with global capitalism, necessitates an understanding of the position of agriculture and the peasantry within capitalism. Is the peasant either doomed to disappear, or – if the peasantry stubbornly persists – to become an excluded population, unable to be fully integrated into capitalist society? One possible way forward is to consider the rural–urban divide as an issue of the subsumption of labor to capital, and to investigate the forms of subsumption and how those forms shape the reproduction of the capital–labor relationship. Second, as mentioned in Chapter 4, Lü Xinyu and others have argued that agriculture has not been fully integrated into the capitalist market economy even in Europe and the US, maintained there as it is by government subsidies.11 This problematizes the entire goal of complete market integration, an idealist project from the perspective of left-leaning critics. Wen Tiejun, He Xuefeng, and other new rural reconstruction advocates argue for maintaining a certain degree of autonomy for the rural economy from the global capitalist market, noting that a full integration of the rural into the market economy would mean the destruction of rural society. They suggest that this necessary semi-autonomy from market forces – without which the peasant would be turned into an urban slum dweller – also means that the peasant will continue to exist for a long time to come in China. The “new cooperatives” developed by Jiang Bailin in Lishu and the comprehensive cooperatives that He Huili has helped to develop in Lankao are attempts at institutionalizing this semi-autonomy through the protection and facilitation of non-market and cooperative aspects of rural society, institutions that can mediate the peasant relationship to the market. Such semi-autonomy would regulate urban–rural flows by limiting the effectiveness of the market economy to promote the outflow of people, goods, and capital from the countryside, but it is less clear how the resulting social formation should be characterized. Although it grows out of criticism of market utopianism, this semiautonomy is still a form of integration with the market economy and not its supercession, and this is especially true considering China’s increasing 11

See Koning, The Failure of Agrarian Capitalism.

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The Peasant in Postsocialist China

absorption into global capitalism. Displaying a different social and economic logic from that of the urban industrial economy in its semiautonomy, the rural sphere nevertheless would not be a continuation of the “moral economy of the peasant” as described within substantivist arguments of an earlier generation of peasant studies in the West. New values are being created and old values are being destroyed as the hegemonic market value of capitalism further subsumes and dominates rural social life. Another task would be to think through what this semi-autonomy might mean for the relationship between the state and the economy. What role the state versus local society would play in constructing and maintaining this semi-autonomy is a political question, one that is being addressed only tangentially in current debates on the peasant. Li Changping notes that a new democratic village society is now a possibility given that the state is no longer focusing on the extraction of surplus from the countryside. Members of the xiangtupai, however, have noted the difficulties in constructing rural democracy; nonetheless, they have experimented with rural decision making in various development projects. Liberal activists have focused on defending local democracy from corrupt officials and state intervention when peasant rights have been violated. Third, as He Xuefeng briefly noted, much of the migrant labor force should not be regarded as an urban population because it does not reproduce itself in the cities. Instead, it relies on the rural village both to bring up its young and to care for its elderly. This separation of the site of production and reproduction is a key characteristic of contemporary Chinese society, and of the way rural labor is subsumed within the economy. Migrant labor power is not being paid at its value – the amount necessary for its reproduction. If China is now the factory of the world, then its workers are doubly exploited, both directly in the labor process (with the extraction of surplus value) and by being paid below their value in the first place (i.e. not being paid at the cost of their reproduction). Here the peasant becomes a very cheap labor reserve for global capitalism and China’s development. This is the most trenchant point of critique in liberal narratives of rural transformation – implying that this exploitation is caused by the incomplete transition from a planned to a market economy. How the semi-autonomy proposed by new rural reconstruction advocates would differ from the present form of separation is an important, but under-addressed, issue. This question creates a special problem for the advocates of non-market solutions to rural crisis, one that dictates a more

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global solution. Rural crisis cannot be solved through changes located solely in the rural sphere or simply by limiting rural marketization. While critics of rural market utopianism are for the most part well aware of this problem, a politically acceptable solution largely escapes their grasp. On the one hand, a semi-autonomous rural sphere constructed upon peasant cooperation together with state subsidies, investment, and agricultural price supports would certainly begin to ameliorate the poor conditions of the peasantry. On the other hand, since it would still be integrated within the global capitalist market to some extent, the state could use the countryside as a social safety valve, in which urban social and economic problems could be shuffled into the rural sphere, as both Lu Xueyi and Gao Mobo argued the dual urban–rural structure allowed. At the same time, capital could continue to use a semi-autonomous rural population as a source of cheap, underpaid labor. Semi-autonomy is thus a double-edged sword, for a rural sphere that is insulated from the full effects of the market economy – an economy which tends to drain rural areas of value – still plays a role within the global structure of capitalism, but one whose contours are as yet somewhat obscured. Fourth, under the conditions of double exploitation, perhaps it no longer makes sense to call rural residents “peasants.” And if we view the peasantry as a disappearing social group, we need to ask what peasants are becoming. Perhaps in many cases they are shifting from one form of exclusion – the peasantry or the small peasant economy – to another: a super-exploited migrant class, an urban underemployed underclass, or even a surplus population of slum dwellers. This is an issue of class. Yet contemporary understandings of the peasant are marked by the occlusion of discussion on class, not only because of the lingering effects of the Cultural Revolution on Chinese intellectual thought, but also because of confusion and disagreement about how to conceptualize this social grouping and its structural position within society. A new theorization would therefore require a reconsideration of the blockages produced in the lead up to and during the Cultural Revolution, for it was at that time that the dialectical image of the peasant disintegrated. Furthermore, as a class of super-exploited workers, peasants point to a much bigger problem, the growth of a surplus population. As Mike Davis and others have pointed out, worldwide there is an increasing population surplus to capitalism, a population that must reproduce itself outside of the wage relation.12 The super-exploitation of the Chinese peasant thus 12

Davis, Planet of Slums; Endnotes, “Crisis in the Class Relation”; Endnotes and Benanav, “Misery and Debt”; Liu Yuanqi, “Xinziyouzhuyi yu fazhan zhong guojia de nongye weiji.”

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reanimates the question of capitalist crisis, until the last couple of years seemingly banished from intellectual discussion in China, just as it was in the West. In this sense, the necessity of super-exploitation within the global economy perhaps should not simply be taken as a sign of the injustice of capitalism, but more importantly of a growing surplus population that indicates the fundamental failure of capitalism to reproduce the capital–labor relation that is at its heart. This leads to a fifth issue: if the peasant or the rural–urban divide is the key site of repoliticization in postsocialist China, are current narratives also impeding the construction of a politics adequate to the present moment? If there is a growing surplus population that cannot be included within capitalist modernity, what does this mean for current historical and political narratives? And, more practically, how is it possible to link the politics of rural social justice for the peasant to social justice in the urban sphere, when a degree of rural–urban separation is still deemed necessary? Here the category “peasant” – and quite possibly “migrant” – remains a block to the analysis necessary to construct this politics. Ultimately, the political and analytical work essential to this problem would lead to a confrontation with the limits of both the Polanyian narrative of market invasion and social protection and the liberal narrative that pits society against the state. In all historical and political narratives the category “peasant” can function to enable various political stances that avoid a direct engagement with the fact of China’s integration into global capitalism. Viewing the issue in terms of political modernization and civil rights, Chinese liberals, such as Lu Xueyi and Qin Hui, argue that the rural– urban dual structure and the status of the peasant must be dismantled, but do not attend to the economic outcome of such a proposition. While those on the left tend to argue for rural autonomy within a global market economy, they have not fully spelled out how such an autonomy would function within the capitalist economy without becoming a marginalized zone of super-exploited workers. Neither radically confronts the dynamics of capitalism.13 While the Polanyian narrative of a peasant society under attack by hegemonic market forces has helped the Chinese left to build a powerful critique of rural disintegration and crisis, thus setting the stage for the increasingly politicized discussion of Chinese society, it can also obscure the overall dynamics driving this process. 13

Whether such a radical confrontation with global capitalism is politically possible within the politics of the Chinese scene is another question. Certainly, both the state and the predominant liberal and neo-liberal stances within the intellectual sphere militate against this kind of discussion.

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An under-theorized relationship between the political and the economic lies at the heart of this contemporary problem. As mentioned above, in very different ways both new-left and liberal narratives in China tend to downgrade the importance of the economic sphere, regarding it as a derivative of the political sphere or of power relations. This is not simply a Chinese problem; it is a problem of the global left. The dissolution of the dialectic of the peasant constructed in the practice of the Chinese revolution – a dialectic through which objective history and subjective politics remained linked and in tension without reducing one to the other – has complicated the repoliticization process. Working through this theoretical knot will only take place through a process of repoliticization; in other words, it is not simply a theoretical issue, but a practical issue of reconstructing popular power in an exceedingly unequal society. While new rural reconstruction is caught within contemporary contradictions, the contradictions of a semi-autonomous rural sphere discussed above, perhaps what is most interesting in this movement is the creation of new cooperative social relations that could possibly overcome the atomization produced by the market reforms and lead to a repoliticization of the rural population. Here the potential for the movement may well exceed the goals of its theorists and activists. As intellectuals have attempted to understand and intervene in the social changes of postsocialist China, so too has the state – and this is my sixth and final point. Here, the intellectual debates around the peasantry that began in the 1990s have helped to create a moment in which the peasant issue, which by 2003–4 was understood in both party and public discourse through the formulation sannong wenti, was seen as the key roadblock to China’s development. This helped to produce a situation in which the leadership of the Communist Party, under Hu Jintao and Wen Jiabao, increased the political importance of social justice, resulting in a shift in policy emphasis from that of the Jiang Zemin administration in the 1990s. Over the past decade, the state has responded to increasing rural protests and public outcry about the situation of the peasantry with new policies aimed in part at alleviating rural poverty. While these policies have significantly increased state investment in the rural sphere and instituted agricultural subsidies, their primary intention was not to improve the lives of rural residents. This policy shift must also be understood as part of a larger structural transformation of the Chinese economy undertaken by the Hu–Wen leadership, in which they have attempted to adjust the economy to its new position within global capitalism by generating internal consumption and relying less on external markets, integrating

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the rural sphere into the national market economy. Turning peasants into consumers is not an easy task to fulfill rapidly, of course, and furthermore it has been met with resistance from the export sector and vested interests.14 At present, the campaign to “build a new socialist countryside” ( jianshe shehuizhuyi xin nongcun) is the most important formulation of this new set of policies. This is still in its initial stages, first announced in late 2005.15 The specifics of its implementation are still somewhat vague. As with all central government campaigns, a big question is how it will be put into practice when it reaches the local level in the countryside. What is already clear is that intellectuals from across the political spectrum are attempting to influence the campaign and mold it to their view of necessary rural transformation.16 In many respects, these new policies are heavily influenced by Lin Yifu’s argument – discussed in Chapter 4 – that combining investment in rural infrastructure and the creation of a unified national market would increase rural demand, soaking up the overproduction of commodities in China. Thus while He Xuefeng believes that the emphasis on raising rural demand is a mistake that might only lead to further social disintegration in the countryside and that a new socialist countryside should instead be built on the foundations of the non-market aspects of rural society (peasant self-sufficiency),17 Lin Yifu’s formulation attempts to undermine these non-market aspects to further integrate the rural sphere into the market economy. The transformation of peasants into desiring consumer subjects integrated into the global market is a long-term project, and one fraught with risks and uncertainties. Unlike Qin Hui’s conception of transforming peasants into citizens, Lin Yifu’s formulation sees the transformation of the peasant less in terms of civil society than of the market: the shift is from peasant to consumer. In this formulation, a new peasant subjectivity would be built on the foundations of new roads, schools, phones, electricity, and 14 15

16

17

On this resistance and the general context, see Hung, “America’s Head Servant,” 21–2. For more on the party’s understanding of this campaign, see Wang Weiguang, Jianshe shehuizhuyi xin nongcun de lilun yu shijian; Xu Xin, ed. Jianshe shehuizhuyi xin nongcun: xuexi duben [Building a new socialist countryside: study book] (Beijing: Xinhua chubanshe, 2006); Zhang Fulang and Hong Xianghua, eds., Jianshe shehuizhuyi xin nongcun: xuexi duben [Building a new socialist countryside: study book] (Beijing: Zhonggong dangshi chubanshe, 2006). Those involved in the new rural reconstruction tendency, for example, have begun to use the language of the campaign to create a space for the creation of cooperatives and influence the campaign. For a variety of views on the campaign, see Pan Wei and He Xuefeng, eds., Shehuizhuyi xin nongcun jianshe de lilun yu shijian [New socialist countryside construction theory and practice], (Beijing: Zhongguo jingji chubanshe, 2006). He Xuefeng, “Xin nongcun jianshe yu Zhongguo daolu.”

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markets. This is in sharp contrast to the experiments and proposals of Wen Tiejun, He Huili, and He Xuefeng, in which cooperative culture and labor – as unmediated by the market mechanism as possible – would be the basis of a new peasant subjectivity. Whether the Chinese state will be able to integrate peasants into the global capitalist economy without simply transforming them into an excluded or surplus population to be warehoused in a poverty-stricken countryside or urban slums – whether it will create a situation in which they are paid at their value – is difficult to judge. Yet this is certainly one of the most pressing issues of China’s current global moment. Which new peasant, a consumer subject or the subject of a cooperative society, becomes reality, and whether a new rural–urban relationship comes into existence, largely depend on the outcome of the state’s new interest in the rural sphere, the reaction of local-level government officials, and whether the peasantry becomes a political actor that is able to exercise its social power effectively. These possibilities, in turn, will be strongly affected by the ability of global capitalism to continue expansion – something called into question by recent events. Ironically, the agricultural subsidies and rural investment that cushion the rural sphere from the depredations of the market in part rely on the continued expansion of the global export market. A deeper recession in China might also prompt the state to shift social distress into the rural sphere as it did in the late 1990s, when urban unemployment grew in the face of the reform of the state-owned enterprises, making the peasantry pay the social costs of an unhealthy economy. Early on in the 2008 crisis, many migrant workers returned to the countryside, although state infrastructure investment was able to take up some of the employment slack. The enormous stimulus instituted in late 2008 in the face of the global economic crisis, however, has not aided the new socialist countryside policy to a great extent, as it has primarily benefited large firms and big infrastructure projects.18 How long this state investment can last and whether China is producing a bubble economy is important to watch. More generally, the issues that were opened up in the peasant debates that began in the 1990s, across the political spectrum from the liberals to the new left, cannot be contained within the state politics of contemporary China. Under the circumstances of the contemporary limits on politics, where the language of class-based social mobilization is not available, the 18

Again, see Hung, “America’s Head Servant,” 22.

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rebuilding of historical and political narratives is taking place through discussions of the peasant. Under any of the political scenarios laid out in the present study, from the liberal to the new left, from the neoliberals and new socialist countryside to the new rural reconstruction movement, the peasant will remain front and center as a site of crisis for some time to come.

Glossary

bai shehui ban shuren shehui bentuhua bijiao youshi zhanlüe

白社会 半熟人社会 本土化 比较优势战略

chanpin de chuzhi quan chanquan bu mingque

产品的处置权

chao jingji qiangzhi chengshihua chengxiang eryuan duili chengzhenhua chongjian chongjian nongcun wenming chuantong xiangtu Zhongguo chuantong xiaonong cunmin zizhi cunzhi cunzhuang shehui guanlian da gongtongti danwei dute de Zhongguo fazhan moshi dute shehui moshi fajia dagongtongti benwei

产权不明确 超经济强制 城市化 城乡二元对立 城镇化 重建 重建农村文明 传统乡土中国 传统小农 村民自治 村治 村庄社会关联 大共同体 单位 独特的中国发 展模式 独特社会模式 法家大共同体 本位 199

white society society of familiars nativization comparative-advantage strategy right to dispose of their commodities property rights were not clear extra-economic force urbanization urban–rural dichotomy urbanization reconstruct rebuilding rural civilization China’s traditional native land traditional small peasants village self-rule village governance village social bonds or cohesion great community work unit unique Chinese model of development unique social model Legalist great community standard

200

Glossary

falixing siyouhua fan biran xing de shehui lilun fan lilun fan xihua fei shichang de feng jian feng jian dizhu tudi suoyouzhi feng jian xiaonong yishi

法理型私有化 反必然性的社 会理论 反理论 反西化 非市场的 封建 封建地主土地 所有制 封建小农意识

fudan gaishan shenwei ganchao zhanlüe geren benwei gong nong hudong

负担 改善甚微 赶超战略 个人本位 工农互动

gonggong shiwu gonggong shiwu guanli de cunzhuanghua

公共事务 公共事务管理 的村庄化

gongmin gongmin shehui gongmin zuzhi gongsi jia nonghu

公民 公民社会 公民组织 公司加农户

gongtongti gongye fanbu nongye gongyouzhi guanban guocheng de gongzheng guodu guodu jieduan guomin de zhengti suzhi guomin jingji guoqing guoqingpai guoren lüse lianmeng

共同体 工业反哺农业 公有制 官办 过程的公正 过渡 过渡阶段 国民的整体 素质 国民经济 国情 国情派 国仁绿色联盟

legal principle privatization anti-necessitarian social theory anti-theory anti-Westernization anti-market feudal feudal landlord landownership system small peasant feudal consciousness burden very tiny improvements leap-forward strategy standard of individuality interaction of industry and agriculture public affairs villagizing the administration of public affairs citizen citizen society citizens’ organization company plus household model community industry to help agriculture common ownership system official management procedural justice transition transitional period the quality of the people of the country as a whole citizens’ economy national conditions national conditions school Guoren Greeen Alliance

Glossary

201

国务院农村发 展研究 中心 黑社会 合作化 后税费时代 华中”乡土派”

the State Council’s Research Center for Rural Development black society cooperatization post-taxation period The Central China School of Rural Studies graying gray society obscuring the innovative potential of this institution mutual aid burden reduction representatives burden reduction inspection organization burden reduction rights protection association burden reduction committee construction to construct a new socialist countryside shackle peasant values foundational theoretical research deconstruction the deconstruction of modernization class ending the ignorance and backwardness of rural society economic rationality economic democracy cash relationships

Guowuyuan nongcun fazhan yanjiu zhongxin heishehui hezuohua hou shuifei shidai Huazhong “xiangtu pai” huihua huishehui hushi ta de chuangxin qianli

灰化 灰社会 忽视它的创新 潜力

huzhu jianfu daibiao

互助 减负代表

jianfu jiancha zu

减负检查组

jianfu weiquan hui

减负维权会

jianfu weiyuanhui

减负委员会

jianshe jianshe shehuizhuyi xin nongcun jiasuo jiazhiguan jichu lilun yanjiu

建设 建设社会主义 新农村 枷锁 价值观 基础理论研究

jiegou jiegou xiandaihua

解构 解构现代化

jieji jieshu nongcun de yumei he luohou

阶级 结束农村的愚 昧和落后

jingji lixing jingji minzhu jinqian guanxi

经济理性 经济民主 金钱关系

202

Glossary

jiti shequ jujue xifang lilun ke chixu fazhan kun zai shichangshang laodong li cong zhuanzhi zhong de jiefang laodong zhiliang laodongli laodongli suzhi laoren xiehui li tu bu li xiang

集体社区 拒绝西方理论 可持续发展 捆在市场上 劳动力从转制 中的解放

collective community rejecting Western theory sustainable development bound to the market the liberation of labor power from dictatorship

劳动质量 劳动力 劳动力素质 老人协会 离土不离乡

li tu bu li xiang, jin chang bu jin cheng li tu li xiang

离土不离乡， 进厂不 进城 离土离乡

li tu you li xiang

离土有离乡

li xiang bu li tu

离乡不离土

liang tiao lu liangchong xing liyi longtou qiye meiyou lingdao nengli minban mincuizhuyi mingong chao mingyun minjian zuzhi minsheng mu nong nong hui nong xie nongchangzhe nongchangzhu

两条路 两重性 利益 龙头企业 没有领导能力 民办 民粹主义 民工潮 命运 民间组织 民生 亩 农 农会 农协 农场着 农场主

quality of labor labor power the quality of labor power old people’s associations leaving the land but not the village leaving the land but not the village, entering the factory but not the city leaving the land and the village leaving the land and leaving the village leaving the village but not the land two paths dual nature interests dragon-head enterprise lack of leadership ability non-official populism migrant worker tide destiny popular organizations people’s livelihood one-15th of a hectare of land rural peasant association peasant association farmer farmer

Glossary nongcun fazhan nongcun xinyong hezuoshe nongmin nongmin de jiefang nongmin de zhongjie nongmin fudan nongmin, nongcun, nongye nongmin wenti nongmin xiehui nongmin yishi nongmin zhiliang wenti

农村发展 农村信用合 作社 农民 农民的解放 农民的终结 农民负担 农民，农村， 农业 农民问题 农民协会 农民意识 农民质量问题

nongnu/gongnu nongye gongyehua, nongcun chengshihua, nongmin zhishihua

农奴/工奴 农业工业化， 农村城市 化，农民 知识化

nongye jingji nongye shehuizhuyi nongye shengyu laodongli nongye shengyu renkou

农业经济 农业社会主义 农业剩余劳 动力 农业剩余人口

pinminku qingshi zhidu qiyi quan gui siyouhua quanguo nongcun gaige shiyanqu bangongshi quanli quanli quanli de shichanghua quanmian siyouhua rangbu zhengce

贫民窟 轻视制度 奇异 权贵私有化 全国农村改革 试验区办 公室 权利 权力 权力的市场化 全面私有化 让步政策

203 rural development rural credit cooperatives peasant liberation of the peasant end of the peasant peasant burden the peasant, the countryside, and agriculture peasant question peasant association peasant consciousness the problem of peasant quality rural slave/worker slave the industrialization of agriculture, the urbanization of rural society, and rendering the peasants knowledgeable agricultural economics agrarian socialism surplus agricultural labor surplus agricultural population slums belittling institutions oddity power elite privatization Office of Rural Reform Experimental Zones rights power marketization of power complete privatization policy of concessions

204

Glossary

renkou zhiliang renli ziyuan renli ziyuan suzhi Ru biao Fa li

人口质量 人力资源 人力资源素质 如表法里

ruoshi qunti

弱势群体

ruozhe de lianhe san da chabie sannong wenti shan fen bu shan he

弱者的联合 三大差别 三农问题 善分不善合

shangfang daibiao shanzhi shehui shehui de ziwo baohu

上访代表 善治 社会 社会的自我 保护 社会关联度 很低 社会化大生产 身分性共同体 生产资料 生存理性 生存资料 生活方式 市民 市民（公民） 国家 束缚 熟人社会 思想解放 私有化 素质 素质低 土 土地束缚 瓦解 维权

shehui guanlian du hen di shehuihua da shengchan shenfenxing gongtongti shengchan ziliao shengcun lixing shengcun ziliao shenghuo fangshi shimin shimin (gongmin) guojia shufu shuren shehui sixiang jiefang siyouhua suzhi suzhi di tu tudi shufu wajie weiquan

population quality human resources quality of human resources Confucian on the surface and Legalist on the inside weak or vulnerable social groups uniting the weak three great differences three rural issues apt to disperse and not to join together appeals representatives good governance society social protection low social cohesion socialized great production status community production resource subsistence logic subsistence resource way of life urban people/citizens citizen nation fettered society of familiars thought liberation privatization quality low quality land yoke of the land disintegration rights protection

Glossary weiquan yundong wenbao

维权运动 温饱

wenhua re wenhua Zhongguo wenyidui wutuobang shi de kongxiang xiandai zhishi gongmin

文化热 文化中国 文艺队 乌托邦式的 空想 现代知识公民

xiang xiangcun fazhan de “kongxin hua” xiangtu Zhongguo xiangtu Zhongguo de lujing xiangtupai xiangzhen qiye

乡 乡村发展的’空 心化’ 乡土中国 乡土中国的 路径 乡土派 乡镇企业

xiao shengchanzhe xiao zichanjieji shehuizhuyi xiaonong xiaonong jingji xiaonong jingji de “liang, zhi guannian” xifang moshi xifang ren shixian de xiandaihua xifang zibenzhuyi xin hezuoshe xin jitizhuyi xin minzhuzhuyi xin qimeng xin shehuizhuyi xin xiangcun jianshe yundong xin ziyouzhuyi

小生产者 小资产阶级社 会主义 小农 小农经济 小农经济 的’量， 质观念’ 西方模式 西方人实现的 现代化 西方资本主义 新合作社 新集体主义 新民主主义 新启蒙 新社会主义 新乡村建设 运动 新自由主义

205 rights protection movement having enough food to eat and clothing to wear cultural fever cultural China cultural troupes utopia modern knowledgeable citizens rural the hollowing of rural development rural China rural Chinese path rural China school Township Village Enterprises small or petty producer petty-bourgeois socialism small peasant small peasant economy “quantity–quality concept” of the small peasant economy Western model Western modernization Western capitalism new cooperatives new collectivism new democracy new enlightenment new socialism new rural reconstruction movement neo-liberalism

206 xin ziyouzhuyizhe xingzheng cun xinmin xinzuopai yaxiya shengchan fangshi yi ren wei ben yichang geming yilai sixiang yilaixing yitiao ziji de fazhan daolu you fan chi, wu qian hua you jiao qiang de shehui guanlian du yuanshi jilei yuanzihua de ge ren zai (zibenzhuyi) zhi qian de jilei zhengce he celüe zhengce jichu yanjiu zhengfu suoyouzhi zhengzhi minzhu zhenzheng de gufen zhi zhidu baiwujiao zhili zhiliang zhishi he jishu suzhi zhishi nongcunhua zhongda xiugai Zhongguo guoqing Zhongguo jingji tizhi gaige yanjiu hui

Glossary 新自由主义这 行政村 新民 新左派 亚细亚生产 方式 以人为本 一场革命 依赖思想 依赖性 一条自己的发 展道路 有饭吃， 无钱花 有较强的社会 关联度 原始积累 原字化的个人 在（资本主 义）之前 的积累 政策和策略 政策基础研究 政府所有制 政治民主 真正的股份制 制度拜物教 治理 质量 知识和技术 素质 知识农村化 重大修改 中国国情 中国经济体制 改革研 究会

neo-liberal administrative village new people new left Asiatic mode of production taking people as the basis a revolution dependent thinking dependency own path to development enough food to eat but no money to spend a relatively strong degree of social cohesion primitive accumulation atomized individuals accumulation before capitalism policy policy foundational research government ownership system political democracy real stock institution institutional fetishism governance quality quality of knowledge and skills ruralization of knowledge momentous revision Chinese national conditions Institute for Research on the Reform of China’s Economic System

Glossary Zhongguo neibu de disan shijie Zhongguo nongcun wenti Zhongguo xiandaixing zhongtianren zhuanye hezuoshe zhuanzhizhuyi huangchao zhuliu jingji xuezhe ziben yuanshi jilei zibenzhuyi gongyehua benshen bixu you yuanshi jilei zibenzhuyi yuanshi jilei ziyou gongmin de zhiye ziyou ren ziyou shichang ziyou zuopai ziyoupai ziyouzhuyi zonghe fazhan zuzhi qilai

207

中国内部的第 三世界 中国农村问题

China’s internal Third World rural Chinese issues

中国现代性 种田人 专业合作社 专制主义 皇朝

Chinese modernity farmers specialized cooperatives absolutist imperial state

主流经济学者 资本原始积累

mainstream economists primitive accumulation of capital capitalist industrialization per se necessitates primitive accumulation

资本主义工业 化本身必 须有原始 积累 资本主义原始 积累 自由公民的 职业 自有人 自由市场 自有左派 自由派 自由主义 综合发展 组织起来

capitalist primitive accumulation occupation of a free citizen free people free market left-liberals liberals liberalism integrated development organize

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Index

1997 Asian financial crisis, 93, 96 2008 economic crisis, 1, 197

Bryceson, Deborah, 109 Burma, 109

activism, 10–11 Africa, 104, 186 African Americans, 125–6 agrarian socialism, 18, 37, 67 as a critique of Maoism, 32, 52, 55, 86 as a form of populism, 57 as a historical anachronism, 30, 38, 86 as utopian, 8, 57 shifting connotations of, 22–4, 30–1 agricultural economics, 92 agricultural prices, 118, 132, 147, 193 Agricultural University of China, 97, 177 agriculture and capitalism, 190–1 global market, 124 involution, 79, 88, 107 land, 105–6, 111, 123, 132 mechanization, 125 modernization, 126 production, 9, 84, 94, 97, 107, 131 socialization of, 22 tax, 167 Agriculture Ministry, 10 Amin, Samir, 99, 126 anarchism, 18, 82, 183 Angang Constitution, 87 Anhui Province, 3, 53, 150, 158, 160, 172 anti-globalization movement, 162, 185 Asiatic mode of production, 18, 25, 31, 33–7, 52, 55, 60, 67, 146

Cao Jinqing, 10, 127, 148, 150, 152, 166, 168 critique of market forces, 138 critique of rural reforms, 137 on peasant organization, 143 on the breakdown of rural social relations, 128–35, 137, 152, 165 capital, 105, 107, 123–5, 145 relationship to labor, 162, 180, 188, 191, 194 capitalism, 17, 59–60, 62–4, 74, 80, 162, 180 and agriculture, 11, 190 and democracy, 83 and power, 63, 76–7 and the peasant, 165 China’s integration into, 1, 15–16, 45, 91, 95, 101, 126–7, 168, 186, 188, 192, 194 critique of, 9, 74, 89–90 delinking from, 30, 55, 105, 115 distinction from markets, 74 uneven global geography of, 112 Western, 70, 84, 124, 152 Center for Chinese Rural Studies, 135, 138 Center for Research on Rural Governance, 138 Central China Normal University, 135, 139 Chayanov, A. V., 108 Chen Baifeng, 142 Chen Duxiu, 19 Chen Guidi, 150–2 Chenzhai Village, 177–8 China Center for Economic Research, 109 China Peasant Survey, 150–2 China Reform, 97, 118, 176 China University of Political Science and Law, 149 Chinese Academy of Social Science, 73, 84, 87, 118, 157–8 Chinese Communist Party, 3–4, 17, 19–20, 44, 65, 110, 163, 195 Chun Tao, 150–2

Bai Nanfeng, 39–41, 43 Bai Yijin, 39 Bangladesh, 104 Braudel, Fernand, 70, 74 Brazil, 103–4, 162 Brook, Timothy, 52

227

228

Index

citizens, 68, 121, 157 farmers as, 47–8, 86 peasants transformed into, 5, 65, 67, 171–2, 187, 190 rural, 1 versus peasants, 45, 50, 52 civil society, 50, 55, 64, 67 class, 2, 16, 21, 25, 28, 34, 49, 65, 188, 193 struggle, 17, 28–9, 31, 35–6, 77 Cold War, 72, 78, 81–2 colonialism, 104, 126 commune system, 87, 112, 122, 141, 165 and peasant dependency, 5, 55, 67 and rural surplus extraction, 9, 100 as a block to development, 48, 136 as a model, 84, 122 as a target of critique, 36, 51, 111, 120 company plus household model, 132 Confucianism, 36, 55–6, 146, 163 cooperatives, 10, 132, 156, 161, 164, 169–71, 185, 191 new cooperative movement, 11, 168, 174–81, 183, 187 specialized, 175 corruption, 62, 133, 192 credit cooperatives, 161, 174 Cui Zhiyuan, 9, 70, 78, 85, 87, 89, 102–4 critique of historical determinism, 83 on institutional innovation, 72, 81–4, 87, 89 on petty-bourgeois socialism, 82 cult of personality, 28, 32 cultural fever, 79 Cultural Revolution, 8, 16–17, 26–7, 29, 31, 33–4, 56, 72, 102, 188, 193 as a result of a peasant mentality, 5, 14, 17, 32–3 as an expression of populism, 57, 65 dagongtongti. See great community Dai Yi, 29–30, 36, 44 danwei system, 50 Davis, Mike, 126, 186, 193 Dazhai Brigade, 38 decollectivization, 5, 97, 121, 130, 165 deflation, 113 democracy, 75 and capitalism, 83 economic, 69, 83, 87 internal party, 30 political, 17, 28, 54, 62, 83, 90, 158, 192 village elections, 71, 83–4, 135–7, 155 Deng Xiaoping, 2, 27–8, 38, 101, 157 depoliticization, 4, 15, 18, 48 developmentalism, 7 Ding County, 163 Dirlik, Arif, 15 Du Runsheng, 157

dual structure, 119–20, 122–3, 194 Durkheim, Emile, 108 Dushu, 121 East China University of Science and Technology, 10, 128 Eastern Europe, 87 economic demand, 1 economy commodity, 31, 40–1 market, 7, 9, 55, 63 rural, 2–3 egalitarianism, 22–3 End of History, 73 Engels, Friedrich, 59 Eurocentrism, 55 exports, 1 Fan Wenlan, 24 Fan Yafeng, 158 farmers, 47, 50–1, 66, 125 entrepreneurial, 14, 18 Fei Xiaotong, 78, 80, 82, 108, 124, 134, 138–9, 149, 182 feng jian, 35 feudalism, 17–18, 27, 35, 41, 49, 53, 55, 60, 67, 120 and historical development, 29–30, 44, n. 107 as opposed to modernization, 59 liberal critique of, 16–17, 31, 37 fictitious commodities, 107 Fordism, 82 Foreign Theoretical Trends, 126 formalism, 108–16, 148 four modernizations, 115 France, 52 free market, 50 Fudan University, 57, 122 functionalism, 80 Gan Yang, 9, 70, 78–82, 86, 88–9 Gang of Four, 30 Gansu Province, 176 Gao Mobo, 121–2, 127, 193 Gao Village, 121 Gao Zhaoyi, 25 Geertz, Clifford, 79 gemeinschaft, 49, n. 5 gesellschaft, 49, n. 5 Giddens, Anthony, 88 globalization, 124, 146 Goldman, Merle, 68 governance, 118, 132, 135, 137, 139, 148, 160 grain prices, 93 great community, 52–5, 60, 65, 67, 126, 134, 153

Index Great Leap Forward, 8, 26, 43 critique of, 111–12 Guangdong Province, 85, 150 Guangxi Province, 8 Guangzhou, 158 Guizhou Province, 150 Guldin, Gregory, 182–3, 189 Guo Houliang, 171 Guo Moruo, 24, 26 Han Jun, 161 He Huili, 176–9, 191, 197 He Qinglian, 62–3 He Village, 177–8 He Xuefeng, 10, 127, 137–44, 190, 197 on cooperatives, 177 on migrant labor, 192 on new rural reconstruction, 170, 191 on social disintegration, 152, 196 Henan Province, 10, 129–30, 176 Henan University, 177 Heshang, 13, 41–4, 49, 65, 68, 173 historicism, 54 history and the peasant, 6–7, 15 relationship to politics, 6, 17–18, 47, 65, 102, 190 household registration system, 100 household responsibility system, 2, 40, 111, 114, 118, 120, 128, 132 Hu Jintao, 2, 156, 162, 169, 195 Hu Weixi, 57 Hu Yaobang, 28 Huang, Philip, 20, 79, 88, 106 Huang Ping, 9, 78, 87–8, 105–6 Huazhong University of Science and Technology, 138 Huazhong “xiangtupai,” 138–50, 152, 158–9, 187, 192 Hubei Province, 6, 10, 116, 159 human rights, 65 Hunan Province, 157 Hung, Ho-fung, 1 import-substitution, 112 India, 103, 112 industrialization, 22, 120 agricultural, 123 and primitive accumulation, 61–2, 100 Chinese attempts at, 9, 102, 107, 166 European, 79, 98 rural, 113, 136, 176, 179 socialist, 2, 127, 151 inequality, 9, 91, 94, 123, 187 Institute for Research on the Reform of China’s Economic System, 164 institutional innovation, 102, 162, 167

229

Japan, 85 Ji Weidong, 85–6 Jian Bozan, 24, 26 Jiang Bailin, 171, 174–81, 191 Jiang Yihua, 57 Jiang Zemin, 195 Jilin Province, 174 Jin Guantao, 44 Jin Huishen, 39 Justin Lin. See Lin Yifu Kant, Immanuel, 29 Keynesian economics, 112 Khrushchev, Nikita, 101 Kobe University, 85 Korean War, 112 labor value of, 16, 18, 37–8 labor process, 192 Landless Workers’ Movement, 103, 162 Lankao County, 176–8, 181, 191 Lanzhou University, 35, 48 Latin America, 186 Legalism, 36, 55–6, 60 Lenin, Vladimir, 57 Li Changping, 122, 135, 151 letter to Zhu Rongji, 6, 10, 116–19, 127–9, 147, 150, 156, 171 on local conditions, 150 on the new cooperative movement, 10, 180 on the rural future, 167–8, 192 on urbanization, 182–3 Li Peilin, 183 Li Xiucheng, 26 Li Yuanxing, 169–70 Li Zehou, 29 Liang Qichao, 172 Liang Shuming, 163–5, 169, 171, 182 Liang Shuming Center for Rural Reconstruction, 164 liberalism, 15–18, 28, 36, 54, 56 conception of rights, 11 modernization narrative of, 60, 64, 87, 126 roots in the discourse on the peasant, 14, 45 view of the peasant, 53, 67 liberals, 7–9, 11, 16–18, 47, 61 advocacy, 11, 110, 192 critique of the new left, 85, 90 historical vision, 45, 60, 78, 98 on rights, 66, 184, 194 politics, 56, 187, 197 split with new left, 7, 63, 71, 77 view of rural society, 156

230

Index

Lin Biao, 30 Lin Yifu, 7–8, 109–14, 120–1, 127, 148, 196 Lishu County, 174, 176–8, 180–1, 191 Liu Laoshi, 170 Liu Shaoqi, 23 Liu Shipei, 18, 80 Liu Yuanqi, 126 Liu Zhenkun, 39 London School of Economics, 88 Lu Banglie, 159 Lu Xueyi, 118, 121, 148, 151, 171, 193–4 as a target of critique, 123 on the early reforms, 122 on the liberation of the peasant, 119–22 Lü Xinyu, 122, 127, 191 Lü Zhenyu, 24 Luo Xingzuo, 139, 141–2 Ma Rong, 182 mainstream economists, 7, 62–3, 95, 105, 109–10, 113, 123, 126, 129, 145 Malinowski, Bronislaw, 149 Mao Zedong, 20–1, 24, 26–7, 35, 80, 145, 173 Maoism, 14, 31, 41, 99, 101, 122, 165, 173, 183 critique of, 16–18, 27–8, 33, 36, 52, 55, 72 Maoist era, 2, 14, 85, 95, 99, 112, 130, 169 as a historical aberration, 33, 57, 60, 136 as a target of criticism, 8, 39, 53, 87 as a time of successful industrialization, 9, 61, 99–100, 104 as agrarian socialism, 52, 86 as transforming rural society, 128 egalitarianism, 16, 38 living standards, 113 political alienation, 34 positive appraisal of, 122 market economics, 93 market economy, 84, 114, 117, 131, 142, 184 critique of, 74, 90, 94, 96, 105–8, 129, 139, 145, 164, 187, 193 Marx, Karl, 1, 31, 55, 59, 63, 133 Marxism, 14, 26, 28, 61–2, 125, 133 historiography, 14, 24–5, 36, 73, 146 influence of populism, 57, 59 modernization narrtive, 81 return to orthodoxy, 16, 28–9, 44, 47 theories of the peasant, 45, 120, 132, 143 Marxist humanism, 32 Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 73 May Fourth Movement, 56 Mexico, 103–4, 162 migrant labor, 127, 144, 188, 190, 197 as a liberation, 119–20, 123 as underpaid, 147, 192

origins, 53, 94, 106 push factors, 116, 118, 124 migration, 136 modernity, 65, 74, 123, 129 alternative, 54 capitalist, 126 Chinese, 79, 81 Western, 79, 81 modernization, 12, 18, 110, 117, 132 agricultural, 86, 115, 126 alternative, 169 American path, 58–9, 97, 104, 125 and populism, 55–60 Chinese path, 42, 86, 88, 95, 144, 149 colonial, 104 crisis of, 133 critique of, 139, 152 global, 115 narrative of Qin Hui, 49–55 narratives, 81, 119, 187 of the peasant, 5, 47 of the productive forces, 17–18 Prussian path, 58 reform-era ideology of, 4, 27–9 socialist, 2, 22, 101 theory, 145 Western path, 95, 97 modes of production, 146 mutual aid, 180 Nanmazhuang Village, 178, 181 national conditions, 85, 97, 102–3, 105, 138, 145, 147, 150, 191 National Institute of Law, 158 Nehru, Jawaharlal, 112 neo-liberalism, 7, 11, 37, n.73, 70, 124–6, 198 new collectivism, 84–5, 89 New Culture movement, 102 New Democracy, 22–4, 31 new left, 7, 9, 11, 63, 187, 197 critique of liberals, 90, 122–5 critique of market fundamentalism, 9, 71–2, 92, 103, 187, 191 critique of neo-liberalism, 90, 124 emergence, 71–4, 77–8 politics, 187 understanding of history, 70 view of the peasant, 9 view of the reforms, 94 views on politics, 76–7 New Policies, 19 new rural reconstruction, 10, 137, 153, 187, 191–2, 195 and culture, 170–1 and new cooperatives, 174–81

Index and peasant organization, 165 and rights protection, 184–54 and urbanization, 181–4 meaning, 154–5 projects, 165 new socialism, 87 new socialist countryside, 114, n. 85, 166, 196 nongmin, 50 number one document, 3, 151, 155, 160 Office of Rural Reform Experimental Zones, 96–7, 103, 107 old people’s associations, 144, 170, 177 Organic Law on Village Committees, 135 overproduction, 113, 196 Oxfam, 167 peasant associations, 156, 184 peasant studies, 108–9, 192 peasant/peasantry, 182, 186 and capitalism, 11 and farmers, 45, 50, 125 anti-peasant attitudes, 14 as a class, 80 as a revolutionary force, 2, 4–5, 14–15, 19–20, 27, 29, 31, 34 as a status, 86 as a symbol of backwardness, 2, 5, 14, 20 as a useful category of analysis, 189, 193 as an excluded population, 191 as figure of possibility, 70 behavioral tendencies, 14, 36 burden, 10, 116, 118–19, 140, 151, 158 consciousness of, 21, 28, 30, 36, 41, 130, 132 conservatism, 27–8, 30–1, 34, 36, 42, 58 dependency on the state, 5, 14, 32, 36, 41, 45, 47, 70, 187 dialectical image of, 14, 16, 18, 20, 26–7, 40, 45, 190, 193, 195 disappearance of, 6, 193 dual nature of, 14, 21, 24, 28, 30, 34, 41, 45, 58 end of, 183 knowledge, 171–4 liberation of, 44, 47–8, 55, 67, 89, 116, 119–20, 125, 131, 136, 158, 184, 190 moral economy of, 109, 192 new subjectivity, 196 organization, 132, 157, 161, 165, 176, 180 production, 85 rebellion, 25, 94, 104 revolution, 18–19 role in history, 76 social organization, 128, 133, 138, 142, 154, 158

231

values, 109, 142, 192 within historical narrative, 2, 4, 12, 27, 29, 98–104, 116, 187 Peking University, 57, 109, 172 People’s Daily, 38 planned economy, 113 Polanyi, Karl, 70, 75, 107–8, 125, 185 Polanyian historical narrative, 75, 114, 122–4, 143, 152, 168, 187, 194–5 Polanyian politics, 115, 154, 174 politics, 187 relationship to economics, 195 relationship to history, 14, 17–18, 47, 65, 102, 190 Politics Research Institute, 139 Popkin, Samuel, 109 popular organizations, 137 population control, 38 growth, 96 rural versus urban, 186 populist politics, 47, 66, 77, 163, 183 and peasant dependency, 65 and rural protest, 45, 69 as a historical anachronism, 14, 31, 33, 47 as a target of critique, 18, 90, 187 Maoism as a form of, 29–30 Qin Hui’s critique of, 55–60 postcolonialism, 145–6, 152 postsocialism, 15–16, 36, 39–40, 61, 100, 105, 126, 162, 187 and postcolonialism, 145, 152 historical narrative, 95, 101, 127 price scissors, 112 primitive accumulation, 18, 47, 60–4, 90, 99–101, 104, 112, 125, 166 period of, 167 positive views of, 113 privatization, 77, 85, 87, 93, 103, 129, 167, 179–80 of land, 102, 105, 123–4, 132, 147, 167, 179, 181 of public resources, 142 property rights, 66 Proudhon, Pierre-Joseph, 82 Qi Benyu, 26–7, 29 Qin Dynasty, 35–6, 55 Qin Hui, 8, 45, 83, 102, 120, 152, 157, 167, 194, 196 comparison of China and the West, 52–5, 57–60 critique of new left, 86–7 critique of populism, 55–60 historical vision, 47, 60 liberation narrative of, 48 modernization narrative of, 49–55, 126, 133

232

Index

Qin Hui (cont.) on primitive accumulation, 60–4, 100 on Township Village Enterprises, 78 writings on Guanzhong, 49, 55 Qin Shi Huangdi, 36 Qing Dynasty, 19, 26, 99 Qiu Jiansheng, 172–5, 180 Red Flag, 26, 29 Red Guards, 48, 65 Renmin Ribao, 32 Renmin University, 9, 13, 33, 92, 97, 140, 164 Research Center for Rural Development, 96 rights protection movement, 11, 66, 154–60, 183–4 ruoshi qunti, 180–1, 188 rural activists, 154, 162, 172, 177, 189 banking, 107 consumption, 94, 113 crisis, 2–4, 6, 9–12, 92, 95, 116–17, 119, 124, 128–30, 134, 138, 155, 168, 189, 193 development, 3 economy, 71 education, 171–4 governance, 118, 135–44 infrastructure, 114 population, 105 protest, 5, 94, 96, 155, 158 surplus, 100, 102, 104, 134, 167 Rural Development Research Institute, 157 rural government, 10, 117, 132, 184 finances, 93 taxes and fees, 94, 116, 159 rural labor, 1, 86, 93, 111, 123, 144–5, 168, 188, 192 cheap, 113 surplus, 5, 9, 67, 79, 87–8, 93, 96–8, 105–6, 113, 117, 120–4, 126–7, 147, 179, 188 rural reconstruction movement, 163, 169, 172 rural–urban relationship, 11, 19, 98, 100, 119, 123, 176, 182, 186, 189–90, 194, 197 Russia, 30, 58 Russian Revolution, 57 Sahlins, Marshal, 108 sannong wenti, 92, 100, 102, 105, 123, 126, 137, 152, 162, 166, 195 and cooperatives, 179 development of the concept, 97–8 popularization, 116–26 Yu Jianrong on, 157 Sannong Zhongguo, 138 School of Agricultural and Rural Development, 92

School of Agricultural Economics and Rural Development, 140 Schultz, Theodore, 109–10 scientific socialism, 30, 33 Scott, James, 109 self-governance, 49, 71, 135 sent-down youth, 48 Shaanxi Province, 42, 49, 73, 75 Shandong Province, 163, 178 Shanin, Teodor, 108 Simmel, Georg, 49, n. 5 slavery, 125 slums, 103, 125–6, 182, 185–6, 190–1, 193, 197 small peasant economy and economic rationality, 88, 105, 107–9, 114, 120, 131, 145 and peasant behavior, 21, 30 and peasant consciousness, 30, 85 small producer, 109 Smith, Adam, 133 social justice, 63, 72, 153, 189, 195 social science, 14, 186 nativization, 145–50 social security system, 106 socialism, 17, 100, 127 and labor, 180 historical narrative, 15, 95 meaning in the reform era, 94 Soviet Union, 59, 72, 77, 84, 90, 101 specialized cooperatives, 161 Stalinism, 101 State Council, 8, 96, 151 State Owned Enterprises, 3, 93, 96 state–society dichotomy, 17, 156 status community, 49, 51 Stolypin, Peter, 58, 60 Su Xiaokang, 41 substantivism, 108–16, 128, 147, 150, 192 Sun Daren, 26 Sun Liping, 57, 149 Sun Yat-Sen University, 142 surplus population, 126, 162, 184–6, 188, 193–4, 197 surplus value, 192 sustainable development, 115 suzhi, 16, 18, 37–43, 130, 161, 171, 188 Taiping Rebellion, 26, 29–30 Taiping Town cooperative, 174–5, 180, 182 Taishi Village, 158–9, 184 Tan Tongxue, 142 taxation rural, 5 technology, 8, 17–18 Thailand, 103

Index Third World, 95, 104, 112, 125–6, 145, 184, 187 three great differences, 38, 115, 173 Tiananmen demonstrations, 7, 13, 56, 73, 75, 78, 93, 135 Tokyo, 18 Tong Zhihui, 140 Tönnies, Ferdinand, 49, n. 5 totalitarianism, 17, 28, 32 Township Village Enterprises, 87–8, 96, 176 and urbanization, 89, 120 as a model of development, 5, 71–2, 77–84 as a stage in the modernization process, 53–4, 86, 113 employment, 71, 124, 189 privatization, 3, 5, 93, 96, 106–7, 117 traditional culture, 169 traditional small peasants, 110, 114 Trotskyism, 146 Tsinghua University, 8, 47, 57, 73, 157 University of Chicago, 73 urban labor, 1, 96, 106, 114, 132, 197 urbanization, 10, 98, 127, 132, 162, 186, 188, 190 as key to development, 89, 103, 120, 171 critique of, 92, 96, 107, 116, 124, 131, 164, 181 Vietnam, 109 village committees, 157 Wang Dexian, 178 Wang Hui, 70, 73, 87, 121 critique of Township Village Enterprises, 88 development of thinking, 73–4 on capitalism, 74–6 Wang Rongsheng, 29, 35 Wang Ruoshui, 31, 36 Wang Xiaoqiang, 30–1, 36, 39–41, 43 Wang Ximing, 139 Wang Xizhe, 32–3 Wang Ying, 78, 84–5, 88–9 Weber, Max, 49, n. 5 Wen Jiabao, 2, 156, 162, 169, 195 Wen Tiejun, 118, 121–2, 124, 150, 164, 197 as a substantivist, 110, 147 critique of market economics, 105–8, 190

233

historical vision, 98–104, 122, 127, 134, 151, 162, 164 on economic cooperatives, 160, 170 on new rural reconstruction, 162, 173, 177, 184–5, 191 on primitive accumulation, 61–2, 99–101, 112 on rural reconstruction, 154 on sannong wenti, 92–3, 116, 119, 158, 166 on social science, 145–6 on the present, 126, 168–9, 183 politics of, 9–10 shift to the left, 10, 94–8 wenbao, 131, 147 Wenzhou, 61 Western civilization, 44 Western social science, 81 Westernization, 169 Wittfogel, Karl, 34, 42 Wong, Sui-lun, 80 world systems analysis, 98–9, 134, 187 Wu Chuntao, 150–2 Wu Dakun, 33–5, 56 Wu Han, 24 Wu Wenzao, 80 World War Two, 112 Xiaogang Village, 53, 158, 160, 184 Xin Wang, 161 Xu Xinwu, 108 Xu Yong, 135–7 Yan Yangchu, 163–4, 169, 171 Yan Yangchu Rural Reconstruction Institute, 164, 172, 175, 178 Yanjing University, 80 Yao Wenyuan, 27 Yellow River, 44 Yin Yongchun, 172–3 Ying Xing, 149–50 Yu Jianrong, 157–8 Yü Ying-Shih, 56–7 Zapatistas, 162 Zhaicheng cooperative, 175 Zhao Lisheng, 25–6, 35–7, 48, 52, 54–5, 59 Zhu Rongji, 6, 10, 116