The Rural Modern: Reconstructing the Self and State in Republican China 9780226383309

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The Rural Modern

The Rural Modern Reconstructing the Self and State in Republican China k at e m e r k e l -­h e s s

The University of Chicago Press Chicago and London

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637 The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London © 2016 by The University of Chicago All rights reserved. Published 2016. Printed in the United States of America 25  24  23  22  21  20  19  18  17  16  1  2  3  4  5 isbn-­13: 978-­0-­226-­38327-­9 (cloth) isbn-­13: 978-­0-­226-­38330-­9 (e-­book) doi: 10.7208/chicago/9780226383309.001.0001 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Merkel-Hess, Kate, 1976– author. Title: The rural modern : reconstructing the self and state in Republican China / Kate Merkel-Hess. Description: Chicago ; London : The University of Chicago Press, 2016. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2016002820 | isbn 9780226383279 (cloth : alk. paper) | isbn 9780226383309 (e-book) Subjects: LCSH: Rural development—China—History—20th century. | Education, Rural—China—History—20th century. | China—History—Republic, 1912–1949. Classification: lcc hn740.z9 c623 2016 ds774.5 | ddc 307.1/412—dc23 lc record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2016002820 ♾ This paper meets the requirements of ansi /niso z39.48-­1992 ( Permanence of Paper).

Contents

List of Illustrations  vii A Note on Romanization  ix Acknowledgments  xi

Introduction

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1 Writing for New Literates in the Chinese Countryside

23

2 To the Countryside

55

3 Organizing the Village

80

4 Village Contestations

110

5 A Movement Made and Lost

139

Conclusion

165 Archives  173 Notes  175 Glossary of Chinese Terms  209 Bibliography  213 Index  235

Illustrations

1. Illustration for a lesson on “The Model Village” in the 1928 edition of The Farmer’s Thousand-­Character Reader 2. A refined depiction of  the model village in the 1930 edition of  The Farmer’s Thousand-­Character Reader 3. Anti-­Japan parade in Dingxian, in front of a wall bearing the Mass Education Movement slogan “Eliminate illiteracy, make new people,” 1931 or 1932 4. A courtyard classroom in Dingxian in 1931 or 1932 5. Illustration of a peasant reading The Farmer’s Thousand-­Character Reader, 1930 6. A boy and his sister look in the window of a pharmacy in The Townspeople’s Thousand-­Character Reader, 1929 7. Lao Wang knocked out by electricity in Beijing, from the newspaper Nong­ min, August 1, 1926 8. The Yan Family in Dingxian in 1931 or 1932 9. Schematic outlining the structure of  basic education in Guangxi, from the journal Shandong minzhong jiaoyu yuekan, February 25, 1936 10. Organizational chart of  the YMCA’s rural project at Weitingshan, from Shi Zhongyi’s Jiu nongcun de xin qixiang, 1933

A Note on Romanization

In this book, I use the pinyin system to romanize Chinese terms, with one ex­ ception. In the case of individuals more commonly known under different titles, I have used that alternate romanization (Sun Yat-­sen, Chiang Kai-­shek, and so on). A number of the figures discussed in this book had both Chinese and English names. I have chosen to use the Chinese names throughout (Yan Yangchu rather than James Yen, for instance). For the ease of the reader, I have also, in a few cases, updated irregular or old romanizations in direct quotations to pinyin (Tianjin rather than Tienhsin), indicating the change as such. Finally, I have contextualized almost all Chinese terms, but two units of measure appear a few times and deserve further explanation. First, a mu is equivalent to about one-­sixth of an acre. Second, sui is the Chinese calculation of age. A person is one sui at birth and adds one sui at each passing New Year.

Acknowledgments

I’ve been fortunate to have wonderful mentors who supported this project. Ken Pomeranz has been a sounding board from start to finish, reading numerous drafts and providing detailed suggestions and queries that greatly im­­proved my work. His diligence and generosity are an inspiration. Jeff Wasserstrom gave feedback on the whole manuscript, and I’m thankful for his help over the years in expanding my lungs in writing for a broader audience and in thinking about the relationships between historical and contemporary China. Several others at the University of California, Irvine—­where this project began—­provided sug­ gestions, help, and friendship, especially Bin Wong, as well as Vinayak Chatur­ vedi, Lynn Mally, Bob Moeller, and Anne Walthall. Many others gave feedback along the way. My colleagues at Penn State have supported and advised me as I have edited and revised, especially David Atwill, Kate Baldanza, Lori Ginzberg, Amy Greenberg, Ronnie Hsia, Michael Kulikowski, and On-­cho Ng. I was fortunate to be able to present this research in many different formats, where people asked questions and suggested fruitful leads, and these comments and queries often opened new avenues of inquiry and resulted in new sections of the book. I want to particularly thank Norm Apter, Janet Chen, Alex Day, Prasenjit Duara, Pierre Fuller, Charles Hayford, Henrietta Harrison, Gail Hershatter, Brooks Jessup, Tom Mullaney, Richard Jean So, Jonathan Spence, Wensheng Wang, and Margherita Zanasi. My undergraduate advisor at Yale, Annping Chin, provided some leads for this research but more generally encouraged me to always value the humanity of the people I was writing about. Also at Yale, John Gaddis, Valerie Hansen, Zhengguo Kang, and Charles Laughlin encouraged my early interest in China and history. It was always a pleasure to talk about rural reform with Wang Guo, and I’m grateful for his help and advice in Beijing. Thanks, too, to Ma

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acknowledgments

Junya, who aided me in Nanjing; Julie Zhai, who gave me a tour of Zouping; Lien Ling-­ling and Ming-­te Pan, who provided guidance and introductions in Taipei; Li Xuechang, who advised me in Shanghai; and Luo Zhitian, who helped with introductions at Peking University. Two anonymous readers for the University of Chicago Press provided helpful and detailed comments that greatly improved the manuscript. The staff of many archives and libraries provided their assistance in locating materials. My thanks goes to the staff at the Shanghai Municipal Library Republican Reading Room, the Shanghai Municipal Archives, the Second Historical Archives of China in Nanjing, the Institute of  Modern History Archives and Library at Academia Sinica, Academia Historica in Taipei, the Zouping County Archives, the Dingzhou City Archives, the Jiangning County Archives, the Peking University Library, the Columbia University Rare Books and Manu­ scripts Library, the Columbia Center for Oral History Archives, and the Rock­ e­feller Foundation records. I am also enormously grateful to the inter­library loan desks at the University of California, Irvine and Penn State University Libraries, whose assistance precluded many additional research trips. Special thanks to Penn State librarians Jade Atwill and Eric Novotny, who helped track down materials and advocate for access to invaluable databases. A number of institutions and organizations supported the research and writing of this book. Research in China and Taiwan was supported by a Fulbright-­Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Grant, a University of California Pacific Rim Foundation Dissertation Grant, UCI’s Center for Asian Stud­ ies and School of Humanities, and a Kent Forster Memorial Fund Award from the Penn State Department of History. The Association for Asian Studies–­China and Inner Asia Council provided a grant that allowed me to conduct additional research in the United States, and the Rockefeller Foundation provided a Rockefeller Grant-­in-­Aid to support my visit to Tarrytown. Writing for this project was supported by the University of California, Irvine’s International Center for Writing and Translation and a Mellon/ACLS Doctoral Dissertation Grant. A Mellon/ACLS Recent Doctoral Recipients Fellowship supported a postdoctoral year at the UCI Humanities Collective during which I began revising the manuscript. This manuscript found a welcoming home at the University of Chicago Press. Priya Nelson has just the combination of friendliness and efficiency that one hopes for in an editor. Ellen Kladky fielded all manner of queries and provided unerring advice. Portions of this manuscript have appeared in previous publications, and I am grateful to their publishers for allowing me to reuse them here. Portions of chapter 1 were previously published as “Reading the Rural Modern:

acknowledgments

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Literacy and Morality in Republican China,” History Compass 7.1 (2009): 44–­ 54, © 2008 The Author, © 2008 Blackwell Publishing Ltd. Portions of chapter 3 were published as “Acting Out Reform: Theater and Village in the Republican Rural Reconstruction Movement,” Twentieth-­Century China 37.2 (May 2012): 161–­80, © Twentieth-­Century China 2012. Many friends shared ideas, dinners, and research forays both at home and abroad, including Nicole Barnes, Maura Cunningham, Patrick Deegan, Kelly Hammond, Denise Ho, Karrie Koesel, Hyebin Lim, Jennifer Liu, and Xia Shi. Kathi and Todd Walton were my home-­away-­from-­home in Shanghai. Emma Tsui and Nicole Gilbertson were always just a phone call away. Mary K. and John McDonald always wanted to hear what I was up to and celebrated every success. Mary and Steve Merkel-­Hess gave me a love of books, languages, and other cultures and enthusiastically supported my forays to Asia. My thanks go to all of them. Bryan and Jed McDonald are my most steadfast supporters. The joy of their presence in my life has infused the years during which this project was completed. There are not thanks enough for that.

Introduction

In 1929, a teenager writing under the name Hongxu published an article on rural citizenship and governance reform in a journal for rural “new literates. ” Hongxu had only recently moved to Beiping (as Beijing was then called) from rural Ding County (Dingxian), where he had grown up and become involved in rural reform work. Before turning to the practicalities of rural self-­government, Hongxu mused on why rural reform was necessary to begin with—­settling, ultimately, on the personal failings of the Chinese people. “Why we have been oppressed by the Great Powers [can be said in] one simple sentence. It is be­­ cause Chinese people could not self-­strengthen, ” he wrote. The Chinese peo­­ ple were illiterate and ignorant, he continued, and thus the nation was weak. “We must admit that it is not imperialism bullying us; in reality we have welcomed it ourselves!”1 Stubborn, conservative peasants “have not reformed their thinking, ” he complained, but if they could do so, they might unify and change China.2 Today, China’s modernization is associated with grand infrastructure projects, such as the massive dams, elevated highways, and high-­speed railways that in recent years have been symbols of Chinese development. When early twentieth-­century reformers dreamed of modernizing their country—­ a task they felt was critical to repelling encroaching imperial powers and preserving China—­they sometimes planned big projects as well. The founding statesman of the Republic of China (1912–­49), Sun Yat-­sen, for one, dreamed of rail lines crisscrossing the nation.3 But just as often, modernizers attributed China’s weaknesses to its peoples’ weaknesses and proposed transforming the common people in order to build a new China. More than twenty years before Hongxu published his piece, intellectual Liang Qichao had written that

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China needed to make “a new people” (xinmin).4 Sun Yat-­sen, in addition to proposing railroads and other infrastructure developments, had argued that a “psychological reconstruction” (xinli jianshe) of the people was critical and that revolution depended on “transforming hearts-­and-­minds” ( geming xian gexin).5 Yet Hongxu’s writing did point to a new inflection by the late 1920s in the discussion of how the transformation and remaking of the individual might change the nation: a growing focus on rural rather than urban people. In the 1920s, many factors came together to draw national attention to the Chinese countryside’s supposed ills. Reform-­minded elites began to sense the limitations of the urban-­based economic reforms that had dominated  dis­­ cussions since the late nineteenth century.6 Newly introduced social science methods encouraged intellectuals to study the people; the 1920s and 1930s were the high point for the “social survey movement, ” which sought to collect and aggregate information about China’s new national subjects and particularly, as the 1920s wore on, those in rural areas.7 The fact that more than 85 per­cent of China’s population lived in rural areas became a mantra among reformers of all stripes, eager to justify their increased attention to the countryside. Moreover, by the early 1930s, the global depression had made deep inroads into the Chinese rural economy, creating conditions that some observers wrote were the worst the Chinese peasant had ever experienced.8 In 1919, Li Dazhao, a leading literary figure and later a cofounder of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), published an essay arguing that the state of China’s rural millions would determine the nation’s future and called for young Chinese to “go to the countryside. ”9 In response to the calls of Li and others, what had been a trickle of reform-­minded young people to the countryside in the early 1920s became a flood by the end of the decade. The CCP famously used peasant power to achieve its rural revolution in 1949. Historians have identified the party’s successful mobilization of rural people, beginning in the 1920s and 1930s, as the critical factor in its success. Yet Communists like Li and the young Mao Zedong were not the only ones who were agitating on behalf of and mobilizing rural people at the time. Intellectuals across the political spectrum called for a remaking of rural China, a call that would intensify in the 1930s as the CCP established its rural base areas and the Nationalists and others scrambled to generate more moderate alternatives to rural revolution. As this book argues, the Communists were neither the first nor the only group of urban intellectuals to look to the villages as the foundation of a new nation. This book instead tells the story of the second most prominent group of rural reformers in China in the 1920s and 1930s—­ a loose coalition of reform-­minded elites who sought to create a rural alter­ native to urban modernity that would mobilize rural people and strengthen

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the nation, eventually coalescing around the idea of “rural reconstruction” (xiangcun jianshe). At the time, their efforts seemed like the most compelling alternative to the CCP: less violent and more participatory. As it turned out, rural reconstruction would be the last non-­Communist effort to remake rural China. The rural reconstruction vision of a new China encompassed many of the elements that were simultaneously being articulated as components of Chi­ na’s emerging urban modernity, from celebrating national holidays to tooth brushing to learning to read, but it resituated the location of modernity from the city to the countryside and celebrated the village community as the core of the nation.10 In their model villages, counties, districts, and schools, thousands of Chinese reformers who ventured into the countryside between the mid-­ 1920s and late 1930s set up streetside literacy classes, founded reform teahouses that provided productive entertainment, established village health clinics, and put on public demonstrations of new agricultural techniques. Though they shared an interest in “reconstructing” a modern nation with the Chinese gov­ ernment (ruled between 1927 and 1937 by the Nationalist or Guomindang [GMD] Party from the capital of Nanjing), their reforms were not initially based around the top-­down, centralized planning for economic development that constituted Nanjing’s modernizing reforms. And while they shared with the Communists a belief that the countryside had to be remade, they believed it should happen through persuasion and education rather than violent so­ cial and economic restructuring. The reformers who affiliated themselves with the ideas of rural reconstruction were a diverse lot, but they shared a belief that the primary site of a new China was the rural self and rural community. The rural reconstruction agenda generated by these reformers focused on changing psyches more than intensive resource investment, embedding the self in public communities in order to better mobilize the population, and creating citizens whose intellectual commitment to modern habits of thought legitimated them as political participants, at least within the confines of their villages. Perhaps most importantly, they believed that localism was not antagonistic to nationalism. In­­deed, they argued that a strong state depended on robust local communities. But there was a danger in reformers’ championing of  local communities. While reformers envisioned self-­sustaining villages that would not place an eco­nomic burden on the central government and that would strengthen the nation through their own development, the existence of such villages—­their security and stability—­depended on a stable central state that allowed and supported the existence of such localism. The government at the time—­and the one that followed—­had little patience for such localism.

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introduction

This book not only explores how these reformers imagined a remade people and their communities and the process they proposed to transform rural people into modern people but also tracks the shifts in rural reconstruction models as government and international interest in the reforms grew. In the face of the devastating conditions of the 1930s, which included the global depression as well as the imminent Japanese invasion, some reconstructionists compromised their vision of communities directed by remade rural people and threw their lot in with advocates of a state-­driven, top-­down approach to rural change. This not only perverted their earlier optimistic vision of individual transformation and village cohesion but also revealed the underlying elitist tendencies of the rural reconstruction message and pointed toward the developmentalism of the post–­World War II period. Examining, as this book does, things like didactic new village operas, literacy drives, and other efforts by urban intellectuals to remake rural people seems to take us away from the main currents of twentieth century Chinese history, which has been more engaged with exploring the roots of rural revolution than the failed moderate reforms that sat alongside it, with the clash of armies than the persuasion of peasants, with a profound physical reshaping of landscape and lived environment than with the subtle remaking of interior life. Yet the ideas at the heart of rural reconstruction were intimately linked to the struggles over the future of China and its place in the world as a supposedly backward region. Rural reconstruction emerged in a critical global and national moment. World War I had just ended, and the Treaty of Versailles had laid bare the hollowness of the Wilsonian internationalism that had so inspired many colonial elites.11 The international implications of the Russian Revolution were beginning to take hold—­slowly—­as it became a symbol of the undoing of old orders that the Great War had effected. Domestically, Chinese society was undergoing such rapid changes in everything from personal deportment to the introduction of technology that it created new gaps in society; rural Chinese people met urban ones, with their bowler hats or bobbed hair, and called them “foreigners” ( yang) rather than recognizing them as compatriots of a shared culture.12 Amid this change and uncertainty, the story of rural reconstruction illuminates the contestations over how to manage the new Chinese republic and the sovereignty of its people, exposing a rural-­centered vision of modernity and governance—­a rural modern—­that by the mid-­1930s many contemporaries felt was a compelling “middle course” between Chiang Kai-­shek’s Nationalists and Mao Zedong’s Communists.13 In this moment of ferment and possibility, a group of Chinese intellectuals created a new vision of China that handpicked portions of Western modernities but rejected what didn’t suit them and retained Chinese elements that did. Rural reconstruction

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ultimately failed to generate lasting political or social change, but that should not blind us to the potential and power it held as an alternative solution to China’s troubles at a time when it remained unclear whether the future would be based on a model of urban or rural development, of measured change or revolution. While this book examines the first few decades of the rural reconstruction vision for the countryside in the 1920s and 1930s, its story has resonance in today’s China, where the rural population is declining but visions of an ideal countryside remain compelling. Since the 1990s, China’s focus on primarily urban industrialization has exacerbated urban-­rural gaps in income, education, health, opportunity, and many other measures. In response, in the early twenty-­first century, the Chinese government was increasingly vocal about the countryside’s lagging economic performance. From the elimination of agricultural taxes in 2006 to the promotion of the policy of “Constructing a New Socialist Countryside” ( jianshe shehuizhuyi xin nongcun) later that same year, the government attempted to ameliorate the conditions of disadvantaged rural populations and limit the potential for rural unrest.14 In spite of these many campaigns, the reality in contemporary China is that there is no far-­reaching plan to save the countryside. The neglect of the countryside is not a new phenomenon. From its founding in 1949, the People’s Republic of China (PRC), for all its rhetorical commitments to remaking the countryside, focused its resources on urban modernization.15 Over the course of its first thirty years, the PRC’s policies resulted in overall increased rural productivity and public health standards as well as, at least until the 1990s, a very slow rate of urbanization given the rate of industrialization. But rural areas also saw incredible dislocation, death, and lagging economic growth during those decades. The CCP saw the countryside as a site of education and reformation and insisted, even while funneling funding into the cities, that agriculture could be the foundation of a modern China. Policies that kept rural populations in the villages and tied to the land were a crucial part of the political agenda in the PRC, particularly af­­ ter about 1960, and have only begun to be revised in the last decade.16 Now China is actively moving rural populations into cities—­razing villages and relocating rural people to suburban high-­rises. China became a majority urban country in 2011, and the government plans to move another 250 million peo­­ple to the cities by the early 2020s.17 This demographic shift is the end of a story that originated in the 1920s and 1930s, when intellectuals began what turned out to be an almost century-­long challenge to the urban nature of modernization, positing, in its place, a modern countryside inhabited by empowered rural citizens.

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The government’s early twenty-­first-­century efforts to address rural problems emerged partly in response to independent intellectuals’ and activists’ efforts to question the growing commodification of rural life and assert alternative forms of rural economic and social organization. Prime among these efforts is the New Rural Reconstruction Movement (xin xiangcun jianshe yundong) begun around the turn of the century—­a loose collection of actions by communities and individuals that range from establishing rural cooperative communities to founding artist’s communes that seek to revitalize their host villages. New Rural Reconstruction consciously looks back to the Republican-­era reforms that are the subject of this book—­some of the projects are even sited in the same locations that hosted the reformers discussed in the chapters that follow.18 These contemporary reformers, observing the failure of both midcentury development models and late twentieth-­century capitalism to bring sustainable prosperity to the villages or create resilient com­ mu­nities, have looked to the Republican models for inspiration as they raise questions about the dominant model of urban industrialization and the exclusion of peasants from public life, particularly from governance of their own affairs. Inspired by what some 1930s activists called “whole society” (zhengge de shehui) reforms, these new reconstructionists have picked up a thread of ideas from Republican reformers who sought to create model communities that they hoped could better weather the buffeting of violence, economic downturn, and political instability that characterized the 1930s. This book returns us to this optimistic vision of rural people and the possibilities of the countryside, exploring not only why rural reconstruction failed to create lasting change but also why its vision of a Chinese nation grounded in the countryside has continued to resonate with intellectuals. The Boundaries of Rural Reconstruction The rural reform world of the 1930s was riotous, with people working in many different venues and registers. Reformers—­ranging from county magistrates to central government officials to university professors to foreign missionaries—­ embraced ideological bents from Confucian to socialist to Christian and established projects in a wide range of settings, from the rural suburbs of Suzhou (the urbane Yangzi Valley city famous for its gardens) to the steppes of Suiyuan (in present-­day Inner Mongolia). While many of the projects began with mass education work, by the mid-­1930s, projects existed that focused primarily on health outreach, agricultural experimentation, financial reform, and sometimes reform of the whole society. Many of these reformers called

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their work “rural reconstruction. ” In 1936, the China scholar George E. Taylor wrote that the rural reconstruction effort was a “welter” of experiments “which cover the whole country, ” encompassing “a mass of facts, schemes, changes and developments. ”19 As I began my research and confronted this morass of reconstruction efforts, I focused initially on a group of reformers who identified between roughly 1933 and 1937, and sometimes thereafter as well, with something called the Rural Reconstruction Movement (xiangcun jianshe yundong). This loosely structured group was organized around a few key government committees, scholarly networks, and independent conferences. Its unofficial membership rolls, such as can be cobbled together from conference proceedings and gov­­ ernment committees, encompassed the internationally recognized experimental county overseen by the liberal, US-­influenced Chinese Mass Education  Move­ment (Zhonghua pingmin jiaoyu cujin hui; MEM) in Dingxian, Hebei; government-­run projects like the experimental county of Jiangning, just outside the national capital; and educational efforts like conservative-­minded philosopher Liang Shuming’s Shandong Rural Reconstruction Institute (Shandong xiangcun jianshe yanjiuyuan). There were also dozens of smaller reform efforts, from missionary-­run literacy programs to experimental districts run by university departments (where very little reform work seemed to take place) to county magistrates who had decided, in the tradition of activist local officials, to take a didactic approach to the betterment of their districts. Yet the closer I looked, the less solid the Rural Reconstruction Movement seemed to be. A web of connections held the loose rural reconstruction assemblage together, from personnel who traveled between projects to conferences where they met to exchange ideas to the rich body of publications that ricocheted between projects, beginning from the founding of the earliest proj­ ects in the mid-­1920s. But it was government interest and involvement in co-­opting the rural reconstruction vision beginning in 1932 that raised the profile of the so-­called movement around rural reconstruction. At that time, the central government granted some of the reform projects status as experimental districts with control over the rural populations who lived there, and reformers no longer needed to rely so heavily on the persuasive techniques they had developed in their first few years in the countryside. Both Nanjing and foreign funders encouraged reformers to focus on technical training and development of rural leadership. The result was a shift in reformers’ priorities, away from the program of individuated transformation of the 1920s and toward economic development, technical expertise, and a top-­down management of reform efforts. The personnel and intellectual interpenetrations of

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government and independent reformers and the diversity of the projects that laid claim to the rural reconstruction title made it difficult to think of this as a coherent social movement. Moreover, how could I account for the offshoots and precursors that were clearly in dialogue with the mid-­1930s movement but that could not be found on the mid-­1930s lists of participants and, despite their influence on later reformers, never referred to themselves with the label “rural reconstruction”? The most important of these was prominent reform educator Tao Xingzhi’s Xiaozhuang School, founded on a verdant hill on the outskirts of the nation’s capital in 1927 but shuttered by order of the GMD government (which feared it was harboring leftists) in 1930, well before the advent of any movement around rural reconstruction. Yet mentions of Xiaozhuang abound in rural reconstruction write-­ups and descriptions of rural reconstruction’s origins, and we can track a handful of its personnel into later 1930s projects. Xiao­ zhuang’s closure points to a greater threat that goaded the GMD to seize on rural reconstruction: the growing power of the Communists. Some of those affiliated with rural reconstruction were sympathetic to the CCP belief in the need for systemic rural change, and a few joined the CCP in the 1930s (and many more of those described in this book would work on behalf of the PRC government after 1949), but more than any specific ideological or methodological connections between the CCP mobilization of the countryside and rural reconstruction efforts, the two rural efforts demonstrate the broad spectrum of initiatives to engage and mobilize the countryside in the 1930s. There were few direct connections between rural reconstruction and the CCP, so how, too, could I situate rural reconstruction in relation to the most important rural movement of the late Republic? In answer, I kept returning to the loose connections that bound this “welter” of reformers together, as they struggled, despite their differences, with the shared constraints of an unstable countryside, the deepening of the global depression, the ham-­handed policy making of the central government, and eventually, the Japanese invasion. Out of these constraints, a variety of indi­ viduals—­not only the rosters of those that the government approached after 1932 but many more before and during that period—­created plans for re­ form  grounded in an affordable and achievable program of individualized education and transformation that would take place in model rural communities. Reformers proposed these communities as templates for national reform, framing them as responses to Sun Yat-­sen’s call for a “national reconstruction. ” These experimental projects had an influence on the ideas and approaches to rural reform out of proportion to their numbers, running institutes to train other reformers and creating public perceptions of what rural reconstruction

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and rural reform looked like through a vast body of publications. This rural reconstruction proposal for social change grappled with—­sometimes challenging, sometimes embracing—­Nanjing’s tendencies toward centralization and its imposition of  bureaucratic hierarchies. Instead, reformers insisted on the importance of recognizing and honoring the boundaries and sovereignty of local communities against the encroaching state, of attempting to create a vision of modernity that did not depend on hollowing out the countryside but instead sustained it. This localist, rural vision of reconstruction was an alternate reading of Nanjing’s plans for national development, turning its urban, industrial, centralizing vision of state making on its head. It was more challenging to track the relationships between the CCP and rural reconstruction. The CCP was well aware of—­and in some cases an active participant in—­1930s discussions of rural reconstruction, and the Communists shared reconstructionists’ concerns about rural society and the belief that rural people could be mobilized for the good of the nation. Mao even advocated using some of the textbooks produced by rural reconstructionists as the model for CCP literacy efforts.20 Indeed, there was a great deal of resonance in the tactics of education and persuasion that rural reconstructionists and the Communists employed, including in some of the CCP’s earliest efforts like the early 1920s mass education and cultural reform efforts in Anyuan.21 Yet while some people who got their starts in rural reconstruction projects joined the CCP during the 1930s, evidence of intellectual exchange between the CCP and rural reconstruction is anecdotal and scattered. And though the two efforts shared many of their tactics for rural engagement, when Communist activists did observe or comment on rural reconstruction efforts, they were quite critical of rural reconstruction for failing to engage with what the Communists perceived as the systemic economic inequalities of the countryside. This critique pointed to a fundamental disagreement between the two sets of reformers about the source of rural problems and thus what they identified as the font of its solution. Rural reconstructionists, as we will see, believed in the ability of rural people to change themselves and, by doing so, change China. The CCP believed in the necessity of first changing underlying economic and social structures. These disagreements spilled over into the early policy making of the PRC, when some former rural reconstructionists took issue with the increasingly functionalist approach the CCP adopted toward rural people—­an approach that the CCP shared with its Nationalist prede­ cessor. For instance, Liang Shuming, the sage of the rural reconstruction efforts, publicly remonstrated Mao about this approach to rural people in 1953.22 Many rural reconstructionists like Liang, in contrast to the CCP, believed that

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rural modernization had to be generated from and by rural people; it was not a process dictated to them. Reconstructionists, moreover, refused to cede that developmentalism and economic growth were the fundamental salves for what ailed rural people. Instead, in contrast to both the GMD and CCP visions of government as the leader of policy and social change, rural reconstructionists advocated for (if not always practicing) a people-­led approach to modernization. For these reasons, while the CCP remains—­as it has in all histories of modern China—­an important touchstone for this study, it is a minor player in the narrative that follows. The Historical Context for Rural Reconstruction Reconstruction was a watchword for development in the Republic of China and, by the 1930s, was closely associated with the Nanjing government. Sun Yat-­sen had begun talking about the process of reconstruction, a postrevolution plan for national reform, almost as soon as the Qing Dynasty fell in 1911.23 Over the following decade, Sun continued to discuss his ideas for the remaking of China in forums such as his trilogy, Plans for National Reconstruction, which contained components that addressed psychological, material, and social reconstruction, and a magazine he founded titled Reconstruction ( jianshe zazhi).24 These discussions were distilled in The Fundamentals of National Reconstruction, published in 1924, which encompassed plans for economic development as well as the political tutelage (xunzheng) of citizens in their new responsibilities.25 Immediately after establishing its government in Nanjing in 1927, the GMD began to utilize Sun’s ideas of national reconstruction—­and particularly his focus on industrial development—­to inform policy making. The GMD established a Reconstruction Ministry, a National Reconstruction Commission, provincial departments of reconstruction, and county-­level reconstruction bureaus. Over the course of the 1930s, as the threat from Japan grew, Nanjing centralized its reconstruction efforts and, eventually, turned them toward national defense and Communist suppression. Yet even though the scope of these efforts was initially ambitious—­and at some times and for some levels of government appeared to be significant, as in one estimate for 1931–­32 that 16 percent of provincial spending was on reconstruction projects—­reconstruction was essentially a trendy catchall for the policy of planned, centralized modernization of infrastructure and industry that has been characterized as the developmental state.26 In contrast to the GMD’s emphasis on economic development or national production, the independent reformers whom this book examines picked up another strain of Sun’s ideas of reconstruction—­the tutelage of the populace

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in the practices of democracy and a psychological reconstruction of the people that would make them better people and thus better citizens. In Sun’s thinking, a period of political tutelage in which elites trained the people in their citizenship responsibilities would ease the way toward successful political transition. The resulting focus on education and tutelage was, for independent or small-­scale reformers, partly a pragmatic choice. They did not have the funding to electrify the villages or to build new roads, but they could teach people to read, attempt to instill self-­discipline, and encourage them to work cooperatively with their neighbors. Yet out of this grew an alternate vision of Chinese modernity that complicated the notion of modernization as solely about the improvement of material conditions. In China, modernization efforts came initially in a rush of government-­led self-­strengthening reforms in the late nineteenth century as the country’s elites tried to confront the deficiencies it believed explained China’s defeat at the hands of Western imperial powers in the Opium Wars. As a result, as in other places around the world, modernity in late nineteenth-­century China was primarily focused on an agenda of industrialization and institution building: shipyards and the military, translations of political treatises, and fiscal rationalization. Nanjing doubled down on this agenda by channeling money into industry and infrastructure. Intellectuals and urbanites of the 1920s, however, were increasingly concerned with being modern—­with behaving in a modern fashion and with manifesting the modern in their day-­to-­day lives. In the 1910s and 1920s, urbanites signaled their allegiance to the new Republic through dress, deportment, etiquette, and many other embodied aspects of the self.27 This new modernism was closely associated with the cosmopolitanism of the cities and the individualism of the modern life that could take place there.28 But reformers, turning their attention to the vast majority of the population who lived in China’s countryside, believed it need not be. Rural reformers saw in this increasingly personal vision a geographic flexibility that could not only take modernity out of the cities and into the countryside but also reshape it to suit the human geography of the small villages and towns that dotted China’s countryside. It could become the basis of a new China that drew on a robust countryside. These shared goals were important enough to enable ideas and personnel to move back and forth among projects and to allow some formal structures spanning the entire rural reconstruction effort to emerge in the 1930s. Across the loosely organized movement around rural reconstruction, reformers shared ideas about how to create a distinctly Chinese rural modernity that would uplift the rural masses and strengthen the nation, yet the differences between reformers were not trivial. At the MEM’s project at Dingxian, Christian,

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US-­educated Yan Yangchu ( James “Jimmy” Yen) advocated populist education and a liberal, capitalist vision of rural reform, while at the Xiaozhuang School, the John Dewey disciple Tao Xingzhi proposed training rural “tutors” who would in turn go out to educate the masses, and perhaps most different of all, the prominent intellectual Liang Shuming—­whom Guy Alitto wrote of as “the last Confucian”—­insisted on grounding his reforms in references to traditional Chinese social structures and rejected the homogenizing influence of Westernization on the culture and economies of Chinese villages.29 Examining a cross section of this collective effort at rural reconstruction allows us to see that an overemphasis on the ideological differences between the most famous of the reformers—­differences that were real and that had real im­ plications—­has nevertheless led to a story of rural reconstruction that stresses its disunity and difference and thus overlooks the political and social power the movement had.30 One of the challenges of understanding rural reconstruction has been teasing out the similarities among projects—­what contemporaries saw as shared approaches and goals—­embedded amid the critical differences. As I will discuss in the following chapters, there were disagreements among rural reconstructionists about forms of village governance, the relationship of the central and provincial state to the county and village, how to educate and mobilize rural people, and the kinds of economic relationships villages ought to ideally establish with the nation and the world. Yet there were also shared methods and approaches, and those provided a repertoire of speech and action for rural reform that could be repurposed by others less invested in rural reconstruction’s shared vision of the integrity of rural people and communities, such as the provincial government rural reconstruction project in Suiyuan, focused around a military garrison, which laid claim to rural reconstruction’s cultural cache by opportunistically pairing the language of self-­transformative modernization with an authoritarian agenda for increasing rural productivity. Locating the threads that reformers believed united them as much as articulating their differences is critical to understanding the power rural reconstruction had for contemporaries as a possible solution to China’s ills. However, what in rural reconstruction’s midstride seemed an aberration—­ government-­run, top-­down rural reconstruction efforts like the one in Sui­ yuan—­foretold important shifts. The ease with which some contemporaries jux­taposed the discourse of the modern self and an agenda for top-­down rural mod­ernization highlights the elitism and authoritarianism that was inherent in reformers’ seemingly self-­empowering vision of rural people. Early on, reformers focused on self-­transformation and self-­discipline, arguing that rural people

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could undertake their own modernization. They felt that elites—­intellectuals, academic experts, political leaders, medical personnel—­were needed to facilitate this process, but reformers plotted a patient process that did not require the coercion of the GMD or the class struggle of the CCP. Within a decade, however, the patience necessary to persuade villagers to undertake self-­reform wore thin, particularly as the challenges to security, stability, and prosperity mounted across China in the 1930s. Many reformers found that their impatience with the slow pace of reform made them increasingly open to a partnership with coercive power—­in this case, the government in Nanjing—­in order to have the tools necessary to effect rapid and immediate change. The Japanese invasion further intensified the ongoing shift to a top-­down means of implementing mass mobilization, as the nation’s dire situation seemed to demand that centralization and commandism take precedence over the earlier dream of a self-­sufficient population that could direct its own awakening. Those reformers who managed to relocate their projects to more secure areas in Southwest China (the vast majority of the reform projects were halted or closed as the Japanese invaded) placed greater urgency on developing a rural leadership that could manage the immediate tasks of modernization rather than on elevating the masses as a whole. In essence, by the end of the movement’s existence, reformers had shifted to sustaining rather than challenging or, in the cases of those more closely aligned to the government from their beginnings, tweaking Nanjing’s vision of modernization and reform. The rapid shift from optimism for rural people’s ability to change to state-­led approaches starkly revealed that many reformers had always privileged their end goals—­material enrichment and nationalism—­over the transformation and elevation of the individual. In spite of the optimistic beginnings for the rural modern, then, this is a story that arcs toward failure. But it was not a failure—­not entirely, at least—­of the enterprise of generating a Chinese notion of modernity grounded in the countryside, as the eventual success of the CCP demonstrates. Yet this vision of the countryside has not fared particularly well in the intervening decades, as the efforts of contemporary intellectuals and reformers to once again revitalize the countryside through New Rural Reconstruction indicate. Prasenjit Duara has argued that nations are constructs prone to splinters and alternative pathways, yet historians are often complicit in obscuring the alternative paths, the resistances to dominant narratives, and the varied definitions of nation and participation that mar and fragment the national narrative.31 Instead, then, of seeing reformers’ efforts as a failed initiative that does not contribute to the national narrative, this book asserts that rural reconstruction

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efforts reflected a broader move to generate an alternative, rural vision of a Chinese modernity—­one grounded in a vision of rural people and local communities as elements of the organic, national whole, not subordinate cogs to the state’s wheel. That vision may have ultimately failed to generate a national agenda for change, but the Republican reforms established an important precedent. In struggling with how to be both modern and rural, Republican reformers set the terms of debate: China could be both. Examining rural reconstruction thus provides a critical and compelling example of Chinese efforts to lay claim to the modern project, to situate Chinese rural people within its parameters, and to develop an alternative model of development that privileged the local community. The Global and Local Dimensions of the Chinese Rural Modern Chinese rural reconstruction efforts developed in dialogue with a broader global discussion about rural reconstruction, the remaking of the countryside, and efforts to bolster rural communities in the face of stronger states and more intrusive markets. Chinese reformers shared their hopes for rural modernity with counterparts in other supposedly backward rural regions such as India and Japan. In those places, as in China, intellectuals and policy makers positioned rural modernity as an alternative to what they believed was a likely outcome of modernization schemes—­industrial agriculture’s depopulation of the countryside, which they saw Western counterparts decrying in England, the United States, and elsewhere. The proposal by Asian elites that their villages could be sites of modernity confounded the received wisdom of the day, that the “Asiatic village” had preserved remnants of universal social properties—­ones that the West, but only the West, had evolved beyond. Western scholars of the time observed that the social organizations and legal traditions of Asian societies resembled practices found in European history and, in so doing, placed the Asian countryside firmly in the past.32 Asian reformers instead argued that the village could be modernized, becoming the model for a new rural (and potentially global) modernity and showcasing an alternative path to industrialization and democracy that did not require urbanization, the destruction of rural communities, or the obliteration of the local in the face of the global.33 Developing a model for rural modernity could thus place Asian reformers in the vanguard of global economic and political change, and they could simultaneously preserve village communities, which many reformers praised as repositories of Asian culture. That supposed past—­for which Western scholars at the time derided Asian societies—­would then become a strength.

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Tracking this transfer of ideas and how Chinese reformers tapped into it helps answer why the Republican efforts were a “reconstruction” and not a “construction. ”34 It is an important quirk of translation that the efforts under scrutiny in this book were referred to as “reconstruction, ” since the literal translation of its Chinese counterpart, jianshe, is “construction. ” The Anglophone term “rural reconstruction” moved along imperial lines of communication, changing shape as it hopped from Ireland across the British Empire (including into England, India, and South Africa) before subsequently converging with the parallel Chinese phrase “xiangcun jianshe” (literally, “rural construction”) in the mid-­1920s.35 By 1937, translating xiangcun jianshe as “rural reconstruction” was so common that the University of Iowa grad and Yanjing University sociology professor Xu Shilian (Leonard S. Hsü), who was at the heart of mid-­1930s efforts to institutionalize an independent reconstruction movement, would note in a speech that while it “should properly be translated ‘rural construction,’ ” popular usage dictated that it be rural reconstruction.36 This circulation of not only the term but also the ideas that accompanied it reveals an emerging rural cosmopolitanism—­an international effort to es­­tablish the countryside as an equal and perhaps even preeminent site of modernity and to see countrysides in disparate places as linked by condition and context—­in the early twentieth century.37 A particular basket of reforms, which included cooperatives, broad social change, and the enlightening of dis­ enfranchised rural populations through science, emerged in Ireland in the first decade of the twentieth century and was dubbed “rural reconstruction. ” As this particular mixture of ideas was ferried around the globe, it carried the term along with it. It was a set of ideas and networks that was developed within a system of global empires and that sought to mitigate their negative effects through village self-­sufficiency, but to do so without engaging in direct political confrontation. The problem, elites argued, was that the rural masses had been too focused on politics and not focused enough on ensuring their own prosperity. The remedy, elites believed, was education and outreach in order to empower rural people to modernize and govern themselves. Rural reformers set out to provide that education.38 In the 1910s, discussions of rural self-­sufficiency were predicated on a global concern for the “rural problem” (in Chinese, it was the nongcun wenti), a litany about disintegrating villages, impoverished villagers, and decaying social values linked to the lingering disenfranchisement of rural people that dates to at least the Long Depression of the 1870s.39 In response to the agricultural devastation and famine of the late nineteenth century, colonial nationalists employed the ideas of rural reconstruction and rural cooperation to recall a

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precolonial past in which rural people had supposedly thrived. The rural re­­ form work subsequently undertaken in many places around the world attempted to bring this imagined idyll into being, and in each place the vision was used to challenge the scaling up of agricultural production (and the resulting disregard for rural communities) that governments increasingly relied on to ensure stability and prosperity. Throughout the twentieth century, various groups engaged in efforts to challenge the commodification of agriculture, but the rural cosmopolitanism of the 1910s and 1920s was a little different. These activists conceived of themselves as reformers rather than revolutionaries, and they were not antimodern: they embraced science, industrialization, psychology, nationalism, gender equality, and bureaucratiza­tion (and its rationalization). But they wanted the scale of such reforms to remain local and centered on the rural community and rural people. In short, they wanted modernity but without the inherent destruction of rural practices and rural people that James Scott, for instance, has chronicled as an im­­portant component of the modern project.40 The international conversation about rural reform encompassed the ideas of both revitalization and construction. Modernization was conceived as a process of change that could restore a sovereignty that had been lost: the village had to be reconstituted and resurrected in order to strengthen it against the economic and administrative incursions of colonialists. In India, the No­ bel Prize–­winning poet Rabindranath Tagore oversaw a village reform effort on his family’s estate that included, beginning in 1922, an Institute of Rural Reconstruction that employed both locals and foreign agricultural experts.41 Indian rural reconstruction efforts—­not only  Tagore’s institute but also YMCA­supported experiments and village uplift projects initiated by colonial offi­ cials—­served as an important example for many Chinese reformers, including Liang Shuming, who met with Tagore during Tagore’s 1924 Chinese tour. Tagore believed that colonial rule had devastated what had once been self-­ reliant rural communities and that Indians could not achieve greater political aims (such as self-­governance) without first attending to the inequities of the Indian countryside.42 Tagore argued that the village was “an organic whole” but had suffered under colonial rulers who had not treated it as such. The British, Tagore charged, “have cut off our intimate ties with rural life. ” Those natural ties, binding all Indians to the land, had to be resurrected and rural society treated, reshaped, and reconstituted (following colonial evisceration of the peasants’ supposedly natural tendencies to self-­organization and self-­ sufficiency) village by village.43 “I have set my heart upon a revival of our villages but let no one think that I am in favour of rusticity, ” Tagore wrote. “The village I envisage will flourish with dignity and with all human resources

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at its command. ”44 The reconstitution of the village was thus undertaken in order to create a community strong enough to progress forward, not to reclaim an idealized past. Chinese reformers shared the concerns of reformers like Tagore that the strength and integrity of rural communities had been eroded and that this made supposedly lagging places more vulnerable to exploitation and occupation. Reformers believed that rural China was collapsing, but in fact the evidence of such phenomena—­local elites fleeing the villages for the cities in droves, rural incomes declining, tenancy rates going up, increased trade having a depressive effect on the rural economy, and so on—­was less certain. Historians have raised questions about whether any of these trends were actually occurring over the long term (some even postulating that at least until the 1930s, rural China had experienced a long period of growth, at least partly as a result of increased international trade). Yet, for the purposes of our story, what matters most is that reformers—­like most people at the time—­believed the countryside was collapsing. In response, the rural reformers examined in this book placed the burden of economic change firmly on Chinese rural people and communities. They believed that rural China was falling behind, they advocated that rural people participate in new markets in response, and they formulated plans for reform that invested in the individual agriculturalist or his village community in order to increase standards of living and that sought, through the formation of economic cooperatives and other subcounty organizations, to insulate villages from the depredations of the global markets that they acknowledged as a new reality. This set of ideas congealed among reconstructionists in the 1930s—­exemplifying that, as David Faure has argued, the global depression profoundly and negatively affected Chinese retrospective visions of the rural economy.45 In this regard, increasing village solidarity through “self-­governance” (zizhi) was a critical goal. Chinese villages were already in practice governing units, if subbureaucratic ones. They encompassed a range of activities that reformers pointed to as evidence of proto-­self-­government activities, from associations with elected leadership that managed water control or religious festivals to the electing of village leadership itself to the existence of village statutes and covenants. They mused on the possibilities that the traditional “village republic” might serve as a basis of future reforms, and in their publications, they stressed that the rural insularity that many early twentieth nationalists derided as rural clannishness and parochialism could be turned instead into a village solidarity that would strengthen and bolster the nation.46 In practice, however, some villages were resistant to demands for increased transparency or open elections that upset existing power structures.47 Thus, in many of the places where

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introduction

self-­governance reforms were implemented, in­­stitutions existed to sustain a transition to self-­governance, but villagers, as we shall see, contested decisions handed down in the name of supposed self-governance that contradicted the solidarity and autonomy of their communities (or, at least, of community leaders). For that reason, rural reconstructionists’ mid-­1930s entanglement with the GMD, which was largely interested in the ways that self-­governance could streamline bureaucratic hierarchies and allow greater state access to the villages, put reformers at odds with the power structures of the communities in which they worked. When it came to both economic and governance reforms, reconstructionists looked widely for solutions. American influences were substantial, reflecting the fact that by the 1920s, most students returning to China from abroad had received their degrees at American institutions. Progressive ideas about education, the relatively new fields of agronomy and public health, and the sociological study of common people all worked their way into reformers’ approaches and ideas. Despite some critics’ charges that the reform efforts were “Americanized, ” the reformers drew from broader sources, looking also to the Japanese New Village efforts, making tours of Russian and Yugoslavian rural public health efforts, and studying European agricultural reforms.48 Moreover, as the 1920s wore on, international institutions turned their attention to China. A variety of “international development experts” trooped through the reform projects, writing reports and taking inspiration.49 Sometimes they treated China like a “virgin” land where any project might be tested anew.50 Others wrote of China as the consummate backward locale—­if it worked there, it would work anywhere. The presence of these experts reflected a broader shift in China and elsewhere away from the loosely organized reform efforts of the early twentieth century and toward an increasingly state-­based vision of rural reform and development.51 Yet these outside observers neither created nor dictated the course of Chinese rural reconstruction.52 They were latecomers to the discussion, turning what had been an attempt to develop a distinctly Chinese vision of rural modernity toward an early incarnation of development. Chinese rural reconstruction illustrates this transformation, one that would have profound implications for the nature and mode of efforts to modernize rural people. Modernity and the Self in Rural China The rural modernization discussed in this book is a transitional one—­not the state-­based modernization and development of the post–­World War II period that has been closely associated with American strategic interests but one

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more personal, independent, and contingent.53 That contingency is evident in the vocabulary reformers chose to describe what they were doing. A few wrote that they were trying to create “modern people” (xiandairen), “modern life” (xiandai shenghuo), and a “modern society” (xiandai shehui) and mentioned their hopes for “rural modernization” (xiangcun xiandaihua) and a “modern nation” (xiandai guojia).54 More often, though, reformers did not speak of modernity so much as “progress” ( jinbu) or “development” (  fazhan). They wrote about a “new life” (xin shenghuo) and a “new people” (xinmin). They advocated “transformation” ( gaizao) and “improvement” ( gaijin). Some reformers were opposed to calling their reforms “modern, ” but in their terminology, they nevertheless conveyed a vision of a countryside made new—­ one built around the goals of greater efficiency, greater awareness of the local citizen’s place in the nation and the world, increased reliance on science and the scientific assessment of social phenomena, greater access to education, and greater transparency in governance. There was space in Republican China for a rural modernity—­indeed, for many different sensibilities about what it meant to be modern. Gail Hershatter has written of modernity in Republican China as “a shifting and receding target. ”55 This was particularly true in early twentieth-­century China, when the founding of the new nation reshaped identity and self-­expression.56 Chinese intellectuals did not believe that modernity was a singular experience or state of  being. In fact, it was quite the opposite: they weighed and recalibrated the possibilities of this or that element of the modern project and selected those that they found most suitable. While it is possible to track the notions that intellectuals held about the self, about modernity, and about social change in early twentieth-­century China, it is much harder to excavate the rural self or even rural intentions and opinions about reformers’ proposed project of self-­transformation. As a result, this book is not a history of the rural self or rural people’s experiences with reform in early twentieth-­century China but rather a history of efforts to encourage self-­transformation and, by extension, transform society. In part, this is a reflection of existing sources. Many of the reform locations were situated in areas that were devastated by the Japanese invasion and occupation, and in some cases, there are few existing archival records before the 1940s. Yet there is a rich body of printed and archival materials created by reformers who wrote widely of their proposals for reforming rural people, their efforts to do so, and their successes and failures in the field. The voices of rural people are much more difficult to locate and, when found, were often being recorded and filtered by the reformers themselves. For instance, the reform publication that Hongxu wrote for, a thrice-­monthly newspaper called The Farmer (nongmin),

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introduction

was edited and written by new literates affiliated with the MEM and often featured letters and other ephemera from students in mass education schools and other rural people. But it is impossible to verify such writings. We must take them as they come to us—­letters written by students being taught by reformers, for a publication overseen and funded by reformers, produced in part to publicize reform efforts. There were no letters on the pages of The Farmer that criticized the movement’s schools, health clinics, or agricultural outreach. As a result, we learn only a limited amount about actual rural conditions from such sources but a great deal about elite perceptions and hopes for rural people (which, in turn, help us understand how and why the state and intellectuals approached rural people during this time period—­and this did, of course, affect rural people’s lives). At the core, the rural reformers who are the focus of this book believed in the ability of rural people to change themselves and, in doing so, to change China. This book explores reformers’ proposals for how this could happen and the results of their efforts. In the chapters that follow, I unravel how Chinese reformers structured a rural pathway to a modern Chinese nation and the role they envisioned within it for rural people. Each chapter is centered on a different component of reformers’ agenda for rural modernization, tracking, along the way, the process by which reformers hoped to recreate rural people and their communities. It also, however, follows the shifts in rural reconstruction from a loosely organized network of reformers in the 1920s to a somewhat more coherent movement closely aligned to the ruling Nationalist Party. I do not seek to cover every element of rural reconstruction on these pages. I do not, for instance, spend much time on health reforms and agricultural reforms. For many of the reformers, these elements of reform were subordinate to their education reform goals. For that reason, I instead focus the following chapters on tracking the trajectory of reformers’ education efforts, broadly conceived, and in particular their use of education to reshape rural selves, social structures, and local government. Agricultural outreach and health campaigns sometimes fit into that narrative, and I mention them when they do. Chapter 1 begins with the vision of the idealized modern countryside and the way that reformers inserted that vision into the popular literature they created for the rural masses, promoting the notion that literacy was the basis of national citizenship. Chapter 2 explores the vision of self-­transformation and self-­discipline that built on literacy education and that was embedded in rural reform projects, even in some cases projects that did not hew to the notion that self-­transformation trumped other forms of modern knowledge. While reformers emphasized the importance of reformed individuals and, particularly in the early years, focused much of their attention on them,

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individuals were always perceived as most effective and politically powerful in a social context. Chapter 3 investigates the efforts, informed by the emerging social science disciplines, to organize (zuzhi) the village community. These efforts were underlain by the assumption that rural culture was backward, degenerate, and ill suited to modern life, underscoring the ways that rural reconstruction was increasingly about the better control and management of rural people. This tendency is further considered in chapter 4, which examines the self-­governance efforts within rural reconstruction, and the national-­ local tensions these efforts revealed as the Nationalist government began its own rural reconstruction efforts. The close alliance between rural reconstruction and Nanjing in some projects (though certainly not all) that grew out of the self-­governance efforts of the mid-­1930s began to compromise the vision of the embryonic Rural Reconstruction Movement when it had hardly gotten off the ground. The movement’s standing in China was further complicated by the involvement of foreign funders, who also had their own agendas, while the Japanese invasion of North China made rural work increasingly dangerous. Chapter 5 explores the rapid rise and fall of the so-­called movement around rural reconstruction and the ways that shared challenges made reformers turn increasingly to ideas of rural development instead of the self-­ transformation that had characterized the early movement. In its early days rural reconstruction emphasized awakening the people and tutoring them to self-­rule, but by the movement’s end it focused on training local cadres who could efficiently implement policies of mass mobilization and mass education, rather than directly educating and enlightening the masses.57 The debates and experiments centered on rural reconstruction provide a window into a time when China’s future was yet uncertain—­would it be the urban industrialization of the Nationalists, or the rural revolution of the Communists, or something else? At a critical moment in the 1930s, rural reconstruction seemed to be a compelling third way for rural and national change. We might ask, then, did rural reconstruction ever have a chance at success? Could reformers’ shared vision—­of a nation of villages, populated by self-­ transformed, politically empowered citizens—­have ever moved beyond its grounding in local conditions to become a national reality? Many at the time felt it did have the possibility to do that, and local elites and government officials across China were convinced enough by its focus on small-­scale efforts to bolster local communities that they adopted its name and borrowed from its grab bag of methods. Yet alongside the GMD and the CCP, rural reconstruction advocates made a distinct choice, shared across their diverse projects: they would focus not on developing a unified theory or philosophy of rural problems and solutions or on constructing state-­making hierarchies

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introduction

but instead would engage in the long, slow process of self-­transformation, mass mobilization, and bottom-­up state creation. Many of the reformers were deeply committed to their goals. They didn’t just write opinion pieces from the security of the cities, they moved, often with their whole families in tow, to far-­ flung rural locales because they believed that education, uplift, social reform, social education, and the many other names they gave their work could carve a way forward for China. Their efforts might have succeeded had there been time for their mobilizations, transformations, and interventions to slowly accrue, but there was not. The approach of their decentralized, diffuse reform efforts was at variance with the demands of the historical moment—­a moment that had little patience for the slow accretion of individual transformations. Labeling this effort a failure and consigning it to the closed box for cast-­ off futures means not only overlooking the immediate effects of the reform efforts—­millions of rural people educated, vaccinations dispensed across the countryside, and new seeds and breeds introduced from hundreds of agricultural stations, just to name a few—­as well as dismissing the harder-­to-­measure ways that the ideas of reconstruction seeped into the rural consciousness, but also ignoring why this image of rural China captivated so many, at least for a few years. Despite the failure of rural reconstruction to generate an ongoing project for national change, its compelling vision of a modern countryside lingered, readymade to be picked up and repurposed through the decades.

1

Writing for New Literates in the Chinese Countryside

In the spring of 1927, the Mass Education Movement (MEM), an organization devoted to teaching the Chinese masses to read, published a textbook written for rural illiterates, The Farmer’s Thousand-­Character Reader (Nongmin qianzi ke).1 The textbook culminated in a three-­part lesson on the “model village. ” Perhaps inspired by the neat, industrious New England towns they had glimpsed during studies abroad, in the accompanying illustrations the textbook’s authors placed at the center of the little hamlet a clock tower (not a sight common to rural China but one that did evoke the urban modernity of, for instance, the famous Customs House clock tower on Shanghai’s Bund), “according to which the townspeople know the time to conduct [their] affairs. ” In the model village, the lesson declared, everyone had a job, officials were elected by popular vote, the young people had organized a militia to protect the village, and besides managing the home, women could “all spin, weave cloth, knit socks, and do needlework. ” No one drank, gambled, or smoked, but instead found entertainment in the village’s gymnasium and museum. Additional components of  life in the model village included a public park, sports fields, hospital, and public health council. This utopian vision of an orderly rural society remade for prosperity and stability placed education at its center, for it hosted “a forest of schools”: a kindergarten, a middle and high school, a People’s School (for adults), and a worker’s school, as well as a library, a newspaper reading room, and help stations where those learning to read or who wanted laws or texts explained could stop for assistance.2 The centrality of education to the model village—­a reform vision of a mod­­ ernized countryside—­reflected the view of the MEM, like many other prominent reformers who emerged in the mid-­1920s, that literacy education was the initial mechanism for educating rural people as citizens and as modern people.

1 . Illustration for a lesson on “The Model Village” (mofancun) in the 1928 edition of  The Farmer’s Thousand-­ Character Reader (Shanghai: Shangwu yinshuguan, 1928)

2 . A refined depiction of the model village in the 1930 edition of  The Farmer’s Thousand-­Character Reader (Zhonghua pingmin jiaoyu cujin hui, 1930)

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chapter one

MEM Director Yan Yangchu wrote that literacy was “the foundation for all other lines of improvement, for with an illiterate people very little headway can be made. ”3 In the mid-­1920s, many rural reform advocates like the MEM were still based in cities, but on the pages of their many publications, they constructed a coherent idea of a remade countryside, like that sketched in the Farmer’s Reader. The lessons on the model village, and the ones that preceded it, outlined a new swath of activities and knowledge—­from how to write and mail a letter to how to celebrate National Day (October 10)—­that the authors believed rural people should be familiar with. This vision of rural modernity adopted the markers of urban modernity, among them literacy, participatory governance, and gender equality, but situated them in a rural context and rural geography, emphasizing particularly their roles and responsibilities within their villages. Above all, it placed the focus of reform on rural people, and particularly their abilities to reform themselves and their communities. Reformers didn’t just believe that rural areas were as capable of being modern as urban ones—­they went a step further and insisted that a modernized countryside was the basis of the Chinese nation. The MEM in particular was strongly committed to the connection between literacy and citizenship. The organization was founded in 1923 to further mass literacy, and was initially engaged in urban campaigns to teach city people to read. A 1922 literacy campaign held in Changsha by Yan’s first literacy organization, the forerunner to the MEM, sported banners that made clear the organization’s belief about the connection between national strength and literacy. “An illiterate nation a weak nation, ” one read, while another offered a solution: “China’s salvation? Popular education. ”4 In order to address the broad illiteracy that MEM leaders argued was a national failing, the organization almost immediately began to publish a literature—­of textbooks, short stories, and educational pamphlets—­for new literates, which would over the next decade and a half grow to a catalogue of hundreds of books, pamphlets and newspapers distributed to millions of readers in China and abroad. By 1927 when The Farmer’s Thousand-­Character Reader was published, the MEM had found a base for its experiments in rural literacy outreach. At the invitation of self-­governance activist Mi Digang, whose family had been involved in local reform efforts in their home county since the first decade of the twentieth century, the MEM began work in Dingxian (Ding County) in southwestern Hebei in 1926. Mi was active in national political movements (he belonged to the GMD and participated in the Zhili Provincial Assembly, among other activities), but remained invested in the future of his home village.5 Inspired by Mi’s ideas that “instead of writing beautiful essays and paper plans, ” intellectuals should undertake rural reforms “in a practical way, ” the MEM decided

w r iting for new liter ates in the chinese cou n tryside

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in 1929 to relocate their headquarters from Beiping to Dingxian.6 There, Yan wrote, “we want in every way possible to merge our life with the village life. ”7 Setting up shop in the county seat’s exam hall, the MEM established a famous and closely watched model county that its founders and funders, who even­ tually included the Rockefeller Foundation, hoped would become a national and perhaps even international model of reform. The MEM was not the only group to place education at the center of a vision of rural revitalization. A few years after the MEM started their rural  edu­ cation efforts in Dingxian, the prominent intellectual Liang Shuming founded the Shandong Rural Reconstruction Institute at the invitation of General Han Fuju, who governed the province. Liang’s vision of the countryside was also grounded in education, proposing that village schools be the organizing institution for the countryside. For Liang, profound social change would result from the “schoolification of society. ”8 Other reformers, discussed in the chapters that follow, also founded schools in rural areas throughout China that became, or attempted to become, the centers of model communities. In drawing connections between literacy and citizenship, Liang, Yan, and their compatriots were in the company of nationalists the world over. Build­ing on Enlightenment ideals that linked literacy and social progress, in places as diverse as India and Russia, early twentieth-­century mass literacy advocates argued that education would civilize new citizens, inculcating people with the values of the nation.9 Indeed, as social science researchers turned their attention to the psychological effects of education, they argued that literates and illiterates differed from one another. For instance, 1930s Soviet researchers concluded that illiterates “had a ‘graphic-­functional’ way of thinking, ” describing the world around them largely in terms of the possessions and activities that populated their own lives, whereas literates were capable of envisioning a world beyond their own experiences.10 Literacy, in this view, was a crucial marker of modernity, citizenship, and the right to participate in the nation, and while critics have since questioned the casual connection made between literacy and good citizenship, it was a powerful belief at the time. As the shifts that the MEM underwent in the 1920s illustrate, during that decade Chinese reformers increasingly came to feel that literacy was critical to China’s future and that meant educating the majority rural population. This chapter examines the vision of a remade countryside that was created on the pages of  the MEM’s publications for new literates, the ways that their rural literacy efforts sought to incorporate previously marginal groups into the vision of the Chinese polity (not just rural people generally but also, for instance, rural women), and the way the MEM’s didactic literature, and its vision of an inclusive and remade rural society, became the basis for its propagation

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3 . Anti-­Japan parade in Dingxian, in front of a wall bearing the MEM slogan “Eliminate illit­eracy, make new people” (chu wenmang zuo xinmin) in 1931 or 1932. Sidney D. Gamble Photographs, David M. Rubenstein Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Duke University.

of a model for rural modernization and a future for the Chinese nation. The MEM’s slogan was “eliminate illiteracy and make new citizens for China, ” a project intended to turn the rural denizen, as Yan wrote, into an “intelligent and progressive citizen of  the Chinese Republic. ”11 As reformers affiliated with projects like the MEM taught rural people to read, they also imparted a vision of a remade rural, a vision in which literacy was at the core. This vision had implications for existing rural communities and power structures. In 1933, after the MEM’s arrival, the local gentry organized a protest in which hundreds paraded through the streets, shouting “Down with the Mass Education Movement!”12 Literacy education was, as historian Harvey Graff has written, “the medium and the carrier of the elements of the hegemonic culture, ” and in the case of 1920s China, that meant a focus on the role rural people might play in the nation but also a profound shift in local power structures as national elites and the state began to meddle in and manage village affairs that had previously been left to local powerholders.13 Local elites, like those who organized the 1933 protest in Dingxian, thus often had the most to lose in such arrangements, and the MEM would bump up against them again and again. The MEM, for its part, insisted that through education they were freeing rural people from the exploitation by local powerholders that illiteracy

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made them vulnerable to, such as being cheated in financial matters, so they might better manage and sustain their villages. Yet it wasn’t just local powerholders who objected to the MEM’s sharp focus on literacy education. Dingxian, some critics asserted, was on a railway line and had a higher standard of  living than the average Chinese county. Solutions generated there might not work in poorer regions. Others complained that the MEM was “completely influenced by American capitalism, ” a charge that stuck. Most of the upper echelons of its leadership had advanced degrees from American universities, the program’s ideology was strongly influenced by an American progressive agenda, and by the mid-­1930s, its largest funding sources were American. But the most repeated critique was the charge that the MEM was myopically focused on literacy, overlooking systemic rural troubles. In 1934, one regular observer of rural reconstruction efforts asked rhetorically, “How can the Thousand-­Character Reader solve all the countryside’s problems?” (His answer: It could not.) He eviscerated the MEM’s plan for the countryside for having a lot of “flair” but no substance.14 That same year, a leftist study group that visited Dingxian for one week critiqued the MEM for starting with education rather than undertaking systemic reform. The MEM, they wrote, shortsightedly critiqued the peasants’ “ignorance” rather than the feudalism and imperialism that these observers believed had created rural poverty.15 They were right that the MEM believed that educating rural people could change China. The influence of the MEM’s program for reform and its vast body of publications for new literates demonstrates that despite the critiques, the MEM’s vision was nevertheless a popular and compelling one for many reform-­minded elites who attempted to persuade rural people to remake themselves through education—­and to do so without a revolution or a complete dismantling of existing institutions. In this, they continued a role that Chinese elites had taken for themselves for centuries as moral and social exemplars. Yet the effect of such efforts was also that literacy—­not just learning to read but also learning to read modernity—­sought to normalize rural people into the contemporary values and mores of modernity and the nation, becoming a vehicle for propagating a new vision of the countryside as a possible site of China’s future. The MEM’s Rural Turn The transition from Beiping to Dingxian was a challenging one for the MEM, as staffers came to grips with the significance of  their move and the realities of rural life. Located on a rail line 120 miles southwest of  Beiping, Dingxian was

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a flat county, situated on the coastal plain that ran toward Tianjin and the sea. The soil was mainly sand and loess, the weather dry most of the year, other than the wet months of  June to September when 84 percent of annual precipitation fell. Plentiful wells kept drought at bay, but the county had a dusty feel to it, with spindly trees dotting the landscape. One photo from the MEM’s early years shows camels lolling in a dusty courtyard beneath the famous pagoda that still stands today in the center of town. The county’s population of 400,000 was scattered in its 450 villages and towns, the vast majority making a living primarily from farming.16 Remembering his introduction to Dingxian, Survey Department Head Li Jinghan (Franklin C. H. Lee), who held an MA in sociology from Columbia and was one of the Chinese pioneers in conducting social research among the lower classes, recalled his sleepless first night in the county. Afflicted by unbearable but inexplicable itching he gave up on sleeping in his bed and instead tried to sleep on a table. He had never encountered bedbugs before.17 The move to the countryside meant personal sacrifice and confronting the unfamiliar in ways that would eventually become part of the MEM myth, anchoring funding reports and magazine stories for decades to come. For instance, Feng Rui, a Cornell PhD who worked for the agriculture division, would later tell a visitor that “he had studied agriculture in China and abroad for more than nine years, ” but until the move to Dingxian “had never seen a Chinese farmer, ” an assertion that seems hard to believe.18 Initially, just a handful of MEM staff members and their families moved to the county, a number that eventually grew to more than 100—­varying reports indicate that by the mid-­1930s there were between 150 and 200 MEM staffers in Dingxian. This was an elastic number that included all levels of expertise and experience, from the dozen or so internationally educated national elites who headlined the project down to local high school graduates. Many staff members who moved to the county were accompanied by their wives, children, and sometimes parents as well.19 Moving to the county made staffers aware of the need for whole-­scale social reform: it was hard to educate students who missed class because of illness or suffered from trachoma (which can lead to blindness) or to convince parents who needed children’s labor at home to send them away for part of  the day to learn to read. As a result, the Dingxian work rapidly extended beyond education to public health, agriculture, popular culture, and local political reform. The MEM established a robust village health program, overseen by graduates from the Rockefeller Foundation–­funded Peking Union Medical College (PUMC), that, among other activities, built a network of central and village clinics, attempted to retrain local midwives in sanitary practices, undertook

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widespread vaccination campaigns, taught villagers to build sanitary latrines, experimented with birth control education, and headed up a fly-­elimination campaign.20 The MEM’s agricultural outreach efforts included a concerted attempt to introduce the Poland China boar to the local farmers, encouraged healthier designs for chicken coops, established agricultural cooperatives, ce­l­ ebrated Arbor Day to encourage tree planting, and held a county fair that was attended by as many as thirty thousand villagers.21 MEM employees and numerous researchers used Dingxian as a basis for social surveys, producing studies of its local operas, folk songs, architecture, health practices, and so on.22 American Sidney Gamble, heir to the Proctor and Gamble fortune, first went to China with the YMCA, but found his way in the late 1920s to Dingxian. He would write three books based on extensive research there, and though he was not a fan of village fare (“Breakfast, ” he wrote in a letter to friends, “was millet gruel and eggs so I usually had mine out of a can”), he thought it had been “a privilege” to participate in the social survey work in Dingxian.23 The organization cultivated a cohort of  local graduates of its adult “People’s Schools, ” as well as local health workers and agriculture specialists, all of whom helped the organization make inroads into insular villages. One visitor to Dingxian in 1934 reported that local People’s School alumni said, “Before, it was the MEM that was active and the rural people were passive. Now actually it is the rural people who are active. ” They reported that, as a result, the problems the institution faced were growing pains—­securing enough funds and teachers—­not trying to convince intractable peasants to participate in their programs.24 Yet education and rural literacy remained the focus of the MEM’s work, threaded through each of the other areas of reform. As Yan would later say, “[If ] there isn’t a plan to reconstruct education, then [our plans] will come to nothing. ”25 The MEM was at the forefront of a national turn toward rural concerns, and its staffers’ experiences in Dingxian were used to inform the body of didactic texts that issued forth from MEM presses for the next decade, texts that were then used by reformers throughout China as primers on how and what to teach rural people. These texts promoted the ideal of a self-­governed, economically self-­sufficient village where rural people were educated, sanitary, maintained a healthy balance of work and leisure, and served the nation through active participation in their local community. By proposing that rural people be the primary targets of reform, the MEM signaled that it believed rural people embodied China’s backwardness, and for the next decade the organization remained, despite the concerns of its critics, optimistically invested in the power of literacy to transform the countryside. The MEM’s literacy efforts built on several decades of Chinese efforts at social mobilization and reform through mass education. Beginning in the first

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4 . A courtyard classroom in Dingxian in 1931 or 1932. It appears to be Yan Yangchu in front of the class. Sidney D. Gamble Photographs, David M. Rubenstein Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Duke University.

decade of the twentieth century when the faltering imperial government initiated its “new policies, ” various proposals were made to fund new schools, from levying new taxes on villagers to seizing temple lands to support schools (and sometimes repurposing temples to house schools) to discouraging spending on other village endeavors like operas (to funnel money into education instead).26 Throughout the Republican period, elites signaled their support of the state’s modernizing agenda by funding local schools, which, in the case of rural areas, were seen as bringing “urban culture” into the villages.27 Some rural people welcomed literacy reforms and opportunities for education, but others were wary. The new schools of the late Qing were targets for rural protests, the primary manifestation of the broader burdens—­especially through taxes—­that rural people bore as a result of the new policies, sometimes resulting in physical attacks on the schools themselves.28 The MEM’s efforts, too, faced challenges from rural people, as when villagers objected to the content of the curriculum or leaders pointed out that they already had a local school and did not need another. Rural people thus did not perceive literacy efforts as innocuous, though many did embrace them and the new opportunities they

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provided. As MEM staffers often noted, the base of regard for literacy that existed in China made many peasants eager for education of any sort. As Yan wrote in 1929, rural people were engaged “the minute we uttered the magic word tu-­shu [dushu, reading]. There was instant attention and interest no matter how illiterate, how ignorant the farmers may be, they recognize the value of education. ”29 The popular embrace of their education initiatives was a crucial part of  the MEM’s origin story. The MEM’s mass literacy work grew out of the creation of a literature for a special group of new literates: Chinese laborers working in France during World War I. In 1918, Yan—­who would be selected as MEM head in 1923—­graduated from Yale and went to Boulogne, France with the YMCA to work with Chinese laborers. As a child, Yan attended a missionary school run by the China Inland Mission in his native Sichuan, which then led to a scholarship to Hong Kong University, and finally to Yale (and, later, also Princeton). In the decades after taking the helm of the MEM, a position he would hold in various guises for most of  his life, energetic, verbose “James ‘Jimmy’ Yen” (as Yan fashioned himself in the Anglophone world) embodied American hopes for a new China. His rural reform efforts were embraced in the United States, where he lunched with Henry Ford, lobbied the US Congress, and was featured in Time Magazine, which described him as “the essence of will, exploding off his seat . . . like an evangelist under a big top. ”30 In China, Yan cut a slightly different figure, downplaying his Christian faith and wearing the traditional long gown of the Chinese scholar, and influencing the formation of public policy on rural issues and, especially, rural education, mak­ ing him one of the most important rural educators of his time.31 In France, Yan confronted a class of Chinese people he hadn’t ever interacted with before: common laborers. Between 1916 and 1920, the French and British governments recruited 140,000 Chinese laborers to build reinforcements, dig trenches, and undertake other kinds of work behind the frontlines of the ongoing war. Beginning in 1917, the YMCA, its efforts run by young men like Yan, coordinated support and entertainment for Chinese laborers in Britain and France. Yan was besieged by requests from the mostly illiterate Chinese laborers to transcribe letters to their families and share with them news of the war raging close to their worksites. In response, Yan organized classes to teach the laborers to read and write.32 Yan found his options for instructive texts limited, and the laborers he was tutoring complained that the first text he chose was “dry and flavorless. ” Yan asked his friend Fu Baochen (Paul C. Fugh), who would later obtain a PhD from Cornell in rural education and then become head of the rural education division of the MEM, to come up with more engaging materials. Fu first combed through characters to select the six hundred

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most commonly used ones, updating the earlier text.33 In addition, Yan founded a newspaper called the Chinese Laborers Weekly (Huagong zhoubao). The first issue was published in January 1919 and each reproduced four-­page issue, handwritten by Yan himself, relayed news from home and pressing updates on the conflict, discussed issues of concern to the workers, and included a short literacy lesson. Within a short time, circulation was fifteen thousand.34 Watching the laborers become more self-­sufficient and self-­possessed as they learned to read made Yan a believer in the transformative power of literacy education. Over the coming decades, Yan’s account of  his awakening to the burdens of illiteracy anchored Rockefeller Foundation funding reports, fundraising speeches in the United States, and the many pamphlets and scholarly texts that issued from MEM presses. After returning to China in 1920, Yan joined a group of like-­minded education advocates, including Tao Xingzhi, a Columbia Teachers College PhD who served as one of  John Dewey’s translators during his tour of China from 1919 to 1921. They began to combine the literacy education methods devel­oped in France with the ideas about education and social mobilization brought back by students who had studied in the United States. But the urban populations who were their initial quarry, MEM leaders knew, constituted only a small per­­centage of the total Chinese population, which was more than 85 percent rural. As most estimates suggested, and as rural reformers confirmed in Dingxian and other rural reform areas, a high percentage of the rural pop­ ulation was illiterate; estimates of the percentage of the rural population that had some level of literacy ranged from between 30 and 45 percent of men and perhaps 2 to 3 percent of women.35 Moreover, school enrollments in the villages—­despite limited efforts to implement compulsory schooling—­were often low. As few as one in four of China’s school-­age children were enrolled in classes in the early 1930s.36 Low literacy rates were frequently cited in both government reports and popular media as one of the barriers to self-­ government. For education reformers, literacy work was vital to creating the citizenry that would form the nation-­state’s base. With the vast majority of China’s population in the countryside, that meant educating rural people. Even before the move to Dingxian, the MEM put its energies into literacy education as the basis of citizenship and the making of a new people. The organization’s emphasis on literacy resonated with international efforts to tie literacy to increased political participation. In the United States, the Immigration Act of 1917 barred illiterate immigrants from entering the country and literacy-­based activities like women’s book clubs and the founding of libraries incubated nationalist sentiments. In Russia, as in China, mass literacy efforts not only sought to teach students to read but used literacy education

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as a vehicle to convey values and to depict the reality of rural life, as well as shaping a tangible, shared national identity that was in part dependent on the reader beginning to think of himself as a distinct individual.37 Aware of and inspired by such efforts, the MEM nevertheless did not argue that in becoming educated the Chinese peasant was joining an international community of national subjects. On the contrary, they asserted that Chinese rural people were particularly suited to turn popular education into citizenship. As one report from the MEM explained, “Unlike the serf-­peasant of Russia or the ‘Untouchable’ of India, the Chinese farmer is a free being. The lack of a strong centralized government has cherished his independence and self-­reliance. Though poor, he is thrifty and industrious. Though illiterate, he is intelligent. ” These people, the report continued, were the ones the MEM was courting; this “young, vigorous, substantial, rural stock” was “capable of building a great modern Republic in our own generation. ”38 The sentiment reflected the organization’s deep-­seated belief in the positive potential of rural people, and faith in the ways that education might harness their inner power for the nation. This is the spirit that infused the body of mass literature the MEM created in the 1920s and 1930, as reformers produced texts that could guide the peasants’ awakening to modern life, to their responsibilities in the nation, and to themselves. In this regard, producing texts for the new mass audience was a call to action for socially conscious writers. A 1934 MEM report argued that new literature had to be created for a growing reading public that included rural people, women, and children and that “if scholars can be induced to begin writing for this rapidly increasing reading public instead of for each other, they will find themselves infused with a new creative power, and Chinese literature will once more take its place among the great literatures of the world. ”39 The New Culture efforts of the 1910s—­to create a new society for the Republic by reforming all aspects of life, but particularly the personal elements, from dress to sexual behavior to marriage practices—­had championed the vernacular and the creation of a common people’s literature. The MEM efforts picked up this call, but instead of the urban-­focused literature that New Culture adherents churned out, they proposed a literature for, about, and sometimes even by rural people.40 Writing for New Literates As the text that taught potential readers how to read, the MEM’s Thousand-­ Character Reader, based on the traditional elementary text, The Thousand-­ Character Classic, was the most important publication in the MEM arsenal. It

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formed the base readership for a slew of  MEM publications: three periodicals (two newspapers for new literates and the journal Minjian) as well as a body of  hundreds of texts and pamphlets on topics ranging from soil enrichment to forming farming cooperatives to novels. By 1927, when the farmer’s version of the reader, in which the lessons on the model village appeared, was published, the MEM’s authors had already produced a series of simple texts featuring series of couplets and simple line drawings.41 After returning to China, Yan coedited the first Thousand-­Character Reader, published in 1921. The reader had four volumes with twenty-­four lessons each, an arrangement preserved in later editions.42 After the MEM was organized, it sponsored the editing of a new thousand character text, which was published in August 1923 by the Commercial Press, a Shanghai publishing house that during the 1910s and 1920s was one of the leading textbook publishers and focused on featuring new knowledge and serving new audiences.43 Over the next two decades, the Thousand-­Character Reader went through numerous iterations, and its authors numbered more than a dozen. The MEM and its founding educators were not pioneers in revising and editing a textbook to suit China’s new educational system and the needs of its citizens. Such efforts had been under way since the Qing reform of the education system began in 1905. Particularly after the 1911 Revolution, educators used textbooks and new educational methods to convey ideas about the society and republic they hoped to build. Educators took advantage of the burgeoning publishing market in the early Republic to promote new ideas, a trend that continued but slowed under the censorship and standardization of the Nationalists after 1927. And these educators implemented a US-­inspired educational system that advocated popular education, citizenship education, and local determination of educational needs.44 Publishers turned their attentions to rewriting textbooks, with pragmatic (rather than traditional literary) goals in mind, with the result that textbooks and the educational experience they guided became a crucial space in which to foment Chinese nationalism and inculcate learners with the new values and practices of the nation.45 The MEM, alongside other rural reformers, helped expand the audience for literature even further by writing for the broadest new group of readers in China: illiterate rural people. Since 1923, the MEM had used its literacy textbook, The People’s Thousand-­ Character Reader (Pingmin qianzi ke), in its urban mass literacy campaigns, selling at least three million copies in its first few years in print.46 Those numbers do not nearly convey the number of people who actually read the textbooks; Tao described how the books were passed from person to person, read over and over until they fell apart.47 The MEM textbooks were carefully cali-

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brated to appeal to their target audiences. The MEM saw that its textbooks had to reach multiple audiences—­children’s textbooks held little interest for teenagers, a textbook that drew deeply on “local color” would be out of place a few counties or provinces over, and materials that addressed the issues of the city were unsuitable for country schools. As a result, there were four separate published versions of the Reader: the early People’s Thousand-­Character Reader and later versions for townspeople, farmers, and soldiers, with differing content in each tailored to its target audience. By 1927, the MEM had published two versions of the People’s Thousand-­Character Reader, the People’s Textbook, and the Young People’s Textbook, as well as higher-­level texts like the Farmer’s Advanced Literature Reader, teacher’s guides, test booklets, and dictionaries.48 The textbooks for rural people were filled with reformers’ expectations and advice for the modern rural person, on subjects from voting in village elections to keeping the roads clean, but they also celebrated what were seen by reformers as consummate rural values, such as family, thrift, and the value of education. This marriage of familiar and novel was critical to the MEM’s construction of a vision in which the generative center of the Chinese nation would be the countryside and not the city, and in which its values were hand selected to resonate with reformers’ notions of the existing rural. At an even more basic level, the textbooks simply extolled the benefits of rural living over urban—­a distinction from much of the Republican modernization discourse, which typically celebrated the liberation of city life. In one lesson in the rural reader on “The City and the Countryside, ” a man named Meng Li­ ming goes to visit his friend Ye Youshan in Beiping. Impressed by the busy city, Meng tells Ye, “The city is so much better than the countryside!” His friend replies, “Actually, the city is crowded, the air is polluted, and it isn’t sanitary enough. The countryside has many big trees [and] the air is fresh. I want to live in the countryside!”49 Most importantly, rural people were the primary actors and subjects in the rural-­focused textbooks—­they were shown reading books, conducting business, and taking part in village activities. Whether prepared for urban or rural audiences, the textbooks shared a considerable amount of content. Both urban and rural readers had lessons on how to mail letters, build and keep up roadways, the health dangers of flies, bathing and tooth brushing, Chinese geography, and the meaning of the National Day, among many others. These were written in straightforward, simple language that provided instructions about the activity at hand. The lesson on National Day in the 1928 edition of the rural reader, for instance, posed the question, “Why do we call it National Day?” and then answered, “Because this is the day the Republic was established.  .  .  . All the country’s schools

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5 . Illustration of a peasant reading The Farmer’s Thousand-­Character Reader (Zhonghua pingmin jiaoyu cujin hui, 1930)

have a holiday. Students attend celebrations, sing the national anthem, [and] bow three times to the Chinese flag. ”50 The Townspeople’s Thousand-­Character Reader published the same year was less prescriptive, lacking the details about singing and bowing, and instead mentioned that National Day was a celebration of the Wuchang uprising that sparked the revolution. Otherwise, the content was quite similar, as were the accompanying illustrations, both showing a celebratory sign on a gate with national flags flying above and a

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crowd gathered below (though the crowds are more substantial in the Townspeople’s version).51 As these similar lessons on National Day illustrate, one of the commonalities between the textbooks was their emphasis on citizenship. Cultivating citizenship, as much as encouraging literacy, was a deep concern for the MEM. A writer in one of  its journals opined, “I often hear people say, ‘China is a nation in name only. ’ Why? Because China has a ‘nation’ but it doesn’t have ‘citizens. ’ ” Citizens, the author continued, had responsibilities, but rural people were still ignorant of their civic obligations. Rural people, he continued, “aren’t even clear why China wants to be known as a nation. ”52 In all the readers—­urban and rural—­the MEM tried to explain why the responsibilities of citizenship mattered, but beyond that, the rural and urban visions diverged. In the MEM imagination, for urban readers, citizenship meant national affiliation, while for rural people the primary political unit was the village. For instance, a lesson in the urban reader that explained the meaning of “government” (zhengfu) stressed that, “if the people are indifferent to the qual­ ity of their government then they have abandoned their responsibilities. As a result, if the government is good it does not have the people’s power to support it; if the government is bad, then when it runs amuck there will be no saving national affairs. ”53 Another on China’s geography ended, “Resist foreign aggression and quell internal strife with one heart; the basis of patriot­ ism is in unity. ”54 The rural reader had few such references to the citizen’s contributions to the nation. Instead, the reader stressed villagers’ obligations to their village community, such as one on village prohibitions that noted, “If all villages have prohibitions, and no one violates them, then everyone can live in peace and contentment. ” Other lessons on cooperative societies and People’s School alumni associations also emphasized the contributions that rural people could make to the village.55 Thus, when set side by side, the textbooks demonstrate that the message of citizenship was a differentiated one. In other ways, too, each version of the textbook reflected the locations and experiences of its target audience. For instance, the Townspeople’s Thousand-­ Character Reader contained a lesson in which a young boy and his older sister stand on a city street outside the large plate glass window of the “Chinese-­ English Pharmacy” and discuss the model human skeletons on display  in­ side—­not a sight rural residents would encounter in their villages.56 The ur­ban reader also featured lessons on topics that did not appear in the rural textbooks such as the purpose of advertising, keeping business accounts, court proceedings, native place associations, and labor unions.57 Though the townspeople’s reader also featured lessons on important Chinese agricultural products, like one on sericulture, the rural readers presented rural people as the

6 . A boy and his sister look in the window of a pharmacy in The Townspeople’s Thousand-­Character Reader. She asks him, “What’s there to be afraid of? They’re just models of the human body” (Shanghai: Shangwu yinshuguan, 1929 [1927]).

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central actors in the textbook’s vision of reformed rural life, its illustrations depicting them in their village homes and fields. The most striking of these rural-­focused lessons was the series on the “model village” that closed the Farmer’s Reader. Other topics of rural-­focused lessons included the village fair, rural employment, growing vegetables, seed selection, and rural education, as well as a subset of lessons that introduced a variety of potentially useful technology, such as windmills and steam power. The texts discouraged elements of rural life that reformers viewed as backward, such as early marriage and praying to local gods. In one such lesson, titled “Praying for Rain, ” an educated local derides villagers’ belief in the ability of the Dragon God to bring rain. “All of you beseeching the Dragon God, ” he scolds, “is useless. ” Convinced by his scientific explanations of the way that rain clouds form, they put a halt to their worship.58 However, other traditional ideals were incorporated into the vision of a revitalized rural China, like the praise for Mencius’s mother (who sacrificed in order to educate her son) and the ideal of a close-­knit (and sometimes still extended, not nuclear) family.59 In addition to being widely used in the “People’s Schools” affiliated with the MEM, the textbooks were used in many other settings. For instance, in the 1920s, Warlord Zhang Zuolin and his son, Zhang Xueliang, invited Yan to oversee the implementation of education for soldiers using the textbook and purchased fifty thousand copies of the Thousand-­Character Reader, as well as five thousand colored slides (used in lanterns for instruction). Shortly after their soldiers completed the course of study, the warlords began to issue a “soldier’s weekly” (tubing zhoukan) that relied on the 250 characters from the first volume of the textbook as its base vocabulary.60 In the mid-­1930s, the magazine affiliated with Liang Shuming’s reform projects in Shandong reported that schools in the model county of Heze were using the Farmer’s Thousand-­Character Reader.61 Mao Zedong even encouraged his CCP fellows to look at the MEM’s Thousand-­Character Reader for inspiration before the Communists produced their own thousand-­character reader.62 Textbooks were only the beginning of the MEM’s massive publishing efforts. By 1934, the MEM was fast approaching ten million books in print, with four hundred-­some different titles on their roster, the majority of which were nonfiction “general knowledge” books.63 Published as flimsy pamphlets on cheap paper and costing a few cents, the pamphlets ranged from works that reported on the MEM’s projects, like An Introduction to the Work of the Rural Family Association and A Plan for Urban People’s Education, to general-­ interest texts on subjects like women’s issues, opera, and farming methods.64 The MEM staffers writing the pamphlets were also observing and collecting peasant literature to inform their work. One literature department staffer

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remembered how he was encouraged by his MEM supervisor to go out to the villages to “experience life, ” and was tasked to attend village temple fairs to watch local opera performances and take down stories and songs, many of which were later collected and published.65 It is unclear how much revenue the organization generated from the sale of its texts. In 1931, the organization reported that only a little more than 1 per­ cent of the organization’s income came from publications and royalties—­about ten thousand Mexican dollars.66 Yet given that most of the publications sold for just a few Chinese cents apiece, these represented significant sales. Many other organizations followed suit, beginning to publish similarly themed textbooks, including a thousand-­character text published by the GMD in the early 1930s called The Three Principles of the People Thousand-­Character Reader and various versions written by Tao Xingzhi or his colleagues at the Xiaozhuang School, founded after he parted ways with the MEM in the mid-­1920s. An MEM report noted in 1934 that many of the major Chinese publishing houses had some kind of thousand-­character reader on their roster, and that “at one time there were at least a dozen readers for illiterates that used our ‘trade mark’” of the “thousand-­character reader. ”67 These textbooks were, like the MEM’s various versions, tailored for their intended audiences, but most, like the MEM’s texts, celebrated education and citizenship. In a literacy textbook produced for soldiers by the Xiaozhuang School’s Mass Education Research Association, for instance, the emphasis was primarily on the nation and the duties and responsibilities a soldier had to it, but the text also discussed family and the interlacing filiality between family and nation. (Lesson 13, for instance, featured a letter from a soldier to his mother, whose birthday happens to coincide with National Day. “Today, October 10, is a good day, ” he writes. “It is Mother’s birthday, and it is the Republic of China’s birthday. Long live Mother! Long live the Republic of China!”)68 In contrast, The Farmer’s Book, published by the Rural Reconstruction Institute in Zouping, Shandong in 1934, focused, like the MEM’s rural reader, on village community. The text covered a familiar set of topics, from forestry to citizenship to National Day, but also included lessons that reflected the concerns of  the Zouping project, such as lessons on “village covenants” (xiangyue), forming self-­defense corps, and establishing cooperative societies.69 The MEM had a set of  topics that it introduced in all its readers, urban and rural, but the rural literature demonstrated an effort to establish a distinct notion of rural modernity—­one that did not aspire to urbanization but that presented a vision for rural people of  how they could achieve modern citizenship in a rural setting. This was reflected in other, later iterations, such as the

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Zouping textbook, but the MEM was the earliest textbook producer to interweave rural modernization with nationalism. The goal of its mass literature was to make citizens of the nation, regardless of  whether they lived in the city or the countryside. The goal of the literature created for new rural illiterates went a step further, and sought to affirm for readers that rural places and people could be the critical basis for China. Lao Wang and the Ignominy of Illiteracy The MEM’s desire to use its publication to mobilize rural people for reform is evident in another MEM publication, founded about the same time as staff members were editing the farmer’s reader: a publication called The Farmer. Initially featuring articles promoting the MEM’s various literacy programs and testimonies from newly literate students who had participated in their literacy courses, over the next fourteen years the newspaper grew to include articles on all facets of rural life, from advice on making fertilizer to advocacy for rural women’s education. The Farmer was distributed across China between 1925 and 1938, including to subscribers in Outer Mongolia, Xinjiang, and Tibet, and even internationally.70 In the early days of  the magazine’s publication, Yan bragged to Stanford University President Ray Lyman Wilbur that the paper had received fifty-­six requests for subscriptions in just one day.71 The Farmer was written for a rural audience, peppered with the earthy vocabulary and interests its authors imagined rural people wanted to read. In addition to in-­depth coverage of the work at Dingxian after the MEM moved its base there in 1929 and reports from the counties and villages officially affiliated with the MEM, The Farmer featured columns on agricultural methods, home sanitation, health, and women’s issues. It instructed its readers on how to write and address letters, recorded folk sayings and folk songs for its readers’ entertainment, and noted current international events and the movement of major military forces across China. At least some rural readers—­if we take the enthusiastic letters to the editors at their word—­were pleased to see their concerns reflected in print. The Farmer, founded and largely written by recent graduates of the MEM’s rural People’s Schools, was meant to showcase the reciprocal role rural people could have in shaping the discourse on Chinese nationhood and modernization.72 In letters to the editor and the submission of stories, news clips, and literature, rural readers of a wide variety of backgrounds—­from rural gentlemen farmers to laborers educated in People’s Schools—­expressed their visions of modern rural China and discussed the way their learning and education allowed them to participate in the changing life of the countryside.

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In the second year of  The Farmer’s publication, a short comic story graced most issues. Picking up a thread of stories detailing the travails of various illiterates published in the first volume, the feature took on a particular character in the second volume with the introduction of “Good Old Wang” (laowang). The twenty-­year-­old Wang, an illiterate who supports his family through a string of odd jobs, illustrated to readers both the novel and familiar dangers of illiteracy.73 Police officers, electricity, and new forms of travel and communication are at the center of this story, and the shame the illiterate Wang experiences is often pegged to his inability to read and understand new practices and technologies. While distinctions between country and city could correlate to the difference between an urbane knowing and an uneducated bumpkinage in literature of this period, in the early literacy efforts geography mattered less to the distinction between modern and backward than participation in literate culture.74 In the context of the Lao Wang stories it was not the responsibility of those introducing new technologies—­like the dangerous electricity pole that plays a central role in one Lao Wang misadventure—­to make them legible to all community members, literate or not. Instead, writers created a dichotomy between literacy and illiteracy, inclusion in a modern society or exclusion, via humiliation, from it. During the first set of stories, Wang loses remittance money from a relative because he can’t read the receipt (the man he asks to read it redeems the ten kuai himself and pockets it), drives a cart—­with ox attached—­into a wolf pit because he fails to notice the warning signs, and mixes up his employer’s mule’s medicine with his own when both fall ill at the same time.75 After this first string of mishaps, Wang “gradually realized the benefits to reading and going to school, and no longer dared say to people, ‘I am a peasant (nongmin), I have no use for reading. People who have money and nothing to do, they can study and become officials. We don’t read or go to school, and we should stick to our roles. ’” Wang sees family members reading and “feels envious” of them, and so “he began to think that if he had time he would go to learn a few common words, but he still hadn’t had the opportunity. ”76 Throughout the series, the authors used Wang as a foil to their many articles encouraging rural people to learn to read. Wang repeatedly invokes typical excuses for his illiteracy—­from lack of time to lack of status—­and the authors of the story chipped away at the legitimacy of such excuses, presenting a new story to pillory Wang in each issue. The japes at Wang’s expense persisted through the story’s run, affirming each parable’s main point: illiteracy was not only inexcusable; it was laughable and, moreover, incompatible with a modern world only accessible through the written word.

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7 . Lao Wang knocked out by electricity in Beijing, from the newspaper Nongmin, August 1, 1926

Shame is at the center of these stories, and Wang’s greatest offenses come not when he fails at day-­to-­day tasks like keeping accounts and reading signs, but when he unknowingly transgresses new rules or fumbles encounters with new technologies, all because of his illiteracy. For instance, Wang’s first train ride ends in disaster, when he disembarks in Tianjin rather than Beijing (the city had not yet been renamed Beiping), then has to walk the eighty-­five-­mile distance (he had already learned in an earlier episode that he oughtn’t fall asleep on the railroad tracks, when he had invariably overlooked a sign that warned him of the danger).77 Later, he is arrested for urinating in a Beijing alleyway. After serving three months of coolie labor for his offense, Wang is released. Stopping to rest on the street, Wang leans against an electricity pole. A police officer notices Wang standing there, but before he can call out, Wang is knocked to the ground by electric shock. When Wang finally comes around, the officer asks, “Didn’t you see the sign on the electricity pole that says ‘Caution Danger’?” Wang replies with the now tired line, “I can’t read. ”78 The MEM and The Farmer were not the only publications of the time to use the “Lao Wang” figure to play on the tropes of rural backwardness and its contrasts to the modern. In 1926, Pearl S. Buck—­a good friend of  Yan and an admirer of the work at Dingxian—­published a short story called “Lao Wang, the Farmer” in The Chinese Recorder, a story that strikes many of the same themes as the MEM stories, from the contrast of urban and rural culture to the protagonist’s desire to make a better life for his son through education.

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Notably, Buck and her coauthor, Shao Teh-­hsing, emphasized the importance of  literacy for their Lao Wang, who waxes hopefully about his grandson’s education: “Ah, but when my grandson can write for me, I shall be afraid of no one!”79 A small Lao Wang “genre” existed in Chinese literature of the time, including other literal Lao Wangs, such as one that appeared in a story in Shandong Mass Education Monthly (Shandong minzhong jiaoyu yuekan), as well as a more expansive literature that featured Lao Wang–­type characters—­some bumpkins befuddled by the workings of the modern world, others more like Buck’s proud rural stalwarts, left behind by a world that did not acknowledge that it was built upon their labor.80 The vibrancy of the genre was apparent even on the post–­Lao Wang pages of The Farmer. After the Lao Wang story concluded in late 1926, readers subsequently began to submit stories about other illiterates, like an “Old Zhang” and an “Old Chen, ” for publication.81 Again and again, The Farmer’s editors and authors emphasized the nexus of  literacy and modernity, with Lao Wang and his ilk acting as strong cautionary tales. This connection was reinforced by occasional letters that trickled in from readers attesting to their appreciation of the publication. In early 1928, the newspaper published an eight-­part series called “What Is Your Favorite Column in The Farmer, and Why?” Its authors wrote of  waiting impatiently for The Farmer to arrive and reading through each copy multiple times, often expressing their belief that literacy and social progress were connected.82 One new literate from Baoding related his personal story of education and enlightenment in a letter to The Farmer in 1925, along the way summing up the relationship between literacy and social reform. He detailed how he gathered together each week with his fellow People’s School graduates to “study the new words in the paper” and “do a little play-­acting, have a little fun, sing a few songs. ” But he also emphasized the social effects of his education: “Reading the newspaper . . . has some benefits. Progressing [things] a few steps. And knowing how to talk about sanitation. And knowing the negatives of smoking opium, drinking alcohol, and gambling. ”83 Though in most cases it is not possible to verify that the letter writer was an actual rural person, these letters nevertheless illustrate how fully the MEM committed to reinforcing its message that literacy and modern reforms were intimately intertwined on the pages of its publications. Women in the Rural Modern As Yan and others made clear on paper and through their actions, their vision of the rural modern made space for previously disenfranchised groups. In contradiction to the often conservative views of women’s social roles that

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reformers encountered in the villages, they stuck to the enlightened notions of the day that liberated, educated women were necessary to a strong nation. Reformers reached out to women in a variety of ways, including health care and home visits by nurses, economic cooperatives that helped women raise chickens, and popular entertainment, like opera performances. But literacy education was the most common way to try to convey a reform message to women. This continued to be true of social reform efforts into the early PRC period. A Women’s Federation cadre who Gail Hershatter interviewed recalled the importance of literacy education in the early PRC’s efforts to mobilize rural women: “Why did we start with literacy? At that time families would only let a woman go out of the house if she was going to learn how to read. When women enjoyed more contact with the outside world by attending literacy classes, their thinking became more liberated little by little. ”84 Similarly, for Republican-­era reformers, literacy education provided them with an opportunity to share with women their vision for a modern countryside. Women’s roles in that vision were distinct from men’s, but women and men had to clear the same hurdle: they had to learn to read. The MEM drew on an impressive roster of female affiliates who advised the organization on women’s issues. The prominent medical expert Marion Yang, who worked with the PUMC and founded the National Midwifery School, designed the Dingxian midwifery training.85 The feminist writer Lu Yin—­best known for her scandalous marriage and tragic, early death—­wrote textbooks and other materials for the MEM in the late 1920s, as well as opining about rural women’s education and the MEM’s work on it. And, of course, there was the legacy of the MEM’s founding donor, Zhu Zhihui, the wife of China’s former premier Xiong Xiling but also an important philanthropist and part of a largely forgotten cohort of elite imperial women who embraced new opportunities for public engagement in the Republic.86 The work of these well-­ known women was undergirded by a number of  lesser known but no less well educated and committed women, such as Zhou Meiyu, a Harvard nursing graduate who worked in the health department at Dingxian and later became a professor at Taiwan’s National Defense Medical College.87 Moreover, many spouses of MEM employees moved their families to Dingxian, established a school in which to educate employee children, and engaged in a variety of outreach activities themselves. This included Yan’s wife, Alice Huie (Xu Yali), a New York City native who received a degree in physical education from Barnard College. She played a critical, behind-­the-­scenes role in organizing and mobilizing the MEM’s women.88 In its classrooms, the MEM was building on twenty years of growth in women’s education that followed the 1907 Qing authorization of girls’ schools.

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This official promulgation had not marked the beginning of women’s education—­a very small number of elite women had been educated before that, and beginning in the late nineteenth centuries some elites, as well as foreign missionaries, began to establish schools for women. On the pages of the MEM’s textbooks and other literature, women were regular presences, though women’s issues were often folded into broader “rural issues. ” Gender was acknowledged as a distinct form of oppression, but usually as a metaphor for the marginalization of rural people more generally, the backwardness of rural cultural practices, or the submission and weakness of the entire Chinese nation. In this way, the MEM’s approach to women reflected the dominant discourse on gender and the nation in the 1920s, when women were cast as, first and foremost, a metaphor for the oppressed Chinese people and potential mothers of citizens. Women’s education was not identical to that of men, emphasizing instead the new subject of home economics as well as the role women might play in educating their children.89 A journalist writing for The Farmer recorded the declaration of a village head of Gaotou Village, Dingxian who said, “To improve the village, we must first improve the family. To improve the family, we have to organize schools for women and youth. ”90 To the basic curriculum in civics, literature, history, and geography, women’s classes added subjects like home economics, home industry, abacus, and penmanship.91 In the classroom, women read the same primer as men. There were repeated discussions of the development of a women’s primer. Though it was apparently never completed, the discussions indicate the MEM’s desire for gender-­ specific educational materials. The MEM did publish pamphlets recording their experiments with women’s education, such as one authored by Lu Yin titled Improving Women’s Lives. The MEM also established “housewife clubs” ( jiating zhufuhui), what Yan referred to in an English-­language publication as “better homes’ clubs, ” based on similar organizations in Japan, in which women studied ways to improve household organization and the education of  their children.92 The housewife clubs were organized by village women and, according to one observer, “although not many of the women have been educated yet, the families rely on them, so we gather the village’s women together to study and discuss home economics, such as knitting, washing, weaving, childcare, gardening, cooking. ”93 The Housewife Association was only one of many kinds of associations affiliated with the reform efforts, including a Head of  Household Association, a Young People’s Association, a Children’s Association, and a Daughters’ Association. The Daughter’s Association gathered the village’s “future housewives” to discuss much the same topics the Housewife Association discussed; in fact, the two associations sometimes met together,

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and the Daughters’ Association sometimes led the Children’s Association’s activities.94 Through such organizations, the MEM mobilized women on behalf of its goals. The MEM shared this method with the CCP, which experimented with courting rural women in order to gain the willing participation of their husbands and sons. In the Jiangxi Soviet, women’s groups were organized in order to aid women whose male family members had joined the army.95 Other rural reform projects, such as the GMD’s reform county at Jiangning, outside Nanjing and the Shandong Rural Reconstruction Institute, also made special efforts to reach out to and mobilize women. In Jiangning, the county provided childcare so women could attend literacy education and vocational classes. In Zouping, a government committee trained women to go into the villages and encourage other women to unbind their feet.96 While female MEM employees worked on a number of issues related to rural women, from health to education, the spouses of MEM leaders played key roles in these attempts to mobilize rural women. MEM spouses reached out to local women through activities like organizing the aforementioned housewife club, teaching home economics, instructing villagers in handicrafts, and participating in the education of local children. These included the wives (unnamed in sources) of Chen Zhushan, a University of Michigan graduate in charge of citizen education (and who Yan once described as “old revolutionary” as he had been active in the early Republican government), and Zhao Shuideng, a member of the literature department. However, Huie was the most prominent and was, for instance, frequently mentioned by foreign visitors as a generous host. As a helpmate and partner in Yan’s endeavors, she played a public role for the organization, all while raising the couple’s five children. She was involved in organizing the household associations, conducting health outreach, and training women in childcare methods, among other activities. She also played a crucial role in hosting the dozens of guests who visited the experimental district every year.97 And though the majority of MEM spouses were, like their husbands, Dingxian outsiders, a few MEM staffers, like Chen Zhice, the US-­educated deputy director of the theater department, married local women.98 Despite the gendered tone of much of the education, schooling did open unique opportunities for some female students. In Dingxian, female students started unions and became involved in establishing preschool education in neighboring communities.99 In 1936, the MEM established another experimental county in Hengshan County, Hunan Province.100 There the MEM used women as part of their “tutors” program, the program based on an idea that Tao Xingzhi had come up with of spreading education by encouraging students

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8 . Yan Yangchu (James Yen), Xu Yali (Alice Huie Yen), and their children in Dingxian in 1931 or 1932. Sidney D. Gamble Photographs, David M. Rubenstein Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Duke University.

to, in turn, teach their families and neighbors to read. According to one study, sixty-­nine female tutors were trained in Hengshan in spring 1935.101 Like so many organizations in the early twentieth century, the MEM connected the status of women to modernity. In this vision, as many scholars have pointed out, women’s liberation was subordinated to other political processes like state-­building and economic growth, the status of women becoming a symbol of social progress. Yet evidence suggests that the MEM’s efforts did make a difference in Dingxian, if in no other way than to begin to plant the seeds in this place—­such as in encouraging the formation of women’s unions and clubs—­for the radical transformation of the role and status of women that would take place over the following three decades. For the MEM, this process was dependent on literacy education for women. Building a Model of Reform through Model Leaders On a 1928 fundraising tour in the United States, Yan collected $10,000 from Henry Ford, who told him, “I like your idea. You go about the mass education of people the way I go about the mass production of cars. ” Yan would later

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tell critics that “it took Henry Ford a long time to perfect his first model, but when he got the model right he turned them out by the million. ”102 The MEM took seriously the premise that there was an ideal model for making new people. Models for reform and change have a long history in China, particularly as built around an idealized local community, but the power of the model in twentieth-­century Chinese society and policy making was unprecedented. This reflected both the international excitement for social reform and the domestic crises that impelled Chinese intellectuals to seek as quick a path to a modern China as possible. As Qin Shao notes in her study of the reform efforts at Nantong, a backwater county seat in the Yangzi Delta that became a well-­known reform model in the 1920s, “the model . . . was a socially engineered simulation of modernity  .  .  . an ‘authentic’ Chinese alternative of modernization based on local initiative. ”103 For the MEM and the many reformers who emulated them, this model was grounded in the notion that literacy education was the foundation of modern behaviors and modern citizenship. The goal of the MEM’s rural model was, Yan wrote, “to evolve a system of education for citizenship that is adapted to the genius of the Chinese people as well as the needs of a modern republic, and to develop a modern (not Western) Chinese district to serve as a model for the New China. ”104 By the early 1930s, the MEM’s Dingxian project was the best-­known rural reform model in China. In part, this was due to its prolific publications and its compelling vision for rural change, but it was also because of the replicability of its education model. That model was laid out in both MEM texts and spread through personal contact. For instance, once the MEM had moved its headquarters to Dingxian, visitors began to stream through, attending conferences and conducted observation tours. The Congregationalist missionary George W. Shepherd attended a 1933 conference in Dingxian as he was preparing to embark on overseeing a GMD-­supported rural reform experiment in Jiangxi Province (discussed in chapter 4) and wrote, “It gave us a new kind of thrill to sit under PhDs who have identified themselves with the people. One by one they came to the lecture platform in the garb of the people, and left us to wend their way on bicycles along the dusty roads, back to the soil and the farmers. ”105 Like Shepherd, many of these visitors were explicitly interested in adapting the MEM’s methods to their own outreach programs. A significant portion of these visitors came as a result of the MEM’s connections to the YMCA and to Christianity. Though Yan downplayed the MEM’s Christian undertones in China (in English-­language materials and when fundraising in the United States, he tended to emphasize it), Christian missionaries and Chinese Christians were a strong constituency for the MEM’s proposed “model” of rural reform, and the MEM hosted regular

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conferences that focused on Christian rural reform. Chinese elites in dozens of locations also saw appeal in the MEM model and adopted it. Centered on “People’s Schools, ” the MEM model of education was used in settings ranging from modern primary schools to night schools for laborers to classes for women held in their own homes. The MEM’s institutional reach was reported on the pages of The Farmer, which published reports from people around the country who wrote to tell of establishing People’s Schools or adopting MEM educational methods. The reports of  projects far and near included those such as the educational efforts in Baoding, a prefecture-­level city in Zhili about forty miles from Dingxian where Yan’s close friend, the missionary Hugh Hubbard, was actively promoting mass education.106 Another correspondent from Henan wrote a report that gave evidence of the extent to which reformers were willing to literally go to reach the people: he reports that three literacy classes were held in the private rooms of  the local bathhouse.107 A number of  provinces were reported to have adopted the MEM model for opening rural schools, including Jiangxi, where all the province’s counties were ordered to open People’s Schools; Hunan, where the local MEM branch printed and distributed thirty thousand copies of a text called the People’s Teaching Text (Pingmin jiaoben); and Shanxi, which ordered that all counties implement educational fees that would in part be used to establish People’s Schools.108 It is hard to gauge the reach of the MEM, in part because over the years the organization laid claim to these many affiliated or Dingxian-­inspired educational projects in an effort to enhance perceptions of its reach. Charles Hayford estimates that by 1931 there were four hundred People’s Schools and fifteen thousand students in MEM-­affiliated programs.109 Yet two years earlier, Yan had reported an unlikely number: that with thirty urban Mass Education Associations and many district ones, a total of five million students in various locations were studying under the MEM method, including in border regions like northern Manchuria and Sichuan.110 Such improbable figures make more sense when examining tallies that the MEM reported to the Rockefeller Foundation. For instance, in 1933–­34, the MEM reported that it had supported the education of one million students in “government and private institutions” and funded 386 Mass Education Bureaus around the country. These totals appear to count students engaged in programs inspired (it seems in some cases only tangentially) by the MEM’s model but funded not by Dingxian or the MEM but instead by provincial governments, private donors, and other sources. Of the money that passed through MEM affiliates during this fiscal year for “rural reconstruction and mass education” expenses, just about one-­ sixth went to programs directly administered by the MEM in Dingxian or to

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support the organization’s central administration. The rest was allocated to these “affiliated” projects, monies not raised and distributed directly by the MEM but rather allocated from start to finish in a specific locale or province. Presenting this as a unified program of reform was in part a strategy for making the MEM look as influential as possible for funders.111 Nevertheless, this presentation also demonstrates that MEM leaders envisioned the Dingxian project (and pitched it to their funders) as a replicable model, their claims to their institutional reach dependent on these affiliated projects. The MEM literacy program was created with replicability in mind, drawing on new educational methods, like lesson plans, to create a curriculum that was easy for teachers to adopt in their own classrooms. MEM leaders propagated standards and methods for everything from the character of their teachers to an exact set of questions teachers could talk through with their students when covering the material in a lesson.112 These guides provided potential adopters with clear guidelines on everything from curriculum to the kinds of teachers they should hire for their schools. In the early twentieth century, as the state implemented compulsory education regulations, the responsibility for school reform often fell to county and village leaders, leaders who might have little firsthand experience with organizing schools. The MEM template tried to provide novice local reformers with a map for successful education reform. They accomplished this through their growing body of accessible, easy-­ to-­read publications, a body of literature laced with the ideas of the modern countryside, which local leaders could pick up and use. Reading the Rural Modern On March 1, 1927, The Farmer published several letters from readers to celebrate their third year in press, including a lengthy piece under the recurring feature “Why Do I Love Reading The Farmer? ” A subscriber for a little more than a year, contributor Deng Runhua described himself as “not one with a book always at hand, ” and yet, he wrote, over the course of the year he had become an avid reader of The Farmer. Presumably thinking of the many features in the publication on agricultural technology and technique, Deng wrote, “Especially when I am in the fields, doing that kind of work, then I really want it for reference. ” Deng continued the piece with an exploration of what elements of The Farmer had so captured his attention: its emphasis on practical agricultural knowledge and its sympathy for rural people and their concerns. He wrote, “They do their utmost to instill us with citizen knowledge, to raise the peasant’s status, to lead us down a promising path, to work for our liberation. ”113

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On the pages of their publications, MEM writers constructed a modern society and culture for rural readers like Deng but also for those who sought to guide and shape rural people’s education. As will become clear in the succeeding chapters, this vision of the modern countryside made room for some forms of traditional social and cultural interaction, like village councils, cooperative societies, opera performances, and women’s management of household matters, while attacking others, like early marriage and the supposed misuse of  time. In this way, the literacy movement was not only about teaching people to read but about teaching people to read a certain set of modern practices. Lao Wang may have been a comic prod to readers to avoid the humiliation of illiteracy, but it was the model village of the rural people’s reader— a vibrant, coherent rural community defined by order and prosperity—that encapsulated reformers’ hopes for a new China. This was a compelling vision, catching on among local elites around China who were comfortable in a didactic role and saw themselves continuing the tradition of elites as moral and social exemplars. The MEM capitalized on these tendencies to spread their vision for rural reform.

2

To the Countryside

The students from Beiping, bundled in thick winter coats, gathered around the car to have their picture taken. Fur collars tickled the women’s chins as they sat on the car’s hood. Their male colleagues stood alongside, hands tucked deep in their pockets. With their Western-­style coats, wire-­rim glasses, and fashion­ able hats, they stood out as the “foreigners” the villagers considered them to be. They were in Jixian (Thistle County) outside Tianjin for one week to conduct social surveys among the peasants. Another team of students had been sent to conduct research in Dingxian by their group—­the Beiping District Allied Rural Assistance Group (Beipingqu lian xiangcun fuwutuan), an orga­ nization dedicated to “aiding rural society” as well as conducting research. The students were part of a movement in the 1920s and 1930s of  young, urban, educated Chinese who ventured to the countryside for a peek at China’s ru­ral underbelly. The calls for modern youth to go to the countryside began in the late 1910s. By 1931, when the students recorded their research findings, rural survey work—­particularly the superficial rural tourism that these students were engaging in—­was a common component of university education. The students prefaced their pamphlet of survey findings with a call to arms: “Future friends! We hope you will research contemporary society’s needs, gathering your strength to go out together with us . . . to the people!”1 But the photo said more than words about the students’ ability to integrate into rural society and learn about rural conditions. These young, reform-­minded urbanites were not alone in their desire to prove their national and modern bona fides by heading to the countryside to aid their less enlightened brethren, nor were they alone in sticking out once they got there. Early Communist activist Peng Pai strolled out to undertake

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rural organizing in “a Western suit and a white hat. ”2 Fei Dasheng, a sericulture outreach worker in Wuxi in the 1920s and the elder sister of sociologist Fei Xiaotong, recalled how villagers referred to outreach workers like her as “foreign” ( yang).3 Nevertheless, thousands of young elites went to the countryside to try to remake rural China, seeking to encourage peasants to self-­ transform while they also remade themselves. For many Chinese reformers, the modern “project of the self, ” as Anthony Giddens has called it, sat at the heart of modernity, and they were eager to find ways to tether that project to Chinese notions of education, self-­transformation, and the rural.4 This chapter explores that project of self-­transformation, arguing that although all the mass rural reform efforts of the 1920s and 1930s sought to remake the people, it was those projects that highlighted the simultaneous, reflexive remaking of rural people and elite reformers that were most appealing to a reading public. Such projects underlined the period’s optimism for the mutability of identity and highlighted that what many contemporaries counted as successful rural reform was not the measurable outcomes of increased literacy, widespread in­ oculation, or the spread of new agricultural techniques alone, but such reforms paired with the reconstitution of identity. This chapter examines how the disparate processes of self-­transformation in two early rural projects illuminated the disagreements among reformers about the best route to a modern countryside. At the Xiaozhuang School, a normal school founded on a hillside outside Nanjing in 1927, students were trained through an exacting program of self-­improvement, which included laboring in the field alongside “peasant advisors” and keeping a daily journal. Their rural education was meant to change them, to “commonerize” ( ping­ minhua) them, but also to create among them (and in turn create among the people) “tutors” (daoshi), who would oversee social change.5 The Xiaozhuang School engaged in considerable outreach, mainly through primary and adult education, to the surrounding community and took seriously its desire to elevate the education and skill of rural people. Yet its focus was on educating and remaking youth who would contribute to their communities. As mentioned in the introduction, though the school closed in 1930, it had a profound influence on a variety of rural reconstruction advocates. The Chinese Vocational Education Society (Zhonghua zhiye jiaoyu she; CVES) project in Xugongqiao, located halfway between Shanghai and Suzhou, shared with Xiaozhuang a focus on cultivating rural leaders. But in contrast to Xiaozhuang’s attention to modern habits of thought and behavior, the Xugongqiao project emphasized pragmatic education and within a few years had handed over administration of its local programs to rural people. The Xugongqiao program stressed training rural youth in a classroom setting in

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not just basic knowledge but also the technical skills that they were then supposed to transmit to their community. Its founders believed that the missing link in rural education, and the greatest need in modernizing the countryside, was technical knowledge. Xugongqiao reformers still used the language of self-­transformation, but on the ground, it was implemented to a different end. The Xugongqiao approach drew criticism from other reformers as being too bookish and classroom centered and lacking enough fieldwork, experiential learning, and going out among the peasants—­in essence, it was criticized as encouraging students to remake their identities through the mastery of modern skills rather than through contact with the rural masses. While the two programs at Xiaozhuang and Xugongqiao were designed and overseen by educators who were in close communication and shared the goal of reforming the countryside, the influence and profile of  the Xiaozhuang program was much greater. The distinction confirms that part of what motivated the reforms—­part of what the reformers found compelling and the public found exciting to read about—­was the construction of modernity as a state of being (and a transformation of that identity) rather than as a specific knowledge set to be acquired and deployed. Public interest was enhanced when that transformation took place in the context of a model community. For many observers, the other intriguing aspect of the model communities was the intermingling of urban elites (whom readers were expected to identify with) and rural people. These urban elites aspired to a rather new goal: to become more like the masses they sought to reform. These seemingly contradictory goals—­elites inspiring peasants to modernize and, simultaneously, becoming more like peasants themselves—­make sense when we consider that the flexibility of identity, and its possibilities for reconstitution in service to the goal of constructing a national, coherent Chinese identity, was at the center of the modern project. This reciprocal reconstruction of  identity mattered not only in Xiaozhuang but also in Dingxian and, later, in Liang Shuming’s program in Shandong. At a 1933 rural reconstruction conference, Liang noted that two of the three pillars of the Shandong project were “arousing the consciousness of rural self-­salvation” and encouraging intellectuals to go “back to the countryside. ” (The third pillar was encouraging rural organization, a theme explored in the next chapter.)6 Reformers had faith that contact with the countryside could help urban, reform-­minded elites become more modern people. Simulta­ neously, they believed that contact with elite reformers like themselves would make rural people more modern. It was these concurrent processes of self-­ transformation—­and the places in which those processes became inter­ twined—­that would generate a national identity.

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Creating a New Self in Republican China Literacy, MEM reformers believed, opened a window onto the knowledge of what it meant to be a new person and encouraged people to engage in a broader process of self-­transformation, for which literacy was just the base. As one MEM report noted, the goal of education was “to ‘open up’ the intellectual life of the rural masses. ” The report continued succinctly, “Stunted personalities must be given a chance to develop. ”7 That meant encouraging peasants to undertake a process of self-­evaluation and change. In a 1926 article published in The Farmer called “The Peasant’s Strengths and Weaknesses, ” author Yu Bida listed first among “our weaknesses” that “they say . . . peasants have no learning, peasants don’t know books or characters, they are simple-­minded, unenlightened. ” Yu listed the peasant’s strengths and weaknesses here, he wrote, because “we all want to know our own strengths and weaknesses so we can correct them . . . In knowing where our weaknesses lie, we can do our utmost to think of ways to get rid of them. ” Yu’s short tract ended by counseling readers that “after we have this knowledge of ourselves, it is easy for us to rid ourselves of our weaknesses. Fellow peasants, do your best!”8 Like Yu, many advocates of peasant enlightenment shifted the burden of responsibility for reform to rural people. Critics of the MEM honed in on this emphasis, accusing the organization of developing a “discourse of education’s omnipotence” that placed the burden on the peasants rather than on the economic and polit­ ical systems that frustrated their potential. The MEM’s goal, one critic wrote, was to “develop the peasants’ minds” rather than to tackle social or systemic problems.9 Indeed, this was precisely the basis of the work of the MEM and many other groups like it. This faith in peasant self-­transformation undergirded its efforts. For the subjects of reform, “doing their best, ” as Yu urged, meant not just learning to read but also modernizing their habits of thought and, by extension, society and the nation. This approach fused the emerging disciplines of sociology and psychology and was an idea reflected in some corners of both academic disciplines in China and abroad. In 1922, the study The Social Problem: A Constructive Analysis by the prominent American sociologist and public intellectual Charles A. Ellwood was translated into Chinese. By the early 1930s, rural reformers associated with the government-­run reform project in Jiangning, outside the capital of  Nanjing, made reference to Ellwood’s work and its influence on their programs of reform.10 Ellwood made it his life’s work to argue that sociology should focus, above all, on “the intangible and imponderable factors in the human mind, ” because society was a “psychological” organ.11 In The Social Problem, Ellwood wrote that “society is at

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bottom the inter-­mental life of individuals. ”12 Ellwood’s perspective illuminates the connections that many early twentieth-­century intellectuals around the world were making between social reform and individual mentalities. These new understandings of human psychology and sociology seeped into Chinese programs of rural reform, as Republican reformers drew out the res­­ onances between the new social sciences of the self and traditional visions of self-­transformation to construct a reform process that began with literacy and ended, ultimately, in a remade modern person—­one who would, notably, contribute to the nation. Chinese reformers had a homegrown and frequently cited reference point as well: Sun Yat-­sen’s notion of the way that the “psychological reconstruction” of the people was necessary for democratic reform. More frequently still, they called—­as Yan Yangchu so often did—­on the Chinese tradition of education as the basis of self-­cultivation, attempting to situate the process of modern self-­ transformation in a distinctly Chinese context. The Republican discussions of self-­transformation picked up threads of discourses on self-­transformation that came before—­and those that would come after as well. By the late Qing, there was a great deal of space, for all classes, for self-­fashioned identities that transcended and confounded easy ideological divisions.13 Social mobility and fluid identities demonstrate that the remaking of the self was not distinctly modern. While pre-­twentieth-­century efforts at self-­improvement served a different form of governance—­Li Hsiao-­t’i contrasts the two as imperial “taming” versus the late Qing and early republic’s “awakening” and “training the people for a new era”—­in both cases, elites played a crucial role as exemplars of proper behavior.14 Most importantly, perhaps, reformers drew on Confucian ideas that reso­ nated with imported ideas of social reform that reformers found compel­ ling, from the belief in the educability of all people to the faith in the “mallea­ bility of man. ”15 Some scholars who have examined rural reconstruction have made a rather natural connection between the interest in self-­transformation and the strongly (and specifically American) liberal backgrounds of some of the prominent reformers, like Yan. In this reading, self-­transformation was grounded in the Enlightenment project’s emphasis on individual mentality and its relationship to the role of individualism in modern liberal democracy. Yet the intellectual Liang Shuming, a bastion of the Chinese rural reform movement at the other end of the ideological spectrum, also believed very strongly in the ability of the individual to reshape the self. In Liang’s case, the belief in the power of moral transformation has been attributed to a firm grounding in Confucian thought and its emphasis on education. Liang abhorred the selfishness that he believed Western individualism unleashed.16

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The shared use of a discourse of self-­transformation and its Confucian roots points to the ways that early twentieth-­century reformers—­even those with quite different ideological commitments—­deployed Confucian notions that resonated with modern ideas of social reform in order to legitimate their efforts as ones that were not wholesale Western imports but instead offered a Chinese path to modernity. The kinds of outreach that reformers offered to encourage rural people to remake themselves took place not only in the classroom but in varied social and educative contexts, from newly established rural libraries to reform teahouses to economic cooperatives. Reformers used these new settings as backdrops for activities that imparted new information as well as a new sensibility about what constituted a good, responsible, and productive person. Reform teahouses, for instance, hosted activities from chicken raising to opera clubs and provided resources from workout equipment to radios. At Tao Xingzhi’s reform project at Xiaozhuang, teahouses sat alongside other cultural outreach efforts, including an arts studio and a radio station (which broadcast lectures, music, and self-­defense bulletins). In the rural outskirts of the city of  Wuxi, rural teahouses hosted medical clinics, lending libraries, book and music clubs, travel groups, literacy classes, radio broadcasts, organ­izing cooperative societies, and agricultural advising.17 Libraries, meanwhile, were not, as one educator put it, “solely book-­collecting places” but locales in which to inculcate people in a self-­discipline that would translate book learning into better living. Libraries, and the self-­discipline of quiet and orderly study that they imparted, could “mold temperament, improve moral conduct, stimulate joy in life, and reform customs. ”18 One of the goals of providing so many different spaces for education and learning was to give rural people the opportunity to better themselves. Yet self-­improvement was not an end in itself. Reformers were very clear that the beneficiary of a reconstituted people was society. This viewpoint was on display in examples published by a young Chinese Christian named Shi Zhongyi in a 1933 book he wrote about the YMCA-­funded reform project in the village of  Weitingshan outside Suzhou. In Weitingshan, the reformers em­ployed familiar methods—­the formation of agricultural and banking cooperatives, the introduction of new breeds of animal (especially the Leghorn chicken), and literacy classes—­with a special focus on cultivating a vanguard of young rural leaders who could act as moral and social exemplars for their villages.19 The ultimate goal of the program was to “evolve with vitality . . . a large-­scope Dalton-­system planned-­education school.  ”20 Shi was referring to the system of education developed by educator Helen Parkhurst for the Dalton School in New York City, often called the Dalton Plan, a progressive vision

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for youth education informed by the ideas of Maria Montessori, John Dewey, and others in which students crafted their own courses of study and educational plans. Yet in the midst of  Shi’s narrative of the work at Weitingshan—­which would eventually serve as inspiration for a GMD project in Jiangxi—­were several stories that illustrated how, through education and self-­discipline, pre­­viously degenerate peasants became contributing members of society, stories of peasant self-­transformation that, in Shi’s hands, bled into narratives of Christian redemption. Shi profiled eight local leaders in the Weitingshan reforms, such as the “peasant-­inspiring Lu Songru, ” a debt-­ridden farmer of thirty mu who had been a key figure in the village’s credit society; reformed drinker and gambler Lu Renming, who had “leapt out of a painful life” and now taught children to read; and Li Guodong, the scion of a family of wealthy satin weavers who had kicked his opium habit in favor of helping workers affected by the collapse of the textile market.21 Shi’s essay reinforced the idea that education was not simply about the acquisition of a set of skills but primarily a process of self-­ transformation, one that would become a foundation for social activism on behalf of the community and the nation. In the stories reformers related, self-­transformation was held up as a virtue for both reformers and reformed. One anecdote from Xiaozhuang tells of how, when GMD soldiers arrived in the late spring of 1930 with orders to close down the school, they could not find the two-­hundred-­some students among the peasants laboring in the fields. Eventually, the story goes, they realized that the students and teachers of the school had taken on the dress and practices of the county’s peasant farmers and so, at first glance, blended in seamlessly with life in the village.22 Former students at the Xiaozhuang School retold this story; it reinforced, they seemed to think, that they capably adopted peasant culture and that in doing so they demonstrated an allegiance to rural people. In this way, reformers’ greatest efforts at change were turned on themselves. Through reform and education, rural people would be enlightened. Intellectuals, in contrast, would be “commonerized, ” a process of not just becoming familiar with but living in solidarity alongside the common people. This reconstitution of elite identity was a remaking of the self that acknowledged the cultural gulf  between reformers and reform subjects. In Dingxian, the head of the MEM’s survey department, Li Jinghan, remembered that “the surveyors were all urban intellectuals who, although determined and ardent [in their desire] to become one with the masses, often couldn’t stand the disgusting rural environment, so that they were unable to even momentarily clear away the gap between themselves and the peasants. ”23 Clearing away the

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gap became a focus for reformers in the 1920s. Remaking the elite self as a reformer or, even more radically, as someone who stood in solidarity with the peasants by adopting their dress, diet, and other habits was not only a nationalist act but also a means to more effectively educate, reform, and modernize the peasants. Tao Xingzhi and “Commonerization” Discipline and monitoring of the self and the remaking of elites through rural work were at the heart of one of the first successful experiments in rural education. The short-­lived experimental Xiaozhuang School was founded in 1927 by  Tao in a rural suburb of Nanjing, located up a wooded hillside on the northwestern edge of city. It incorporated a variety of new educational ideas that he had developed over his years of study and work, first at the Teachers College at Columbia University and, after his return to China, in various academic positions and education associations. The school was closed by order of the Nationalists in 1930—­its politics apparently ran afoul of the government—­ and in reaction, Tao wrote a column decrying the closure. In it, he listed the hardships he and his colleagues endured in building the school, prime among them “struggling with the false knowledge we ourselves brought with us” to the countryside.24 Overcoming those misperceptions of the countryside was at the core of not just Tao’s rural work but also the coursework and activism of the school’s students. Self-­transformation was the crux of Tao’s own story. Born in 1891 in the hardscrabble province of Anhui in the famous area of Huizhou (known for its extensive network of migratory merchants), Tao was the son of an illiterate laundress and a pickle seller who eventually settled on a small piece of family land. Schooling—­and later, missionary schools—­was Tao’s ladder up and out of the Chinese underclass. His early recorded intellectual influences in the first decade of the twentieth century point to an interest in both the republicanism that was taking shape around him and the ideas of Neo-­Confucian thinker Wang Yangming, who advocated the integration of  knowing and doing and was, as a result, popular among late Qing revolutionaries, including Sun Yat-­sen. (Tao’s chosen name, “Xingzhi, ” was inspired by Wang’s assertion that knowledge, zhi, and action, xing, were one. Originally called “Zhixing, ” Tao would later change the order to emphasize that action came before knowledge.) As for Sun, Tao was particularly interested in his ideas about social reconstruction and proposed as early as 1914 that what the new nation needed most, in order to achieve these goals, was education.25

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As soon as he returned from study in New York in 1917, Tao threw himself into education reform. Soon he was at the center of the Chinese education reform world, joining the faculty of first the National Nanking Teachers College and then National Southeastern University and building contacts with leading educators and reformers.26 Tao was the initial organizer of the MEM, which based its model of mass literacy outreach on Tao’s first branch of the organization in Nanjing. He played a crucial role in drawing together the cohort that became the core of  the MEM, including suggesting that Yan Yangchu be offered the position as the MEM’s leader.27 During these early, mainly urban education reform efforts, Tao’s plan for reforming Chinese education began to take shape. He adapted Dewey’s idea of the integration of society into the school, coming up with pithy statements that “life is education” and “society is a school. ”28 Like so many other young Chinese educators, Tao was interested in the idea of  bringing education to the masses. In 1923, he wrote to his sister Tao Wenmei that he was visiting Buddhist temples, restaurants, and inns—­and in coming days hoped to go to homes for widows, factories, and prisons—­in order to promote and research mass education programs.29 If all society was a school, then education could occur anywhere, and eventually Tao was taking his literacy classes literally to the streets, adapting the early Republican intellectual practice of streetside lectures to educate the masses. In the mid-­1920s, Tao began to argue that in order to change rural China, his normal school students needed to not just sympathize with the peasants but also adopt their daily habits. In one instance, Tao wrote that good rural teachers would have “the farmer’s skills, a scientific mind, and the spirit to transform society. ”30 Like many educators at the time, Tao had noticed that students being trained in the cities became urbanized, with only a very small percentage actually returning to the countryside to pass on what they had learned, either as teachers or in vocational settings. This was in part a result of the 1922 Educational Reform, which had rapidly urbanized the educational system, resulting in a dearth of teachers for rural schools.31 The ramifications for rural learners were dire. They weren’t benefitting from the new pragmatic curriculum that focused on vocational and citizenship knowledge—­they weren’t even receiving what reformers perceived as an out-­of-­date classical education. In response to this phenomenon, Tao argued that education for rural teachers should take place in the countryside itself.32 His ideas echoed those of Liang Shuming. In 1924, at the invitation of a Shandong educator named Wang Hongyi, Liang tried his hand at reforming rural education. Liang was still being celebrated for his 1921 Eastern and Western Cultures and Their Philosophies when he encountered Wang through

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a mutual student.33 Liang’s intellectual success—­his book contemplated the future of Chinese culture in a world dominated by Western economic and political systems—­had come at just about the time that young cosmopolitans in Beijing had begun to consider the problem of the countryside. Wang Hongyi, educated in Japan and employed in his home province of Shandong after that, invited Liang to Shandong to try out his ideas at a middle school in Wang’s hometown of Heze. Liang’s stint in Heze lasted just a year before he moved on (though Liang would return to the area again in the 1930s), but his writings from the period were deeply influential on many rural reformers, establishing the notion that the village community was threatened and that young, rural people needed to be educated in the countryside, and within the village community, in order to bolster it.34 Laying out the plans for the Heze experiment, Liang opined on the need for education reform, an experience he hoped to build around a community modeled on the ancient notion of xiangyue, or literally, “village covenant. ” For Liang, the community setting for rural education was crucial—­without it, young students who left the villages for the cities lost their way, becoming depraved and depressed. Liang remarked that urban schools were “even more distant from society’s needs . . . You could even say that they are substituting another kind of society in order to educate and cultivate talent. ” Instead, a rural school would gather as a group, “not only creating students but also creating themselves. ”35 Liang’s notion of self-­transformation—­and his reliance on Confucian ideas—­reverberated in Tao’s writings. In 1929, Tao wrote that by emphasizing learning through laboring, he had encouraged his students to “become close to the people in all things. ” This, he wrote, was the first step to learning to properly be a person (zuoren) and in the “investigation of things” ( gewu)—­both Confucian concepts of education, learning, and self­improvement.36 In the 1920s, Tao took steps to get closer to the life of the peasants. In another 1923 letter to his sister, Tao detailed recent purchases of Chinese clothing—­“a cotton jacket, a pair of padded cotton pants, and a skullcap”—­ and wrote that “when I wear them, I feel completely Chinese and feel much closer to the people. ” He rued that his schooling had made him less Chinese, and he vowed to reject the “foreign aristocratic air” he had acquired along the way and commit to “race back to the path of the Chinese common man. ” Tao wrote of this as the practice of “being a commoner” ( pingminxing) and argued that the goal of mass education should be to bring about such a change (i.e., commonerize, pingminhua) among the population at large.37 Tao’s sartorial choices were designed to indicate solidarity with the peasants, a solidarity that Tao confirmed through labor. In 1928, he wrote about drawing together

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the laboring (laoli) and intellectual (laoxin) classes. He pilloried the ancient idea that “intellectuals rule [and] laborers are ruled” and proposed instead that students be “intellectuals on the basis of  labor” (laoli shang laoxin).38 Tao was laying the groundwork for an educational method that was responsive to rural populations, but he was simultaneously intent on remaking himself and other intellectuals. The problem in this line of thinking was not only the ignorance of the masses but also the alienation of elites from their own culture. Intellectuals’ mobility and inclusion in a global elite made them foreigners to their supposed compatriots. This was a condition shared with elites who engaged in rural reform elsewhere. In India, Rabindranath Tagore wrote of feeling that “we are foreigners in our own country. A country does not become one’s own merely because one has been born in it. Our country remains foreign to us so long as we have not known it and possessed it through our strength. ”39 For Tao and many others like him, this entailed not only knowing and possessing peasants’ habits of behavior, such as dress and industriousness, but also adopting and practicing such habits with the diligence and discipline that the intellectuals’ education had, at least ideally, cultivated in them. The resulting shared rural culture could then be the basis for a national community. Planning for a New Self Liang and Tao had the occasion to exchange ideas about their shared views of how to remake rural youth in 1928 when, following his aborted rural experiment in Shandong, Liang visited the Xiaozhuang School on a tour of various centers of rural reform to observe ongoing work. What Liang saw in Xiaozhuang would resonate—­as Liang’s ideas from Heze resonated in Xiaozhuang—­in the Shandong Rural Reconstruction Institute in Zouping that Liang founded in 1931. It and the MEM’s experiment in Dingxian were the two most famous rural reconstruction experiments of the 1930s. In particular, Liang detailed the Xiaozhuang School’s efforts to cultivate students’ talents—­and teach students to themselves cultivate their talents. Liang felt that cultivating practical skills was the most important way that schools nurtured talented people (rencai).40 By “practical skills, ” Liang meant not scientific knowledge—­the critical definition of modern knowledge for many Republican intellectuals—­but the knowledge of day-­to-­day living: working the fields, cooking the meals, and governing their own school. Students were encouraged to “do” (zuo) alongside their studying.41 In taking teacher training to the countryside, Tao’s primary targets were not rural people but instead the young teachers he was training (some of them hailing from rural

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areas, but others not), and he hoped that locating the school in the countryside would create teachers who better understood and sympathized with rural people.42 To that end, on the one hand, the school used labor education and, on the other, it employed persistent and critical self-­evaluation as part of its curriculum. During its short life, staffers created a body of literature that propagated these ideas. The influence of these ideas was widely felt within rural reconstruction circles, as other programs modeled themselves on Tao’s ideas and, after the school’s 1930 closing, many of its staff dispersed to other reform projects. The Xiaozhuang School was founded on March 15, 1927. Plans had been laid in the previous months for what was originally called the Experimental Village Normal School by Tao and another educator, Dr. Zhao Shuyu, a professor from National Southeastern University.43 Over the coming months, the school (then holding classes in temporary tents) attracted a few dozen students.44 One year later, the school encompassed two institutes—­a primary education normal institute and a preschool normal institute—­as well as the Xiaozhuang Central Primary School, the Xiaozhuang Central Kindergarten, the Xiaozhuang People’s Night School, the Xiaozhuang Hospital, and the Xiaozhuang United Village Fire Brigade. Organizers had plans for a middle school and university as well.45 Its faculty included Tao, who was school principal; Yang Xiaochun (author of rural literacy textbooks at both Xiaozhuang and, eventually, the Shandong Institute in Zouping); and eight others (including theater reformer Pan Yichen, who would later work at Zouping as well), as well as eight more who held joint or part-­time appointments. By the fall of 1929, when Tao’s Columbia Teachers College mentor, prominent educator William Kilpatrick, visited Xiaozhuang, the school was at its maximum capacity of normal school students—­about two hundred—­and was enrolling about one thousand students in its village schools and another two hundred adult students in evening classes.46 Although the initial focus was on literacy education, the Xiaozhuang experiment rapidly expanded to include a wide variety of activities and institutes. Though this expansion from literacy education to social reform in tea­­houses and reading clubs would become common as other education reformers relocated to the Chinese countryside, Tao’s project was one of the first to exhibit (and document) this pattern of expansion. In addition to its educational institutions, the Xiaozhuang reformers also made plans to increase irrigation in the area, build wells, establish a towel factory, encourage the founding of credit cooperatives, cooperate with the local GMD Party office to reduce rents, start a “required reading” class for farmers, and organize an alumni association.47 The goals of the school’s local outreach work were not

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only teaching peasants to read and cultivating their skills but also “cultivating their scientific minds” (kexue de tounao), as organizer Cheng Benhai explained (he would later go on to open his own school in his home province of Guangdong), but this work was undertaken by attempting to eliminate the classroom itself.48 The school’s program immersed hopeful rural teachers in a disciplined schedule of study and physical labor meant to acquaint them with the rigors of peasant life at the same time that it inculcated a spirit of service. These efforts were at the heart of Xiaozhuang’s training. As Tao wrote, the school’s mottos were “If you can’t farm, then you aren’t a student” and “If you can’t cook, then you won’t graduate. ”49 The amount of work expected of students was not initially significant: fifteen minutes of daily cleaning and the responsibility for cooking two to three days each school term. But, as Tao pointed out, while that amount seemed minimal, if the school hired laborers to clean and cook, each of those laborers would have to clean for two to three hours a day and cook for four to five hours. “If students fear the trouble [of cleaning], ” he asked rhetorically, “do laborers not fear the trouble?”50 In addition to custodial and kitchen labor, students rented out half-­mu plots of the one hundred mu (a little more than sixteen acres) of arable land held by the school, receiving advice on their gardens from agricultural specialists from nearby universities and local “master farmers” (laonong) whom the school invited to act as advisors.51 The egalitarian spirit of the school, expressed in the emphasis on labor, spilled over into the pedagogical relationships among instructors, the young teachers, and their primary school students. Organizers emphasized that “there [were] not strict divisions between teachers and students. Teachers can teach students. Students can teach teachers. Teachers need not know all and be able to do all; they need not entirely teach people and never be people who learn. ”52 Remaking society was an explicit part of student curriculum. When Liang visited the school, Tao told him that the school sought to “smash the separation of classroom and life  .  .  . smash the separation of teachers and students  .  .  . [and] smash the separation of school and society. ”53 In breaking down those barriers, the school offered a variety of social services to the community: founding teahouses, providing health services, broadcasting radio programs, and conducting surveys. Students also formed a dizzying array of societies and clubs, including several small groups of “rural education vanguard” members who worked to build relationships with “rural friends” in order to encourage road construction, investigate rural education, or aid rural people in forming fire brigades.54 In large part, these organizations were oriented toward eventual self-­government for peasants in surrounding areas,

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as when teachers and students led meetings of villagers to resolve contentious issues, like one that arose over access to well water.55 The discipline of the students’ lives extended, at least on paper, to a rigorous scheduling of days, months, and even years. Students awoke at 5:45 a.m. and held a meeting of the Farming Association from 5:45 to 6:10 a.m.; reports and discussions of each crop followed the singing of the school song. After the meeting adjourned, students either practiced martial arts or had military drills from 6:10 to 7 a.m. From 7 to 8 a.m., they ate breakfast; the standard fare was porridge and pickled vegetables. In his report, Liang noted that the quality of the food was poor, and because there weren’t seats, the students, advisors, Tao, and even Tao’s mother all stood through the meal. (Tao’s mother accompanied him to Xiaozhuang; as Kilpatrick noted in his journal, “No one over 5, or under 50 is allowed a servant. Tao and his wife have no servants; his mother lives with him as a helper. ”) After breakfast, students took care of household chores from 8 to 9 a.m. From 9 to 11 a.m., they studied, and this was followed by “systematic discussions” from 11 a.m. to noon and then lunch. From 1 to 3 p.m., they worked in the fields, studied, or did handiwork. There was physical exercise again from 3 to 4 p.m. They ate dinner at 6 p.m. In the evenings, there was a period of journal writing from 9 to 10 p.m.56 The daily schedule was thus persistently scattered with reminders of the students’ commitment to living sparse, rural lives. In their daily journaling, the students had an enforced practice of self-­ reflection. Kilpatrick noted in his 1929 observations that even primary students kept “a diary of daily happenings, including a writing out of [their] own thought[s]. ”57 The goal was to give students practice writing regularly as well as to encourage students to make “self-­reflections” (zi fanxing) and to learn through recording and accumulating their own experiences and thoughts. These were not private journals but were read and graded by instructors and advanced students.58 Other reform projects also encouraged journaling to improve literacy and foster self-­reflection. In one of its short explications on modern life, The Farmer answered the question, “How Do I Write a Journal?” by running through a list of potential topics: recording what one saw and heard and “ran into on the street after school, ” matters of daily life, self-­ reflections, and “discussions of knotty problems. ”59 The notion of using daily journaling to record one’s self-­transformative undertakings had a long history. Confucian scholars often kept journals that since at least the Ming were used for self-­study and improvement, and these journals, like their Western counterparts, were usually written to be read by others.60 For the teachers in training at Xiaozhuang, self-­reflection was how they created themselves as the models they would become for their rural students and communities—­much

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as their Confucian predecessors had seen themselves as models of filial, frugal, learned behavior (and their journals as potentially public manifestations of that process of self-­improvement). The twin interests of recording one’s activities and creating disciplined schedules were combined in a book of New Year’s resolutions written by the instructors and students affiliated with the school. The book, One Year’s Plan for Xiaozhuang, featured list after list of self-­improvement goals from those involved with the Xiaozhuang experiment, including Tao, many other school leaders, and students. Their commitments ranged from how many books to read in the coming year to how many hours of sleep to get per day. Writing annual New Year’s resolutions was not a tradition indigenous to China, and it isn’t clear what the inspiration was for the book. The notion of writing out a detailed plan for learning was advocated by educational reformers like Parkhurst and others, and perhaps that was the genesis of the idea. Whatever the idea’s provenance, it reflected the Xiaozhuang ethos of self-­improvement. The resolutions in the Xiaozhuang book are detailed to the point of banality. The lists were separated into sections for institutional goals, including for each branch of the schools, and individual goals, which included annual plans for sixty-­three people affiliated with the school. Tao’s plan included the resolutions to “work for six days and rest for one. ” His sixty-­one hours of weekly working time were dedicated to “the Xiaozhuang School for twelve hours each week, ” the school in Heping for twelve weekly hours, the Chinese National Association for the Advancement of Education for six hours, the Rural Education Fellows Association for six hours, and Wuliu Village for six hours, as well as time each week working with the Xiaozhuang Opera Society and the Peasant Women’s Vocational School. In addition, Tao scheduled twelve hours each week for walking, fifty-­six hours for sleeping, and thirty-­ nine hours for personal activities. All 168 hours of the week were accounted for. But Tao’s plan didn’t end there. He also delineated various activities he would conduct for the school in the next year (“edit ten plays, ” “hire personnel, ” “discuss the problems of  human life with my colleagues”), various educational goals (“assist with the implementation of the plan for adult education”), and personal goals (“edit the Collected Poems of Zhixing, the Collected Ver­ nacular Essays of Zhixing, [and] the Collected Speeches of Zhixing”; “translate 300,000 words”; “learn to ride horses”; “read 18 million words”; and “research the problem of love”).61 The plans of other contributors were more general. One contributor, Guo Huilin, noted that her everyday activities would include “reading the newspaper, journaling, primary school activities—­at Heping School, reading, attending all kinds of meetings at Heping School, exercising, eating, ” as well

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as research activities (such as childhood sanitation and physical education), reading goals (“ten books concerning women’s issues, ” “ten books concerning rural education”), work activities (“work with the women’s movement”), and editing activities (on the subjects of “group play” and “people’s literature, ” as well as contributing articles for the school’s wall newspaper). Another contributor, Liu Shihou, included details on precisely how many hours he would sleep, read the newspaper, nap, go walking, and eat each week; notes on his finances; as well as a dedication to “attend activities at the Central Teahouse twenty-­four times. ” (The school founded a “reform teahouse” that hosted a variety of activities.)62 The efficient scheduling of time was a crucial part of training the Xiao­ zhuang students, and it was a concern for reform-­minded Republican intellectuals more generally. The assumption that the Chinese underclass lacked an awareness of time and that this lack correlated with laziness was common among elite Chinese in the early twentieth century. In 1935, Yan, for instance, wrote that one of the goals in Dingxian was to “cultivate concepts of time” (though it should be noted that the MEM accomplished this by regularly ringing the local temple bell rather than installing a public clock like the one pictured in the model village lesson).63 Republican intellectuals were, in fact, interested in reforming and closely governing all elements of time making—­ the lunar calendar was a particular target, but so was public awareness of time and, reformers hoped, punctuality. This was not, of course, a fascination for Chinese elites alone but one inherited from Europeans, who had created a narrative that their close monitoring of time and their engineered clocks were in part the explanation for their economic success and their dominance over colonial peoples.64 Scheduling time was thus meant to discipline the students and to allow them to make the most productive possible use of their days. The ultimate goal of rural reconstruction was self-­governance, and students practiced this within the schools, governing their own affairs. This approach corresponded to the notion in progressive education circles that students needed to control their own learning process and learning environment. The approach was particularly ap­ parent among those like Tao who had been exposed to the Mon­tes­sori method and reflected its notion that students who chose their own course of study would be more independent, more socially adept, and better society  mem­ bers. In this sense, when Tao Xingzhi wrote about student self-­government, he meant as much self-­regulation of study and behavior as political self­government. In fact, he saw the two components as wholly integrated with one another: “Student self-­government is students forming organizations, everyone studying the procedures of ruling oneself. ”65 The students participated

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in self-­governing their school environment and their own education, as well as their own behaviors. Students were trained in the discipline of self-­improvement so they could model such behavior for their schools and communities and be responsible not only for education but also for agricultural outreach, introducing methods of self-­government, reforestation, and other elements of rural life reform.66 But how would they transfer this knowledge to rural people? Gaining the trust of locals was a challenge. Xiaozhuang observers noted that rural people were initially resistant to and suspicious of the reformers, reflecting broader observations that rural people preferred their traditional schools to new schools. One author recorded the questions that greeted Xiaozhuang organizers when they attempted to establish a village primary school. During their four or five meetings with local leaders in the fall of 1927, they encountered the following questions and statements: “Will you teach foreign texts?” “Are you going to teach our children to believe in foreign religion?” “Could you teach Confucius’s Four Books and Five Classics?” “Even though you say now that you don’t want any money, won’t you want money in the future?” “You want to destroy our religious idols!” “We have a private school here; we don’t want your school. ” As staffer Yang Xiaochun noted with exasperation, “They were unwilling to trust us. ”67 The villagers’ concerns point to several of the challenges that faced reform­ ers who tried to work with rural communities. First, despite reformers’ sometimes elaborate efforts to live in solidarity with peasants, rural villagers saw reformers as outsiders. Second, villagers doubted that reformers shared their values, as evidenced by the desire that students continue to be taught the texts that had served the upwardly mobile so well for almost a thousand years (the Confucian classics) as well as by the suspicion (well-­founded, after the efforts to seize or repurpose temple resources that had been ongoing since the late Qing) that reformers might destroy their religious icons and take over their temples as schools or offices. Third, reformers were often stymied by in­ ternal power struggles. Outside reformers often tried to gain the support of local leaders. The most effective and long-­standing reform projects existed in places where there was strong local elite support (such as in Dingxian), so this was a sound practice. However, local leaders might feel the reform project did not serve their interests. Based on this account, we cannot know why the village leaders opposed the opening of a primary school, but in addition to their objections to the curriculum and values of the reform educators, they also noted that they already had a school. Depending on the power structures in the village, a second school, particularly one run by outsiders, could well unbalance internal politics (as happened in some northern Chinese villages

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when missionaries opened schools in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century). In the end, cultivating local goodwill mattered little. The Xiaozhuang School had a short life. Reflecting the sensitive circumstances surrounding the school’s 1930 closure, Tao fled to the Shanghai French Concession and then left China for Japan.68 After returning in 1931, he continued his education reform work for fifteen years more, with a particular emphasis on kindergarten education. He died in 1946, supposedly from exhaustion exacerbated by his belief that he was under imminent threat for arrest or assassination. By that point, he had garnered the admiration of the CCP (though he had not sought it out; Tao was adamantly neutral). After his death, the party laid claim to his educational legacy.69 Those accolades, too, were short lived. Tao’s mentor Dewey was already reviled by the Communists and had been for several decades. In 1951, Tao was also widely denounced.70 Nevertheless, the Xiaozhuang School set an important example for other educators in the late 1920s, including the GMD, who recommended that all village normal schools adopt Xiaozhuang’s methods. Moreover, Tao’s students established several other village schools in Guangdong, Zhejiang, and other locations, while some of the Xiaozhuang personnel found positions at other reconstruction projects, such as the Zouping institute.71 The Xiaozhuang School’s emphasis on self-­reflection and common labor as linked components of self-­ transformation were particularly influential. The two ideas reinforced the way that elite guidance of reform—­as elites were themselves experiencing living and working in the countryside—­was a critical component of  the cultivation of Chinese rural modernity. This process of rural transformation resonated with Confucian ideas about ideal rural communities and the role of educated elites as virtuous models. Yet the rural reform of the 1920s also embraced something new: a celebration (if not always an actual enactment) of social leveling, a commonerization, in which elites consciously adopted and practiced virtuous peasant behavior. This emphasis on social leveling and on the process of self-­transformation as the producer of a community of equals seemed to fit smoothly in with the dominant Republican political belief that individuals should sacrifice their subjectivity for the nation. But the educative process adopted at the Xiaozhuang School and the ideals espoused by Tao presented possible contradictions to this. Tao did not lay heavy stress on the service that his remade students would provide to the nation—­it wasn’t absent from his writing, but it was not omnipresent as it was with Yan, for instance. Instead, Xiaozhuang’s self-­awakening and self-­transformation put the education and strengthening of the individual before the integration of the individual into “group life” or the service the individual might provide to

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the nation. Moreover, it placed self-­transformation before even the acquisi­ tion of new knowledge or at least emphasized that knowledge had to be acquired through practice. It was a view of rural reform that would seep into even programs strongly oriented toward the nation, like the MEM, and would have an even more profound influence on Liang Shuming. Self-­Transformation from Within or Without? The Xiaozhuang School’s relative lack of attention to technical and scientific knowledge is apparent when it is contrasted to a closely related project focused on vocational education that was founded by some of  Tao’s colleagues. In 1930, the journal Education and Vocation published a piece by a writer who had recently visited the rural reform project at Xugongqiao. The work at Xugongqiao, a village of 3,200 people located halfway between Shanghai and Suzhou, was widely written about, and contemporaries saw it as interconnected with, and even influential to, projects at Dingxian, Zouping, and the reforms of General Yan Xishan, who ruled Shanxi from 1911 to 1949 and was famous for the reform programs he implemented there. The project at Xugongqiao was overseen by the Chinese Vocational Education Society (CVES) and began just before Tao established the Xiaozhuang School. The two efforts were born out of the same Shanghai-­based education reform circles and collaborated on some work—­CVES helped the Xiaozhuang School with a few of its more vocationally focused undertakings, including its central teahouse and woodworking studio. The close relationship between the two projects wasn’t lost on the piece’s author, who began this way: “A few days after reading the little book In Xiaozhuang [by Cheng Benhai, published in 1930], some friends invited me to take advantage of spring vacation to observe [the Xiaozhuang School] on-­site. Needless to say, Xiaozhuang’s handling of rural education is famous the country over. While awaiting my visit to Xiaozhuang, yesterday I first went to Xugongqiao. ”72 The juxtaposition was apt, but so was the presentation of Xugongqiao as an afterthought. While the two projects shared priorities, outlook, and an exchange of ideas among leaders who had worked together for years, Xiaozhuang attracted significantly greater interest. There are a variety of potential explanations for the limited reach of Xugongqiao’s reform efforts. The Xugongqiao project lacked a charismatic leader like Xiaozhuang had in Tao and Dingxian had in Yan, figures who had vibrant careers before and after their Republican-­era rural reconstruction activities and were adept at connecting their projects to broader trends and events. Moreover, there was no mention of  Xugongqiao becoming a “national model. ” Even in its earliest days, it was heavily reliant on locally recruited

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staff. Over the course of the relatively long life of the reform project, from its 1926 founding into the 1940s, the Xugongqiao efforts were gradually handed over to local management. Perhaps even more important, Xugongqiao was lo­ cally oriented and focused on training and dispersing knowledge rather than cultivating practices of modern behavior among staff and rural people. Xugongqiao organizers used the language of self-­transformation, but because they were mainly interested in educating local rural youth, there was little focus on, as Tao had put it, commonerizing urbanites. Instead, the focus was on educating and modernizing rural youth and orienting them toward pragmatic vocations. The work of the reform project ranged from establishing primary schools to implementing self-­governance reforms to organizing agricultural outreach, but the main focus was training local people to be teachers, or more accurately “rural advisors, ” who would spread their practical knowledge (of reading, woodworking, sericulture, self-­governance, and so on) throughout the countryside. As a result, much of the education was classroom based (the thinking being that this was what rural youth lacked), but critics charged that this absence of field experience was a notable oversight. For instance, Xugongqiao was on Liang Shuming’s rural reconstruction tour, and after visiting, he argued that there was too much of a focus on education at the site and not enough of a focus on the practicalities of peasant life.73 What such observations reveal is that field experience—­going out to the villages and living and working alongside the peasants—­had become the measure of modern reform education, even for rural youth who might already possess such experience. Focus elsewhere—­away from self-­transformation—­drew critique and was less exciting to educators and the reading public than stories of reflexive elite and peasant self-­transformation. The CVES oversaw a number of educational programs and schools; had its own imprint (like the MEM) through which it published pamphlets, books, and journals; and held conferences of its associates. The society was founded in 1917 by an illustrious group that included the president of  Peking Univer­ sity and former minister of education Cai Yuanpei, but the major force behind the society was educator Huang Yanpei, who had only recently returned from a globe-­trotting tour of educational institutions and had served as the Jiangsu minister of education. The CVES founders wanted to recreate education in China so that it didn’t place so much emphasis on moral self-­cultivation but was instead soundly oriented toward vocational education. In its first nine years, the society focused on research, publishing, and founding and encouraging largely urban vocational education. The society’s rural program was created in response to the lack of vocational training present in rural areas:

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according to a survey conducted by Huang Yanpei, most vocational and even agricultural training occurred in urban areas.74 Yet like other rural reconstruction experiments, the CVES’s rural undertakings took a broad view of what constituted education and quickly expanded. Beginning in 1926, the society initiated rural projects that spanned a familiar range of social improvements: founding hospitals, running experimental fields, staffing primary schools, establishing police forces, creating cooperatives, and fostering local government reform.75 The earliest and most developed of these efforts was at Xugongqiao, but the society also oversaw rural outreach at three other locations in Jiangsu and another in Zhejiang.76 As it did in its collaborations with the Xiaozhuang School, the CVES reached out to build connections to others involved in rural reconstruction: the MEM was involved in the initial stage of the Xugong­ qiao  project and Xugongqiao was represented at the annual conferences of the Rural Work Discussion Society held at Zouping, Dingxian, and Jiangning between 1934 and 1936, which gathered together hundreds of reformers from across the country.77 While Xugongqiao was included for decades in the write-­ups of the CVES’s work, officially the organization’s direct oversight and funding of the project lasted only a little more than a year. Founded in October 1926, by spring 1928 the project was under the auspices of the newly formed Rural Improvement Society. The CVES paid for one or two of this organization’s staff members, but the majority of its staff were locals. In 1934, control of the program was transferred to the collective management of more than four hundred involved villagers and prominent locals (the county magistrate, local school principals, and others).78 The Xugongqiao efforts were particularly focused on making education available to rural youth in the countryside. Like Tao and Liang, CVES leaders like Huang Yanpei had watched as young Chinese attended middle and upper schools in their county seats or provincial capitals and, rather than returning to the countryside to serve as local leaders, adopted city habits—­from the food they ate to the way they dressed—­as well as urban ways of thinking that alienated them from the countryside, if they ever even returned to it. Removing students from the countryside in order to train them for rural careers was deemed ineffective. Instead, the Xugongqiao project tried to make education as easy and approachable as it could. Similar to Liang Shuming’s later proposals for Zouping, the philosophy of the Xugongqiao project was that “schools and society are one” (xuexiao yu shehui, dachengyipian). Even for the primary (compulsory) schools, this meant accommodating rural people and considering the knowledge they needed most. So the program developed

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a system of “mobile classrooms” in order to make attendance more convenient, held half-­day classes so students could work at home the rest of the day, and included “useful” subjects in the curriculum.79 Reflecting on his visit, Liang Shuming recalled having a tense exchange with his Xugongqiao hosts about whether the heavy emphasis on education was really a very effective way to achieve vocational training in order to elevate economic productivity. (Liang clearly felt it was not.)80 Liang felt, instead of teacher-­directed learning (the CVES approach), the rural student should direct and activate his own learning (Liang’s approach). The distinction thus centered on rural people’s motivation—­their very desire for education and how much they were willing to work to achieve it. That desire, Liang and others believed, was the spark of self-­transformation. For the CVES, the focus was instead on acquisition of specific, expert knowledge, something it was widely believed that rural people lacked. In his book on the papermakers of Jiajiang County in rural Sichuan, Jacob Eyferth explores the way that Republican intellectuals focused on technical knowledge as a defining feature of modernity and cast rural people—­even highly regarded craftsmen like those in Jiajiang—­as lacking in it.81 The CVES sought to address such lacks through vocational education, which was the heart of adult education at Xugongqiao. It was understood very broadly and translated into a range of programs for holistic social education, not just professional training. This included, for instance, training young people to be frugal (there was even a “frugality association, ” jiejianhui) and urging them not to waste money on wedding ceremonies, funerals, and New Year’s celebrations, as well as guiding people in establishing cooperatives, setting up experimental farms, and encouraging self-­defense efforts.82 This work reflected the increased interest in vocational training and adult education in China in the 1920s and 1930s, particularly training people for outreach. These elements were present at other reform locations as well, where technical skills were seen as elevating the possibility that these remade people could be of service to their communities. In rural reconstruction projects, vocational education was an important component of agricultural and health outreach. In Dingxian, for instance, village midwives received training, and local health care outreach workers were taught to dispense basic medical care and collect health statistics.83 One of the CVES’s signature efforts was a pilot program at Xugongqiao that trained people for rural work and was expanded after one year with the aid of the Shanghai city government to a special training course in “rural aid” held in a Shanghai suburb. Students who graduated from the course worked on a range of topics, from local governance to strategies of engagement with rural people to rural investigation. This emphasis on teaching people to teach

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was expressed in a saying from the project: “Learning is rooted in teaching, do­ ing is rooted in learning, doing is the beginning of learning, teaching is the beginning of learning. ”84 In writing about their work, there was much less discussion from Xugongqiao staff than those at, say, Xiaozhuang about the moral or psychological implications of their work. And yet they clearly recognized that their work did have those implications and occasionally nodded toward this emphasis, which so strongly pervaded other reform efforts like Xiaozhuang. For instance, a small chart shoehorned into the corner of one 1934 write-­up—­ encircled with the motto “Sincerity, Excitement (reli), Universal Fraternity, Vitality”—­outlined the goals and changes that all the CVES’s rural workers committed themselves to. First, the goals were “rousing rural people to awaken” and “cultivating rural people’s autonomy. ” Rural people would be taught “self-­governance, to govern the masses; self-­cultivation, to cultivate people; self-­defense, to defend the nation. ” A series of commitments guided the work: The people are the targets [of our work] (especially young people) Science is our method (especially applied science) Life is our scope (especially the necessities [of life]) Setting persuasive examples is our method (especially by watching and being close) [We are] guided by interest (especially when it comes to entertainment) Moral character is our foundation (especially by practicing what we preach ( gong­ xing shijian)).

“We have our eyes fixed on a distant place (the world situation, national events, the current state of society), ” the chart says, “but our hands are busy here (starting with the local and from the bottom up). ” The chart ended with the ultimate goal: the revitalization of the Chinese nation.85 While the reforms at Xugongqiao sparked critique for their old-­fashioned methods, they too framed their reforms in the context of self-­transformation, an emphasis on “local conditions, ” and bottom-­up social transformation. Education in subjects that the reformers believed would increase rural prosperity was at the core of Xugongqiao and the CVES’s other projects (another of the CVES’s sayings was “wealth and teaching are one”), but in carrying out that work, its staff and students were expected to hold themselves up to the same standards of morality and psychological modernity that dominated at Xiaozhuang, Dingxian, and other rural reconstruction projects. Even in places where the recreation of the interior self was not at the center of reform efforts, the rhetoric of self-­transformation seeped in.

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Transforming the Rural Self Change was hard for both elite reformers and rural peasants. Elites found it difficult to commonerize themselves in an effort to better reach out to peasants and be at one with the masses. So, too, did peasants find themselves trapped within systems and social structures that made it hard to change, and their inability to do so frustrated some rural reconstructionists who, in contrast to the Communists’ development of a systemic critique of rural poverty, identified instead a range of personal failings—­from laziness to ignorance—­that accounted for rural poverty and backwardness. Yet for some of the most prominent early rural reconstruction projects, their pragmatic outreach efforts in agriculture, health, and economy were underscored by the article of faith that rural people could simply change themselves. For some, like Tao, this belief was grounded in the notions that education could awaken people to themselves and self-­discipline could transform them into modern beings. While nationalist visions of a China made new floated ethereally above these efforts, in many cases—­not least in Tao’s efforts with the Xiaozhuang School, but even in the vocationally focused CVES project at Xugongqiao—­the nation remained an abstract rhetorical flourish. The idea of constructing a strong nation goaded reformers forward, but their work was slow, based on the persuasion of individual rural people, and focused on the construction of a new China one person and one village at a time. Yet reformers were preoccupied with reforming the individual within a social context and for a social purpose. In this thinking, the reformed indi­ vidual was never an end in himself but was constrained by his ability to sustain and support community and national goals.86 Not all intellectuals took this functionalist view of the individual. Wang Hui, for instance, has written about turn-­of-­the-­century intellectual and revolutionary Zhang Taiyan’s re­ jection of the common early twentieth-­century idea that individual subjec­ tivity should be sublimated to the state or the community and his revolution­ ary assertion that “the individuated is real; the collective is the illusory. ” In contrast to many rural reconstructionists, Zhang Taiyan envisioned an individualism that enabled people “the freedom of refusal” to any supposedly universal obligation, including responsibilities to the state. In contrast, reformers’ idealized transformed rural subject always said an enthusiastic yes.87 Rural reconstruction complicated the community of affiliation—­they advocated for the village as an intermediary between rural people and the nation, but they still saw one of their primary goals as integrating the reformed self into a body politic.

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While the CVES’s Xugongqiao project would stick around to be part of rural reconstruction activities in the 1930s, Xiaozhuang’s closure came before the advent of any notion of  a movement around rural reconstruction. Tao’s experiment would prove to be a great inspiration to rural educators and reformers, but the rural reconstruction projects of the 1930s augmented the focus on education and self-­transformation that had characterized Xiaozhuang and the earliest efforts by the MEM. Instead, as they moved into the countryside in greater numbers, reformers tackled social problems beyond education, including health care, agriculture, economy, and governance. The result was a scaling up of scope as reformers increasingly took the community rather than the individual as their measure of social transformation.

3

Organizing the Village

In 1925, Mi Digang, the patron of the Dingxian reforms, wrote that a movement for rural change should be grounded in “organization. ” By “organization, ” he meant not just the creation of new institutions (though that mattered too) but primarily the mobilization of rural people through social institutions. A decade later, the MEM, which Mi had invited to his county, was well established in Dingxian, and a group of its staffers had started a modern theater troupe that put on performances and trained local theater troupes. Rural reform theater, they wrote, was a productive, educational activity that sought, above all, to “organize” the people.1 As they moved into the villages, reformers in other locales also commented on rural disorder and, like Mi and the MEM staffers, postulated that the village was floundering because its residents did not know how to “organize” their villages as part of the nation, instead focusing on factional forms of organization such as the clan. By 1935, a government publication would baldly state that the work of rural reconstruction boiled down to improving “rural organization. ”2 The Chinese word used most commonly for “organization” was zuzhi, and it was a term so new to some rural people that reformers who used it in the countryside had to explain its meaning to their audiences. Some observers took this novelty as further evidence that the concept—­not just the term—­was alien to the countryside.3 Like the efficient ordering of daily life and labor, which Tao and others thought would result in a remaking of rural people, reformers declared that the organization of rural people would create resilient, modern villages. Some reformers adopted a term for their efforts to use village social life to mobilize and order rural people: “social education” (shehui jiaoyu). Chinese intellectuals were not alone in promoting the idea of  village organization as an element of  rural modernization. Inspired by the emerging

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field of rural sociology, intellectuals in places like India and the Soviet Union also sought to revitalize rural society through organizational and institutional re­­form. The Soviet People’s Commissar of Agriculture pronounced in 1925, “Our task is to organize the peasant completely. ”4 In India, Tagore opined that “only through co-­operation can the villages achieve a comprehensive re­­cov­ ery from their present sunken state. ”5 Western experts who were undertaking reform in supposedly backward areas of the world repeated these earlier calls by reformers from India, China, Eastern Europe, and many other places for the strengthening of rural communities, building on these ideas to support their own critiques of the urban, industrial model of modernity.6 The Chinese movement was part of a global effort to reconstitute and mobilize rural communities, focusing above all on social organization that—­not acciden­ tally—­also sought to make village social networks more legible to the state. Iron­ ically, the focus of this global effort was local communities that were more resilient in the face of the new global currents that—­particularly as the global depression took hold—­were readily apparent. This chapter explores the different ways that reformers attempted to mobilize rural people into communities. In particular, across many reconstruction projects, reformers turned to the idea of social education in order to cultivate and organize a village community. Social education, wrote one advocate, meant not just education but “society transformed in its entirety. ”7 Critics charged that social education was “borrowed indiscriminately from America” and was ill suited to Chinese conditions.8 This was not an unfair criticism, as social ed­ucation deployed many methods inspired by and adapted from American progressive educational efforts. Nevertheless, social education used village social situations to expose villagers to new practical and cultural knowledge on subjects from food safety to the application of fertilizers. It took advantage of both existing local institutions, like opera troupes and teahouses, as well as new ones like economic and agricultural cooperatives (hezuoshe). The important thing was that the education took place in a social, public setting to better utilize the pressure of collective participation to change behaviors. At the same time, reformers from Dingxian to the rural suburbs of Wuxi remade existing institutions, focusing their activities on strengthening the community and, by extension, the nation. In contrast to the government’s sometimes punitive and violent measures to implement social change in urban areas, as in the New Life Movement, these efforts continued to rely heavily on persuasion. But not all reformers who utilized reconstruction ideas and discourse relied on the persuasive techniques that characterized social education. After examining reformers’ visions of and plans for how to organize (and reorganize)

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rural society, this chapter examines two particularly vibrant examples of the efforts to bolster rural organization through social education—­the rewriting of the village opera tradition and the introduction of agricultural and economic cooperatives. Finally, however, the chapter turns to a markedly different vision of the relationship between reformed individual and community, a vision of rural reconstruction that was promoted by government-­affiliated figures who seized on the compelling rhetoric of rural reconstruction to frame their heavy-­handed, top-­down reforms: a military settlement in Suiyuan overseen by General Fu Zuoyi, a deputy of Yan Xishan. The Suiyuan efforts were inspired by the MEM’s work at Dingxian but settled by soldiers and with the main purpose of organizing (actually, creating out of whole cloth) model villages in order to stake out the state’s claim to “wasteland” territories. This kind of military settlement was a distinct alternative to rural reconstruction’s remaking of the countryside, yet the Suiyuan experiment used much of the vocabulary of rural reconstruction reformers—­talking about self-­ transformation of its reform workers, the centrality of the village community, and so on. Nevertheless, the work of the project was, from its inception, compelled by state-­building and not the reconstitution and modernization of rural people. The possibilities of rural reconstruction as a method of rural mass mobilization made it appealing for leaders like Fu and, as we will see in the next chapter, the GMD government: those interested less in the betterment of rural people and more in the strengthening of the state. These authoritarian ap­ proaches to rural reform laid bare that the ultimate goal of organization was to teach rural people to place the interests of the state over the interests of factional entities. In this regard, setting the militarized rural reform efforts in Suiyuan side by side with the persuasive efforts in places like Dingxian and Zouping illuminates the underlying autocratic tendencies of the rural reform message. As this domineering vision of rural change came to the fore, the reality of a new countryside constructed and managed by rural people began to fade from view, undermining the ideal of building anew on China’s tradition of what Yan called a “village republic”—­a polity of rural individuals who could organize their own communities as part of the national, organic whole.9 Charting the Self  in Society In 1936, a Shandong-­based monthly  magazine published a striking set of charts to accompany an article, authored by a graduate of the Xiaozhuang School, on Guangxi’s mass education efforts. In 1934, the province promulgated a

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9 . Schematic outlining the structure of  basic education in Guangxi, from the journal Shandong minzhong jiaoyu yuekan, February 25, 1936

system in which schools acted as education nodes for holistic social reform, initially testing it in an experimental district. The province had looked for inspiration to the models of Dingxian, Zouping, and Xiaozhuang in formulating their plans for schools as the integrated center not only for education but also for rural cooperatives and a variety of other organizations and kinds of social education. Two circular charts, one depicting the hierarchy of district, county, and village schools and the other of cooperative societies, showed

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the organizations as series of closed circles that radiated out like the inflorescence of Queen Anne’s lace: the educational institute at the bloom’s heart, surrounded along its edges by circles that represented the county and village, with, in the case of the cooperative societies, goods moving along the pedicels.10 This example is only the most evocative version of an illustration that was common among rural reformers: the organizational chart (zuzhi xitong biao). Descriptive or prescriptive, the charts traced the hierarchies and interconnections of bureaucracies and society, emphasizing social relationships and often the role reformed individuals would play in society. These schematics reflected a growing early twentieth-­century interest in creating greater efficiency in social organizations, epitomized by Lewis Mumford’s notion of  “the machine, ” an idea that encompassed not only nuts-­and-­bolts technology but also organizational structure.11 Bolstered by the introduction in the 1910s and 1920s of Taylorism and scientific management, China’s industrial, government, and publishing worlds were already participating in a discussion about efficiency and the perils of economic failure.12 This broad interest was reflected in the charts Chinese reformers sketched for the express purpose of mapping and then streamlining the remaking and restructuring of village communities. Organizational charts—­whether representing a reform institute’s bureaus or the ideal facets of a reformer’s personality—­attempted to order the integral relationship of self to society. Many of the reforms that were carried out tried to instill discipline and order on what contemporaries felt was a particularly chaotic society and to do so in a way that simultaneously expressed a commitment to a rationalization and efficiency informed by modern scientific meth­ ods.13 Organizing society was thus a central fixation for the reformers. Very quickly, once they moved to the countryside, their concern with it overtook literacy efforts. Neither charts nor the notion of reforming society were new, but the representations of a systematic organizing of society and the self as represented in two dimensions were. In them, reformers attempted to make more efficient and transparent the circulation of power within society and to reduce social bodies to boxes and circles within that space, sketching an ideal framework that sought to incorporate (in the case of rural reconstruction, initially through persuasion rather than force) social and individual bodies into a disciplined state society. The movement’s interest in ordering bodies was most explicit in the extensive medical outreach at many affiliated programs. But organizational charts also starkly rendered reformers’ visions of how the individual and, perhaps more important, the village community might be incorporated into the

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social mass that now, in the ideal if not reality, constituted the power base of state legitimacy. It is emblematic of a process of social ordering that sought to map people in order to make their social relations more efficient.  Orga­ nizational charts provided a schematic for how the individual and his commu­ nity might be led toward this better future. The history of the organizational chart has been unexplored in the case of China and is not particularly well articulated even for the West. In the West, the organizational chart fit into a post-­Enlightenment growth of efforts to map and depict knowledge, a project that, as numerous scholars have pointed out, was a loaded one. As Robert Darnton has written, “classification systems exert power, ” in part—­and most relevant to rural reconstruction—­the power to “contain the danger” of everyday life by “ordering[ing] experience. ”14 In China, the term “organizational chart” appears to have entered usage sometime in the mid-­1920s. Prior to this, charts were of course sometimes used to present information, but they tended to be text-­based and generally lacked a spatial dimension, typically neglecting the use of two-­dimensional space to represent hierarchies or flows of information in favor of simply list­ ing descending levels of, for example, generations (in the case of genealogies) or gods (in the case of spiritual hierarchies) in vertical, right-­to-­left columns. Casting more broadly, many historians of China have weighed the implications of cartography and other efforts to classify and map people, diagrams of Chinese horoscopes, and Buddhist prayer charts, so the impulse to system­ atically record information about society and to use space to indicate a hierarchy of knowledge was not the new component of this effort.15 By the late teens, journals began to publish images that hierarchically organized knowledge—­on subjects from agriculture to social reform—­in precisely the way that the reformers would with the representations of their organizations. But when the term “organizational chart” began to appear in the mid-­1920s, it most commonly appeared alongside discussions of Western educational endeavors, bolstering the notion that the term was of Western provenance. For instance, one of the first appearances of the term was in the Shanghai-­based Shenbao, the most influential Chinese paper of the time, where it appeared twice in May 1924—­in an article on the Suzhou Boy Scouts and a separate story about a Yangzhou school that was implementing the Dalton Plan for ed­ uca­tion.16 Though actual charts did not accompany the Shenbao news items, there were such charts alongside stories that appeared in other publications at roughly the same time. A 1923 piece on the Jiangsu Provincial Second Women’s Normal School featured an organizational chart that looked much like those that would later appear in rural reform publications, while a 1924 chart in the Shanxi Education Monthly (Shanxi jiaoyu yuekan) was so intricate its

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hand-­drawn and handwritten details—­lines to track administrative structure and the flow of information crisscrossing the page—­are barely legible.17 Rural reconstruction was, at its height and afterward, faulted for relying in many, if not most, of its projects on a top-­down style of management and information distribution. While its leaders dismissed such ideas, pointing to their end goal of fostering self-­governance among rural populations as belying their autocratic tendencies, their charts tell a different story. A chart from the YMCA-­funded project at Weitingshan, for instance, depicted the work undertaken by local organizers in reaching out to rural people and then listed results that ranged from the practical, such as “improving agricultural methods” and “organizing all types of cooperative societies, ” to those focused on self-­improvement, such as “eliminating superstition and wicked habits” and “cultivating noble character. ” The chart depicted the flow, from top to bottom, of knowledge and activities as they trickled down from government, prominent people, and organizations through the Suzhou YMCA to rural people, resulting, at the bottom, in “abundance[,] nobility[, and] happiness” ( fuzu gaoshang kuaile) that produced a “happy village life. ”18 Reprinted in 1933 in a small book on the project, the chart had already reached a large audience when it accompanied a 1931 report on the work at Weitingshan in the rural reconstruction publication that Liang Shuming edited, Village Governance (cunzhi).19 Chinese intellectuals were conscious of actively using the visual representations of social structures not only to “map” social relations but also to track and clarify the transfer of knowledge. Organizational charts linked the transformation of the self to the transformation of society and connected the reforms of interior life discussed in the previous chapter to the reordering of rural communities. The ideas that reformers were reading in works by Dewey and others reinforced the interrelationship of mentalité and society. Philosopher and social psychologist George Herbert Mead, a renowned pragmatist whom Dewey cited as a profound influence, emphasized society’s influence on the mind: “Inner consciousness is socially organized by the importation of the social organization of the outer world. ”20 In this light, the state of China’s disintegrating rural communities must have seemed even more dire to intellectuals: not only were communities the building blocks of the nation, but their structures (or lack thereof ) also reverberated through the interior life of the peasant masses. This was true even at projects not typically associated with the persuasive approach of projects like the Xiaozhuang School or the MEM’s efforts in Ding­ xian. For instance, at the provincial government–­led rural reconstruction project in Suiyuan, organizers were more concerned with wasteland cultivation and

1 0 . Organizational chart of the YMCA’s rural project at Weitingshan, from Shi Zhongyi’s Jiu nongcun de xin qixiang (Suzhou: Suzhou zhonghua jidujiao qingnianhui, 1933)

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public security (the two were believed to be linked) than with individual transformation. And yet, in the midst of efforts to get province-­wide rural reform under way, officials there created a massive fold-­out chart that elucidated their so-­called self-­training plan, a plan generated by the province’s committee on rural reconstruction based on what they had learned after administering three four-­month rural reconstruction cadre training courses in 1935 and 1936 that trained a vanguard of more than nine hundred reform personnel from around the province. The experience left them feeling that identifying and cultivating character—­things like perseverance and willpower, the spirit to face hardship, and upright bearing—­was as necessary as imparting knowledge about how to effect rural change and that training the cadres in the skill of “self-­inspection” ( by “cultivating habits of voluntarily seeking knowledge, ” as the committee put it) would be crucial to their ongoing transformation and thus success as reformers. The same genre of training of the self that had characterized the Xiaozhuang reformers here buttressed the twin foci of the province’s reconstruc­tion efforts: stronger communities and stronger defense organizations. The resulting chart mapped the ideal character of the reformed rural leader. All this resonates with the efforts at self-­reform that were discussed in the previous chapter, but here what is most interesting is the visual presentation the committee chose to convey the characteristics of self-­study and its benefits and the way that presentation integrated the individual into the reform process. The most common kinds of organizational charts enmeshed the individual, when he appeared, in a social structure. The individual was subordinated to hierarchies of power and lines of communication. But in the Suiyuan chart, as in the chart by the reformers at Weitingshan, the reformer was the one who brought about change, spurring social change and transforming so­ciety by encouraging either his own or others’ mental and behavioral alterations. The Suiyuan chart begins at the top by dividing the individual’s self-­training efforts into two primary pursuits: “cultivating moral character” ( xiushen) and “rectifying the mind” (zhengxin). In the context of this chart, cultivating moral character meant focusing on the kinds of actions that rural reformers had identified as crucial components of China’s necessary modernization: the standardization of spoken language, economic reforms, self-­ governance, law and order, and public health. Rectifying the mind, the chart details, meant a psychological and ideological transformation by modernizing one’s knowledge, “socializing” (shehuihua) one’s ideology, and revolutionizing the spirit, with the ultimate goal of transforming the self to reorder thought, society, and the nation. These many invocations to self-­reform trickled down past a litany of negative qualities that candidates would expunge to forty-­three positive outcomes at the bottom of the chart that placed benefits

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for the individual ( like “habits of work”) next to benefits for the community and nation (“a national view of coexistence, ” for example).21 The transformations of self and society were thus intimately connected, and the reordering of the mind—­particularly for the reform vanguard and village leaders—­was a crucial step to remaking community structures that would, it was presumed, reflexively transform the minds of the masses. Acting Out Reform The reform of the self could thus not happen in the classroom alone, as Liang Shuming had argued in Xugongqiao. In literacy classes and schoolrooms, reconstructionists introduced rural people to their vision of a reformed rural citizen, but reformers also felt it was critical to bring them together outside the classroom. Their response was social education, which took reform education to village teahouses, libraries, and opera houses. In these settings, reformers utilized leisure space to educate, holding classes on agricultural in­ novations, hosting radio broadcasts and book clubs, setting up gyms, and founding economic cooperatives.22 In embarking on this form of education, Chinese reformers expressed not only their desire to reach the people wher­ ever they were—­which could include the sometimes morally decayed atmosphere of teahouses and theaters—­but also their desire to bolster rural community organization. Ultimately, for many Chinese reformers, “the goal of organization, ” as a representative from the CVES put it succinctly, was “to make everyone capable of self-­governance. ”23 Many reformers considered social education to be the precursor to self-­governance. Famous editor and MEM employee Sun Fuyuan stressed the centrality of social education, as opposed to classroom learning, to cultivating social organization. Chinese education had emphasized “concentrating on reading, ” Sun wrote, to the detriment of “group life. ” Instead, the goal of education should be to “learn how to be people” (quxue zuoren), and that meant, Sun wrote, “studying society’s life, or the life of groups. ”24 Whether it was the “headquarters of rural economic degeneracy” like the village teahouse ( host to gambling, opium smoking, prostitution, and other vices) or the traditional theater (which reformers derided as crass, wasteful, and disorderly), reformers concluded that social education would require a remaking of time spent outside the classroom as well.25 Some reformers referred to these efforts as “leisure education” (xiuxian jiaoyu) or framed the efforts as “living education” (huo de jiaoyu) that would convince people to give up “unvirtuous habits” in order to “improve leisure-­time life. ” Wastefulness of all sorts irritated Republican intellectuals, who had become convinced that

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any actions not turned productively toward national salvation and strengthening ( but particularly those undertaken by the poor) were weakening the country. The targets of their ire ranged from expenses on religious rituals to playing street checkers. In Jiangning, reformers started classes not only to teach village women how to read but also to encourage them to make more productive use of their free time by producing handicrafts. In Suiyuan, the government reform bureau fussed about encouraging handicrafts that could occupy villagers during winter downtime.26 Reformers were also intrigued by the possibilities for cultural settings to provide opportunities for community mobilization. To experiment with this, reformers turned to the existing primary source of rural entertainment: opera. Intellectuals postulated that cultural activities might be a rich entrée into village social lives (a hunch that was borne out in later testaments from adherents initially drawn in by opera performances).27 It was even better that opera encouraged social organization and that it sometimes brought together the entire village community. This desire—­to marry entertainment, cultural reform, and organizational education—­underlay the opera reforms in multiple locations. Reformers drew on opera’s centrality in rural cultural life; it was an art form that acted as an important link to a community’s past, provided a shared cultural vocabulary for rural people, and brought together villages or clusters of villages as ritual communities.28 The reform of opera as it took shape among rural reformers had its roots in the New Culture Movement of the late teens. Efforts to reform opera—­to heighten the morality of actors (generally considered a suspect class), for instance, or root out sex or violence in the performances—­existed in imperial times as well. As Andrea Goldman describes in her study of opera in late imperial Beijing, opera was a core site of cultural contestation in the late Qing, a realm where transgressions of class, ethnicity, and gender boundaries raised court concerns over stability and virtue, particularly in the relaxed atmosphere of the temple fair—­the dominant opera venue in rural areas—­where genders and classes freely mixed.29 In the waning days of the Qing Dynasty, intellectuals began to propose that opera—­alongside the reconsiderations of many traditional cultural vehicles—­might be modernized.30 Instead of emphasizing the immorality of the theater, Republican educators bent on theater reform expounded on theater’s possibilities for conveying moral values such as “kindness” and “bravery” to the masses. Social reformers as highly placed as Yan Xishan recognized that new behaviors could be modeled onstage. (In particular, he hoped to discourage footbinding by preventing performers from copying onstage the distinctive gait it produced.)31

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More broadly, reformers hoped theater could be actively utilized to mobilize the masses for political and social action. The notion of drawing on current events was well established in opera tradition, but the idea of then using those performances for popular mobilization had been percolating since the late Qing. American missionary Arthur Henderson Smith recorded examples of operas in the 1890s that dealt with the Tianjin Massacre, war, and other current events, bemoaning that people confused the heightened drama of the theaters with reality. In Shandong, agricultural outreach workers teamed up with missionaries to present a drama that encouraged rural people to adopt US cotton seeds rather than praying to the gods for a better cotton crop. By the 1930s, theater was commonly used in urban areas to portray themes that had captured popular attention, as Eugenia Lean demonstrated in her study of  the Shanghai performances created to memorialize the dramatic murder of warlord Sun Chuanfang by “female assassin” Shi Jianqiao.32 Using cultural forms to deliver political messages was a technique most fully developed by the Communists, who had experimented with mobilization through theater as early as the early 1920s at Anyuan and who established opera troupes in Yan’an in 1935.33 Like other Republican-­era opera reforms, the CCP efforts traced their provenance from the late Qing enlightenment efforts through the New Culture Movement’s folklore movement that employed culture, and opera in particular, to mobilize the masses.34 The CCP troupes reflected characteristics shared more broadly by other 1930s attempts to use opera for rural mobilization, including the recruitment of local troupes, reliance on peasant traditions and themes from village life, and a desire to use the theater to model social reforms, like the equality of women. While the earliest CCP theater experiments in Anyuan mobilized peasants through political dramas, by the 1930s, the CCP’s opera efforts were primarily focused on bolstering the resolve of soldiers, not mobilizing rural people. The CCP would not use opera to mobilize rural people on a wide scale until the late 1940s, when it began implementing land reform in the regions it controlled. Though there are no documented connections between the CCP opera reform efforts and those of the rural reconstruction projects, there is a tantalizing ( but poorly documented) mention in the literature that one of the Dingxian village theater troupes later joined the Eighth Route Army.35 That theater troupe, if  it indeed existed, was a product of the most famous rural theater reform experiment of its time. Dingxian had a lively village theater culture built around amateur troupes and its distinctive yangge ( literally, “rice sprout song”) opera form. But many other reform projects also experimented with opera reform, with performances ranging from street plays to

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classroom theater at, among others, the Xiaozhuang School, the Rural Re­ construction Institute in Zouping, the rural districts of Wuxi (where city officials supported rural reforms), the government’s project in Jiangning ( just outside the national capital), and the National Christian Council’s project in Lichuan, Jiangxi.36 In all these locations, social issues at the heart of national revitalization efforts took center stage in the reform dramas. Reform plays on opium smoking, footbinding, and other controversial topics connected those practices to the health and vitality of the nation.37 The reform message was not only imparted in content: reformers expressed hope that the community experience of participating in or attending the performances would influence villagers outside the theater, encouraging them to build local community. Opera brought all of Dingxian society together, which was one of the reasons it intrigued the MEM staffers. Observers noted that in Dingxian, the songs people carried from opera performances into their daily lives became the soundtrack of the county.38 But theater was not just entertainment; the state of rural opera also illuminated issues like the countryside’s economic health (temple fairs that hosted opera performances drew more business than those without) and the relationship between state and society (rural opera’s close association with popular religion meant that it suffered a serious blow during the 1920s antisuperstition campaigns, in which the GMD at­ tempted to institutionalize religion by, in part, attacking popular religious practices).39 Reformers thus sought to use opera to reinforce village community and to imbue it with their nationalist agenda for rural modernization and self-­governance. Theatrical activities infused all aspects of the Dingxian project, from pub­ lic health parades (one featured a human-­sized papier-­mâché fly) to agricultural demonstrations (as when the afternoon slate at the county’s 1931 agricultural fair was given over to plays).40 Whether on a formal stage or not, the goal of public performance was to convey a message of modernization to an often illiterate audience. In the MEM’s new theater, however, the organization went beyond education to actively encourage, through theatrical practice and performance, the formation of village community. All the reforms at Dingxian were grounded in observation and research that was informed by surveys and interviews of rural people. This includ­ed cultural reform, where the goal was “to study and improve” cultural practices. Dingxian researchers collected materials on cultural activities from the storytelling practices of local blind men to peasant painting to musical in­ struments.41 The most extensive Dingxian cultural investigation was Chinese Village Plays by Sidney Gamble, Li Jinghan, and Zhang Shiwen, which recorded the lyrics and, in a very few cases, the scores of Dingxian’s operas,

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the yangge.42 As this study illustrated, the yangge form in Dingxian resembled traditional narrative-­driven opera, in contrast to the more widely known yangge that dominated in much of northern China, where it was a variety show–­style mélange of dancing and singing (a style the CCP adopted for use by its reform troupes).43 As MEM educator Qu Junong emphasized in his fore­ word to the Chinese version of the study, Dingxian researchers viewed yangge in the context of the international interest in folk art, seeing yangge as the collective expression of the nation’s essence; Qu believed that collecting yangge would allow reformers to better understand the life and soul of rural people.44 The dramas’ reflection of daily village life led Li and Zhang to argue that yangge were the best entrée for reform of social practices.45 In 1933, the MEM kicked off a six-­year plan of drama reform under the new direction of Xiong Foxi. A graduate of Yenching University, where he had been involved in May Fourth reform theater efforts, Xiong studied at Columbia University before returning to China to serve as a drama professor at several Beijing universities. By the late 1920s, Xiong had acquired a reputation as a theater innovator.46 Xiong in turn recruited Chen Zhice, a fellow dramatist who had also studied in the United States and who published many plays and works on theater through the 1940s.47 At Dingxian, Xiong hoped to integrate the MEM’s ideals of social education into spoken dramas (huaju) that emphasized reform themes of education and community action. Xiong’s most notable contribution to the small repertoire of rural plays was “The Ferry” (Guodu). The play’s title, Guodu, was also often translated as “Crossing Over” in the MEM English-­language materials, but its literal translation is “transition, ” and the play fittingly took place in the contemporary “transitional period” and sought, like other uplift works of this time, to “lead the masses to a road of unity, cooperation, and progress. ”48 The three-­act play tells the story of a recent college graduate, Zhang Guoben, who returns home and convinces the locals to build a bridge to circumvent an extractive member of the local elite, Master Hu, whose ferryboats are the only way across a dangerous river that bisects the area. Though a college graduate, Zhang demonstrates to the villagers that he is just like them—­a local boy from Zhang Family Village whose own father drowned in a ferryboat accident on the river when Zhang was young. He has returned to the village, like the MEM reformers themselves, out of a desire to improve conditions there. When a villager says, “I’m just saying, a rich person like you should be an official, ” Zhang replies, “When most people study, perhaps it’s so they can be an official and make money . . . [ but] I went to school to seek knowledge to serve my country and society. ” The play emphasizes the unity of the villagers in the face of Master Hu’s intransigence and then crime ( he is accused of murder by the end), and the

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nation makes only the briefest appearance. Other than in Zhang’s own name, which means “nation’s foundation, ” the nation’s most important moment is in Zhang’s final triumphant speech, when he celebrates the progress made on the bridge: “This bridge can be likened to our ‘Chinese national soul’; [it] can represent our Chinese spirit!”49 As in most reform dramas, the nation is the ultimate beneficiary of the village’s mobilized power, but only in a passing way. The local story, and the local community, is the focus of the action. As one MEM leader wrote of the play’s plot, it “epitomizes the multifarious oppo­ sitions to any reconstruction work, and . . . brings out the strength and power of the masses, when organized under intelligent leadership. ”50 “Crossing Over” was the cornerstone of Xiong’s efforts—­reprinted in its entirety in Eastern Miscellany (Dongfang zazhi), one of the most influential journals in early twentieth-­century China, as well as in an illustrated 1937 book called Crossing Over and Its Performance. In his book on the play, Xiong emphasized that it was not enough to write a play that was interesting to rural people; the playwright should also endeavor to write a play that was simple enough that rural people could perform it themselves. Xiong wanted to build a theater that drew on rural themes and stories, was dominated by group per­ formance, and encouraged audience participation.51 Like Xiong, other rural theater reformers wanted to create new dramas tailored for rural audiences, and some may have been influenced by the work at Dingxian. They were certainly aware of the MEM theater project—­for instance, when a national conference of rural reconstructionists was held in Dingxian in 1934, its 150 attendees from projects across the country gathered in the evening to watch a performance of Xiong Foxi’s “The Butcher” (Tuhu) by a local Dingxian theater troupe.52 Few projects wrote as extensively about their theater reform as did the MEM, but other projects also utilized theater to disseminate their ideas, with performances ranging from street plays to class­ room theater. In April 1937, educator Pan Yichen wrote a piece about rural theater for Rural Movement Weekly (Xiangcun yundong zhoukan), a short-­lived magazine published in Zouping.53 A drama aficionado since childhood, in 1933 Pan had published A Collection of Children’s Plays (Ertong xiju ji), which included among its scripts for children a one-­act mime show called “Overthrowing Imperialism” (Dadao diguozhuyi).54 In the 1920s, Pan worked at the Xiaozhuang School. At the school, Tao incorporated drama into the curriculum, such as the “cherry blossom fairy” ( yinghua xianzi) plays he advocated that teachers share with students when the cherry trees were in bloom, thus fulfilling the school’s goal of integrating life and education. The school was dedicated to using drama not only to educate students but also to combat social ills

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like gambling and drug use: “We deeply believe that theater has the power to awaken rural people, ” Tao wrote in 1929.55 By the late 1930s, Pan was working as a teacher at the Shandong Rural Reconstruction Institute, organizing a spoken drama group for institute students.56 At the Rural Reconstruction Institute, educators also saw opportunities to “do the work of awakening the masses” through spoken drama. The Shandong projects, located primarily in Zouping and later in Heze, rivaled the MEM’s Dingxian project in renown and influence. The village community—­as at Dingxian—­was urged on in its work by appeals to national need. In Zouping, for instance, educators working in one village staged New Year’s plays, including “To the Countryside” (Xiaxiang); “Save Oneself ” (Zijiu); “The Pain of Illiteracy” (Bushizi de tongku); and “The May Third Tragedy” (Wusan can ’an, in reference to the 1928 clash between GMD and Japanese troops in Shandong’s provincial capital city that is sometimes also called the Jinan Incident). These plays were meant to rouse the audience’s nationalist sentiments, linking nationalist mobilization with rural revitalization. “To the Countryside, ” for example, featured crowds of students smashing shops that sold Japanese goods; farmers suffering from plagues of locusts, drought, and bandits; and unemployed workers—­all of whom, after protesting in front of the county magistrate’s office, band together to go “to the countryside. ” Insti­tute students, perhaps the same as those under Pan Yichen’s direction, also  per­ formed plays that, as one participant recalled in the 1980s, addressed social issues like footbinding.57 His role at Zouping gave Pan cause to reflect on the kind of theater likely to appeal to rural audiences. Pan thought that only a few of the urban-­oriented reform dramatists were composing productions suitable to the countryside. Pan recalled that the landmark 1935 drama “Thunderstorm” (Leiyü), which explores the psychological traumas that old China inflicted on its people, was once performed by the Zouping Women’s Training Office, delighting the performers and the audience. But he felt that much of urban reform drama might not be as palatable to rural audiences. Though his fellow teachers were, Pan wrote, rushing to take the stage, the plays themselves were still too far from the regular lives of the rural people.58 Rural theater reformers like Pan and Xiong wanted to do more than just create theater that appealed to rural people. They were also intent on deliver­ ing a message of reform, often through local drama traditions rewritten to excise material reformers deemed backward. At Dingxian, for instance, Li and Zhang wrote that they had raced to document yangge because Ding­ xian’s county government had proposed abolishing opera because it “offended public decency. ” Once they were recorded, Li and Zhang wanted to rewrite

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the yangge to reflect reform goals.59 A pamphlet on theater reform from the MEM lamented the scripts filled with “backsliding feudal thought, ” arguing that theater should instead be put to use as an educational tool.60 Such impulses were explicitly manifested in Jiangning, the rural county that abutted the national capital of Nanjing, where county officials proposed plays, among other forms of “proper entertainment, ” in order to combat the dominance of temple fairs. The heavy-­handed nature of the Jiangning reforms, discussed in greater detail in the next chapter, were evident in the mechanism of reform—­village leaders were required to make “personal guaran­ tees to the police” that they would put an end to the religious festivals that hosted performances.61 Few of the other reform projects had the authority to implement the kind of top-­down initiatives that characterized the Jiangning reforms, and Jiangning, as a test site for the central government, was also closely aligned with the state in ways that programs like the MEM’s were not. As such, the Jiangning efforts to substitute plays and other forms of “proper entertainment” for what reform-­minded intellectuals and officials saw as cacophonous and wasteful local culture were the most authoritarian example of the use of reform opera. Here, reform opera was not a dialogue with or expression of local culture—­not even just in pretense—­but a means by which to deliver a message and inculcate villagers with the values of the nation. Rural theater reformers sought to reshape rural social networks, encouraging villagers to gather as communities (by performing and attending theater performances) and using texts of new dramas to send messages about the values citizens should hold. They did so with varying levels of intensity and with differing senses of whether they worked on behalf of the local community or the state. Nevertheless, they shared a sense of the functional benefits cultural reform could deliver and the ultimate goal of strengthening the nation. Reformers noted that as a group activity, theater (the “most complicated art”) built “organizational skills” and “cooperative spirit” that were critical for citizens. One writer explicitly made the connection: “The organization of a theater troupe is much like that of a government center—­so long as even one small part does not cooperate, then none of the work will be quick. ”62 Villagers, who prized their operas for other reasons, had different ideas. Talking Opera in the Chinese Countryside In 1934, a People’s School alum from the Dingxian village of Dongbuluogang wrote a glowing report in The Farmer about the effects spoken opera initiatives had on his village. Opera brought pleasure and happiness to the dreary, provincial, backward lives of the villagers, he wrote, but it was also “the best

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kind of social education, ” bringing together the People’s School graduates in Dongbuluogang to form a new opera society. Opera affected village customs and habits and thus “cannot help but to [move the village] from darkness down a bright road. ”63 In one short paragraph, the author summed up the goal of social education for the MEM: bringing together groups of villagers to alter the shape and style of village culture. Despite a handful of such testimonials in The Farmer—­another wrote that his introduction to the MEM’s social education came through attending one of its opera performances—­it is hard to know how the masses of rural people received the dramas.64 Drawing on evidence such as the writings of various MEM-­based theater reformers and interviews with locals in the late 1980s, some scholars have argued that the MEM theater department crafted dramas that were attractive to rural troupes and their audiences and that many Ding­ xian people were truly taken with the spoken dramas.65 A broader survey of the scattered extant reflections on rural opera performances provides a more ambivalent picture. The MEM staffers, for instance, noted the high turnouts for some of their performances but also recorded their impressions of villagers’ suspicion, fear, hostility, and most often, bafflement. Emotional audience reactions to issues like the representation of women onstage and the content of the reform operas highlighted the cultural divide between villagers and reformers. Reformers’ repeated surprise at the cultural practices of the countryside reveals how little they knew about the rural areas they were seeking to reform. While the content of the reform operas, the focus of the previous section, exposes the tensions in reform discourse between village and state, the records of opera outreach from the MEM’s project at Dingxian demonstrate just how ill suited reform agendas, even ones supposedly tailored to local culture, could be. Both elements—­debates over village and nation and knowledge of local culture—­sparked reactions from rural people on the ground. Rural people, while willingly embracing the new-­style theater, did so on their own terms, insisting on the maintenance of crucial cultural practices ( like an absence of women from the stage) and rebuffing unappealing aesthetic revisions (they preferred tragic to happy endings, for instance).66 In Dingxian, these responses from rural people are most readily apparent in the records of village theater troupe training by the MEM drama council, led by Xiong Foxi and made up of  both male and female staff members. Outreach work was meant to alleviate the council’s feelings that they were not interacting with rural people effectively under their current program: most stages were in the county seat and larger towns; the majority of performances were held in the evenings, thus limiting the audience to those close by; and the vast majority of the audience at department performances were students

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from the MEM’s People’s Schools. For all these reasons, moreover, the majority of attendees were men, and the council hoped to get more rural women into its audiences. In 1934, the council’s determination to tour rural villages to share their new dramas coincided with requests from local troupes for professional assistance.67 The MEM dramatists were not simply concerned with leading villagers to the stage (where they were already to be found in ample numbers) but also wanted to introduce villagers to their reformed theater. The MEM’s revised theater would, reformers hoped, build up skills the MEM had identified as crucial for Chinese citizens, such as speaking standard Mandarin (guoyu) and nurturing community and organizational spirit.68 In this way, the MEM hoped to create a form of “opera education” (xiju jiaoyu) that “molded character and morals. ”69 Reformers appear to have believed that it was important for villagers to literally act out the modern dramas and thereby enact community building. The reformers’ desire to make rural people feel comfortable on the stage may have struck villagers as an odd goal—­multiple sources recount the widespread presence of local opera troupes in Dingxian. Gamble estimated that there were three dozen amateur troupes in the county.70 Regardless, there does appear to have been widespread enthusiasm for the spoken dramas. The in­ terest of more than a dozen village troupes in learning the new dramas and the audiences of  hundreds who flocked to see them should not, however, lead us to believe that rural people swallowed whole the reform messages embedded in the new plays. This is apparent in the varied responses to the presence of women on the stage. In yangge, men traditionally played women’s roles.71 The council hoped to change the practice—­which one internal report deemed “unreasonable, not to mention unnatural”—­and take advantage of village women’s enthusiastic interest in the theater to encourage gender equality onstage and off.72 One village tried a short-­lived experiment with establishing an all-­women’s theater troupe (where women played the male roles as well), but it was unsuccessful, as villagers remained unwilling to see women onstage.73 Two anecdotes from the drama council’s tours further illustrate the differing reactions to women in theater. In one account, the MEM’s deputy theater director, Chen Zhice, mentioned that a village sent out a cart to meet and escort the “actresses” (kunjue) accompanying the council troupe, but the troupe didn’t have any “peasant actresses” (nongmin kunjue).74 It is clear that Chen meant female actors in this instance, rather than dan (men playing women); elsewhere, the peasants themselves made this distinction. The 21-­member local troupe from Dongbuluogang, a village of 1,200, had worked closely with the MEM theater department on plays such as “The Butcher, ” and pictures of the

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troupe onstage appeared in Xiong’s book on the play “Crossing Over. ” In 1933, the troupe headed to a neighboring village for a performance, with several members of the MEM drama council in tow.75 They were greeted by a crowd who picked out the fair-­skinned among the actors and asked if they would be playing the female roles (danjue) and singled out those with slightly rougher (cu) voices as the “painted faces” (hualian) in the troupe. “Do you have actresses (kunjue) or not?” the villagers asked as they crowded in.76 This detail appeared in Chen Zhice’s handwritten account of the rural troupe tours but does not appear in his 1934 printed account, published largely verbatim. The anecdote is confusing—­it isn’t clear whether the crowd was clamoring for the novelty of kunjue or preferred the traditional dan. However, the fact that the story was omitted from Chen’s printed account may reflect the MEM staffers’ discomfort with gender’s complicated place in the theater (specifically with cross-­dressing and the ways that it confounded what they perceived as modern gender divisions, as well as the inequality of keeping women from the stage). The anecdote itself demonstrates the peasants’ interest in clarifying and anticipating gendered representations onstage. The casting was not the only point of concern for villagers. Several accounts note villagers’ dissatisfaction with modern drama’s short duration—­several hours rather than the several days common to traditional opera performances. In one village, local officials convinced the Dongbuluogang actors to perform for a second day. The actors who stayed behind were flabbergasted when the exact same audience returned to see the same plays.77 The chronicles of the council’s rural interactions showcase the cultural chasms that remained between even those reformers who had deep experience in the countryside and rural people. For instance, in one village, Zhang Shiwen, who had collected the records of Dingxian’s yangge, caused a stampede when he attempted to take photos and the crowd fled in fear. (Chen Zhice noted that “the rural people are very fearful of other people taking their picture because they believe that by taking their pictures then they can take their souls. ”)78 In another anecdote, Chen told of how in a performance of “I Am a Person” (Wo shi yige ren)—­a play “meant to combat superstition” (the “person” in the title played opposite a nonhuman witch)—­the audience ended up spooked when, just as the character of Grandpa Fox (huxianye) ascended to his throne, a central beam in the stage snapped.79 In some cases, ignorance of village politics hampered reform efforts. When the council visited Majiazhai, a market town of about 640 people, they found that officials were not cooperating with the local MEM People’s School graduate society to enact a reform agenda.80 The MEM encouraged the founding of village associations of People’s School graduates, envisioning these as a

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vanguard of village outreach and the core of the village community. The disconnect between local officials and the student association was not the only time the touring troupe members noted the failure of the MEM school graduates to affect village culture. When the Dongbuluogang troupe visited a village called Hufang, council members were surprised, as the account of their travels tells us in boilerplate language, to find that while the local People’s School graduates were “eradicating superstition on the one hand, on the other hand they, surprisingly, were encouraging the village’s local tyrants and evil gentry. ” Though their objections went unspecified, council members still prescribed an antidote: they felt that the Dongbuluogang troupe’s performances of “I Am a Person, ” and “The Butcher” were “exactly the remedy for the disease of this day and this place. ”81 Yet their medicine—­didactic spoken dramas—­did not appear to be making inroads into Dingxian’s villages. Taking the reform operas into the villages was a crucial step in building the village communities reformers envisioned. But reformers overlooked embedded networks and the exigencies of village life. For instance, notably absent from reformers’ accounts is any comment—­beyond mentions that the­­ ater performances coincided with temple fairs—­on theater’s ritual and religious roots. Moreover, it isn’t clear the degree to which the big, enthusiastic crowds pictured and described in reformers’ reports turned up out of curiosity or enthusiasm, nor how much of the dramas—­which appear to have been performed in standard Mandarin ( guoyu), though the dialect used isn’t always explicitly mentioned—­the audiences actually understood. The opportunities for miscommunication, or even no communication, were great, as the reformers’ many missteps demonstrate. It was not just theater reformers who made the mistake of ignoring cultural and social context. Sigrid Schmalzer has described how in promoting the Poland China boar (an American breed that gains weight easily and quickly), the MEM’s agricultural bureau did not take into account how the pigs would fare under local conditions—­for instance, being fed waste rather than the grain feed it had been bred on in the American Midwest—­nor did they take seriously the concerns of local farmers over matters like the Poland China boar’s low manure production. (Schmalzer notes that this was the most valued porcine characteristic for local farmers.) As a result, they missed opportunities to make agricultural reforms by engaging with village society and culture. Such engagement would have required acknowledgment that the Western science underlying their outreach efforts was also contingent and culturally constructed.82 These misunderstandings, whether about pigs or plays, meant that reforms were less effective than they might otherwise have

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been and may explain their short life in local culture, for local commentators noted that the spoken dramas did not outlast the reformers. A Cooperative Community When it came to pigs and other agricultural matters, there were all kinds of efforts at outreach. Reformers tackled agricultural reform on multiple fronts, founding county agricultural fairs, supporting experimental farms and agricultural education outreach, and establishing programs with agricultural specialists, among other initiatives. The task of modernizing agricultural production and the rural economy seemed particularly urgent during the late 1920s and 1930s. The global depression and commodity price collapses had far-­reaching ramifications for parts of China’s economy. A series of North Chi­na droughts and floods in the late 1920s further squeezed rural people. GMD economists were interested in addressing rural poverty by increasing nationwide agricultural productivity and the vibrancy and resilience of the rural economy, but policies that might have increased rural productivity, such as expanding access to credit in rural areas and redistributing land, were subject instead to slow and incomplete implementation.83 One of the attempts to fill the gap in response to the rural credit crunch was the formation of agricultural credit and marketing cooperatives. Though credit cooperatives were the most common, cooperatives were often also involved in production, purchasing and selling, and even extension education. Cooperatives were already quite popular when various rural reconstructionists, like the MEM, began to test them out at rural experimental sites in the late 1920s. A few years later, the cooperative movement had become quite broad and included central government efforts to encourage cooperatives.84 The Nationalist government adopted policies encouraging villages and townships to cultivate cooperative institutions in large part to undercut the financial grip of local elites and merchants who were perceived as frustrating the cen­ tral and provincial governments’ ability to collect taxes and direct fiscal policies for local society.85 Rural reconstructionists embraced cooperative societies in the context of this nationwide push for rural credit expansion by the government. These efforts ran alongside—­if they weren’t entirely responsible for—­large increases in the number of cooperatives in the Chinese countryside.86 Yet convincing villagers that co-­op formation was in their interest was one of the toughest hurdles reformers faced. To make the point that villagers should form cooperatives, one author in The Farmer wrote, “We can say that the reasons for [our] poverty are many, but the fundamental cause is a

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complete lack of cooperation. ”87 The push to encourage villagers to establish agricultural, banking, and consumer cooperatives was thus often, in the end, about bolstering community and organizing villagers. Rural reconstructionists adopted cooperatives not only because they would allow rural people more economic opportunities but also because they extended community allegiances beyond the family. A Dingxian pamphlet from 1936 described the MEM’s philosophy as based on the notion that “the family, which is the economic unit and the only form of organization, is too small for effective action. ”88 Dingxian had a hierarchy of cooperatives that started as relatively informal self-­help societies and were later, based on their success, converted to integrated cooperative societies that extended credit and purchased in bulk. By the mid-­1930s, there were hundreds of informal and formal cooperatives societies in Dingxian—­not only credit co-­ops but also those focused on buying, production, and savings. As a collective, peasants were able to obtain credit, which allowed them to postpone the sale of their crops until the market was favorable, increasing profits by as much as 25 percent.89 An extensive network of cooperatives was also at the heart of the reforms in Zouping, where, as in other locations, in addition to being economic centers, they also served as places to cultivate community and citizenship.90 By 1936, there were more than three hundred cooperatives in Zouping, with almost nine thousand members.91 A variety of cooperative societies were formed in the county, such as “mutual aid societies” (huxiangshe) organized by the institute’s rural schools, which were created to deal with local flooding. In that instance, the co-­ops, writers opined, could be centers for training villagers in the “new society, ” skills that included, most importantly, coopera­tion.92 Such skills were equally applicable to the county’s agricultural endeavors. Zouping’s most intensive agricultural efforts went into cotton cultivation, and leaders there believed that cooperatives were a crucial part of local success with the crop. Not unexpectedly, they reported that farmers who joined cooperatives increased profits. Member cultivators also increased their yields, a shift that has been attributed to their use of hybrid seeds provided to them by the co-­op.93 Building on the connection between the individual inner life and society, literature produced by the institute emphasized the relationship of individual character to the co-­op’s success. In The Farmer’s Book, a textbook written by Tao Xingzhi’s former colleague Yang Xiaochun, a lesson titled “Cooperative Member” stressed following the co-­op’s rules and resolutions before switching to a first-­person mantra: “I love the cooperative. I want to be a sensible co-­op member, not a muddled co-­op member; I want to be a conscientious co-­op member, not a troublesome co-­op member. ”94 Thus even

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in reform institutions that had narrowly focused economic goals like co-­ops, reformers inserted discussions about citizenship, community, and other related modern virtues. Community and Control At Dingxian and Zouping, discussions of the benefits of cooperatives were often framed around individual participation in the community: reformers hoped cooperatives would create communities of shared interest where people could practice making collective decisions. But reform-­minded officials employing the top-­down approach of the Nationalists sometimes seized the rural reconstruction discourse on self-­transformation and community. For projects like this, as for the Nationalist adoption of cooperatives more generally, cooperatives were imposed from above and were about the state’s ability to more effectively direct the resources and capital of a community. This perspective is apparent in the vision of the model village implemented for a provincial government experiment in Suiyuan Province in several counties southwest of Hohhot. The experiment claimed to be building village communities anew, right up out of the steppe “wasteland” of the big-­sky plains of what is today Inner Mongolia. Yet the Suiyuan experiments actually most closely resembled traditional military garrisons (tuntian), which had been used to govern and pacify the borderlands since the Han period (206 BCE–­ 220 CE).95 In their Republican incarnation, their founders reframed these settlements using the contemporary language of rural reconstruction and self-­governance. Yan Xishan allocated the initial funding for the project, called the Suiyuan New Agricultural Experiment (Suiyuan xin nong shiyan chang), in 1929 (the same year that Suiyuan transitioned from Special Administrative Region to province). Yan was at times engaged in matters in Suiyuan, as it was directly to the north of his primary stronghold of Shanxi and thus affected Shanxi’s security (particularly as the Japanese encroached there). The experiment took on new life under Yan’s successor, Fu Zuoyi, who was appointed governor of Suiyuan in 1930 following Yan’s defeat in the Central Plains War, a factional conflict between the GMD and warlords who had allied to it. During Fu’s tenure as governor from 1931 to 1937 (during which time he was often actually acting on orders from his mentor, Yan Xishan), rural reconstruction experiments were tested in Suiyuan that drew on the ideas of nongovernmental reconstructionists like Yan Yangchu and Liang. Some of the plans referenced Dingxian, and the province sent a commission to study at Zouping.96 The combination of Nationalist state-­building approaches with the rural

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reconstruction language of self-­transformation (exemplified in the chart dis­ cussed in the first section of this chapter) and community organization reflects not just the broadening popularity of rural reconstruction ideas but also the ways that those ideas began to be folded—­quite easily—­into Nationalist policy making and notions of militarized government that it drew on. Fu’s rule of the region was characterized by marked interest in institu­ tion building and, particularly, creating institutions in Suiyuan that reflected those in other provinces (thus establishing the new province’s governing bona fides), from gazetteer writing to hotel building.97 Establishing rural re­ construction efforts fit into this agenda, as the Suiyuan project was initiated at the precise time that the GMD was beginning to express interest in rural reconstruction and was inviting movement leaders like Yan Yangchu to Nanjing to speak about their projects. Moreover, as Suiyuan’s efforts took shape, it became a primary example for the GMD’s northwestern development efforts and, as was happening in other rural reconstruction pilot sites across the country, a testing ground for a particular regional approach to rural reform. This had the same results as elsewhere: university study and survey groups trooped through, various warlords (including Feng Yuxiang and Yan Xishan) piloted social and infrastructural reforms in an effort to demonstrate their gov­erning legitimacy, and journalists started cranking out columns trumpeting the reform work.98 The province undertook several rural reconstruction efforts, including an experimental farm. Residents of the farm—­which included a model village—­ were settled on the newly cleared land, with land allocated to families based on need and capacity, roads built, and a local government set up. The plans for reform included additional new infrastructure, like telephone lines and irrigation systems, while also encompassing the typical social reform agenda of youth and adult education and citizenship education.99 The goal of the experiment was to provide a model for development in the northwest and reflected the desire of reformers to reinforce community morals and train residents in a more efficient organization of the village through such programs as the implementation of a baojia system (a subgovernmental system of hierarchical organization of households that had traditionally been used in China to regulate and manage local society).100 At its heart, however, the project took on the core of not just Suiyuan’s reform efforts but the province’s central goal: agricultural development.101 Like the programs in the heartland, the Suiyuan village was meant to inspire emulation by neighbors. However, in this case, it was also meant to serve, on the one hand, as a model of settled agriculture for surrounding nomadic people,

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whom the provincial reconstruction commission felt had both constructed ( jianshe) and destroyed ( pohuai) the natural environment, creating an unstable agro-­economic base, and on the other hand, as a draw for Han migrants, whom the province hoped to attract to the region. In this regard, progress and reform were equated with settled agriculture, as opposed to primitive herding practices.102 The aggressive nature of this rural reconstruction effort was manifested in the practicalities of daily life at the model village. The new residents of the experiment were garrisoned soldiers who patrolled part of the time, lent a hand in farm work the rest, and even fortified the village with a 100 zhang (about 330 meter) wall, with gun turrets on its four corners, gates at the north and south walls, and a moat.103 Training residents in self-­defense was a core part of the project, though this was by no means unique; both the MEM and the Shandong Rural Reconstruction Institute placed similar emphasis on self-­ defense training.104 However, while their presence was framed as an effort at securing a bandit-­infested area and creating a model of security and pacification, the garrisoned soldiers underscored that the project was part of a larger land reclamation effort in Suiyuan and other border regions that opened land to cultivation or, in the case of some parts of Suiyuan that were held by ethnic Mongolians, documented and registered land for the tax registers.105 Such land reclamation efforts put Fu’s government in the midst of longer-­running frontier disputes between Han settlers and ethnic Mongolians, and James Leibold has argued that Fu’s early 1930s heavy-­handed approach led to a “pan–­Inner Mongolian resistance movement. ” By 1934, in the midst of the reconstruction experiments in the region, the Nationalist government granted ethnic Mongolians in Suiyuan autonomous government.106 Layered on top of these regional conflicts were high-­level political struggles. In 1932, the reconstruction experiment and some similar projects across Suiyuan became small pawns in a warlord power play as Yan Xishan, who frequently used social reforms to extend his political control over a populace or region, supervised the “military land colonization” efforts in the province. There may have been as much as one million mu of land under military jurisdiction.107 Education reform at the experiment was also focused on supporting pacification. In this case, provincial leaders hoped that higher education levels would lead to better enforcement of existing village covenants. Though the villages that lay within the experiment’s purview (which included the brand-­ new model village as well as several existing ones) had already committed to banning opium, prohibiting gambling, encouraging tree planting, and so on, reformers pointed to a lack of education as the reason these regulations

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went unenforced. Education began in 1932 with male children and continued that winter with adult education that included citizenship classes and self-­ defense training.108 The primary method of bringing about the transformation of the Suiyuan countryside from “wasteland” to arable land, however, was “cooperative organization”—­an undertaking that, as one report on the project remarked, would “activate rural finance” by “strengthening rural people’s moral character” on the one hand and increasing rural credit on the other.109 While discussions of the enterprise linked virtue to economic surfeit, the effort to organize local people into cooperative societies was also a response to immediate conditions in the region. North China, including Suiyuan, experienced disas­ trous droughts from 1926 to 1930, and this reinforced for organizers the importance of creating strong community structures that could aid villagers in need ( paired, it should be noted, with top-­down efforts at infrastructure development: a large irrigation channel was also part of the province’s plan). For most of those who suffered from the drought, external assistance had not arrived. As in other reform areas, a doctrine of self-­reliance thus seemed a solid antidote to future disasters and was one of the few avenues cash-­strapped leaders could pursue in the hinterland. The efforts in Suiyuan were encouraged by the provincial government, which undertook a project in 1930 in response to the drought to organize a rural credit society umbrella group. Their first step was sending a committee to study Hebei Province’s rural credit societies in eighteen counties, including Dingxian. In Suiyuan, the credit movement was a top-­down one, begun by the provincial government’s Reconstruction Department ( jiansheting) with the early planning stages focused on laying out an administrative structure for the co-­ops. By fall 1931, government officials and local elites were appointed to a committee to discuss the shape those structures should take, and credit societies were formed across the province. Societies were formed in the experimental areas of the province in 1933 and 1934. All the cooperatives were organized and overseen by the government.110 Village organization in Suiyuan remained focused on economic outcome, even when it was concerned with education, village regulations, and bureaucratic efficiency. As mentioned above, Suiyuan reformers also hoped that village organization, as deployed through a kind of civil society structure, would reconstitute village culture. This was not, however, an effort at mass mobilization but instead an efficient allocation of government responsibilities to different social bodies. The lin, or five-­family unit, managed matters of credit; the lü, or twenty-­five-­family unit head, adjudicated legal disputes and

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criminal matters; the zhuang, or hamlet, handled “cooperation, ” particularly on matters of self-­defense and community infrastructure and public health; and the cun, or village, enforced the village covenant and oversaw the welfare of all within its borders. Within these entities, avowals were made to enforce what elsewhere became widespread social reform projects—­such as banning opium and gambling.111 The imposition of these structures on the villages reflected a broader effort in the late 1920s and early 1930s to generate a workable plan for social management. Some of the Suiyuan units (the lin and the lü, for instance) were also used in the lower Yangzi, while many places adopted the baojia system or modified it in various ways.112 In the Suiyuan project, however, social reform was never center stage. Instead, even in matters such as cooperative societies, the government was the primary driver and actor. The Suiyuan experiment demonstrates that, as the profile of rural reconstruction increased, reformers who were undertaking profoundly different kinds of rural reform saw a benefit in seizing on the methods and rhetoric of rural reconstruction. In Suiyuan, government committees hoped to delegate responsibilities through social organization and increase economic productivity, but there is almost no mention of encouraging popular excitement about education or self-­defense or any of the other reform activities that had characterized Dingxian, Xiaozhuang, or Zouping—­unnecessary, after all, in a place populated by garrisoned soldiers. Moreover, as will be discussed further in the next chapter, in other militarist-­created rural reforms, reformed villages were integrated into a bureaucratic hierarchy little concerned with village integrity or local conditions but instead focused on the most effective mobilization of the village and its resources on behalf of the state. In contrast, in many of the independent reform projects, the focus was on creating a sense of shared village esprit in order to encourage social change and strengthen the village unit. This notion—­of revitalizing the village community by persuading villagers to transform themselves—­would fade as independent  recon­ structionists increasingly collaborated with the Nationalists on rural reform. The Suiyuan case illustrates why rural reconstruction seemed appealing to the Nationalists, and also how easily the ideas of rural reconstruction could be turned to more authoritarian, hierarchical, and bureaucratic ends than many of its early advocates had hoped for. Organizing a New Nation The Suiyuan bureaucrats, despite their references to Dingxian and Zouping, made no claims to belonging to the Rural Reconstruction Movement in the

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years to come. If we were to demarcate the boundaries of rural reconstruction as only those organizations that were nongovernmental and led by intellectuals, Suiyuan clearly falls outside it. Yet it—­and the hundreds of provincial and county reconstruction bureaus, offices, and efforts like it—­was in dialogue with nongovernmental efforts. Altogether, this range of reforms constituted the emerging rural reconstruction of the early 1930s. In this important transition in the movement, a broader coalition began to experiment with its ideas of remaking rural people, and the notion of rural reconstruction began to move beyond its initial grounding in persuasive mass education. Set side by side with more liberally minded rural reconstruction organizations like the MEM, the Suiyuan efforts, in which it seems to have mattered little to planners whether their experiments were populated by soldiers garrisoned by order on the land or nomads forced into settlement, illuminate something further: whether relying on persuasive or authoritative means, whether bottom up or top down in their rhetoric, the notion of rural reconstruc­tion was one that depended on the directed and controlled remaking of rural people. Suiyuan shared with independent reformers a reliance on elite oversight and guidance. The MEM opera reformers, for instance, wrote that they wanted each villager to be not “a spectator but an actor” onstage and off.113 Yet they simultaneously noted the necessity, as one MEM official wrote, of “intelligent leadership” for reform, a dynamic manifested in the educated Zhang Guoben from “Crossing Over. ”114 This tension was written into the political philosophy that guided not only the GMD but also many reformers. In proposing a process for the modernization of China’s political system, Sun Yat-­sen had placed at the center of his proposal a six-­year period of political tutelage in citizenship practices for the Chinese people. The crux of Sun’s idea was the active training of Chinese citizens in preparation for their participatory roles in a constitutional democracy. The period, according to the schedule Sun laid out in 1924, which was adopted by the Nationalist Party after it came to power, was due to end in 1935 with the implementation of democratic constitutional rule.115 Reflecting this widespread idea that people needed to be tutored in the practices of citizenship, some of the most influential rural reformers built models that depended on the protection and guidance of outsiders and hierarchy.116 Those that did not and that quickly tried to hand control over to locals, as at the CVES project in Xugongqiao, received significantly less attention and coverage than those who made their projects more about the glorification of elite reformers and their project of evangelizing modernity than about enabling peasant self-­ governance. This question—­who governed in self-­governance?—­would come to a head in the mid-­1930s as the Nationalist government became interested

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in using rural reconstruction’s model villages and counties as experimental sites for local self-­governance (difang zizhi). As discussed in the next chapter, the result of the cooperation between independent reformers and the central government would be important shifts in the ideas and applications of rural reconstruction notions of not only self-­transformation but also the integrity of rural communities.

4

Village Contestations

The ultimate goal of rural reconstruction was rural self-­governance. There was a lively and diverse debate at the time about what self-­governance actually meant and how to achieve it. In 1933, a local dispute between a group of rural villagers and the central government illustrated the gap—­a gap reconstructionists were attempting to bridge, at least in some locales—­between how peasants and the central government perceived the justifications and goals of rural self-­governance and reform. A few years earlier, government planners in the Ministry of  Industry had proposed to build a Central Agricultural Experiment (zhongyang nongye shiyansuo) in the experimental county of Jiangning, located just outside the national capital at Nanjing and a center for the government’s experiments with rural reforms. Ministry officials announced that they would requisition villagers’ land to build the experimental center. As described in greater detail later in this chapter, in their petitions over the next few years, the villagers argued that the government’s responsibility to preserve local people’s livelihoods trumped the national exigencies that justified the requisition of their land. The seizure of their land demonstrated, they wrote, that they were just “sacrificial offerings” to state objectives. The government argued back that the betterment of the nation—­in this case, the testing of a model that could be replicated across the countryside—­ took precedence over the needs of individuals or communities.1 Issues like those raised by the Jiangning villagers over the integrity of local communities highlighted Nanjing’s top-­down approach to rural reconstruction. Rural reconstruction advocates, for their part, argued for a new relationship of self to state that rested on local solidarity and autonomy, but they also urged ru­ ral people to take seriously their duty to serve and sustain the nation. As the central government increasingly collaborated with rural reconstructionists

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focused on local communities, this tension—­whether rural reform should happen from the top down or the bottom up or whether there could be some combination of both—­put its advocates in an awkward position between state and society. The experiments in Jiangning—­of which the Central Agricultural Experiment was just one—­drew widely on ideas and personnel from other reform projects and connected Nanjing to the independent rural reconstruction efforts. Established in the early 1930s, the countywide government experimen­tal district demonstrated Nanjing’s growing interest in rural reform. Immediately following the establishment of a new government in Nanjing, the GMD began to implement Sun Yat-­sen’s ideas of a national reconstruction, and by the early 1930s, discussions of turning those reconstruction efforts on rural areas were common. This led the government directly toward rural reconstruction reformers, who were invited to sit on government panels and to cooperate with Nanjing on establishing government-­led rural reconstruction projects. Their collaborations included Jiangning but also a string of loose outreach centers known as the Jiangxi Rural Service Centers (their name adopting a term used by Jiangsu YMCA-­led rural reconstruction efforts like the one in Weitingshan) that Nanjing cooperated on with the National Christian Council and that was designed by the National Economic Council and a League of Nations committee.2 As the Nationalist government began to invest heavily in rural reform and to connect rural reform to county-­level “self-­governance” (zizhi), rural reconstruction’s combined emphasis on rural mobilization and rural self-­governance made it particularly appealing to Nanjing. In addition, as the CCP rural agenda began to take shape in the mid-­1930s, rural reconstruction provided the government with a ready-­made template with which to counter the Communists. Yet as the land seizure disputes in Jiangning illustrate, the GMD did not have a good record of courting and interacting with rural areas. In policies directed at rural areas, the central government repeatedly focused on top-­ down projects that sought to extract resources, implement security measures, and generally impose control rather than share it. Providing services to the rural populace came about largely as an unintended consequence, if at all. Si­ multaneously, the Nationalists subjected rural people to new regimes of social control, from the implementation of compulsory education to efforts to eradicate “superstitious” popular religious practices that resulted in seizures of temple lands, the destruction of religious icons, and efforts to prevent lu­ nar New Year’s celebrations. However, Nanjing was eager to build resilience and self-­sufficiency in rural areas, and rural reconstruction’s emphasis on self-­transformation and localism,

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its notion of  broad-­based rural reform, and its focus on self-­governance seemed to provide a path forward. Government reformers were not much interested, beyond its rhetorical uses, in the process of individual self-­transformation that the MEM, the Xiaozhuang School, and others like them had been advocating, nor were they much concerned—­as evidenced in the Jiangning case—­in honoring local rights when they ran afoul of national goals. Nonetheless, the Nationalists and the reconstructionists shared a focus on self-­governance, and both heavily referenced Sun’s vision of a self-­governed populace. This shared set of ideas provided a basis for collaboration, even though differing ap­proaches to rural mobilization would ultimately reveal fundamental distinctions between the government and many independent reformers. GMD commandism undercut the message of self-­transformation, self-­ sufficiency, and self-­defense that defined early rural reconstruction efforts and that had fueled the vision of peasant self-­transformation sketched in the previous three chapters. As reformers increasingly cooperated with Nanjing on rural reform efforts, and particularly on cooperative and self-­government efforts that sought to bolster the strength and security of the county and subcounty governments, the enforcement of social reform from above—­an impulse that had always been present in rural reconstruction, as previous chapters have shown—­instead became its dominant register. The tension between these two visions of citizenship and self-­governance—­as a bottom-­up, local affair versus a top-­down, central initiative—­became particularly acute after 1933, when the Nanjing government designated a select number of reform projects, including the famous projects in Dingxian and Zouping, as “experimental districts” and allowed reformers to take over the county governments. Relying on social reformers with track records of success (relative, at least, to the GMD’s abysmal one) in reaching out to rural people may have seemed promising. But it overlooked the fact that turning nongovernmental organizations into county governments saddled the projects with coercive powers and responsibilities that had never before been theirs. Even for the many reconstruction projects that were already government related—­one historian estimated that 84 percent of  the reconstruction projects were government affiliated—­integrating the reconstruction agenda into every element of governance was challenging.3 The projects that were granted government powers began to rely on punitive measures (since they now controlled the police forces and the courts) to carry out reform proposals. As discussed in this chapter’s examination of these efforts in Zouping and Dingxian, this shift undermined reformers’ rhetoric of self-­ transformation, the power of which had rested in large part on the appeal of allowing rural people to choose to transform themselves.

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As this narrative suggests, the collaboration between the Nationalists and rural reconstructionists was not a happy one. Some of the reasons it was unhappy are obvious to us in retrospect, but at least some of them were also apparent at the time. So it seems we should ask, why did rural reformers acquiesce to the arrangement, willingly placing their own projects alongside government-­ run ones and creating organizational and institutional connections that, as the 1930s wore on, bound them ever closer to the Nationalists? The answers are mul­tiple and will be considered one by one, but all end in the same place: a  dis­­appointment for both participants, as the collaboration undercut rural reconstruction’s legitimacy as an independent effort and failed to provide the Nationalists with a cheap template for rural self-­governance that would benefit the central state. Village Self-­Governance and the Tensions of  Tutelage In the early fifth century, government official Tao Yuanming left his job and settled on a secluded farm. Tao created out of his rural sojourn a body of pastoral poetry that established him as one of the greatest poets in China’s history. In one of his poems, “Peach Blossom Spring, ” Tao tells the story of a hapless fisherman who wanders into an isolated valley where a contented group of villagers has lived for more than seven hundred years, undisturbed by the intervening political turmoil outside and with no connection to the government. When they send the fisherman on his way, after feasting with him for several days, they caution, “There’s no need to tell the people outside. ”4 Tao’s vision of the countryside as a place of retreat from the world was a compelling one for many Chinese scholars through the centuries, but Republican-­era reformers were adamant that the point of rural reform was not to insulate the countryside from the world or to turn it into an idyllic retreat. Self-­governance reforms were not about bringing about a “utopia, ” an “independent village, ” or “a Peach Blossom Spring, ” as writer Lü Zhenyu put it in 1929. Lü, later an influential Marxist historian who in the early 1950s challenged Stalin’s assertion that the Asiatic mode of production was not one of the stages of histor­ ical production, was the first editor of a journal called Village Governance, and his statements are surprising if only because the journal is closely associated with a group of conservatives—­among them Liang Shuming and his friend Wang Hongyi—­who were often accused of wanting to reclaim an ancient utopia rather like Tao’s imagined “Peach Blossom Spring” refuge.5 Instead, rural reformers like Liang, Wang, and Lü—­individuals who would within a few short years find themselves being asked to take sides in the struggles

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between the Communists and the Nationalists—­found common ground over the importance of creating resilient, sustainable rural communities. They insisted that these model villages be engaged with and integrated into the poli­ty, relying particularly on Sun Yat-­sen’s template for self-­governance reforms. Sun’s ideas about self-­governance drew on a rich body of past ideas but failed to resolve the strains inherent in late nineteenth-­and early twentieth-­century self-­governance debates, especially the tensions between local and nation and between individual and state. It was in these interpretive interstices that the critical tensions between the Nationalists and some rural reconstructionists resided, and a few short years of collaboration brought to the surface differing views of who was served by the political enfranchisement of rural people and the shape rural political participation should take. Given the importance to ru­ral reconstruction advocates of the individualized modernization of rural people, Sun’s ideas of tutelage—­the process by which imperial subjects would be educated and turned into citizens—­proved a particular point of difference. Local self-­governance had been at the center of political debates since the late Qing. Championed by progressive political theorists, activist local elites, and county magistrates who sought to strengthen subcounty governance, the idea of self-­governance was at the core of late Qing constitutionalism and embodied in the nineteenth century’s devolution of power to provincial-­and county-­level elites. After the turn of the century, the Qing began to recognize village leadership and officially task it with various responsibilities, such as village education and infrastructure. The tension between local and central power that this brought to the fore was also not new: Chinese political thinkers had been struggling with it for centuries. In the seventeenth century, political thinker Huang Zongxi considered the relationship between ruler and ruled, arguing that the system had been upset: where once the people were the “masters, ” now they were the “servants, ” subject to dynastic corruption and greed. Like many early twentieth-­century reformers, he saw literacy and ed­ u­cation as a precursor to political participation. And he proposed many reforms that would check the power of the central state, including the dispersal of authority to lower organizations.6 Huang and other Chinese political thinkers of his day also mulled over “feudalism” ( fengjian), or what Philip Kuhn describes as “an accommodation between centralized and decentralized models of the state, ” largely in an effort to achieve social stability and local control but also to decrease government corruption and neglect. The debates between visions of  local governance grounded in local or national power and centralization or dispersal of political power continued in the nineteenth century, when literatus Feng Guifen made practical suggestions for the shape of subcounty governance that informed the efforts of early twentieth-­century reformers,

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particularly in his focus on making official the role of subcounty local elites in order to better check abuses of the system. The result of this long thread of conversations, as it was adapted to early twentieth-­century ideas of self-­ government and nationalism, was, as Kuhn has asserted, that “localism, far from being a danger to the collectivity, was really essential to it. ”7 In other words, we should be wary of thinking of localism as inherently antagonistic to na­ tionalism—­not all contemporaries, among them figures like Liang Shuming, thought of the two concepts as antagonistic or exclusive. Nevertheless, the tensions between local and center were strategically deployed by a variety of  leaders in the Republican period, some of  whom cham­ pioned ideas like popular sovereignty or provincial autonomy. Many of the warlords who emerged in the 1920s were not just military strongmen but also legitimate regional rulers who advocated semiautonomous provincial rule, such as Chen Jitang, the leader of a rival faction to Chiang Kai-­shek’s within the GMD and the ruler of the wealthy southern province of Guangdong from 1931 to 1936, during which time he repeatedly challenged Nanjing’s authority to implement taxes and other policies within Guangdong.8 The political effects of such ideas after the establishment of a relatively strong central govern­ ment in Nanjing was, of course, that proposals of provincial or regional rule were seen as challenges to Nanjing’s legitimacy. In response to such threats, the Nationalists hewed to a strong centralized agenda and sought to reverse the trend toward the growing power of local elites. They were suspicious of  the ways that self-­governance might undermine their control and, as a result, many of their proposals for self-­governance reforms sought to offset the power of local elites and provincial leaders.9 Rural reformers shared with Nanjing a concern about the effects of bad local governance, and they saw self-­government reforms as a bulwark against unprincipled local elites and, worse, “local bullies, ” corrupt local leaders who arose in the Republic’s rural power vacuum. Yet many rural reformers sought to return to (or reconstruct) an idealized vision of the countryside in which respon­ sible rural elites successfully managed and mobilized rural communities. This was true of the loose group that Liang, Wang, and Lü all belonged to, dubbed the “Village Governance Faction” (cunzhipai), which became closely associated with mid-­1930s rural reconstruction and influenced the shape of self-­ governance efforts at the two major rural reconstruction projects in Dingxian and Zouping, as well as many other locations. Despite its profoundly conservative tendencies, in its early days in the late 1920s, the faction included some Marxists ( like Lü) and other radicals, who argued that the best check on local elite corruption was an active and mobilized rural citizenry. This idea—­the rad­ ical bottom-­up mobilization of rural people in order to achieve the ancient

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ideal of a well-­governed community under the direction of enlightened local elites, and that such communities could be the basis of a strong China—­was in­corporated into intellectual Liang Shuming’s ideas of rural reconstruction. It also challenged Nanjing’s focus on centralization and top-­down reform. But in the early 1930s, both reformers and Nationalists still had at least a professed interest in making rural self-­governance a reality, and to do that, each needed the other. Their shared reliance on Sun’s ideas made it seem that they could cooperate on a shared vision for rural self-­governance reforms. As Sun’s 1935 proposed deadline for China’s transition to democratic constitu­ tional rule loomed, Chiang Kai-­shek pushed back the deadline for the transi­ tion until the excuse of war exigencies allowed him to disregard it entirely.10 In the meantime, the Nationalists still needed a template for tutelage. Model counties were an appealing fit, for Sun had advocated they be adopted as the initial unit of self-­governance.11 This increased the appeal of co-­opting the grow­ing efforts around rural reconstruction. Yet the GMD and many rural reformers differed on critical readings of Sun’s ideas, particularly when it came to the proper relationship of citizen to the state. In Sun’s 1924 Three Principles of the People, he formulated the three pillars of nation-­building as nationalism, democracy, and the people’s livelihood (Sun’s answer to Communism).12 Of these three, the most compelling for a broad range of  Chinese was the idea of  “people’s livelihood, ” or the responsibility of the state to provide its citizens with the means to survive, an idea not original to Sun but stretching back at least into the Qing.13 In Sun’s hands, the idea had strong populist overtones, yet it was also clear that the initiative for change remained with the government.14 Nevertheless, it was his appeal to op­ timistic populism that drew the attention and imagination of the Chinese peo­ ple, who understood and deployed Sun’s ideas to advocate for their own security and the stability and integrity of their communities. Sun’s writings were often frustratingly vague, which was part of what made them a powerful rallying tool (they could be interpreted in many ways) but also made them notoriously difficult as guiding documents for rule. As a result, however, people interested in a populist interpretation of the Three Principles—­which was common and widespread at the time and exemplified by the conflict in the government’s model county of  Jiangning—­read right past the multiple strands of thought and policy proposals that suggested ways to streamline top-­down bureaucratic structures and violently alter cultural and political practices. Within rural reform discourse, reformers again and again encountered both peers and peasants whose ideas of the state’s responsibility to the people (and not the other way around) had been shaped by the Three Principles. A staff member at the Xiaozhuang School wrote that the rural

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people there “are always hoping that we will give them the salvaging food of the Three Principles of the People, ” a reference to Sun’s avowal that enough to eat was one of the rights of the people and a component of the state’s responsibilities to them.15 Rural reformers were not always sympathetic to the view that the state had more responsibility to its citizens than they did to it. They were, like Nanjing itself, focused on the ways that remaking citizens might strengthen the nation. But their reliance on notions of self-­transformation and the modernization of rural people meant that the success of their independent programs depended on persuasion, and that ensured they had to be at least somewhat responsive to the rural people they were courting. Their cooperation with Nanjing changed that, as they began to have the ability to rely on coercive powers to enforce reform. Nevertheless, the reformers’ hope that rural people might choose to transform themselves remained the motivating desire for rural reconstruction, highlighting the ongoing tensions with the GMD, which had no such idiosyncratic expectations for rural people but instead focused on developing methods of control and discipline. Sacrificial Offerings to the State Their shared admiration of  Sun’s ideas made it seem that rural reconstruction­ ists and the GMD were working from the same playbook when it came to the paternalism of training the people for self-­governance. But scale mattered. Rural reconstructionists were focused on the village or, at most, the county. They believed that solutions should be worked out from the people up (even if they did not always follow this method in practice). The GMD had a differ­ ent logic of state-­local relations, one that rested on an authoritarian implemen­ tation of self-­governance. This tension was evident at the central government–­ sponsored self-­government county of Jiangning, which wrapped around the southern edge of Nanjing and whose staff included academics and activists. In the early 1930s, the central government engaged in a standoff there with lo­ cals over the requisition of land for an experimental farm. Locals, agitating to oversee their self-­governance reforms themselves, deployed Sun’s ideas to de­ fend their rights against the state. In response, the state leaned on Sun’s theories to justify seizing the land in order to better national conditions. The popular resistance of Jiangning residents provides a glimpse of how much collaboration with the heavy-­handed government would damage the voluntary enthusiasm that rural reformers relied on to make their projects viable. In December 1931, representatives of eight villages in Jiangning filed a pe­ tition with the central government’s Ministry of Industry to register their

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discontent with a proposed land requisition. The Ministry of Industry wished to purchase land in Xiaoling, near the grounds of the Ming imperial tombs, to establish the Central Agricultural Experiment.16 But local representatives filed letters of complaint even before the government issued its final drafts for the experiment’s plans. The petitioners questioned the goals of Nationalist improvement, arguing that while land seizures were undertaken in order to provide a platform for national agricultural progress, with few other places for residents to move nearby, the land seizures would destroy the community and the livelihoods and lives of local inhabitants. The implied question the writers raised was clear: was it right to achieve national rejuvenation at the cost of destroying local communities? Even while championing local rights in the face of national goals, the twenty-­two signatories called on national ideals to bolster their cause, noting that the seizures and their resulting effects on local people were “incompatible with the Three Principles of the People. ”17 The conflict dragged on for years, while the frustration of local people—­ that the government would not indicate the land slated for requisition, that the levels of compensation shifted, and so on—­grew. The tension between stra­ tegic national goals and the rights of local people and local communities to resist incorporation into those goals infused the ongoing exchange of documents. In September 1933, local representatives sent a petition to the central government in which they accused the government, after it had adjusted compensation levels ( presumably upward), of “believing that reviving the countryside diminished the necessity of active progress. ”18 Officials and re­ formers spoke often of their desire to aid rural people and lift them out of pov­erty. But rural people like the Xiaoling petitioners viewed the projects as a loss of autonomy that circumvented their participation in that process, not to mention an explicit attempt to better the nation at the expense of its ru­­ ral people. The Xiaoling petitions were part of a much larger story of the central gov­ ernment’s encroachment on Jiangning and the resulting scuffles between lo­ cal elites who wished to retain control and the central government. In fact, Ji­angning’s self-­governance and rural reform efforts appear to have begun as a strategy to ward off the incursions of the Nanjing municipality on the county’s land. Jiangning, outside the safety of Nanjing’s formidable city walls, was reputedly dangerous and bandit infested, but it was also an important source of resources for the city. In 1927, the city proposed to annex the entire county, with the stated goal of securing Nanjing’s perimeter and food supply. But Jiang­ning leaders discerned what the real outcome would be—­siphoning tax revenues away from the massive county to support the municipality. Jiang­ ning residents insisted instead that Jiangning should be designated a model

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county, a status that would allow local forces to largely continue to manage subcounty concerns. In October 1928, Jiangning farmers even blocked shipments of local goods such as food into Nanjing to try to force the government’s hand in naming Jiangning a model county. Municipal officials opined the real reason for local resistance: local elites feared losing their own local standing and influence.19 It would take until 1933 for Jiangning to be named one of the national experimental districts, emerging as a leading government example for other government-­run experimental or self-­governing counties (including one established in Lanxi, Zhejiang).20 But the push in the county to consider self-­ governance reforms, and to do so in the explicit context of the relationship of local and center under the new Nationalist government, began with the county border disputes of 1927 and 1928. It is clear from this series of events that declaring one’s locale as self-­governing could be a strategy to ward off the predatory state. It is also in this early dispute that we see the caricatures of each side that would define tensions over self-­governance within the Rural Reconstruction Movement: the local elites as power-­hungry and provincial, eager to hold on to their little piece of the pie, and the avaricious center as greedy for tax revenue, the plight of the locals be damned. It was in the midst of—­indeed, apparently in response to—­these tensions that Jiangning began local reform efforts to encourage self-­governance in 1928 with the establishment of an academy to train rural leaders in areas ranging from education to self-­defense.21 Meanwhile, the county’s proximity to Nanjing drew officials and researchers interested in testing out plans for rural change. The institutions involved included central government ministries such as agriculture, industry, and education and universities (often in partnership with government agencies) such as National Chengchi University, and they focused on a range of schemes to improve the rural economy and society, from developing better crops to helping establish granaries to founding night schools.22 The scope of the reforms attempted in Jiangning, and the number of institutions involved, was vast. Infrastructure projects included increasing electric irrigation. The county government actively encouraged the establishment of cooperatives and helped local farmers gain funding for a range of agricultural activities, such as buying seeds and oxen. In 1930, the county absorbed the cast-­off health program from the shuttered Xiaozhuang School, which then helped train doctors and nurses and established other public health projects like vaccination campaigns. The districting of the county changed multiple times, regrouping hamlets into different townships and districts, which in some cases also meant assigning new personnel to oversee the villages.23 Rebecca Nedostup notes that the area during this time became a “high-­pressure

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testing ground for Nationalist governmentality, ” where the Nationalists sought to reform and remake the county as a model of modernity.24 Local leaders, in the meantime, fretted that government encroachment in the county would pollute the unspoiled countryside with the “evil social habits” of industrialization and urbanization.25 Local advocacy to be designated a reform county may have allowed the county to retain the majority of its land holdings, but it had brought many outsiders—­along with their modernizing impulses. Of the major rural reconstruction projects, Jiangning was the most focused on bureaucratic reforms, reflecting its close relationship to the GMD. Unlike many of the other prominent reform programs, which started with efforts at social improvement and then slowly recognized the importance of government reform and the necessity for government involvement in broader social reforms, once in full swing, the Jiangning program was conceived and exe­ cut­ed as a government reform project from the county level down. County Magistrate Mei Siping, who was simultaneously head of the Politics Department at National Chengchi University (and would in 1938 infamously follow Wang Jingwei, who became president of occupied China, in collaborating with the Japanese), highlighted two elements of Jiangning’s mission: the reform of government institutions and the rationalization of governance practices. He told one visitor the county “should wield political power, using the administrative organization to reform the countryside [and] to advance rural reconstruction. ” At a 1934 annual meeting of rural reconstruction advocates, Mei spoke about how different Jiangning’s reforms were from those at Dingxian and Zouping because Jiangning used “administrative power” to save the countryside.26 The county’s reforms were heavily shaped by GMD Party tenets: in one telling, the goal of the county reforms was “to completely implement the Three Principles of the People. ” The statement is notable, particularly set side by side with the villagers’ own indictment, mentioned above, of the land requisitions as “incompatible with the Three Principles of the People. ”27 Jiangning’s administrative reforms, which one historian categorized as “vertical integration, ” seized on Sun’s vision of trickle-­down governance in which elite tutelage was necessary to prepare citizens for self-­rule. However, it sat in opposition to the Jiangning villagers’ interpretation of Sun’s ideas as advocating for their right to govern their own affairs, particularly when it came to ensuring economic prosperity for their community. In the Three Principles, Sun had indeed argued that in order to ensure the people’s livelihood the “solution is for every cultivator to own his land” (a sentiment succinctly expressed in Sun’s famous slogan, “land to the tiller”). The Jiangning petitioners repeatedly drew the connection between the idea of the “people’s livelihood”

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and their own personal claims to their land, calling on the government to live up to its ideals.28 The local representatives scattered set phrases throughout their letters to indicate their emotional connection to the land, such as that villagers were “attached to the land and unwilling to leave, ” contrasting such phrases of longing and rootedness with the repetition of a bit of officialese about how the land was being requisitioned “in order to improve nationwide agriculture” (emphasis mine). Whether these were heartfelt sentiments or sim­ ply good strategy (and there’s no reason they couldn’t have been both) matters little. Their use points to the letter writers’ sense that the proper emotion to express was their connection to the local community.29 Finally, in late 1933, the government established an office for the proposed experiment to begin to appropriate the land, and a day was publicly announced when all residents were to come and register their land with the office.30 The experimental farm would occupy more than two thousand mu of land and affect some three hundred households. A letter from the local representatives again referenced the Three Principles of the People in its call to the government to halt mistreatment of an already heavily burdened people: “The first of the Three Principles of the People emphasizes the people’s livelihood. Our country relies on agriculture to establish the nation, properly understanding that its premise is to aid the peasants. Year after year, on the occasion of natural disasters and human disasters, when the countryside is bankrupt, it is yet not so feared as restoration’s helpful scheme . . . Not harassing the people and not harming the people should be taken as the principles of this [aid]. ”31 In again invoking the Three Principles, the villagers underscored their own attention (among the three principles of nationalism, rights, and livelihood) to the notion of the people’s livelihood (and conveniently elevated it from third place to first) while emphasizing their interpretation of it as meaning that the state would secure rural productivity. As the negotiations dragged on, the petitioners dramatically wrote that they were just a “sacrificial offering” and the people, unwilling to relinquish their land, would oppose the government’s orders “to the end. ”32 But in the end, villagers began to sell their land to the government.33 The motivations for their change of heart are not clear—­perhaps they finally received a price for the land that seemed fair, perhaps it became evident that there was no alternative to selling the land. In any event, in their letters, the Jiangning petitioners had advocated prioritizing local needs over national ones—­and, unsurprisingly, failed to make their case to the central government. The Xiaoling petitioners were not alone in this failure. As Nedostup

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details in her examination of conflicts over temple lands in Jiangning, objections on the grounds of property rights or economic value to government seizures of temple land holdings, when they coalesced, were overrun by the central government.34 Nearby, in Nanjing proper, disputes over land were common during the decade of Nationalist rule as the government attempted to remake the municipality into a model city. Forms of protest against urban land seizures included refusal to receive notices of the government’s attempt to appropriate land and even threats of mob violence against municipal officials.35 In contrast to other reform locations where reformers were heavily de­ pendent on the goodwill of—­and thus more responsive to—­local elites and local people more generally, in Jiangning, the Nationalist government did not need to make such concessions. The Jiangning reforms appear to have had little lasting impact on the area. While there were some inroads made in education, in regard to other rural issues like the founding of cooperatives, little progress was made. The government’s limited authority in its rural areas—­and its failure to establish working relationships within the villages—­meant that rural reforms were never well integrated.36 Within the broader rural reconstruction story, however, Jiangning illustrates the increasing institutional and intellectual closeness between independent rural reformers and the GMD government.37 The larger implication of the project was an increasing affiliation of the independent reforms with the government’s efforts to seize the rural reconstruction discourse for its own purposes: to gain greater control over local decision making, and even­ tually also oppose the CCP in rural areas. Moreover, the language and demands of the Xiaoling petitioners point to broader questions about whose community mattered most. The government framed rural reconstruction as a vertical hierarchy of organized people working toward the collective goal of economic and political self-­sufficiency. This was, of course, quite different from how rural reconstruction was being discussed in places like Dingxian or Zouping. The Xiaoling representatives provided yet another interpretation, challenging their integration into—­or, as they saw it, their sacrificial offering to—­what they perceived as a kind of national pyramid scheme in which rural people would pay first for national revitalization with no faith in future returns. The notions of community and society, a term reformers used more commonly, depended enormously on where one stood. Reform discourse—­whether in the hands of reformers or the government—­ emphasized the sacrifices people should make on behalf of the nation, but rural people staked a different claim by making demands of the government on their own behalf, seeing in self-­governance a buttress of local community and local rule and a bulwark against the encroaching state.

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Self-­Governance, Education, and Village Self-­Defense in Zouping In the nineteenth century, self-­governance ideas had gained traction in response to the central government’s failures to vigorously repel threats like the Taiping Rebellion, the midcentury millenarian uprising that led to almost twenty million deaths during the fourteen years that it devastated swaths of the countryside. Similarly, the warlord battles and political volatility of the 1920s resulted in violence, crime, and instability throughout rural areas—­an instability that rural reformers quickly encountered once they moved to the countryside and that contributed to their determination to build stronger, more resilient rural communities. When Tao founded the Xiaozhuang School, he put out the word that bandits “would be welcomed with a cup of tea and have the work explained, and if they should take any of the workers for ransom, the one so taken would use his time of captivity to teach the 1,000 characters to his captors. ” After bandits seized and then killed a village child, Tao changed his approach, setting up watchtowers armed with guns, building defensive walls, and founding a self-­defense league.38 Self-­defense organizations became standard components of many of the larger rural reconstruction programs, and while connected to the programs’ interests in healthy bodies ( like Xiaozhuang, many schools incorporated daily or weekly martial arts drills into their curriculum), they were also a way to create social organizations for village youth. As the once distinct discussions of self-­ governance and rural reconstruction were intertwined in the early 1930s, village security emerged as a related consideration for rural reformers. While the militia was a way to mobilize and harness the energies of village youth and to protect and defend the integrity of the village, reformers also often advocated goals for the militia—­such as collecting village information to pass on to the county and provincial governments—­that undercut the notion of the militia as an organization that served the village first and foremost. The clear exercise of state control over reformer-­organized village militias could  inval­idate the reputations of whole reform institutions, as happened (as described later in the chapter) in Zouping, when the village militias that Liang Shuming had helped form were called up for provincial service against the invading Japanese forces. Nanjing wanted to try to incorporate local militias into its bureaucratic structures, but traditional militias or self-­defense forces had been the respon­ sibility of individual villages. Each village mustered their own men, or hired them, to protect the village. In Dingxian, it was noted that these village volunteers were much more effective peacekeepers than professional police forces, since they were embedded within the village community. Following

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its assumption of power, the GMD attempted to unify and coordinate these disparate efforts and put in place a county administration to manage village security forces.39 Nanjing’s efforts to more closely administer village militias were reflected in other top-­down reform efforts. For instance, Yan Xishan implemented modernizing social reforms in Shanxi that included rural self-­ government and local militias, which were closely integrated into a vertical hier­archy overseen by the provincial government.40 Many reformers were opposed to this hierarchical approach to self-­ governance and village self-­defense. Prime among them was Liang Shuming, who, like earlier intellectuals such as Huang Zongxi, envisioned a reconstituted rural community centered on schools, with education as the necessary preparation for political participation. Not unlike Huang, Liang came to the conclusion that village security should be drawn from local communities, in part because it would be—­as researchers discovered in Dingxian—­more effective, would reinforce and strengthen the village community, and would maintain the integrity of  village control over matters within its borders. Moreover, for Liang, the connection between village security and the education and remaking of  village youth was direct: Liang argued that schools provided a community for young people who might otherwise be lost to vice, whether the well-­worn tropes of gambling and drug use or the modern dangers of ennui and self-­indulgent individualism.41 Village self-­defense could put these drifters and miscreants to good use, building on the self-­transformation of individuals that education enabled. Village security was thus tied into discussions of self-­governance and reconstruction—­not only becoming a justification for the growing power of the villages ( because the state was failing to make the countryside safe) but also demonstrating how self-­governance efforts sought to create the village within the state not as an autonomous entity but one nested within a constellation of villages. Wm. Theodore de Bary has described this concept of dispersed power in the seventeenth-­century ideas of Huang Zongxi as not “unity out of plurality . . . but one sharing with many. ”42 Liang himself explained the notion of “rural reconstruction” to his critics in similar terms: the problems of China, he wrote, “clearly cannot be solved one village and one town at a time. How could we reconstruct part of the countryside?” One village could not be a reformed entity, because all Chinese villages were bound together—­indeed, the whole countryside was a broad and coherent organism.43 These efforts to create a countryside nation or a nation of villages would ultimately prove inadequate in the face of not just domestic instability but also foreign invasion, which together led many reformers into an alliance with a state that prized the “bureaucratic centralization” that Liang, for one, despised.44 In the early 1930s, however, the vision of a nation made of

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villages—­or, as Yan Yangchu sometimes wrote about, a nation built of counties reformed one at a time—­still seemed promising. By the late 1920s, Liang had made a name for himself as a reform-­minded thinker who wanted to put his ideas into practice. As Liang made national circuits, visiting and observing various reform projects, the famous intellectual was approached again and again with opportunities. The first of these opportunities that led to the northeast was the invitation by provincial elite and village self-­governance advocate Wang Hongyi to run a middle school in Shandong, which Liang had taken up briefly in 1924 before moving on to other efforts, such as his engagement with a school to train local government cadre in Henan that was inspired by the work at Dingxian and funded, as the Zouping institute would be, by General Han Fuju.45 Wang was a key figure in the vibrant group of North China elites, social scientists, and social activists called the Village Governance Faction, and he cofounded the journal Village Governance with Mi Digang, the local elite who invited the MEM into his home county of Dingxian. The journal reflected the faction’s diverse ideas. Wang himself was a cultural conservative who harkened back to an idyllic vision of Confucian governance in which compassion (and particularly elite compassion for the common people) sat at the heart of the government’s responsibilities.46 Similarly, Mi Digang and others involved with the faction advocated a “renaissance” of the Chinese countryside, a rebirth that could be achieved only by returning to the virtuous village and its virtuous people.47 This pedestrian conservatism was balanced by the avowals of the faction’s more progressive participants that while the past might serve as an interesting model, it was not the goal of the self-­governance reforms to recreate it, much like Lü Zhenyu’s rejection of the utopian vision of a “Peach Blossom Spring. ” Wang and Liang met in 1921, and the relationship proved fruitful: Wang found resonance in Liang’s ideas about Chinese culture, while Liang was slowly drawn toward the rural reform that Wang was advocating.48 In 1930, after Wang’s sudden death and at the behest of the journal’s financial backer, Yan Xishan (who, like several other prominent military strongmen, was involved in social reform efforts not only in the areas he governed but all over the country), Liang took Wang’s place running Village Governance.49 Liang’s three-­year stint at the journal overlapped with the 1931 founding of the Shandong Rural Reconstruction Institute. By the mid-­1930s, Liang’s central place in national discussions of local self-­governance and rural reconstruction was solidified, as his reputation as a famous philosopher was now undergirded by his advocacy of a practical vision of rural self-­governance exemplified in the project in Zouping and the pragmatic reforms and network and institution

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building that were in evidence on the pages of not only Village Governance but also the journal Rural Reconstruction. The Shandong Rural Reconstruction Institute was established in the Zouping County experimental district—­chosen because it met the criteria of being neither particularly rich nor particularly poor and because it was close to a railroad line. Located northeast of the provincial capital of  Jinan, Zouping was isolated, its villages nestled among small, green hills and scattered streams. One year after its founding, the institute’s training department was working with three hundred teachers and students, placing them in the ninety-­some peasant schools the institute had established. The institute combined many elements of earlier and ongoing projects, drawing in potential rural teachers and leaders from outside the area to train at the institute, much like the Xia­ ozhuang School had done, and it also ran three-­month courses for locals with coursework that covered a range of topics, from literacy to agriculture to household affairs (for women), much as the MEM was doing at Dingxian.50 In 1933, Heze County was added as a second experimental county, and a branch of the research institute was established there. Heze was poorer than Zouping, so its institute branch created the opportunity to experiment with strategies for addressing more severe poverty.51 In Liang’s thinking and in the plans proposed for the county, schools acted as “nodes” of learning and governance, particularly in regard to village citizenship. Practically speaking, this meant a range of things but notably included, as one writer put it, “sparking a spirit of ‘standing on one’s own feet to help each other, ’ [thus] fostering increased productivity [and] improving organizational skills, in the hope of cultivating a strong citizenry. ”52 The objective was to convert the community into a school or to effect what Guy Alitto translated as the “schoolification of society” ( jiaohua), an idea not so far removed from Tao Xingzhi’s symbiotic “life and education. ”53 Making schools the social, political, and economic heart of the village was explicit in the institute’s education program, where, one author proclaimed, “school learning, social education, and local self-­government are one. ”54 The centrality of schools in the Shandong reform counties reflected reformers’ reticence to use the power of the government to enforce the transformation of social practices and their preference for the persuasion of moral education. One writer in Rural Reconstruction noted that the schools in Heze were the incubators for local efforts to eradicate drug dealing and gambling. When it came to such social reforms, organizers preferred the long-­term effect of education to the forceful intervention of government in a policy the author referred to as “education first, then governance. ” In fact, the Heze-­ based writer noted that the goal of the project was to “minimize reliance on

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government’s power, ” even while he acknowledged, with an oblique reference to the failure of reforms that weren’t backed by government, that the government’s enforcement capabilities produced results.55 As this reflects, reform­ ers were in a bind—­they believed that the persuasive approach was preferable, but it wasn’t showing results in the ways that they hoped. As at Xiaozhuang and Dingxian, education-­centered reforms meant reliance on pedagogical materials to convey the goals and values of the institute. The former head of social studies at the Xiaozhuang School, Yang Xiaochun, wrote one of the literacy textbooks for the institute. His textbook, The Farmer’s Book, tackled a variety of generic Republican-­era topics for rural texts, such as literacy, agriculture, and symbols of the nation (National Day, the flag, and the Chinese people), but it was also tailored to Zouping’s emphasis on the village community. It included a lesson on the village covenant that was the centerpiece of Liang’s notions of village community but also topics like “dropping a lawsuit” (urging villagers to value “friendly sentiments” over financial matters), village self-­defense, and mutual dependence. The school was synonymous with the village in Liang’s proposals, and the self-­defense of that community was at the core of village identity—­a lesson titled “All People Are Soldiers” opined, “All people are soldiers, all villages are barracks; bandits and brigands won’t dare run amuck. Strictly observe discipline, bestir oneself; [when] all the people are in full battle gear (quanmin wuzhuang) the world will be at peace. ”56 The notion of mobilizing the population to combat rampant banditry was nothing new, but the vision of the village as military barracks grew directly out of the centrality of the school and of the moral inculcation of youth at Zouping, yet it was remarkably far from Liang’s alleged visions of an idealized Confucian society (or even the Buddhism that he later claimed was his inspiration). Such dissonances alert us to the way that rural reconstruction programs like those in Zouping and Dingxian were not simply real-­life manifestations of their famous leaders’ reform visions but often reflected a broader set of reform ideas that muddied their leaders’ individual ideological positions. The militarization of the village and the building up of village self-­defense forces were crucial components of Shandong’s experimental efforts. It was by far the most remembered element of the project when oral interviews of Zouping villagers were conducted in the 1980s, perhaps because residents as­ serted that the militias became active components of both anti-­Japanese efforts and the Communist forces that were established in the region, but perhaps also because the 1937 mobilization of village militias by the province and their subsequent devastation at Japanese hands turned villagers against reformers.57 Liang had experience with the village militia—­it had been one

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of the chief concerns at the Henan institute that Liang had been involved in prior to moving to Zouping. The leader there, intellectual Peng Yuting, wrote widely about the importance of self-­defense to self-­governance, seeing the de­ fense of the locale as a core responsibility of the villager. Peng advocated that all villagers be “militarized. ”58 Efforts to train Zouping youth—­with a particular eye toward self-­defense and the formation of community in the villages—­began in 1933. The institute initiated a four-­month training course that educated select young men between twenty and twenty-­five sui from fourteen villages. (Each village chose the students it would send.) Over the next several years, subsequent larger training courses were held for local youth, supported by the county government. The training was meant to teach the youth “how to be people and manage affairs” (zuoren he zuoshi). They were expected to then return to their villages and, un­ der the auspices of the township and village schools, direct self-­defense and training in their villages as well as conduct a household census.59 There were numerous problems with the project’s implementation. According to organizers, after the first two training sessions, the young men who received training in the county seat “felt they were different from regular people” and “did not know their place. ” The next conference incorporated village elders into the training programs in an attempt to impress on the young men their proper rung in the village hierarchy (and perhaps to reassure village elders that their investment in the program—­the villages and the county jointly covered the costs of the program, with the villages paying to support the students’ day-­to-­day needs—­would pay off).60 As it would in Dingxian, a focus on building up the county’s security apparatus accompanied the melding of rural reform organization with county government, coming just  af­ ter the county was granted “experimental county” status by the GMD government. In fact, Liang wrote that the project’s focus on youth was inspired by the MEM’s investment in rural youth.61 There were other examples to look to in the mid-­1930s, notably the GMD’s organization of the New Life Move­ment and the corps of “Blue Shirts” who enforced its rules on the streets of GMD-­ held cities. The overlapping emphasis on militarization points to a widespread interest in the untapped reservoir of youthful energies and also a defensive employment of those most likely to stir up trouble. In this regard, there are ways the youth organization could be framed as a successor to the earlier crop-­watching societies that had emerged in north Chinese villages in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and certainly to the night watchmen and then the village guards implemented in some places in the insecure 1920s. All served protective functions and were often drawn variously from all men of the village or might even target for employment

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those most likely to commit crimes themselves.62 Such a comparison helps us see these ostensibly popular militia as more than just “people’s” forces, placing villagers’ militia enrollment in line with a defensive tradition of incorporating potentially marginal and disruptive social elements into the community. Moreover, the combination of tasks and expectations set the young Zouping militia leaders at the crux of state and community, much like baojia heads who oversaw subcounty civil control had been in earlier periods. Once they had completed their course of study, they were responsible for making their local community legible to the state (utilizing their local position and trust to carry out the household census, for instance) and privileging the state’s goals above their own. As a result, the militia did not maintain the physical sanctity of the community above all but rather maintained order and control on behalf of the central state and was a key point of negotiation between local and center. This role was reinforced by the shift in title of the Zouping militia in 1935 from “village self-­defense” (xiangcun ziwei) to “security forces” ( jingweidui), a bit of nomenclature that pointed to the process of modernization as community services were transformed into state services (in name if not always in fact).63 The Shandong projects thus provide insight into how the discourse on self-­improvement served the needs of the local community by bolstering its security and solidarity even while these “improved” individuals worked in ser­ vice of the nation. The tension is evident in the propaganda of the time, such as in a song from the Zouping allied village militia training that reinforced the con­nections among improving the morals of young village men, the security of the community, and the strength of the nation. Its first few verses emphasize the service the militia provided to the nation, as when it proclaims that the militia men “directly give [their lives] and locale (difang) [to] indirectly save the nation. ” But reform and local community stayed at the center: “Self-­governance and self-­defense are the two ways to safeguard the neighborhood (lüyan). . . . Let my compatriots together shoulder [the burden]; defending the local (difang) is the core!” The militia, the song concluded, maintained order and peace so that reconstruction and self-­governance could be implemented: “And then for reconstruction’s future plans, the big achievement will be self-­governance. ”64 The song exemplifies the complicated questions of village integrity when it came to security and self-­governance. After all, local militias, particularly since the late nineteenth century, had stepped into a vacuum the state left in local security, and this growing role for local militias remained a worry for the central state into the Republic.65 Yet as the example of the Shandong projects shows, rural reconstruction advocates saw village self-­governance as

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filling the people’s needs (such as security) and checking the possibility of government corruption, but the village was not an autonomous entity. It was just one part of a unified whole.66 The local militias initiated by the independent reformers could not reliably secure rural areas, particularly as the volatility of the countryside increased, and those failures highlighted that villages could not go it alone when it came to self-­defense. The threat and then the actual presence of foreign troops only reinforced the inadequacy of village-­by-­village security forces. However, it also bolstered the reservations villagers had carried with them in their initial meetings with reformers about what costs they would pay for their incorporation into broader political entities. When the Japanese invaded Shandong in 1937, village militias, including those that Liang had built up, were mobilized on behalf of the province. The peasantry, in reaction, turned on rural reformers, burning schools and killing some reformers. “If  there had been no mass training, ” Liang would recall, then the young men couldn’t have been mobilized. “A rural reconstruction agency was used as a tool for rural destruction. ”67 But such outcomes were not clear in 1933. Instead, reformers still faced their own inadequacies in implementing reforms and providing a plan for something as basic as physical security. That inadequacy helps explain some of the reasoning behind rural reformers’ increasing willingness to collaborate with the government—­perhaps with the resources of the county and provincial governments behind them, they could do a better job of making the countryside a safe place to become a citizen. Remaking the County in Dingxian and Zouping In 1933, the Ministry of the Interior in Nanjing requested that every province establish an experimental county or district, overseen by an experimental institute, in order to test a variety of methods of county governance and to serve, once established, as province-­wide training grounds. Dingxian, Heze, and Jiangning were singled out with a handful of others as examples of districts, constituting one to four counties, that were designated by the provinces. All those named in the original resolution were primarily rural counties. The government’s guidance for the experimental counties was informed by its advisors (including Yan and Liang) and, alongside administrative restructuring, the resolution gave equal weight to what was identified as “local reconstruction” (difang jianshe): providing agricultural outreach, establishing cooperatives, encouraging education, and developing infrastructure. The counties were expected to integrate preparations for self-­governance into their experiments. The requirements emphasized that the experimental counties were meant to be testing sites for policies that were responsive to the people—­if a province

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had regions of disparate “local conditions and popular sentiment, ” the guidelines urged the province to establish multiple experimental counties so that policies sensitive to the needs of each region could be tested. The ministry stressed that the experiments, and their implementations of self-­government, needed to be run according to the “procedures prescribed by local people” and with “attention paid to the people’s social organizations. ”68 The Nationalists’ concern for the variegations of local culture emerged not only out of a desire to better govern a diverse nation but also out of their growing need for a workable plan for self-­governance and rural reform. Though the proposal never discusses rural reconstruction, the establishment of the experimental districts was one of the major steps that, on the one hand, made clear that there was a growing movement around the intertwined concerns of rural reform and self-­governance and, on the other, demonstrated the increasing intimacy between Nanjing and rural reconstruction advocates. However, it seems it was not apparent to rural reformers like Liang—­who was not a great supporter of the GMD’s approach to the reform of countryside—­that their acquiescence to the arrangement would be the first step in allying their reform efforts with the Nationalist agenda. Instead, despite his wariness, Liang appears to have been reassured by the independent nature of the experimental districts.69 For many rural reformers, the possibility of large-­scale reform was simply too good an opportunity to pass up. As one report from the MEM not­ed, “Our experience as a private institution has taught us that some of the results cannot be effectively demonstrated without government authority. ”70 As proposed by Gan Naiguang after a tour of prominent rural reconstruction sites in October 1932, research institutes established in each experimental district would “exercise full control” over the counties in which they would be located, allowing reformers full oversight of the county’s tax and court systems as well as the local administration.71 In the early 1930s, Gan had remade himself as a centrist and an “administrative expert, ” but in the 1920s, as a young protégé of Wang Jingwei, he held a series of high-­level positions in the GMD, culminating in his position as mayor of Guangzhou. Inconveniently, his assumption of office coincided with a Communist uprising in the city. Gan was purged from the GMD for allowing the uprising to occur. By the time of the experimental counties, he had begun to reassert himself in the party, remaking himself as an administrative reformer. The experimental counties’ focus on delegating responsibility to smaller units, working to in­ crease efficiency and accountability, and streamlining administrative structures all reflected Gan’s interests.72 The proposed institutes supplanted the county government, subsuming its duties and also its staff. In Shandong, the Rural Reconstruction Institute

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oversaw the governance of the experimental counties, Zouping and Heze. As the institutes took shape, established centers took the lead in assisting newer institutes. Guangxi Province, for instance, sent staff to Dingxian for observation and study in preparation for opening its own institute. There, they ob­ served the activities at the newly created Hebei County Government Re­ construction Research Institute (Hebei xianzheng jianshe yanjiuyuan), which became the umbrella organization for both the MEM and the Dingxian local government. The county government was the institute’s “Division of Practical Application. ”73 This was not to say, however, that the experimental counties were autonomous. On the contrary, the heads of the county governments had to be appointed by the provincial government, and any changes that ran contrary to provincial or national laws required consultations and the filing of detailed reports with the Ministry of the Interior and Executive Yuan.74 The establishment of the institutes thus enmeshed some once-­independent reformers in not just all the practical matters of local governance but also the hierarchical machinery of national governance, which kept close tabs on their experiments. For reformers who had begun their persuasive efforts with literacy campaigns and then progressed to the organization of social groups through cultural reforms, the 1933 establishment of model counties and their installment in research institutes that directed local government further abstracted the making of a new people: reformers would reconstitute local governments in such a way that government reorganization would trickle down to the individual character of rural people. Reformers in some places took advantage of the full powers of the county government they oversaw—­including the police forces and the courts—­to implement social reforms. In Zouping, for instance, in an effort to wipe out early marriage, the county required that fathers of teenagers who were violating new early marriage strictures be detained in the county jail. The push to end footbinding also relied on government-­enforced compliance—­in this case, inspectors who were sent out to the villages.75 The tension over the political roles and responsibilities of rural people emerged in the discussions of and plans for the designated counties. Among these, two unsurprising picks took center stage: Dingxian and Zouping, the twin stars of rural reconstruction, each led by charismatic leaders who stood for profoundly differing ideological visions of the relationship of state to society. Yet the respective plans for county reform in the two places were remarkably similar: in particular, both privileged citizen education that focused on building stronger social organizations. For both Yan and Liang, creating social organizations that mobilized rural citizens was not just crucial to the success of self-­governance reforms but also honored what they presented as

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a village tradition of self-­governance and brought government in line with the people and less under the control of local bullies, as Wang Hongyi had earlier written about. In 1929, for instance, Yan asserted that for centuries “the villages of China . . . have been democratic and self-­governing, through a system of councils of elders, ” but villagers were too provincial and selfish to recognize themselves as members of an entity any larger than the village. Thus “the main work of the movement in the field of training citizens is the extension . . . of the political institutions operating for centuries in the ‘village republic, ’ to the larger units of the district community and the nation. ”76 Reformers simultaneously reinforced village integrity—­by introducing self-­ governance reforms—­and sought to reinforce that the village was part of a broader whole. In fact, villages had not universally been governed by elders’ councils (though that was one form of village governance). Instead, village government often reflected the internal politics of the villages, with some villages governed by a council of clan heads and others by neighborhood representatives; in some villages, leadership positions were held indefinitely, and in others, leadership positions rotated according to a set schedule.77 And even when offered the opportunity to hold open elections, some villages insisted on main­ taining existing power structures, as Liang Shuming observed in a village in Henan.78 In Dingxian, village heads selected by a council of prominent men had governed most villages, until the 1929 County Organization Act required elections for village heads. Beginning in the 1910s, there had been efforts to organize self-­government councils in some villages, but these were overseen by influential local men and with no popular suffrage, largely as the late Qing village government had been.79 Moreover, the subcounty governing structures to which early twentieth-­century reformers pointed as evidence of pro­ todemocratic institutions often were the result of efforts by the imperial government to efficiently utilize local society to carry out tasks it was unwilling or unable to undertake itself.80 At Dingxian, self-­governance efforts had already been implemented by the county government following Nanjing’s promulgation of  local self-­governance regulations in 1928, including elections for village heads.81 Yan was eager to integrate his own reform work into the county’s existing efforts and was excited about the expanded scope it afforded him. Government involvement was necessary, he argued, to face issues like health, taxation, and education: “Only by working through [the government] could a private research institution such as ours develop a complete [county]-­unit reconstruction progress, which must include the political aspect. ”82 The work of  Dingxian’s institute largely followed the MEM’s agenda. The goal of the institute was to “study questions pertaining

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to rural life, and especially, the [county] political administration with a view to making it an effective instrument for carrying out rural reconstruction. ”83 The experimental county work drew on the MEM’s skills in mass mobilization to focus on cultivating and strengthening “citizen-­aid” organizations. The other two branches of its new government were the “People’s Plenary” and the “Township Reconstruction Council. ” For immediate action, the experimental county particularly relied on young people, aged sixteen to thirty-­ five sui, in these groups, and their “citizen training” was a first-­order duty for the experimental county government. Once trained, the young people became the base of participants in the citizen-­aid groups and provided an educated, enthusiastic contribution to the People’s Plenary (which was open to all people in the county). Yan used military language to describe these groups’ actions: they would be on “active duty” and would push for the MEM’s rural reform agenda “with a spirit of military discipline. ” In this way, youth would “cultivate the people’s resources, organize the people’s resources, wield the people’s resources. ” But this progression of activities ultimately came back to the MEM’s bread and butter, the education of village people, which included the writing of educational materials and the training of teachers who could go out to the countryside.84 The emphasis on citizenship education became more pronounced in 1934, the second year of the experimental county’s existence, when it constituted two of the five main areas of the experimental county’s focus (the others were social investigation, health care, and economics). But as the MEM and the county government became intertwined, the MEM became an implementing arm for county policy. Speaking in regard to illiteracy eradication, Yan highlighted the adjustment by noting that in 1933, the experimental county’s first year, “education used political power—­namely for the purpose of research, ” but by 1934, “politics used educational power—­namely for the purpose of  im­ plementation. ”85 Yan did not write of the government’s growing influence negatively, nor did others at Dingxian. Chen Zhushan, the head of citizen education for the MEM, praised the greater sobriety and caution that came when the MEM collaborated with county government. The “experimental department” (as the MEM was redubbed when it was integrated into the county government bureaucracy) was no longer free to act as it wished, he wrote, but was now acting under the regulations of the research institute and the laws of the provincial and central governments. In doing so, “whatever obstacles we encounter, we will research the obstacle itself and not make irresponsible criticisms on the basis of, by chance, getting upset and emotional. ”86 The transition from independent reforms to those overseen by the government was also apparent in Zouping, where Liang’s focus was similarly on

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cultivating social groups. When Liang and the Rural Reconstruction Institute assumed leadership of the county, government administration was orga­ nized  at four sublevels: the rural township, the nonadministrative market town (zhen), the twenty-­five-­family community (lü), and the five-­family unit (lin). In place of this organization, Liang proposed a plan that would divide the county into fourteen townships, each organized around an already existing school, with villages subordinate to it. The school was to be the civic, social, and administrative center of each community, encompassing the entire population as its students.87 This was an extreme extrapolation of the self-­ transformative ethic—­the entire village was the target of organized pedagogic dissemination (which seems a goal likely to lead to embracing coercion, even if that wasn’t planned from the start). The village school “improved contemporary society’s life skills” by tackling the entire scope of rural reconstruction’s plan for a remade countryside, from antifootbinding campaigns to the establishment of economic cooperatives. By remaking the students—­in other words, all the villagers—­“the life of a village gradually improved, [and] culture was gradually elevated, ” resulting in shared social progress. Liang predicted the transformation of the individual through education would reverberate up the governing structures, resulting in the emergence of “local group life, ” which would in turn cultivate “the capacities of citizen organizations, ” after which self-­governance organizations would naturally emerge, bringing the nation into being.88 It is possible to read Liang’s rural vision as an egalitarian, antistate utopia, in which villagers managed their own affairs and oversaw their own society. While Liang was adamant that governmental reform had to happen from the bottom up, he also believed that the job of the “local governance groups” was to carry out the plans of  the political units above it: nation, province, and county.89 Philip Kuhn, in writing about Tao Xingzhi’s ideas of society-­as-­ school, which were inspired by and, in turn, inspired Liang, called it “a totalitarian system—­in which . . . the whole society becomes a classroom. ” As Kuhn notes, Xiaozhuang’s brief life meant that it could be “essentially voluntarist” and never had to “resort to compulsion. ”90 The experimental counties, however, did begin to resort to compulsion to implement reforms. Rural reconstructionists and the Nationalists both spoke of supporting Sun’s idea of political tutelage, but their shared lip service to those goals didn’t mask their profoundly different approaches to rural people—­the reformers hopefully persuasive, the GMD bureaucratically top down. However, as reformers took on a greater breadth of responsibilities, they found that the power of persuasion and individualized self-­transformation had its limits. Reformers approached their 1933 cooperation with the Nationalists optimistically if

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cautiously under the impression that Nanjing’s interest in their work was an admission of the failure of the government’s own approach. In one report on the formation of the experimental district, the MEM asserted that the crises of the early 1930s “have driven home among the more progressive political and military leaders the fact that they cannot possibly expect to bring about reform just by legislation or by issuing mandates; and the positive work of rural reconstruction centers has helped them to realize that the solution for the problem of political as well as social reconstruction must be worked out from the bottom up, on the basis of actual conditions. The Provincial Institute for Social and Political Reconstruction is a concrete expression of this new attitude on the part of the government. ”91 Yet this was not the case. Rather than the MEM influencing a new GMD policy for rural outreach, its cooperation with the GMD caused the public to conflate the rural reconstruction efforts and Nanjing’s top-­down rural politics. Moreover, the distinctions between Nationalist and rural reconstruction approaches to mass mobilization were slowly dissolved as reformers acquired the powers of coercion and their once necessary reliance on persuasion faded away. The experimental districts, the new powers bestowed on reformers, their increasing integration into national and provincial bureaucracies, and even the national rural reconstruction organizations that emerged around the same time (discussed in the next chapter) all led to a greater integration of rural reconstructionists into the structures and goals of Nationalist state-­making. This process would become even more pronounced when, a few years later, the nation faced foreign invasion and war and the vision of a community of self-­ transformed villagers was scuttled. Dire circumstances required a more heavy-­ handed approach to mass mobilization and social change. Local Participation, National Affiliation The question remains: Given reformers’ well-­founded concerns about allying with the Nationalists, why did Yan, Liang, and others risk tarnishing their independent reputations by allowing their projects to be swept up into GMD self-­governance efforts? Another example of rural reform, Lichuan County in Jiangxi, which was jointly overseen by the GMD government and the National Christian Council (and eventually by the National Christian Council’s local affiliate, created to oversee the reforms, the Jiangxi Christian Rural Ser­ vice Union), provides insight into the answer.92 The Lichuan experiment was the result of Song Meiling’s lobbying for a Christian rural project as well as Christian missionaries’ desire to create a nonviolent rural outreach alter­ native to the CCP’s model; many Christian missionaries recognized the fun-

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damental similarities between their own hopes for rural China and those of the Communists but found the CCP’s violence abhorrent.93 The National Christian Council, following the model of Dingxian, initially ran the Lichuan experimental district. George Shepherd, a Congregationalist missionary, took the lead on the project, while Yan Yangchu’s brother-­in-­law, Chang Fuliang (Chang had married Alice Huie Yan’s sister, Louise, and visited Dingxian on several occasions), oversaw the efforts as the National Christian Council’s rural secretary. In 1933, in preparation for running the district in Lichuan, Shepherd visited Dingxian, where he decided that the MEM project was the perfect rebuttal to the Communist rural agenda: “I honestly believe, ” Shepherd wrote, that Yan “has the only answer” to the Communists.94 As the project got off the ground, the MEM promised support for the Lichuan reformers and the project also received guidance from League of Nations advisors.95 The Lichuan reforms were implemented through “Rural Service Centers” (nongcun fuwuchu), a concept that had first been used by YMCA-­affiliated reformers at Weitingshan and a project outside Hangzhou (themselves inspired by Yan’s work at Dingxian). In the ten counties where the effort was adopted, the service centers became the substitute for local government—­ much as the reconstruction institutes had in other places, such as Dingxian and Zouping. (Indeed, the area was designated an experimental district.)96 But the project was an unqualified failure. Ironically, leaders had so much difficulty recruiting young, educated Christians to staff the program that they eventually hired Communists to work for the project. More important, reformers found that without state coercion, they accomplished little in the impoverished, resource-­scarce region, but reliance on heavy-­handed methods of social mobilization and reform, when they could manage it, alienated villagers.97 The Lichuan reforms were launched as Chiang Kai-­shek attempted to encircle the CCP base in Jiangxi, and thus the social reforms went hand in hand with political and military strategic goals. As with rural reconstruction, the GMD snapped up the ideas and visions of rural reformers and turned them to political ends yet made little headway in generating a compelling pro­ gram of rural revitalization. But reformers like the National Christian Council—­and Yan at Dingxian—­ were taken in by the GMD’s request for their help, seeing an opportunity to expand their influence and potentially reshape the centralizing vision of national reconstruction. In so doing, they ran headlong into a state that, in contrast to their diffuse, slow-­paced reforms, had a strong vision (if not always the ability to implement it) of a countryside subordinate to its bureaucratic hierarchy. The GMD’s effort to integrate rural reconstruction into its agenda was a strategic move to build on rural reconstruction’s embryonic populist

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engagement and neutralize a movement that was, in some cases at least, advocating self-­governance in order to ward off the penetrating control of the central state and that it worried (mainly without cause) was harboring Communists. These troubling (to the GMD) tendencies were evident in rural reconstruction’s concern for local conditions and its emphasis on cultivating an allegiance to the national community but not necessarily the party and state. The rural reconstruction vision, shared by many at the time, was of a shared national culture grounded in the countryside, not of the countryside’s integration into a hierarchy. This was a vision that threatened the GMD’s policy of growing centralization and control. For the Nationalists, rural reform, as exemplified at Jiangning, became instead about a top-­down imposition of new political ideas on backward, resistant peasants, enacting the GMD’s authoritarian agenda of transformation and insisting on political control of the reform process. As Lichuan demonstrated, this was a vision rural people resisted. As they gained control of the county governments, other reform projects also adopted a more authoritarian approach to implementing social reform. This was a grotesque exaggeration of the early rural reconstruction utopianism around self-­transformation, and it brought into stark light the coercion rural reformers had previously cloaked in paternal concern. Moreover, the association with the GMD was eventually devastating, as rural reformers’ claims to impartiality and independence from the government (which were never really true, as we have discovered in earlier discussions of the interpenetration of rural reconstruction and local and provincial governments), and the distinction they had attempted to draw between their own social reform tactics and those of the government, were muddied.

5

A Movement Made and Lost

In 1933, as a result of the formation of a few government committees and the inaugural meeting of what would be a three-­year run of national conferences, people began to write about the increasing influence of the Rural Reconstruction Movement. For many reformers, the growing attention to the loose network of rural reconstruction projects that accompanied cooperation with the government seemed like a gain after years of paltry attention and funding. The post-­1933 movement, such as it was, emerged as a national phenomenon not in spite of but because of reformers’ growing cooperation with these sources of power and support. As a result, rural reconstruction becoming a movement served the interests of the GMD and foreign experts much more than it did rural reconstructionists themselves, who for years, after all, had been communicating with each other and visiting each other’s projects and, in some cases, talking about their work as part of a “rural movement” (xiangcun yundong or nongcun yundong). The spread of rural reconstruction ideas caused growing pains and concerns about the dilution of reformers’ ideas and reputations. As a 1933 MEM report remarked about the increased interest in rural reconstruction, “From one point of view it is highly encouraging, but in view of our past experience in literacy campaigns, we look upon it as a grave situation. . . . This national wave of rural reconstruction may also turn out to be a disappointment, unless we help to maintain the highest possible standard in at least one center” ( by which it meant Dingxian). A year later, an MEM report would note, “There is already too much cynicism and skepticism in China about the possibility of carrying any sort of constructive work through to successful completion. China cannot now afford another failure. ”1 Reformers worked to balance the growing excitement about rural reconstruction with their own control of its

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message and methods. Given Nanjing’s close relationship to the ideas of national reconstruction, it wasn’t possible to keep the central government at arm’s length (and not all reformers wanted to). The new Rural Reconstruction Movement was folded into the swirl of Nationalist ideas about social reform and mass mobilization. Simultaneously, the influence of foreigners on the direction of rural reform ideas in China shifted in the post-­1933 period in ways that had real implications for how the efforts around rural reconstruction were perceived in China. The previous chapter demonstrated the growing affinity between rural reformers and the Nationalist government and the negative effects that association with the GMD’s heavy-­handed self-­government policies had for rural reformers. Similarly, in the post-­1933 period, the profile of foreign involvement in Chinese rural reform increased, and some of the reformers discussed in the previous chapters—­particularly the MEM—­increasingly aligned their reform work with the agendas of foreign funders. While Chinese reformers had long had a consciousness of their work as part of international discussions of rural reform and the future of rural people in the nation, foreigners now also had a growing sense of the important contributions Chinese reformers might make to the global rural cosmopolitanism that had emerged in the 1920s. But cooperation with the government and foreigners, coupled with the political and military exigencies of the day, shifted the earlier reform focus on self-­transformation and self-­governance. Instead, China became a key training ground for what would, after World War II, become rural developmentalism. Many global development experts who emerged from the post–­World War I international peace and cooperation efforts gained expertise and experience in China.2 These experts brought attention to Chinese reform, sometimes lauding Chinese reformers’ innovations but just as often decrying the deep poverty and the inadequacy of government responses. In the open political setting of Republican China, a variety of intellectuals, researchers, and political activists were able to test out new techniques of social mobilization and social reform, establishing a variety of models for social and political transformation. This chapter explores this transformation as, under the influence of the GMD and foreign funders and experts, rural reconstruction became less about the self-­transformation of rural people and their communities and more about the cultivation of a cohort of rural cadres who could efficiently lead the masses toward modernization. The increasing profile of the “international development experts, ” as Margherita Zanasi has called them, highlighted tensions between global and local in the visions and methods of rural reform. These experts were not schooled in a specific cultural or geographic background. Instead, Zanasi and Timothy

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Mitchell, on whose work she builds, have argued that these new experts were focused on the economics of supposedly backward countries and sought universal solutions to the problems supposedly shared by all these backward regions.3 As international experts and funders increasingly took the reins of the discussions and agenda of Chinese rural reform, they heavily influenced the directions and perceptions of rural reconstruction, and not for the better. Developmentalism—­an agenda of reforms undertaken on behalf of the Chinese state but governed by supposedly international standards and practices—­ took precedence over self-­transformation. The interest in rural reconstruction became more intense over the 1930s as international concern about the CCP grew, and many of these experts mused on the possible solutions that rural reconstruction offered to the national crisis. If rural China was the critical battleground for China’s future, then there were two possible pathways forward: rural reconstruction or the CCP’s rural revolution.4 While some Chinese reformers accommodated themselves to the new intensity and political overtones of this interest (or even, like Yan in Dingxian, appeared to embrace it), other rural reconstructionists spoke out against the homogenizing vision of rural development. The most famous critic was Liang Shuming, who emerged in this period as the preeminent theorist of rural reconstruction. Having risen to fame with his critique of Westernization and his insistence in the early 1920s that China should not modernize under such conditions but instead find its own China-­centered path forward, Liang had, as already discussed, come to believe that path was grounded in the Chinese countryside. He hoped that pursuing a future of robust rural communities, rather than urbanization and accompanying industrialization, would create a moral, humane society. Liang insisted that the focus of rural reconstruction was not material enrichment but self-­cultivation and the strengthening of the rural community and, by extension, China. This viewpoint, of course, placed Liang at odds not only with the development-­focused GMD and foreign experts but also with the CCP, which also argued that rural reform had to tackle systemic problems, particularly those of an economic nature. As Liang’s objections highlight, one of the results of the shift toward development and expertise that both foreign funders and Nanjing were urging was a change in the targets of rural reconstruction work. Instead of working with villagers, reformers increasingly gravitated toward working with colleges and institutes to train a new professional leadership that could transform the countryside from the county level down. In the face of the Japanese invasion, reformers made a clear choice to focus on training government and social leaders rather than continuing to emphasize mass education and mobilization; they hoped they could reach more people and more places through

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diffuse rather than direct means. This shift, which was encouraged by both Nanjing and international supporters, moved rural reconstruction away from the self-­transformative underpinnings of its education projects. Making a Movement In 1933, the New Journal of Agriculture and Forestry reported on the founding of a new national organization of rural reconstructionists, noting, “This year the Rural Reconstruction Movement has risen suddenly, but it doesn’t have unifying organizations or liaisons, so its effect has been slight. ”5 While other observers pointed to the emergence of rural reconstruction as a social movement around 1930 or 1931, the name “Rural Reconstruction Movement” was not used until 1933.6 Before that, publications like Village Governance wrote about the “rural movement” and “rural reconstruction” side by side, so reform­ ers were certainly contemplating the ways that what they were undertaking might be part of a broader movement. But the idea of a “Rural Reconstruction Movement” was most strongly associated, above all, with the emergence of Liang Shuming as a leading rural reform figure for the movement and with his increasing discussions over the course of the mid-­1930s of a rural reconstruction theory (xiangcun jianshe lilun). Liang began to write widely about rural reconstruction in the early 1930s as he was beginning work in Shandong. Liang’s theories emphasized that rural reconstruction was not simply about giving rural people a better material life, and it was not about effecting reform one village at a time. In a 1933 response to critics titled “What Is Rural Reconstruction?, ” Liang outlined rural reconstruction as a process of reforming the whole through all its parts, a process of change that entailed reforming all of society. He outlined three components to the rural reconstruction movement: (1) the work of resolving China’s problems had to begin with the countryside; (2) this work had to be grounded in the strengths and energies of “rural people themselves”; and ( 3) when the work was concluded, it should have created a government that could address these problems itself.7 Liang focused on a reconstruction of the village community. Leftists found his proposals reactionary; the GMD felt his efforts were not modernizing enough ( particularly because he was not encouraging investment in infrastructure and industrialization).8 Nevertheless, his writings drew widespread attention to the idea of rural reconstruction, and particularly to the notion, shared among so many other rural reconstructionists, that rural people would be the generative force behind rural reform. At the same time, his intellectual luminescence meant that his vision of rural reconstruction overshadowed most others in the popular mind.

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While Liang was promoting and explaining his ideas of rural reconstruction, he was also engaged in helping institutionalize earlier informal exchanges around rural reconstruction by serving on government committees and allowing Zouping to play host to the first meeting of the “Rural Work Discussion Association” (xiangcun gongzuo taolun hui ), or what was initially called the “National Rural Reconstruction Advancement Association” (quanguo xiangcun jianshe xiejin hui ) and would by 1937 be the “Rural Reconstruction Discussion Association” (xiangcun jianshe taolun hui ). These formal exchanges confirmed and bolstered the pre-­1933 interconnections of the movement. Many of these relations have cropped up over the preceding pages—­the collaboration between Yan and Tao on the MEM readers; the shared work between the Xiaozhuang School and the CVES’s project at Xugongqiao; the handful of Xiaozhuang School personnel who later worked at the Shandong Institute; Liang’s observation tours and subsequent writings, which did so much to help shape the notion of a rising movement; the MEM’s advisory work in Jiangxi; and the Village Governance Faction. There were multiple networks and nodes that were active within what was eventually called the Rural Reconstruction Movement, and they were not in agreement with each other about the path forward, something that was apparent in the records of their meetings and the vibrant exchanges of the mid-­1930s. However, shared experiences were important in helping dispersed reformers speak and write about themselves as part of a shared effort. The Rural Work Discussion Association was born of the 1932 and 1933 exchanges among rural reformers. Preliminary discussions of the association took place in a variety of locations over the course of 1932: at the CVES’s project at Huangxu in January 1932; at a CVES meeting in Fuzhou in July; and finally, in December 1932, after the Ministry of the Interior hosted a meeting of the major rural reconstruction projects (the same meeting where the ideas of the experimental districts were hammered out), at which time the association was established. In July 1933, the association held its first national meeting in Zouping.9 Subsequent meetings were held in Dingxian and Wuxi. Accounts of the movement written in the following decades described the founding of the association as the beginning of a “nationwide movement, ” and it did create a set of names and organizations that have been considered the core of the movement since.10 The meetings encompassed reformers and researchers from a diverse group of organizations that included universities ( like Yenching University and Nankai University), government agencies and committees (such as the Executive Yuan’s Rural Revitalization Commission), agricultural experiments and research projects ( like the Jiangxi Agricultural Institute and the Hunan Cotton Experimental Farm), experimental counties

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( like Dingxian, Zouping, and Jiangning), and experimental schools and vocational training programs. Members were diverse: men and women, academics and missionaries, returned students and local middle school graduates.11 While calling itself a national organization, the base organizations on which the society was built were in the Chinese heartland—­mainly in North China and the Yangzi Delta. At the meetings, attendees spent most of their time presenting reports of the last year’s work, sharing their frustrations and successes, and talking about ways to improve rural outreach. Only three meetings were held; the 1936 sessions were scheduled for three locations rather than one—­Xi’an, Chongqing, and Guangzhou—­to ease travel for those living in the south and southwest, areas underrepresented at the conferences.12 But the 1936 conferences never took place. By 1936, North China, where the largest reform projects were located, had become too dangerous. That year, even while some projects like the MEM continued to expand, establishing new experimental counties in Hengshan County, Hunan, and in Xindu County, Sichuan, they began to put in place evacuation measures for their North China staff.13 The Rural Work Discussion Association conference proceedings are the best overview of what reformers considered components of rural reconstruction, and the definition is inclusive. Some of the projects asserted their roots in post-­1911 reform efforts led by local elites, of  the sort started in Dingxian by Mi Digang more than a decade before he convinced the MEM to relocate there. The majority were founded in the late 1920s and early 1930s. The kinds of reform they undertook encompassed everything from health and sanita­tion to reform teahouses, but most focused on education or agriculture. Repre­­ sentatives came from projects in Jiangsu (nine of 1935’s thirty-­two represented projects were in Jiangsu), Hebei (nine), Shandong (four), Jiangxi (four), Zhejiang (two), Anhui, Shanxi, Guangxi, and Hunan (one each). Given the geographic allocation of these projects and that leadership of the conference was given primarily to North China representatives, it is not surprising that increasing Japanese incursions prevented further meetings. The association’s conferences were advertised and written up in a variety of rural reconstruction publications, creating a coalition of rural reconstructionists who worked together in the coming years.14 One result of the meetings and the resulting rural reconstruction exchanges they encouraged was the further transfer of reform ideas from one place to another. For instance, in the 1980s, people who as children had attended rural reconstruction schools in Dingxian and Zouping independently sang the same rural reconstruction song to researchers—­just one small piece of evidence that ideas and content were shared between projects.15 Another result of the meetings was a growing

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comparison of  the varied rural reconstruction projects as writers set them side by side in books and articles. That alignment corresponded to the growing institutionalization of the movement more generally. While the Rural Work Discussion Association was an independent organization, the largest institutional growth in rural reconstruction–­related affairs happened at the behest of the central government. The government’s direct outreach to rural reconstructionists began in 1931, when the central government invited indepen­­ dent reformers, among them Yan, to serve on the National Economic Council. It was proposed that the MEM would administer three more programs like Dingxian in Jiangsu, Zhejiang, and Jiangxi. The project was too ambitious for the MEM, which had only been based in Dingxian for two years at that point. Yan wrote that the feeling among the MEM staff was “that the experimental work at [ Dingxian] was not sufficiently advanced, and also that there was no adequate trained personnel to tackle such an extensive task effectively. ” Yan withdrew from the council.16 Other government efforts proceeded to spread the ideas of rural reconstruction, however, including a directive from the central government to every county in China to establish a “Bureau of Mass Education. ” But these kinds of directives seemed to have little impact and were often haphazardly implemented.17 The government initiative that most actively engaged rural reform leaders was the 1933 establishment of experimental counties. As discussed in the previous chapter, while the experimental counties may have ceded to reform organizations the running of experimental districts—­an unprecedented relinquishing of control to extragovernmental organizations—­the government had reasons for doing so: its desire to lay claim to the energy and activities of rural reconstruction. The government’s interest, in no small part, appears to have encouraged reformers to begin to see themselves and speak and write of themselves as a movement. As the 1930s wore on, rural reformers became more intertwined with the central government, relying on its funding and siting their reform projects in close proximity to its successive capitals. The result was an increasingly close alignment of the goals of rural reconstructionists and those of Nanjing. The International Expert and Rural Reconstruction Before the Japanese invasion, a combination of factors made China a particularly appealing destination for a diverse bunch of social scientists, educators, and public health advocates. For example, many of the reform projects that were accessible to foreign visitors appeared to be unencumbered by political ideology. China’s supposed rural backwardness meant that if the reforms

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worked in China, they would work anywhere, and the inability of the GMD to closely control local government and society meant that fairly radical reforms proceeded relatively unimpeded. Chinese reformers referred to their projects as a “social laboratory” or a “laboratory county. ” MEM staffer S. Y. Chu argued that it was only in the Chinese social laboratory that solutions to Chinese problems could be worked out: “We have no source to copy from in the West or elsewhere. We shall have to work out our problems by scientific methods. ”18 Foreign visitors, on the other hand, treated the whole of China as a social laboratory; they saw it not as a place where particularly Chinese policies were being developed but instead as a blank canvas of undevelopment where universal solutions could be perfected.19 Chinese reformers were not immune to the allure of the universal Chinese model: in 1945, Yan visited Cuba and noted that, after hearing about the MEM’s work, his hosts “met and decided to select a county as a Social Laboratory to be modeled after the system our Movement is developing in China. ” It would be, Yan, wrote, a “Cuban” Dingxian.20 This sense of the international possibilities of the Chinese countryside was short lived. During the Cold War, the Asian village became, in Western assessments, a dangerous, treacherous place and, as a result, a target of renewed, top-­down reform efforts.21 But for a few decades in the early twentieth century, the Chinese countryside was something else: even while reformers characterized the village as a haven of backward, degenerate practices, they believed it held the possibilities of revitalization, innovation, and inspiration, and both Chinese and Western reformers were eager to use the villages as laboratories of social engineering. These experiments were taking place at the same time as the emergence of the global development expert.22 The early twentieth century was a moment when states around the world mobilized the emerging social sciences on their behalf. Experts in economics, health care, agriculture, and many other fields contributed their efforts to strengthening their nations through the development of universal principles of national development. This was true in China as well, where upon establishing their government in 1927, the Nationalists initiated a state-­led drive toward industrialization—­what has been called the developmental state.23 By the time of the “rural reconstruction tide” of the mid-­1930s, many rural reformers found themselves roped into the Nationalist cause, their own projects now serving as inspiration for and examples of the effort to generate a compelling program of rural reform. The developmental approach to rural reform was bolstered by the presence of foreign advisors who, as the next few sections will show, actively worked to align rural recon­struction with the Nationalist government, sometimes as a result of explicit (anti-­Communist) political underpinnings and a concomitant desire

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to boost Nationalist rule. Hundreds of such experts—­foreign and Chinese—­ traversed the Chinese countryside over the 1930s and opined about what fix rural China needed most. But they had little effect on the actual conditions of rural people. Of the experts who were working in China at this time, Americans were the most numerous, but they were not alone. Foreign observers came from Japan, Britain, France, Italy, and India, just to name a few that visited Dingxian, Zouping, and other reform centers for observation tours and periods of study, and for many of them, these visits became treasured moments where they experienced the “real” China. Late in his life, John B. Grant, a professor at the Peking Union Medical College and a Rockefeller Foundation representative in China, stated, “The recollections of China which I often have felt the most pleasant are those of my visits to [Dingxian] as a guest of the Yen family, where I was lodged in a small guesthouse room and ate with the family. ”24 No less than did their Chinese counterparts, the foreign observers gloried in going out to the countryside—­a supposedly authentic experience in which they could meet the real Chinese peasant. The British economic historian R. H. Tawney, educated at Oxford, wrote that he was a “peasant displaced from the soil” and thus at ease in rural China.25 Chinese reformers, for their part, traveled to Russia, Japan, America, and India to observe rural reform efforts in those places and brought back ideas, explicitly framing their efforts—­as Yan once did when he wrote that he was planning a “Chinese Chautauqua, ” a reference to the American adult education efforts built around a summer gathering—­in terms that resonated internationally.26 What emerged out of this dialogue was a growing sense that China was a special node on this international rural reform tour, a place of particular poverty where real progress was being made.27 Criticisms of this approach came from numerous corners. Domestic critics condemned the projects (the MEM, above all others) for their foreign influences or foreign funding. Critics sympathetic to the CCP critiqued the projects for focusing too much attention on the failings of the individual peasant rather than on the systemic challenges that faced rural people—­for example, faulting people for illiteracy without acknowledging that families had to send children to work at a young age in order to survive.28 Others attacked programs like Liang Shuming’s for the insistence that personal reform had to precede political reform, arguing that such an approach would fail to make the wholesale changes necessary to transform rural conditions. (Liang, in response, argued that critics misunderstood his proposals as individual and local in scope rather than in their source of instigation.) International critics sometimes took the same tack, judging programs such as the MEM’s undertaking in Dingxian as

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too narrowly focused on local exigencies and unsustainable without plentiful foreign funding. The criticism of the local nature of the reform projects highlighted the tensions inherent in the international rural reconstruction movement, as foreign experts pushed for universal principles of rural reform and Chinese reformers continued to insist on the importance of understanding specifically Chinese dynamics and local conditions. A 1932 report by a League of Nations committee highlighted the push and pull between the local and the universal and the tensions between internationally focused bodies and nationalist institutions like the MEM. The so-­called Becker Commission, named for C. H. Becker, a former minister of educa­tion in Prussia and scholar of  Islam, visited various education sites throughout China, collecting materials and making observations that informed a comprehensive analysis of the Chinese educational system.29 The committee had been invited by the Chinese government in May 1931 to assist in preparing a proposal for wholesale reform of the education system, but the League of Nations was also interested in encouraging exchange between international education centers and Chinese ones.30 The report covered all aspects of education in China, including school administration, student admissions, and issues related to each particular kind of educational institution (primary, secondary, vocational, university). At the outset, the report noted that foreign educators, and particularly Americans, had profoundly shaped the new Chinese education system. The result, the report worried, was that they didn’t draw as effectively as they might on “the great traditions which were specifically Chinese. ”31 Moreover, the report went on, Chinese who had returned from abroad were likely to have applied education methods without thought for local conditions or needs, thus resulting in “the purely formal imitation of the methods and substance of foreign civilisations. ”32 The committee members expressed concern that the adoption of a single model might blind Chinese educators to the variety of models of modern education available. “It must not be the aim of the development, ” they wrote, “to Americanise or Europeanise China, but to modernise China’s own national and historical individuality. ” The observation reflected precisely the feelings of many Chinese reformers that the condition of modernity was not a product of the West only. “The object of these remarks, ” the report continues, “is solely to warn Chinese educators against superficial Americanisation. ” To be accused, then, of having simply adopted Western models wholesale, when reformers like Yan and Tao had spoken so passionately for the need to adapt foreign education models to Chinese realities, was a harsh criticism and keenly felt in China.33 The education work at Dingxian was singled out for particular critique in a three-­page section listed under “adult education. ” Committee members

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expressed concerns that Dingxian’s supposedly plush budget (the MEM would charge that the committee’s figures for Dingxian’s operating budget were wrong ), along with the MEM’s dependence on volunteer labor, would lead it to develop a program of reform unsuitable for national adoption. The endeav­ ors  the MEM was undertaking in Dingxian, the report stated, ignored the central issues confronting the countryside in favor of those of “an altogether secondary and unimportant character”—­such as making records of local social and familial organization or developing affordable radios. These distractions, as the committee saw them, meant not only that the efforts at Dingxian focused on a local setting (where committee members feared reformers would develop a particular rather than generalizable education model) but that the program was “[idealizing] the present mode of living instead of working with a view to the future. ”34 The committee, in its closing sentences, argued that local work like that at Dingxian could not precede a remaking of the system as a whole. Instead, the commission asserted that the MEM should be focusing on developing generalizable principles for reform that addressed the underlying systemic problems of the countryside and that would lend themselves to a national model. The report thus highlights the confusing tensions between global principles and standards and local needs that foreign experts were work­ing out at the time. While the international influences on Chinese rural reconstruction were diverse, including Indian, Soviet, and Danish models of rural reform, the report is also typical of a broader tendency, both at the time and today, to emphasize the influence of American funding and education on the activities and priorities of Chinese reformers (and to equate Americanization with international principles for development). These charges were not untrue, as the next section’s discussion of the Rockefeller Foundation in China shows, but they also telegraphed European discomfort with growing American influence around the world, not just in China. In light of the role America would play in the 1940s as it underwrote the faltering Nationalists and put in place government agents to try to broker a peace between the GMD and the CCP, the accusations of Americanization would have real ramifications for rural reconstruction’s popular legitimacy and particularly for the political fortunes of some of the reformers closely tied to American funders. The Rockefeller Foundation and Rural Reconstruction The churn of international visitors into and out of China was the beginning of a network of experts who would play key roles both domestically and abroad in the 1950s and 1960s. Informed by foundational experiences in the Chinese

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countryside, Chinese and foreign experts went on to work at the United Nations and other international development organizations, as well as in programs in China, the Philippines, Taiwan, and the United States, among other locations. The desire to establish this community of experts who “crossed international boundaries” was at the heart of the institutional goals of a major contributor to the Rural Reconstruction Movement: the Rockefeller Foundation. While there were a number of international philanthropies that took particular interest in China, first among them was the Rockefeller Foundation, which began its interest in Chinese social issues only a few years after the foundation’s formation in 1913.35 Its most important China project was the Peking Union Medical College, and for more than a decade, its primary interest in China was in furthering health reforms. The foundation viewed China’s “plasticity” as a positive environment both for its early health reforms and for its 1930s rural efforts.36 Like many foreigners who landed in China, the Rockefeller Foundation saw China as a kind of  virgin land, ready and open to a scientific remaking. In 1928, Yan spent a week with the Rockefeller family at their summer home in Seal Harbor, Maine, and J. D. Rockefeller subsequently pledged $100,000 from his personal funds toward a half-­million-­dollar fundraising effort Yan had undertaken for the MEM.37 Beginning in 1933, the Rockefeller Foun­ dation itself began granting funds to the MEM (which meant oversight by and significant reporting to the foundation), and the MEM became one of the foundation’s cornerstones for a broader project to reform rural China.38 Thereafter, connections to the MEM led numerous Rockefeller officials, either from the foundation or associated with the Peking Union Medical College, to visit Dingxian to observe the work there. It was not just the MEM that the foundation affected, however. The foundation’s influential program officers eventually attempted to direct the course of rural reform experiments in China with the founding of the North China Council for Rural Reconstruction (NCC; Huabei nongcun jianshe xiehui ). The approach they supported there—­to integrate their China efforts by funding social science research ( primarily with an economic bent)—­resonated with the Nationalists’ develop­ ment goals and with the growing international focus on rural development. As a result, the foundation’s engagement with the MEM provides evidence of how foreign funders assisted in, first, cultivating the idea that there was a movement around rural reconstruction and integrating single projects into that movement and, second, redirecting rural reconstruction away from a focus on individualized self-­transformation and toward the adoption of a system of reform focused on elite expertise and training.

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In this regard, Selskar “Mike” Gunn, who worked in China on rural reconstruction throughout the 1930s as vice president of the Rockefeller Foundation, played an instrumental role. An early activist in the emerging field of public health, Gunn studied public health at Harvard and then spent time in France in 1917 developing a tuberculosis educational campaign, sharing with Yan the experience of wartime grassroots education work.39 An early booster within the foundation, Gunn sold foundation officials on the benefits of placing the MEM, alongside Yanjing and Nankai Universities, at the center of an expanded North China rural reform effort, a national program that brought together the work of the scattered rural reform efforts.40 Gunn felt that rural reconstruction in particular offered a “real opportunity” to make a difference in China.41 The MEM and Yan were Gunn’s way in; the PUMC’s John B. Grant later reflected that without Yan “there would never have been the opportunity for Selskar M. Gunn and The Rockefeller Foundation to have a North China project. ”42 Even so, Gunn’s efforts to broaden Rockefeller funding to more than just Dingxian were motivated by a desire to have an effect beyond just a single project and ensure that the model that developed was not tied to a single locale. Partly, this was borne out of concerns of pegging the Rockefeller Foundation’s rural project on the MEM. Rockefeller Foundation officials received reports from foreign experts that led them to believe that the project was too insular and was not relying heavily enough on international expertise.43 For instance, the League of Nations education committee wrote that there was “reason to fear that the leaders of the movement are not sufficiently in touch with other specialists, and thus lose the benefits of scientific criticism. The limited sphere of their activity also prevents them from accurately estimating the big national problems and the general needs of the country. ”44 Yan’s resistance to courting other large-­scale donors—­particularly government sources of funding—­was also a sore point with foundation officials, and Gunn repeatedly urged Yan to work more closely with Nanjing even after the advent of the experimental district in Dingxian.45 In 1933, Gunn began to encourage the foundation to collaborate with Chi­ nese institutions of higher education, with a particular focus on “national uni­ versities rather than on mission colleges. ” ( The latter had been a traditional entrée for foreign funders.)46 A year later, he had convinced the foundation to fund the NCC. The council was led by the Yale-­educated Nankai profes­ sor He Lian ( Franklin L. Ho) and emphasized academic research and training. It was composed of five North China university research centers—­Na­ tional Qinghua University, Nankai University, Yenching University, Peking

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Union Medical College, and University of Nanking (each with a different fo­ cus: on the fields of public works, local governance, education, medicine, and agriculture)—­and the MEM.47 Observers like Grant later noted that the council’s greatest contribution was in demonstrating the importance of real-­ world experience to university training, but such work had been going on in China since the 1920s.48 More specifically, what the council pioneered was an increased professionalization and vocation-­focused training for rural leaders that would cultivate expert leadership. He Lian argued that rural reconstruction had faltered as a result of “a gross lack of trained personnel to undertake the task most urgently needed by the rural population of China. ” While China had compensated by importing foreign experts, that was not, in He Lian’s opinion, a long-­term solution, for “their usefulness ends the moment recommendations are written up and sometimes published, serving no other purpose than the satisfaction of having added another paper plan to the government archives. ” These fly-­by research and consulting trips were “chiefly valuable as an education for the foreigners. ”49 What China needed instead was a corps of Chinese experts who were invested in and knowledgeable about Chinese conditions. The council’s efforts to produce high-­quality research on rural problems reflected parallel work (in some cases by some of the same researchers) being undertaken by other organizations. The Institute of Pacific Relations (IPR), for instance, was mainly concerned throughout the 1930s with publishing research on China’s economic conditions and efforts to improve them. Founded in 1925 as a forum for discussion of trans-­Pacific concerns and with a focus on “human welfare, ” the institute hosted a series of five conferences between 1925 and 1933 that drew in some figures from Chinese rural reconstruction. The organization embodied the Wilsonian international spirit of the 1920s. One 1925 report on the IPR commented on the events in China “in the light of the International Mind”; another noted the institute’s desire to move diplomacy beyond the “monopoly of government. ” In reflection of its roots in the YMCA, in the 1920s in China, the IPR largely engaged with moderates and Christians like Yan, who was a member of the China council. However, the main focus of the Chinese IPR was supporting and publishing research and cultivating experts, which it did through collaborations with various uni­ versities—­including all those involved in the NCC except the Peking Union Medical College.50 By the 1930s, the IPR had picked up on the rural turn, even publishing a pamphlet in 1936 titled “The Reconstruction Movement of China” by historian George E. Taylor, in which he posited that, in addition to the Communist and Japanese threats, the main driving force behind reconstruction was the acquisition of technical knowledge, particularly as a

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result of the influence of international bodies like the League of Nations.51 Several of the studies of rural China that the IPR featured in the 1930s were based on research conducted in Dingxian, and He Lian published his study, Rural Economic Reconstruction in China, with the IPR in 1936. Like so many assessments by international experts, these works focused on improving rural material conditions and creating change through the accumulation and deployment of specialized knowledge. In bodies like the IPR and the NCC, Chinese researchers actively engaged in generating the specialized knowledge that undergirded the new plans for rural reform. This was the focus of researchers supported by the NCC as the council began its work in 1936. Focused primarily on field research and training for undergraduate and graduate students, the council’s work was divided between “stations” in Dingxian and Jining, Shandong, as well as some work in Jiangning, though the Jiangning project is little described in reports on the council.52 Faculty were sent to either the Dingxian station (which housed the efforts on public health and education) or the Jining station (for economics and government administration) for further training, teaching, and research.53 Funding for the first year included support for research in such diverse subjects as ceramics, composting in North China, county library ser­­ vice,  and new uses for fruits.54 Instead of mass mobilization, reformers invested energy in training a cadre of young people (mainly men, but also women in fields like education and nursing) who would be village and county officials, carrying out rural reform at the local level. The NCC had promise to potentially integrate the communities of international and local experts. That was certainly one of its charges, but there was little chance to see it play out. The disruption of the council’s work came at the same time as many rural reformers were routed from their rural programs in North China and, in many cases, subsequently turned their attentions elsewhere. The North China Council and Expert Leadership in Rural Wartime China The council’s work began just as Japan stepped up its aggression. The Japanese occupation was particularly brutal in North China, where resistance was met with a policy of complete destruction. Villages were sometimes burned to the ground, and indiscriminate killing of civilians and the requisition of food and other necessities from villagers were common. These policies affected all the North China reform areas. Dingxian, located on a strategic rail line, was a focus of  heavy fighting. The Japanese took it but, as elsewhere, left the governing of surrounding villages to locals—­some of whom included former MEM affiliates.55 In Shandong, the networks of support that Liang and his institute

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had built crumbled quickly. Governor Han Fuju, the patron of the reform program, was arrested and executed after allowing the Japanese to take the province without a fight.56 While the majority of reformers moved south as the danger of invasion became apparent, rural reformers who stuck it out in North China found themselves in increasing danger and their vision for a national network of reformers imperiled. This was true within days of the founding of the NCC. As one report noted in 1938, “Seven days after the formal inauguration of the Rural Institute of the Council at [ Jining], the present Sino-­Japanese War broke out” in Hebei. Work at the Jining station for the NCC got off to a slow start, as some of the academic members “underwent many kinds of humiliation in the occupied regions” as they made their way to the station to begin that year’s work. The council quickly decided that the goals of the project, in light of the military conflict, would have to shift.57 Rural reconstructionists had long justified their work by pointing to how naturally rural reconstruction was suited to national mobilization. By the late 1930s, the discussions were more explicit: rural reconstruction, the argument went, naturally lent itself to the War of Resistance (kangzhan) now being waged against Japan, but now reconstructionists’ focus was on mobilizing education of young people, not the rural masses. The linking of rural reconstruction to Japanese resistance was just one side note to a wide-­ranging and urgent conversation about how to “resist and reconstruct” (kangzhan jianguo), a two-­prong policy that the GMD adopted as a guiding principle in 1938. That year, CCP cofounder Chen Duxiu wrote a piece on the policy, a year after his release from GMD prison. Mainly concerned with laying out a progressive view of history, Chen’s essay linked sovereignty to nation-­building—­in this regard, expelling the Japanese was the first step in “constructing a nation” ( jianguo). While Chen’s article fit into a broad category of writings that contemplated the relationship between resistance and reconstruction, the CCP’s commitment to the rural came in for prominent mention: the first step in Chen’s “democratic tasks” was national sovereignty and unity; the last was “the liberation of the peasants. ”58 At the other end of the political spectrum, GMD affiliates played up the connection between resistance and rural modernization, emphasizing that the stability and security of the countryside were a necessity for national strength. In an essay titled “The War of Resistance and Rural Reconstruction, ” the Hunanese warlord He Jian argued that rural reconstruction was the basis for success in a protracted war.59 Rural reconstructionists, too, made such connections, but usually with specific initiatives attached. In the case of Yan, that meant advocating for the education of potential rural reform leaders. In a speech to students at the relocated (from

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Nanjing to Chengdu) Jinling Women’s College, Yan encouraged them to raise their consciousness and reform themselves in thought and life so that they could be leaders of the female masses necessary in this “mighty age” amid the “tides of the War of  Resistance. ”60 Yan was not the only rural reconstructionist to advocate for investment in rural leadership. Mei Siping, the political scientist who had acted as county magistrate in Jiangning, helped author a book in 1938 that emphasized the importance of the self-­cultivation of educated youth in China’s efforts to repel the Japanese.61 The connection between cultivating leaders and rural reconstruction’s role in resistance was in its nascent stages a few years earlier, as the NCC was just getting off the ground. In its very earliest work, council members simultaneously cultivated local leaders and emphasized increasing the resilience of rural China. Work moved forward as council members turned new villages into rural reform models and trained young administrators to take rural reconstruction methods further into the countryside. For instance, the Jining station focused its work on the village of Nanjiacun. The council sent several students there to conduct survey work, laying the groundwork for the familiar reforms to follow: cooperative societies were organized, land surveys completed, smallpox vaccinations administered, trees planted, and roads repaired. In Jining itself, the council’s work encompassed even more familiar work, such as overseeing women’s education (the subjects studied were civics, home hygiene, first aid, and handicrafts—­several dozen women also organized a patriotic association), organizing government archives, conducting surveys of the local population and economy, developing “war-­time education” curricula, experimenting with better agricultural products (mainly wheat), surveying local latrines, and so on. The project also oversaw the education of three hundred students who were being trained as prospective principals of rural schools, presumably to be sent all over the local region. One unique project stands out from the council’s description of its Jining-­based work and is perhaps related to the growing national defense efforts: the Jining station organized labor and supplies from ten nearby counties to build an airfield in Jining—­the first such project mentioned in rural reconstruction accounts.62 But as the year went on, the North China work became more tenuous. By 1937, efforts were under way to find a new home for the recently displaced NCC stations. Council members selected as their new rural outpost the Gui­ zhou experimental county of Dingfan, located south of Guiyang. (Meanwhile, the MEM, which had played host to the second of the NCC’s stations in Dingxian, relocated to Changsha.) Chen Zhiqian, the former head of the MEM’s health division, served as the acting director of the Dingfan institute (resigning his position with the MEM to do so).63 In the first year of the work,

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most of the council members settled their families in Guiyang rather than living in Dingfan, “for lack of facilities. ” By early 1939, however, the institute had built a suitable headquarters, including dormitories, a library, a kitchen, and modern latrines on a hill behind Dingfan’s Confucian temple.64 The council immediately began work on its first project in Dingfan, construction of an aqueduct, and council members were assigned to various posts in the county government, from magistrate on down (with new offices created for those for whom there was not a ready position). The relocated institute then began work on opium and bandit eradication, militia training, prison construction, and establishment of experimental farms and health centers.65 Partnerships were secured with multiple Guizhou provincial organizations (the Guizhou Provincial Agricultural Institute, the Provincial Committee on Farm Irri­ gation Loans, and so forth) as well as some national-­level committees like the National Agricultural Research Bureau) to cooperate on exper­iments in Dingfan. Dingfan was an entirely new environment for those council members who had been working in the north. Half the population in Dingfan were ethnic minorities ( primarily Miao and Yi), the area was poor and isolated, education levels were low, and handicrafts did not make up a significant component of household incomes as it had in the north. In contrast to Dingxian, where at least some prominent local elites had welcomed the project and the government was generally friendly, Dingfan’s local government was, in the assessment of the recently arrived reformers, “thoroughly corrupted. ” In laying out their plans for the reform of Dingfan, the council emphasized the need for broad social surveys; improved communication through roads, telephone, radio, and newspaper; better education; establishment of economic cooperatives and banks; and reinforcement of the subcounty governing baojia system, already in use in the county.66 Over the next few years, some social surveys were carried out, including a series of investigations of the differences and relations between the Han, Miao, and Yi ethnicities in the county as well as other publications on census findings, health work, property taxes, and education. Other efforts in the county were more familiar, even if the social environment was different from the ethnically homogenous and relatively well-­to-­do locales where reformers had worked in the north: the institute planned an annual county agricultural fair, agricultural youth and mother’s clubs, and health and agricultural reforms.67 As in the other provincial experimental districts, Dingfan’s rural institute became the county government and a field site for students and facul­ty from universities across China.68 Institute staff confronted issues that had not been so central in Dingxian, including combating banditry, controlling salt,

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and attempting to turn opium cultivation, a major local crop, to wheat farming. This could mean a surprising level of hands-­on work. After Chen moved on, the county magistrate was a political science professor named Xie Guanyi who, the economist Fang Xianting (H. D. Fong) recalled, “often went out with the soldiers to round up the bandits, carrying a gun of his own. ”69 The activities of institute staff also reflected the changing context of reforms: much of their time was spent fulfilling demands from higher levels of government for horse purchases, food storage, and labor conscription.70 The work in Dingfan was not long lived. In 1939, a council report noted that Dingfan was the only functional institute remaining from the NCC’s work. By this point, though, plans were already under way to transfer the work farther southwest; the council headquarters itself had already moved twice by this point, from Beiping to Guiyang and then to Chongqing.71 Despite assurances from MEM affiliates about the continued work of the council (including publishing an academic journal, Rural Reconstruction Bimonthly), the council’s activities began to run thin by 1939 as government agencies like the National Agricultural Research Bureau and the Guizhou provincial government pulled their support from council projects.72 In 1940, the institute relocated to Beibei, Sichuan, a county on the outskirts of Chongqing. In Beibei, yet again, institute members encountered a new set of social challenges: the area was infested with secret societies that reformers perceived as a “conservative” influence in the community.73 The heavy reliance on the Rockefeller Foundation continued: Fang Xianting, the secretary-­treasurer of the council and a Yale-­educated professor of economics from Nankai in exile in the southwest, wrote to the Rockefeller Foundation requesting the bulk of the funding to sustain the work in Beibei. New to the MEM, Fang’s connections to the organization nevertheless went back to his graduation from Yale with a PhD in 1928, where he met Yan, who received an honorary MA that same year.74 Regardless of the personal connections that knit the staff of the MEM and the council together, rifts emerged. With the establishment of the NCC, the Rockefeller Foundation had hoped to transfer the bulk of its rural reconstruction funding away from the MEM and toward the broader rural reconstruction initiative. But as the council disintegrated, Yan and the MEM attempted to lay claim to the council’s funding, resulting in serious tensions among council members. The foundation threatened to pull funding from the MEM unless they managed to work things out. Though the foundation did not make good on that threat, its support diminished over the 1940s.75 Yan, for his part, blamed the Rockefeller Foundation for creating “friction” among the universities who had signed on to participate in the NCC and

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the MEM, the only independent organization involved. In Yan’s view of the council’s work, the MEM was the lead organization, and he frequently spoke and wrote of the council as an initiative based in and led by the MEM.76 But there was little patience left for Yan’s idiosyncrasies at Rockefeller, where field staff blamed the MEM’s shortcomings on a mismatch between Yan’s enthusiasm and his lack of administrative skills. In 1937, Gunn wrote to New York to say that he wanted to limit the funds being sent to the MEM: “We have had disappointments in the past on account of Mr. Yen’s undue enthusiasms and resulting failures to accomplish his stated objectives. ”77 Later that year, Grant wrote in his diary, “I have frankly come to the conclusion Jimmie just is lacking in the gene that provides realism. ”78 Scholars who have studied the foundation have noted that blaming local partners such as Yan, rather than questioning whether the foundation’s agenda would really create constructive change, was a common response to failure.79 The blame of local partners was followed by a general sense of dissatisfaction with the rural reconstruction initiative. Officers who succeeded Gunn at the foundation did not support the China project to the same degree; one officer “thought that it was Gunn’s eloquence that had allowed him to sell it to the Trustees. ”80 When Fang Xianting requested funding from the Rockefeller Foundation for Beibei, he asked for CN$200,000 out of a total operating budget of CN$260,000.81 As war tightened funding opportunities at home, Chinese re­ formers increasingly turned to the few forthcoming international funders and to central and provincial governments, the other major financial players. But those funders had agendas and ideas of their own. The opportunity to continue in the face of dwindling financial resources required accommo­ da­tions to the desires of funders—­funders who were more interested in establishing institutes to train rural researchers and bureaucrats than in supporting activists to live among and learn from rural people and assist rural people in changing themselves. This shift fundamentally altered the goals of the remaining projects as their leaders scrambled to keep them alive amid the dislocation caused by the Japanese invasion. Training Professionals and Experts For no one was this transition so apparent as for Yan and the MEM. In part, this was simply because of the organization’s long and prolific life. At a challenging time when many reformers abandoned their local reforms to focus on national-­level political organizing, Yan’s enthusiasm for and commitment to the MEM never eased. The organization, buoyed by Yan, reestablished itself again, and again, and yet again, moving from Dingxian to Changsha to

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Chongqing to New York to Manila. Its staff network was also the most educated and accomplished and thus continued to have influence beyond 1937 and again beyond 1949, as the majority of  its employees chose to stay in Chi­na, where they played various roles in government and society, while a handful of others were scattered abroad. Tracking its organizational transmogrification reveals the changes during the war years as uplift became development, elites became experts, and the social engineering goals of the early twentieth century were massaged into outreach and aid. By 1935, the MEM was beginning to consider how to relocate its base to Changsha, and by the end of 1936, it had relocated the majority of its staff to the southwest. Alone among the major reform organizations, the MEM successfully replanted itself in the southwest. This was partly possible because the organization had already been building experimental counties elsewhere in the country, such as Hengshan in Hunan. As a result, as MEM members began to prepare in 1936 for a move out of Dingxian, they were not starting from scratch. The move was difficult, as the MEM not only had to coordinate the removal of staff and supplies as well as consider the transfer of their reform programs to completely new areas (with markedly different demographics, geography, and culture from Dingxian) but also had to convince their funders that such a move would be successful. But the commitment of its central leadership and its comparatively diverse funding base—­despite heavy reliance on Rockefeller funding—­allowed the MEM to survive for a decade longer than any other rural reconstruction project. After making the decision to remove its headquarters from Dingxian, the MEM gradually shifted personnel, records, and supplies to Changsha. When the government retreated to Sichuan, the MEM followed. There the organization made common cause with reform-­minded local leaders, including warlord Liu Xiang, to choose a single county on which to focus their efforts—­ Xindu County, just outside Chengdu. Once again, the MEM was given admin­ istrative control over the county, and Yan personally selected the new county magistrate. But the Chengdu efforts soon proved insecure as well (if not quite so insecure as Dingxian); MEM sources wrote that the location, like Beibei, was rife with secret societies, and indeed, local leaders organized an uprising to retake the government in Xindu in 1938.82 Next, the MEM purchased eighty-­five acres of land in a village called Xiemachang, in the countryside outside Chongqing, which was by then the GMD’s provisional wartime capital.83 The village was close to Beibei, which was not only now the base of operations for the NCC but also a major center of reforms overseen by shipping magnate Lu Zuofu. Lu and his brother had completely remade their hometown, and multiple visitors remarked on its

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clean streets, modern buildings, utilities (electricity, sewers, and telephones), and public institutions such as the library, public park, and hospital. The central components of these efforts were part of Lu’s determination, on one hand, to urbanize rural areas (creating what one scholar has referred to as a unified “rural-­urban”) and, on the other, to manage the endemic bandit problem by coopting the bandits into local militia organizations. The district became a center for various rural reconstruction personages, including Tao Xingzhi and Liang Shuming, who each opened short-­lived schools there.84 With these inspiring neighbors nearby, Yan brought into being on the Xiemachang land his newest rural reform brainstorm: the National College of Rural Reconstruction ( NCRR). The college proposed to train young leaders for rural reform work in subjects from local governance to social science research. Yan’s contemplation of the college began in the mid-­1930s—­at the same time that the MEM was taking over the running of the county government in Dingxian—­as Yan recognized his own organization’s difficulty in recruiting skilled personnel. As he noted in one mid-­1930s report, the organization had a “pressing need” for more personnel who could release senior MEM members to start new rural centers across the Chinese countryside.85 The training program that would eventually grow into the college was first proposed in 1934, just as county governance was ramping up and other organizations were increasingly approaching the MEM for “technical assistance and leadership, ” sending local administrators to Dingxian for on-­the-­ground training. In the early 1930s, among its thousands of annual visitors, for instance, the MEM received staff from Chiang Kai-­shek’s reconstruction project in his hometown of Fenghua in Zhejiang Province and from warlord Zhang Xueliang’s model county in Shenyang.86 Rockefeller Foundation officials had noticed the same trend during their visits to Dingxian in the early 1930s. In 1933, Grant noted that during a recent visit to Dingxian “the outstanding impression . . . is the lack of sufficient personnel to make effective the scheme outlined, ” and Gunn wrote to New York that “the demand on [Dingxian] for men is very heavy, and it has become obvious [Dingxian] must now start in and train men for other parts of the country. ” Gunn urged the foundation to begin funding a proposed Dingxian training program.87 Such an effort dovetailed with the cultivation of  “talented youth” that had been ongoing not just at Dingxian but also at Zouping, Xiaozhuang, and other rural reconstruction locales since the inception of rural reconstruction work. As local governance responsibilities grew at the experimental county-­based rural reconstruction institutes, this need became direr, and the combined influence of national circumstances and the encouragement of funders meant that the MEM increasingly focused primarily on training leaders rather than uplift and popular education work.

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The need for trained leaders seemed even more vital in the face of the Japanese invasion. The MEM hoped the students at the NCRR would “train the masses for more conscious and effective participation in the national struggle. ”88 This undertaking resonated with the development goals of both the GMD government and foreign funders like the Rockefeller Foundation. To that end, Yan positioned the college as a national project; in 1939, he asserted that one of the reasons Chongqing was chosen as the home base of the college rather than Chengdu was because it was better connected to the rest of the country. A college in Chengdu would have had difficulty, he wrote, not becoming “local” (difangxing), by which he meant that it would have been coopted by local powerholders and local issues rather than remaining connected to national needs and concerns.89 The effort to train local leaders became Yan’s preoccupation during his remaining time in China and the focus of MEM work through 1949. This was seen as an explicit extension of the work started in the experimental counties in 1933, as it paired the development of local self-­government with its other necessity: not an educated citizenry, but a professionally trained bureaucracy to lead them. The MEM’s goal in this work was “to train men for leadership” so that through education “they will acquire a deep and personal interest and faith in this work, becoming later on efficient executives. ” All discussions of the college’s work emphasized this pragmatic goal of training a corps of young people who could carry out “the practical application” of MEM principles.90 That meant a vocationally focused education. A proposed “county civil service system” would create a new corps of rural administrators who would receive a “liberal education background and a ‘rural reconstruction mentality. ’ ”91 The NCRR recruited professors to teach in subjects like animal husbandry, veterinary science, entomology, soils and fertilizers, rural economics, visual education, sanitary engineering, public administration, rural sociology, and statistics.92 In 1940, the NCRR was opened under the management of Liang Zhonghua, who had previously worked at the village governance academy in He­ nan and then in Zouping and had played a major role in the Rural Work Discussion Association. Fifty enrolled students initially selected a major in either agriculture or rural education ( later, majors in hydraulic engineering and social administration were added), as well as several courses in general rural reconstruction studies. Female students could substitute a course on “women’s work” (  funü gongzuo) as an alternative to the male students’ course in military affairs.93 By 1947, the college had enrolled 260 students, including 45 women.94 The fieldwork component of the students’ educations expanded the local reach of

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the MEM as they undertook extension work to nearby counties such as Bishan (the college’s “social laboratory, ” established in 1945, where students assisted twenty full-­time reform staff in testing schemes to enact self-­governance). Local projects—­like a series of local water control projects underwritten by the Sichuan Provincial Government (the province provided the funding to sup­ port fifty students in the water conservancy program) that included organiz­ ing thirty cooperative societies to dig canals and build irrigation systems—­al­ lowed students to test their technical expertise. As late as 1947, college staff members were telling reporters of plans to relocate the college, possibly back to Hebei, and expand it to a university.95 Some of the college’s funding came from the sale of crops out of its own fields, but the bulk was sought from government and international sources, including the provincial and central government as well as the Rockefeller Foundation and United China Relief, a wartime philanthropy organization based in the United States.96 Acquiring this funding was not easy, however. The Nationalist government was cash strapped, and as China experienced rapid inflation, international agencies became even warier of investing funds in China. Moreover, the reservations the Rockefeller Foundation had about Yan increased as the difficulties before him mounted. In spring 1939, Gunn wrote, Yan “always presents grandiose schemes and I see no reason why we should make him the large appropriation he asks for both the project and local fellowships. ”97 None of the rural reconstruction projects survived and were remade like the MEM, but the challenges of the wartime years still caught up the MEM’s leadership and altered its ideas. Stuck close to the GMD capital and increasingly reliant on foreign funders (and correspondingly responsive to their requests), the MEM moved away from its insistence on responding to local needs. The NCRR manifested an emphasis on scientific and technical expertise that had always existed within rural reconstruction thought, but making it the foremost goal of the MEM’s work from 1940 onward reflected a shift away from mass uplift and faith in the transformative powers of the masses and exemplified a broader shift in rural reconstruction thinking. A cohort of professional rural leaders was now the first priority as, in war’s upheaval, many members of the rural reconstruction effort relinquished the hope of reaching every rural person, county by county and village by village. The Waning of Self-­Transformation Until 1933, rural reconstruction efforts had been a vibrant but largely tangential part of national reconstruction and revitalization discussions. But be­

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tween 1933 and 1937, rural reconstruction moved closer to center stage, as the government and foreign funders saw the value of coopting rural reconstruction discourse and reformers correspondingly staked out space for the movement in the political realm (sometimes expressing ideas that were contradictory to those the government or agencies like the Rockefeller Foundation were promoting) and sought funding from government and international sources to sustain their work. The experimental counties had placed some reformers in a position to feel that profound change could happen through government reform. The move to the southwest exacerbated this feeling. Unmoored from the local elites who had supported rural reforms in North China, reformers increasingly found themselves in locations where they felt the elites were either absent or, worse, part of the rural problems of corruption and resource misallocation. In this vacuum, they felt they would have to train a new local leadership: a young cohort of administrators who could effect change from within the system. Most rural reconstruction projects fizzled in the face of the Japanese invasion, their legacy hard to gauge. Though locals in various places, from Dingxian to Zouping, would later claim that the rural reform efforts had laid the groundwork for community organizations that were transformed into pro-­ CCP forces, these claims are challenging to verify.98 For a handful of identifiable rural reconstruction figures, we can track the decades that followed the end of the movement. As they scattered from their heartland reform projects in 1936 and 1937, reformers went separate ways, converging occasionally over issues and in places ( like Beibei) that were conducive to continuing the discussions begun in the 1920s but largely moving to other issues. Tao Xingzhi focused his attention on rural youth education, a focus he carried out during his seven years in Beibei—­his final rural experiment prior to his 1946 death. By the time of the Japanese invasion, Liang Shuming’s national reputation as a rural reformer was taking him away from Zouping for extended periods as he gave talks and conducted visits elsewhere. This included several weeks in Yan’an, during which time he met regularly with Mao Zedong and observed that, absent its earlier antagonism toward landlords (relinquished in Yan’an as the party attempted to build a broader wartime coalition), the CCP program there resembled the work at rural reconstruction sites. At the same time, Liang was trying to bring together a like-­minded cohort, among them Yan and Huang Yanpei (of the CVES), to advocate for the power of rural mobilization, but the GMD was little interested in his proposals.99 Throughout the 1940s, Liang was best known for his participation in the Democratic League (where he spurned the notion of elections but advocated the “decentralized politics” he had supported in Zouping), but occasional mentions of  his pivotal role in

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rural reconstruction cropped up in the media. Increasingly, these mentions constructed a narrative in which Liang had been the prime mover in the construction and dissemination of rural reconstruction.100 Yan turned his attention away from mass mobilization and the uplift of all rural people in favor of training a select cadre of rural leaders who could instruct and lead villagers toward a stronger, unified China. Other efforts—­like the government’s work in Jiangning—­simply came to an abrupt end as the Japanese occupied and put in place puppet governments to manage previously GMD-­held areas. The ideas central to rural reconstruction initially reflected the optimistic belief that if the masses could be persuaded to transform themselves into modern citizens, they would do so, and the villages and nation would be strengthened in turn. The crises of the 1930s, and especially the scattering of rural reform projects away from the local settings that had made local solutions seem possible, made clear to intellectuals the impossibility of the patient and individuated awakening they had championed only a decade earlier. In order to guarantee China’s sovereignty, the countryside had to be mobilized, but there was no longer faith that it could happen peasant by peasant. A new model presented itself: modernization could be spread efficiently and scientifically, based on a generalizable global model. Those approaches to the countryside—­the expectations of personal transformation, new imaginings of the relationship of self to society—­lingered in ways that mattered. Yet many hoped the experts being trained in institutions like the NCRR to work within government structures would succeed in awaking China where earlier ad-­hoc and independent reforms, focused on local solutions, village needs, and rural minds, had failed. The result was a relinquishing of the hopes for a more participatory, politically active countryside.

Conclusion

The Chinese Communists did not settle on a rural mobilization strategy until after the Long March, the epic eight-­thousand-­mile retreat in 1934 and 1935 that took the CCP on a meandering, dangerous path from the abandoned Jiangxi Soviet in southeastern China to their new refuge at Yan’an, located in a remote area of Sha’anxi Province governed by Yan Xishan. Up until that time, party advocates of mobilizing a peasant base (Mao Zedong prominent among them) struggled with those who clung to Marx’s ideal of an industrial (and thus urban) revolution. Mao has often been credited with the genius of the CCP’s rural turn—­a groundbreaking realization that peasant power could turn the world’s most populous country socialist. But of course, Mao was neither the first nor the only Chinese intellectual to recognize the potential of a mobilized countryside. Instead, as the story of rural reconstruction shows, the Communists were just one among many groups that looked to the countryside in the 1930s for a solution to China’s problems and a pathway to its future. In contrast to the diffuse world of rural reconstruction, the CCP was relatively ideologically cohesive, and its members shared the goal of cultivating revolution. But for a few years in the mid-­1930s, a multitude of rural-­focused reformers and revolutionaries, all with roots in the 1920s intellectual turn toward social activism and rural reform, existed side by side, finding in each other both inspiration and competition. It was by no means clear that one vision of rural mobilization would win out over others. Yet by the early 1940s, the world of rural reform had polarized. The radical elements in rural reconstruction, like the former Village Governance editor Lü Zhenyu, were moving their affiliations, and some joined the CCP. Although in earlier years some reconstructionists—­not only Liang Shuming but also a study group from Dingxian—­visited the CCP

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base at Yan’an, by the 1940s, Yan was making speeches in which he said that the goal of reconstruction was “to beat the Communists. ”1 Meanwhile, the CCP advocated that its underground members infiltrate educational groups like the MEM, the CVES, and the group surrounding Liang, perhaps seeing them as a soft, amenable target.2 While we know the end of the story—­rural revolution and the establishment of the PRC—­this book returns us to a less certain moment, when it was not yet clear what would happen to China’s countryside. The intellectuals and reformers introduced over the preceding pages held a range of political viewpoints and came from a myriad of backgrounds, but all turned to the countryside in the 1920s and 1930s. They shared a belief in the countryside’s possibilities and the hope that it could be modernized. The remaking of the self and the individual’s power to effect changes not only to the self but also to society played a central part in these discussions. Rural reconstruction re­ flected and refracted a core set of Republican-­era values that intellectuals mobilized in answer to these concerns: the centrality of literacy to citizenship, the value placed on social organization and association building, and an investment, eventually, in scientific expertise and professional bureaucracy. These qualities were all geographically flexible, and rural reconstructionists took them to the countryside, sometimes insisting that they were actually best manifested—­perhaps even natural—­among rural people. Yet this focus on the individual and the remaking of rural people and their communities in order to strengthen the nation seemed to reify a fundamental tension between the perceived goals of the individual and those of the nation. Early on, reformers had committed themselves to fostering the people toward self-­governance, which they saw as a form of local governance that would be sensitive to local conditions and that met the needs of the people. It was a vision of the village or rural community that situated it within the na­ tional polity—­not an autonomous unit but also not part of an integrated bu­ reaucratic hierarchy. Instead, the rural community was one political and so­ cial unit among many—­part of a body politic. This was not a repudiation of the nation but a localized embrace of it; in modernizing rural people and strengthening their communities, the nation was itself strengthened. The emphasis reformers like Liang and Yan—­each in his own way—­placed on the importance of the rural individual and his possible political potential furthered this perspective. Even while Liang, for instance, advocated for the importance of rural communities as a central component of Chinese culture and identity, and something it should hold on to as distinct from the selfishness of  Western individualism, he noted that rural reconstruction had to be generated by and for rural people—­a privileging not necessarily of individualism

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but certainly of the ability of the individual to change himself and his society.3 Rural reconstruction leaders were thus engaged with the humanizing of modernization, placing the needs and desires of rural people and the moral and intellectual cultivation of the individual at the center of state-­making and dreaming of a system in which rural people governed themselves. In contrast, the GMD interpreted Sun Yat-­sen’s minsheng—­the people’s welfare or livelihood—­as being about improving the economic well-­being of the state and the strength of the nation. In this view, the people’s welfare, as the dispute in Jiangning illustrates, took little account for anything beyond the economic welfare of the people and the way their economic improvement strengthened the state. In turning to foreign experts who argued the same, the GMD presented this set of policies as modernization—­the one and only path forward. Rural reconstruction challenged this view. In reaction, the GMD and foreign experts (and the organizations they worked for) attempted to seize on the national excitement reformers had generated over a rural reform grounded in self-­transformation and sensitivity to local conditions, but they underestimated and in some cases dismissed the centrality of responding to local people and local needs and misunderstood the way that the reforms had been generated out of an agenda for the continued or constructed (in cases where it did not already exist) coherence of rural communities. As rural reconstruction came within the orbit of the Nationalist government and foreign funders, its focus shifted from encouraging the transformation of rural people and the reconstitution of rural communities to training a cohort of professional leaders who could implement reforms at the local level. This meant abandoning the emphasis on self-­transformation and the centrality of the individual in contributing to the cohesion of the supposedly distinctly Chinese, community-­based vision for the nation. This abandonment marked a profound change not only for rural reconstruction but for Chinese liberalism more generally. In this way, the history of rural reconstruction in China illuminates intellectuals’ loss of faith in individualism—­a core tenet of the new youth of the 1910s—­and the abandonment of a powerful alternative to the state-­making process that could have laid the moral and psychological groundwork for a more inclusive form of governance. The dreams of mass awakening and the cultivation of individuals gave way to a faith in top-­down national development. After the Japanese invasion, many intellectuals tabled their ideas of local needs and local communities. The economic and military health of the nation had to come first, and national concerns pushed aside the concerns of rural people and rural communities. As China went to war, the idea of rural reconstruction was mobilized on behalf of the security of the nation, and the efforts around rural reconstruction were

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increasingly associated with institutions that appeared to spurn the core values of rural self-­transformation and community resilience. The unintended result was a replication of a trend ongoing in other parts of the world as well: the ordering of rural society and agriculture in order to make both legible to the state and allow its corps of professional experts to further rationalize and industrialize rural practices and rural life.4 This was part of the broader emergence of global development, which, while it came to full international fruition in the post–­World War II years, was built on prewar shifts toward an international development approach to social and particularly economic change. In the United States, for instance, the “voluntarist” reforms and cooperation of the pre–­Great Depression period gave way to an increasing emphasis on government regulation and rationalization. As Amy Staples has noted, the international development efforts of the postwar world resulted in part from this shift from “individual and professional efforts” in the early twentieth century to government-­driven ones by the late 1930s.5 This transformation, as David Ekbladh has discussed, laid the groundwork for the American development efforts of the 1950s, but it also shifted domestic discourses in China, India, and many other places. India, an example that has cropped up repeatedly in this book, is the most salient comparative case to China, as both countries had robust rural reconstruction efforts in the 1920s and 1930s. In the post–­World War II period, India was one of the first major testing grounds for postwar development efforts. There, American funders and experts drew direct connections between the rural reconstruction and village uplift of the prewar period—­the ideas that had inspired and resonated with Chinese reformers—­and the community development of the postwar period. These were not the big dams and other large-­scale investments that were being planned and funded by the Indian government and international partners at the same time, but the efforts were still grounded in the notion that the villages were a drag on the nation’s development and thus contrasted with the approach of  Tagore or his Chinese counterparts, who saw the villages as part of an organic, national whole.6 That confrontational approach to the villages was reflected in efforts to sublimate villages to the state bureaucracy. For all the differences between postwar India and China, both states sought to integrate their villages into the broader postwar reform efforts and were primarily focused on measuring success in the terms that had been established in the nascent developmentalism of the immediate prewar years. These efforts to modernize the Asian village (in which the specter of the “loss of China” loomed large for Westerners) thus spelled the end in China of rural reconstruction’s vision for a countryside defined not by economic prosperity alone but by a broader sensibility of what constituted a good life.

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China was not a part of the postwar international development world in the way that India, for instance, was. Yet many of the approaches and values of developmentalism were adopted in the PRC as well. In the postwar period, the CCP picked up the mantle of rural reform, their success evidence not only of the rural turn and a broader sensibility that China’s future depended on the mobilization of rural power but also of a particularly compelling combination of a strong political perspective and an overarching agenda for systemic change. The CCP retained vestiges of the Republican-­era enthusiasm for the personal, interior remaking of the rural individual, evidenced in, among other things, the CCP strategies of “speak bitterness” sessions and self-­criticisms. Yet not only did such tactics quickly turn toward coercion and violence, but they did not characterize the broader policy making and economic trends of the CCP and the state it established. Instead, like many other countries in the postwar decades, the PRC focused on an aggressive agenda of economic development. While political differences meant that the PRC stepped away from the international organizations that China had a hand in founding in the immediate postwar period and stood apart from the goals of bodies like the World Bank to integrate global economies, it nevertheless continued to prioritize a parallel agenda of economic growth, industrialization, and top-­down social and economic reform. That focus was a logical ex­ tension of the tendencies that began to manifest themselves in Republican China—­and within rural reconstruction circles—­over the course of the 1930s. It reflected an international move toward development and a reduced focus on the sustainability and resilience of rural communities. Some of the reformers we have encountered embraced the new vision. But others continued to insist on—­or, in some cases, returned to insisting on—­the importance of rural people in determining rural policy priorities, perhaps recognizing that the nationalist turn that had taken hold in the midst of war had damaged their vision of a vibrant countryside of strong communities. Liang, for instance, was initially lauded by the CCP; he, in turn, gave his blessing to their rural programs. But by 1953, he was accusing the CCP of having “forgotten the villages. ” In 1955, an “anti–­Liang Shuming” campaign was launched, and he was caught up and attacked in later political campaigns as well.7 Others, working outside China, were explicit about the ways that the remains of Chinese rural reconstruction ran counter to the international postwar development models. Yan, who left China prior to the CCP victory and did not return until the 1980s, continued to promote rural reconstruction to the end of his life. In 1947, he founded the (Sino-­American) Joint Commission on Rural Reconstruction, which was initially intended to funnel American funding into programs like the National College of  Rural Reconstruction

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and the MEM.8 After 1949, the work of the joint commission continued in Taiwan. Yan looked elsewhere for opportunities in part because he was worried about how his many colleagues who had chosen to stay on the mainland might fare if he was viewed as closely tied to the Nationalists.9 In 1951, he founded the International Mass Education Movement ( IMEM).10 The new movement’s home was in the Philippines, where Yan attempted to resuscitate the MEM’s work in a slightly altered form. The Philippines Rural Reconstruction Movement was founded in 1952 in cooperation with the IMEM. In the late 1960s, Yan decided to create a permanent base in the Philippines for his international rural efforts, the International Institute of Rural Reconstruction (IIRR). From there, the IIRR laid claim to the whole-­society approach to reform that had been pioneered at Dingxian, and used it as a model for independent ( but affiliated) programs established in Guatemala, Colombia, Ghana, India, Sri Lanka, and Thailand, as well as training and support for rural reformers in many other locales, including South Vietnam, Indonesia, Nigeria, and Bangladesh. Yet the IIRR insisted its work was not development. Instead, an institute publication recalled, “The choice of the term rural ‘reconstruction’ as used by the IIRR is understood to be more purposeful than the more commonly used term rural ‘development. ’ ‘Reconstruction’ in its Chinese origin means to change and to build and conveys a dynamic sense of moving ahead. ”11 It was an issue not only of nomenclature but of method and purpose. The IIRR retained the MEM’s goals of valuing communities and of emphasizing sustainable development. The IIRR perspective was not dominant through the late twentieth century, but it seems much more relevant in the early twenty-­first century, as China confronts a countryside that is feeling the negative effects of the nation’s incredible economic boom. While in the early years of economic liberalization after 1979, rural people reaped many benefits from their new ability to engage in sideline production, cash cropping, and rural industrialization (through the township and village enterprises, or TVEs), in the past two decades, those benefits have waned as urban/rural inequalities have deepened.12 Young rural people across China have left for the cities in the largest migration in human history, leaving ghost villages all across China. In their absence, the future of rural communities is dire, as cascading environmental crises like drought and pollution have intensified out-­migration. That rural people were not benefitting from the economic reforms at the same rate as others became increasingly clear at the turn of the century. Chinese intellectuals and policy makers generated a raft of proposals to remedy the rural crisis, and the Republican rural reconstruction efforts have served as inspiration. As People’s University professor Wen Tiejun and others drew

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together the New Rural Reconstruction Movement, they explicitly referenced the 1930s efforts in their early twenty-­first-­century plans for rural change.13 The Republican reconstruction focus on rural people and rural communities has resonated for contemporary reformers, who are wary of the possibilities of industrializing the countryside, having seen the environmental and social impacts of such industrialization and the limited employment opportunities left after economic liberalization. As Alexander Day has argued, New Rural Reconstruction is an effort, as the earlier one was, to “transform rural social life, ” focusing particularly on peasant organization (that now familiar word zuzhi). Like the Republican movement, the present rural reconstruction movement is diverse, fragmented, and made up of a loosely affiliated membership that has, as their Republican forerunners did, “an entangled relationship with the state. ” And new rural reconstruction rests—­as did at least some parts of its Republican counterpart (most notably those elements of it closely allied to the Village Governance Faction and Liang Shuming )—­on an explicit critique of marketization’s possibilities for peasants, even while it attempts to increase economic opportunities and markets for rural people and their products.14 Republican-­era reformers took a measured approach to the commodification of the countryside, attempting to moderate its effects by using village and county communities as buffers yet still allowing rural people to benefit as much as possible from their incorporation into global markets. However, they were adamant that peasants were not intrinsically ill suited to self-­government. As the New Rural Reconstruction experiments demonstrate, the Republican debates about the relationship between self-­improvement and self-­governance continue to resonate today, when the supposed failure of rural people to embody modernity—­their failure to be “quality” (suzhi ) individuals, in the parlance of  late twentieth-­century China—­has been used to justify their continued disenfranchisement. In twenty-­first-­century debates over “meritocratic elitism, ” some scholars have sought to justify the resulting governance of China by only its highly educated, CCP-­affiliated elite as part of a notion of “Confucian democracy” that links education and governance rights, arguing that such a system is better suited to Chinese traditions and culture—­and that such an assumption justifies continued limitations on speech and rights in contemporary China.15 Rural reconstruction reformers identified the same relationship of education and governance but maintained, at least in the early years, a broader faith in the moral virtue and educability of all people and worked under the assumption that all Chinese people could eventually self-­govern. Their reforms were premised on an image of rural people as backward, clannish, ig­ norant, and passive, but they did not discount the potential of rural people to

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modernize themselves. It was not the unsuitability of Chinese culture to self-­ governance that led reformers to forsake their programs of self-­transformation but the political and military crisis of imminent Japanese invasion, a crisis that many reformers believed demanded personal sacrifice for the nation. In the alternative vision of the remade Chinese countryside, self-­governance was taken seriously and grounded in Confucian notions of education and educability, providing a model of an ideal modern countryside—­never achieved—­in which Chinese rural people fully participated in governing themselves. Today’s reformers continue to advocate for the ability of villagers and local communities to shape and determine their future, but now they do so under the governance of a strong central state that is able to enforce its lack of tolerance for discussions of local organization that imply autonomy from, rather than greater dependence on, the central government. The notion of the modernized village remains a compelling vision for the Chinese countryside—­and one that informs officials and elites alike, just as it did in the Republican period—­but conflicts between locality and nation and questions about the role of the village and villagers within the larger polity remain critical hurdles to its realization. The Republican efforts at rural reconstruction demonstrate that there is a tradition of a Chinese alternative for revitalizing the countryside, one that worked in some places for some times and that remains resonant and compelling for those dissatisfied with a state success defined, above all else, by estimates of national economic growth. Yet the rural reconstruction vision was not a panacea—­even while reformers argued that innovations had to come from rural people, they set standards for appropriate and modern behavior that sought to discipline and order rural people. This contradiction—­a tension between the desire to structure a system where innovations came from the people and the desire to guide the people toward choices elites deemed in rural peoples’ best interest—­was and remains a stumbling block to humane, effective solutions to the problems of rural poverty and marginalization and to the development of a vibrant and sustainable rural society and economy that benefits rural people. The Republican-­era debates over rural reconstruction thus illuminate that period’s robust political discussions as well as contemporary ones. Yet today, China’s century-­long challenge to the centrality of an urban-­based modernity appears, in terms of the influence and importance of the countryside, to be coming to an end. Meanwhile, Chinese intellectuals continue to seek a path forward that will contest headlong urban industrialization and a solitary focus on economic growth as a measure of success.

Archives

AHT CUL IMH RF, RAC SHAC ZP

Academia Historica, Taiwan Columbia University Rare Book and Manuscript Library Institute of Modern History Archives, Academia Sinica, Taiwan Rockefeller Foundation records, Rockefeller Archive Center Second Historical Archives of China, Nanjing Zouping County Archives

Notes

Introduction 1. Hongxu, “Jinian wo de pengyou” (Remembering My Friend), Qingnianyou 10.6 (1930): 3–­6; Hongxu, “Gongmin changshi: Cunzhi” (Citizen Knowledge: Village Governance), Nongmin 4.30 (March 21, 1929): 10. 2. Hongxu, “Gongmin changshi: Cunzhi (xu)” (Citizen Knowledge: Village Governance [Cont’d]), Nongmin 4.31 (April 1, 1929): 15. 3. Lyon Sharman, Sun Yat-­sen: A Critical Biography (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1968), 152–­53. 4. See, for instance, Liang Qichao, Xinmin shuo (Speaking of New Citizens) (Shenyang: Liao­ning renmin chubanshe, 1994). 5. Quoted in Rebecca Nedostup, Superstitious Regimes: Religion and the Politics of Chinese Modernity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, Harvard University Press, 2009), 228. 6. See, for instance, Paul A. Cohen’s analysis of the reform goals of  Wang Tao, mentor to Sun Yat-­sen and advocate of economic and social reforms: Paul A. Cohen, Between Tradition and Modernity: Wang T’ao and Reform in Late Ch’ing China (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1974), 201–­2. 7. Tong Lam, A Passion for Facts: Social Surveys and the Construction of the Chinese Nation-­ State, 1900–­1949 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011), 3–­4, 152. Yung-­chen Chiang also discusses the emergence of the “social science” mentality in Republican China in Social Engineering and the Social Sciences in China, 1919–­1949 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). 8. Franklin L. Ho, Rural Economic Reconstruction in China (Shanghai: China Institute of Pacific Relations, 1936), 59. 9. Li Dazhao, “Qingnian yu nongcun” (Youth and the Countryside), February 20–­23 1919, in Li Dazhao Xuanji (Beijing: Renmin chubanshe, 1962), 146–­50. 10. For a discussion of “rural modernity” in China and another alternative vision of rural industrialization (by someone engaged in rural reconstruction by the 1930s), see Margherita Zanasi, “Far from the Treaty Ports: Fang Xianting and the Idea of Rural Modernity in 1930s China, ” Modern China 30.1 (2004): 113–­46. 11. Erez Manela, “Imagining Woodrow Wilson in Asia: Dreams of East-­West Harmony and the Revolt against Empire in 1919, ” American Historical Review 111.5 (December 2006): 1327–­51.

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12. Lynda S. Bell, One Industry, Two Chinas: Silk Filatures and Peasant-­Family Production in Wuxi County, 1865–­1937 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), 142–­43. 13. On rural reconstruction as a “middle course, ” see Lucien Bianco, Origins of the Chinese Revolution 1915–­1949, trans. Muriel Bell (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1971), 131–­32. 14. Terry Sicular, Yue Ximing, Björn Gustafsson, and Li Shi, “The Urban-­Rural Income Gap and Inequality in China, ” The Review of Income and Wealth 53.1 (March 2007): 92–­126. These authors adjusted income for location and thus have more conservative findings than is typical; nevertheless, they too found a significant and increasing urban-­rural income gap. For more on the campaign for a “New Socialist Countryside, ” see Anna L. Ahlers and Gunter Schubert, “ ‘Building a New Socialist Countryside’—­Only a Political Slogan?, ” Journal of Current Chinese Affairs 38.4 (December 2009): 35–­62. 15. For a cogent and compelling explanation of the development of urban-­rural inequities in the early PRC period, see Jeremy Brown, City versus Countryside in Mao’s China: Negotiating the Divide (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012). 16. Martin King Whyte, “The Paradoxes of Rural-­Urban Inequality in Contemporary Chi­na, ” in One County, Two Societies: Rural-­Urban Inequality in Contemporary China, ed. Martin King Whyte (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010), 8, 13–­14. 17. Ian Johnson, “China’s Great Uprooting: Moving 250 Million into Cities, ” New York Times, June 15, 2013. 18. Alexander F. Day, The Peasant in Postsocialist China: History, Politics, and Capitalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 7–­10, 154, 160–­63; Matthew Hale, “Reconstructing the Rural: Peasant Organizations in a Chinese Movement for Alternative Development” (PhD dissertation, University of  Washington, 2013), 3–­5, 31 (and see also Hale’s fascinating case studies); Oliver Wainwright, “Our Cities Are Insufferable: Chinese Artists Go Back to the Land, ” The Guardian, December 2, 2014. The inspiration between the Republican movement and the present-­day one has been direct—­there is a “Yan Yangchu Rural Reconstruction Institute” in Dingzhou ( present-­day Dingxian) and a “Liang Shuming Center for Rural Reconstruction” outside Beijing (Day, 163–­64). 19. George E. Taylor, The Reconstruction Movement in China (London: Royal Institute of In­ ter­national Affairs, 1936), 11–­12. 20. Charles Hayford, To the People: James Yen and Village China (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990), 161. 21. Elizabeth Perry, Anyuan: Mining China’s Revolutionary Tradition (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012), 47, 56–­57, 89–­99, 122. 22. Guy Alitto, The Last Confucian: Liang Shu-­ming and the Chinese Dilemma of Modernity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986 [1979]), 1–­2. 23. Sun Yat-­sen, “In Seeking the Means to Reconstruction, Be Responsive to the People of the Entire Nation, ” in Prescriptions for Saving China: Selected Writings of Sun Yat-­sen, ed. Julie Lee Wei et al. (Stanford: Hoover University Press, Stanford University, 1994), 85; Sun Zhongshan, “Qiu jianshe zhi xuewen wei quanguo renmin fu zeren” (In Seeking the Means of Reconstruction, Be Responsive to the People of the Entire Nation), in Guofu quanji (The Collected Works of the Nation’s Father) (Taibei: Zhonghua minguo gejie jinian guofu bainian danchen choubei weiyuanhui, 1965), Vol. 2, subsection “Yanjiang” (Speeches), 26–­27; Sidney H. Chang and Leonard H. D. Gordon, All under Heaven . . . Sun Yat-­sen and His Revolutionary Thought (Stanford: Hoover Institution Press, Stanford University, 1991), 97. 24. Sun Zhongshan, preface to “Sanmin zhuyi, ” in Guofu quanji, Vol. 1, 1. The trilogy consisted of, respectively, The Philosophy of Sun Wen or Memoirs of a Chinese Revolutionary (Sun

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wen xueshuo), The International Development of China (shiye jihua; written in 1921 and dominated by discussions of reclaiming China’s infrastructure, particularly its railroads), and The Primer of Democracy (minquan chubu). 25. Sun Zhongshan, “Jianguo dagang” (The Fundamental of National Reconstruction), in Guofu quanji, Vol. 1, “Fanglüe” (Plans) subsection, 369–­7 1; Chang and Gordon, 93–­95, 119–­20. 26. William Kirby, “Engineering China: Birth of the Developmental State, 1928–­1937, ” in Becoming Chinese: Passages to Modernity and Beyond, ed. Wen-­hsin Yeh (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 137, 141, 143, 150; Margherita Zanasi, Saving the Nation: Economic Modernity in Republican China (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 191–­92; Ho, 15–­17; Chalmers Johnson, MITI and the Japanese Miracle: The Growth of Industrial Policy, 1925–­1975 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1982), 17. 27. Henrietta Harrison, The Making of the Republican Citizen: Political Ceremonies and Symbols in China, 1911–­1929 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002 [2000]), 49–­60. 28. Chaohua Wang, “Modernity: East Asia, ” in New Dictionary of the History of Ideas, ed. Maryanne Cline Horowitz, Vol. 4 (Detroit: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 2005): 1482. 29. See Alitto; Hayford. 30. For instance, see Zheng Dahua, Minguo xiangcun jianshe yundong (The Republican Rural Reconstruction Movement) (Beijing: Shehui kexue wenxian chubanshe, 2000) or Liu Jiafeng, Zhongguo jidujiao xiangcun jianshe yundong yanjiu (1907–­1950) (China’s Christian Rural Reconstruction Movement [1907–­1950]) (Tianjin: Tianjin renmin chubanshe, 2008). Cao Tianzhong is notable for taking a more integrated approach. See Cao Tianzhong, “Minguo shiqi xiangcun jianshe de paifen yu lianhe” (The Division and Unification of the Republican Rural Reconstruction Faction), Shehui kexue zhanxian 2008.2: 123–­29; and Cao Tianzhong, “1930 niandai xiangcun jianshe paibie zhijian de zifa hudong” (On the Voluntary Interaction among Different Sects of Rural Construction in the 1930s), Xueshu yanjiu 2006.3: 96–­102. 31. Prasenjit Duara, Rescuing History from the Nation: Questioning Narratives of Modern China (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 16. 32. For instance, see Henry Maine, Village Communities in the East and West, 2nd ed. (London: J. Murray, 1872), 13, 18–­19. 33. Margherita Zanasi, “Western Utopias, Missionary Economics, and the Chinese Village, ” Journal of World History 24.2 ( June 2013): 366. 34. I am grateful to Gail Hershatter for asking the question so succinctly. I didn’t have a satisfactory answer at hand at the time, but it inspired me to write this section. 35. The first use of the term “rural reconstruction” that I have located was in 1910 in reference to Horace Plunkett’s cooperative experiments in Ireland (see “Recent Periodicals and New Books, ” The Economic Journal 20.79 [September 1910]: 506). Plunkett’s efforts were widely written about, influencing President Theodore Roosevelt’s “Country Life Movement” as well as other cooperative efforts throughout the empire, including, notably, in India. See Patrick Perterras (Col. Henry Lionel Pilkington), “A Country Life Institute, ” Westminster Review 175.4 (April 1911): 403, 407, 412; Theodore Roosevelt, The Autobiography of Theodore Roosevelt (Digireads Book, 2011 [1913]), 230; G. S. Dutt, “A Practical Scheme of Agricultural Organisation and Rural Reconstruction in Bengal” (delivered for the Bengal Co-­operative Organisation Society on March 28, 1919) (Calcutta: Bengal Co-­operative Organisation Society, 1920). 36. Leonard S. Hsü, “Rural Reconstruction in China, ” Pacific Affairs 10.3 (September 1937): 249. 37. Thanks to Vinayak Chaturvedi for suggesting the idea of  “rural cosmopolitanism. ”

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38. For more on this, see the sources listed in note 35 above, as well as Lionel Smith-­Gordon and Laurence C. Staples, Rural Reconstruction in Ireland: A Record of Co-­operative Organisation, preface by A. E. (George William Russell) (Westminster: P. S. King & Son, Ltd., 1917). 39. For a discussion of the ways that the rural crises of the late nineteenth-­century highlighted the devastating effects of the increasingly integrated global economy, see Mike Davis, Late Victorian Holocausts (London: Verso, 2001), 9–­10. 40. James Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999). 41. The name “rural reconstruction” was credited, by Tagore himself, to a Cornell-­trained British agricultural economist named Leonard K. Elmhirst. Elmhirst worked for Tagore in Sriniketan in the early 1920s. In a 1932 letter, Tagore recalled, “You rightly named your work Village Reconstruction Work, for it was a living work comprehending village life in all its various activities and not merely productive of analytic knowledge. ” Letter from Rabindranath Tagore to Leonard K. Elmhirst, September 3, 1932, reprinted in Kissoonsingh Hazareesingh, ed., A Rich Harvest: The Complete Tagore/Elmhirst Correspondence & Other Writings (Mauritius: Editions de l’Océan Indien, 1992), 152. 42. S. N. Mishra, New Horizons in Rural Development Administration (Delhi: Mittal Publications, 1989), 1–­8; Sugata Dasgupta, A Poet and a Plan: Tagore’s Experiments in Rural Reconstruction (Calcutta: Thacker Spink & Co., 1933), 3, 6, 21; Alitto, 148–­49. 43. Dasgupta, 22–­23, 30; Rabindranath Tagore, Rabindranath Tagore on Rural Reconstruction (Delhi: Government of India Press, 1962), 18; Nityananda Roy, Tagore’s Thought on Rural Reconstruction and Role of Village Development Societies (Delhi: Abhijeet Publications, 2008), 5. 44. Tagore, Rabindranath Tagore on Rural Reconstruction, 73. 45. David Faure, The Rural Economy of Pre-­Liberation China: Trade Expansion and Peasant Livelihood in Jiangsu and Guangdong, 1870 to 1937 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), 3–­8, 202–­3. For more on the debate over the long-­term realities and perceptions of the rural economy, see also Ramon Myers, The Chinese Peasant Economy: Agricultural Development in Hopei and Shantung, 1890–­1949 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1970); Philip C. C. Huang, The Peasant Economy and Social Change in North China (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1985); and Kenneth L. Pomeranz, The Making of a Hinterland: State, Society, and Economy in Inland North China, 1853–­1937 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993). 46. James Yen, “New Citizens for China, ” Yale Review 18.2 (December 1, 1929): 275. 47. Chang Liu, Peasants and Revolution in Rural China: Rural Political Change in the North China Plain and the Yangzi Delta, 1850–­1949 (London: Routledge, 2007), 73. 48. Susan Daruvala, Zhou Zuoren and an Alternative Chinese Response to Modernity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, Harvard University Press, 2000), 51–­52; Hayford, 54–­ 56; C. C. Chen, Medicine in Rural China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), 99–­104. 49. Margherita Zanasi, “Exporting Development: The League of Nations and Republican China, ” Comparative Studies in Society and History 49.1 (2007): 144; Timothy Mitchell, Rule of Experts: Egypt, Techno-­Politics, Modernity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 15, 54–­55. 50. For instance, see “A Rural Health Experiment in China: Milbank Memorial Fund Aids the Development of the Public Health Program in Ting Hsien, ” The Milbank Memorial Fund Quarterly Bulletin 9.4 (October 1930): 108. 51. Amy Staples, The Birth of Development: How the World Bank, Food and Agriculture Organization, and World Health Organization Changed the World, 1945–­1965 (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 2006), 4.

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52. For instance, this has been argued by David Ekbladh, “To Reconstruct the Medieval: Rural Reconstruction in Interwar China and the Rise of an American Style of Modernization, 1921–­1961, ” Journal of American–­East Asian Relations 9.3/4 (Fall–­Winter 2000): 169–­96. 53. See, for instance, David Ekbladh, The Great American Mission: Modernization and the Construction of an American World Order (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010), 2–­3. 54. Yan Yangchu, “Zhonghua pingmin jiaoyu cujin hui Dingxian shiyan gongzuo baogao” (Report on the MEM’s Dingxian Experimental Work), in Xiangcun jianshe shiyan dierji (The Rural Reconstruction Experiment), Vol. 2, ed. Zhang Yuanshan and Xu Shilian (Shanghai: Zhonghua shuju, 1938 [1935]), 57; Zhonghua pingmin jiaoyu cujin hui, Dingxian de shiyan (The Dingxian Experiment) (1935), 19; Beipingqu lian xiangcun fuwutuan, Dao minjian qu (To the People) (n.p: Beipingqu lian xiangcun fuwutuan tekan, 1931), 1; Chen Yi, Dangdai Zhongguo zhi nongcun jianshe shiyan yundong ji qi qiantu (The Present-­Day Chinese Rural Reconstruction Experiment Movement and Its Future) (Nanjing: Zhongguo jianshe xiehui, 1935), 12; Zhonghua pingmin jiaoyu cujin hui, Hunan de shiyanxian Hengshan (Hunan’s Experimental County Hengshan) (1937), 3. 55. Gail Hershatter, Dangerous Pleasures: Prostitution and Modernity in Twentieth-­Century Shanghai (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999 [1997]), 7. 56. The literature on urban modernization in China is diverse. See, for instance, Joseph W. Esherick, ed., Remaking the Chinese City: Modernity and National Identity, 1900–­1950 (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2000); Ruth Rogaski, Hygienic Modernity: Meanings of Health and Disease in Treaty-­Port China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004); Qin Shao, Culturing Modernity: The Nantong Model, 1890–­1930 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004); Kristin Stapleton, Civilizing Chengdu: Chinese Urban Reform, 1895–­1937 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, Harvard University Press, 2000); Di Wang, The Teahouse: Small Business, Everyday Culture, and Public Politics in Chengdu, 1900–­1950 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008). 57. For more on the discourse of “awakening” in the Republican period, see John Fitzgerald, Awakening China: Politics, Culture, and Class in Nationalist Revolution (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996). Chapter One 1. I have not located a first edition of this textbook. However, a notice appeared in The Farmer announcing the publication of the first volume of the textbook. See “Pingmin xiaoxi: Nongmin qianzi ke” (MEM News: The Farmer’s Thousand-­Character Reader), Nongmin 3.5 (April 11, 1927): 4 for the announcement. The revised (second) edition was published in 1928 (see full citation below). 2. Zhonghua pingmin jiaoyu cujin hui, Nongmin qianzi ke (The Farmer’s Thousand-­ Character Reader), 4 volumes, revised (Shanghai: Shangwu yinshuguan, 1928), Vol. 4, 56–­60. The industrialist and reformer Zhang Jian built a clock tower in the lower Yangzi “model city” Nantong (see Qin Shao, Culturing Modernity, 95–­96). 3. Y. C. James Yen, Ting Hsien Experiment, 1930–­1931 (Ting Hsien: Chinese National Association of the Mass Education Movement, 1931), 4. 4. Y. C. James Yen, “How to Educate China’s Illiterate Millions for Democracy in a Decade, ” Bulletin 15, Vol. 2 (Peking: Chinese National Association for the Advancement of Education, 1923), 7; Hayford, 43–­46. 5. Li Defang, Minguo xiangcun zizhi wenti yanjiu (Consideration of the Republican Rural Self-­Government Issue) (Beijing: Renmin chubanshe, 2001), 76–­79; Li Defang, “Shilun Nanjing

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guomin zhengfu chuqi de cunzhipai” (On the School of Village Self-­Government during the Early Years of the National Government), Shixue yuekan 2001.2: 72; Li Jinghan, “Huiyi pingjiaohui Dingxian shiyanqu de shehui diaocha gongzuo” (Remembering the MEM Dingxian Experimental District’s Social Survey Work), in Hebei wenshi ziliao xuanji, Vol. 11, ed. Zhongguo renmin zhengzhi xieshang huiyi Hebei sheng weiyuanhui, Wenshi ziliao yanjiu weiyuanhui (Shijiazhuang: Hebei renmin chubanshe, 1983), 71. 6. Y. C. James Yen, China’s New Scholar-­Farmer (n.p.: Chinese National Association of the Mass Education Movement, 1929), 6. 7. Yen, Ting Hsien Experiment 1930–­1931, 3. 8. Alitto, 248–­49. 9. Harvey J. Graff, The Literacy Myth: Literacy and Social Structure in the Nineteenth-­Century City (New York: Academic Press, 1979), xiv–­xv; Stephen Lovell, The Russian Reading Revolution: Print Culture in the Soviet and Post-­Soviet Eras (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000), 12–­13. 10. Caleb Crain, “Twilight of the Books, ” The New Yorker, December 24, 2007; Maryanne Wolf, “Re: Twilight of the Books” (letter), The New Yorker, January 28, 2008; Maryanne Wolf, Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain (New York: HarperCollins, 2007), 5–­6. This view, of course, resonates with the well-­trod arguments of Benedict Anderson in Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (New York: Verso, 1991 [1983]). 11. Yen, “New Citizens for China, ” 263, 275. 12. Materials on “Tell the People” (Dictated by Dr. Yen), Box 102, International Institute for Rural Reconstruction (IIRR), Columbia University Rare Book and Manuscript Library (CUL), p. 1 of section “Problems and Difficulties (cont’d). ” Mi Digang had experienced the tensions between reformers and locals more than two decades before when, after he seized the lands held by village religious associations to put them to reform ends, villagers filed a lawsuit that continued for years (Duara, Rescuing History, 98). 13. Graff, 35. 14. Zhang Yuanshan, “Cong Dingxian huilai” (On Returning from Dingxian), Duli pinglun 95 (1934): 7–­9. 15. Yan Zhenxi, Dingxian shiyanqu kaochaji (An Investigation of the Dingxian Experimental District) (Beiping: Beiping zhongzhi xueshe, 1934), 22, 69. 16. Letter from Sidney Gamble to Friends, February 25, 1932, Box 5, IIRR, CUL; Sidney Gamble, Ting Hsien: A North China Rural Community (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1968 [1954]), 3–­4, 52, 62; “Camels Resting” (Item 648-­3787), Sidney D. Gamble Photographs, David M. Rubenstein Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Duke University. 17. Li Jinghan, 71; Hayford, 93. 18. Julean Arnold, “The Mass Education Movement in China, ” June 20, 1932, 5–­6, Folder 70, Box 7, Series 601, Record Group (RG) 1.1, Rockefeller Foundation records (RF), Rockefeller Archive Center (RAC). 19. Du Shuchu, “Pingmin jiaoyu yundong zai Dingxian” (The Mass Education Movement in Dingxian), in Hebei wenshi ziliao xuanji, ed. Hebei sheng weiyuanhui wenshi ziliao yanjiu weiyuanhui (Shijiazhuang: Hebei renmin chubanshe, 1983), 39; Xi Zhengyong, “Huiyi Dingxian pingjiaohui pingmin wenxuebu de gongzuo” (Remembering the Work of the MEM’s People’s Literature Department in Dingxian), in Hebei wenshi ziliao xuanji, ed. Hebei sheng weiyuanhui wenshi ziliao yanjiu weiyuanhui (Shijiazhuang: Hebei renmin chubanshe, 1983), 85; Letter from Sidney Gamble to Friends, February 10, 1932, Box 5, IIRR, CUL.

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20. Hsun-­Yuan Yao, “The First Year of the Rural Health Experiment in Ting Hsien, China, ” The Milbank Memorial Fund Quarterly Bulletin 9.3 ( July 1931): 68, 75–­77; C. C. Ch’en, “The Rural Public Health Experiment in Ting Hsien, China, ” The Milbank Memorial Fund Quarterly 14.1 ( January 1936): 76. 21. Sigrid Schmalzer, “Breeding a Better China: Pigs, Practices, and Place in a Chinese County, 1929–­1937, ” The Geographical Review 92.1 ( January 2002): 1–­22; Letter from James Yen to Mrs. Auchincloss, April 15, 1931, Box 1, IIRR, CUL; “Dingxian nongye zhanlan zhi shengkuang” (Dingxian’s Spectacular Rural Products Exhibit), Cunzhi 1.10 (November 1, 1930): 5–­6; “Animal Improvements, ” Folder 2684, Box 143, Series 601, RF Photograph Collection, RAC; Letter from James Yen to Mrs. Auchincloss, April 15, 1931, Box 1, IIRR, CUL; C. C. Ch’en, “The Development of Systematic Training in Rural Public Health Work in China, ” The Milbank Memorial Fund Quarterly 14.4 (October 1936): 383–­84. 22. Li Jinghan, 71–­72; Du Shuchu, 39. 23. Letter from Sidney Gamble to Friends, February 10, 1932, Box 5, IIRR, CUL; Letter from Sidney Gamble to Friends, February 25, 1932, Box 5, IIRR, CUL; Hayford, 92. 24. Yan Zhenxi, 92. 25. Yan Yangchu, “Zhonghua pingmin jiaoyu cujin hui Dingxian gongzuo dagai” (An Outline of the Work of the MEM at Dingxian), in Xiangcun jianshe shiyan diyiji (The Rural Reconstruction Experiment, Vol. 1), ed. Zhang Yuanshan and Xu Shilian (Shanghai: Zhonghua shuju, 1936 [1934]), 54. 26. Robert J. Culp, Articulating Citizenship: Civic Education and Student Politics in Southeastern China, 1912–­1940 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), 22; Elizabeth VanderVen, “Village-­State Cooperation, ” Modern China 31.2 (April 2005): 208–­10; Roger S. Thompson, “Statecraft and Self-­Government: Competing Visions of Community and State in Late Imperial China, ” Modern China 14.2 (April 1988): 199–­202. 27. Helen R. Chauncey, Schoolhouse Politicians: Locality and State during the Chinese Republic (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1992), 2, 7, 10, 74–­77, 129; VanderVen, 206; Stephen Averill, “The Cultural Politics of Local Education in Early Twentieth-­Century China, ” Twentieth-­Century China 32.2 (April 2007): 5. 28. Lucien Bianco, Wretched Rebels: Rural Disturbances on the Eve of the Chinese Revolution, trans. Philip Liddell (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, Harvard University Press, 2010), 133–­36. 29. Yen, China’s New Scholar-­Farmer, 8–­9. 30. Hayford, 13–­21, 31; Edgar Snow, “How Rural China Is Being Remade, ” China Weekly Review (December 16, 1933): 100; “China’s Yen, ” Time, November 22, 1943, http://www.time.com /time/magazine/article/0,9171,851893,00.html. 31. On the return of the scholar’s gown as a sartorial and political statement, see Wen-­hsin Yeh, The Alienated Academy: Culture and Politics in Republican China, 1919–­1937 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, Harvard University Press, 1990), 223, 226. 32. Guoqi Xu, Strangers on the Western Front: Chinese Workers in the Great War (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011), 177–­79, 192. 33. Tang Maoru, “Chengshi pingmin xuexiao de jiaocai” (Teaching Materials for the Urban People’s Schools), Jiaoyu zazhi 19.10 (October 1927): 1–­2; “Summary 1930, ” Box 2, IIRR, CUL. 34. Y. C. James Yen, Jidujiao qingnianhui zhufa huagong zhoubao (YMCA’s Chinese Laborers in France Weekly), Issues 1 ( January 15, 1919), 2 ( January 29, 1919), and 8 (March 26, 1919), Box 6, IIRR, CUL; Guoqi Xu, 193, 206–­8; Hayford, 57.

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35. See Yan Zhenxi, 2. Estimates for literacy rates are varied, and the distinctions based on gender are crucially important. Only about 2–­3 percent of women were literate in rural areas; estimates for male literacy range from about 30 to 45 percent. In Dingxian, Gamble estimated that 37 percent of men, but only 3 percent of women, were literate (Ting Hsien, 10), while Xu Xiuli and Yu Keping give slightly lower numbers: 31 percent for men, 2 percent for women (Xu Xiuli and Yu Keping, “China’s Rural Governance in the Past and Nowadays: A Comparative Analysis of the Cases of Dingxian, Zouping and Jiangning Counties, ” in China’s Rural Governance in the Past and Nowadays: A Comparative Analysis of the Cases of Dingxian, Zouping and Jiangning Counties, ed. Xu Xiuli (Beijing: Shehui kexue wenxian chubanshe, 2004): 173–­74). 36. Don-­Chean Chu, Patterns of Education for the Developing Nations: Tao’s Work in China 1917–­1946 (Tainan: Kao-­chang Printing Company, 1966), 27; Gamble, Ting Hsien, 11. 37. Anne Ruggles Gere, Intimate Practices: Literacy and Cultural Work in U.S. Women’s Clubs, 1880–­1920 ( Urbana: University of  Illinois Press, 1997), 20–­21; Jeffrey Brooks, When Russia Learned to Read: Literacy and Popular Literature, 1861–­1917 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985), xiii–­xiv, xvi, 51–­53, 166, 214–­15. 38. “Chinese Mass Education Movement: A Summary, 1934, ” 14, Folder 87, Box 8, Series 601, RG 1, RF, RAC. 39. Ibid., 7–­8. 40. Vera Schwarcz, The Chinese Enlightenment: Intellectuals and the Legacy of the May Fourth Movement of 1919 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), 208. 41. Illustrations were commonly used in imperial texts intended for illiterates and women. See Dorothy Ko, Cinderella’s Sisters: A Revisionist History of Footbinding (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 41. 42. The ninety-­six lessons were meant to be covered over a four-­month period, at the end of which the MEM believed its students achieved a basic literacy that allowed them to read simple publications like The Farmer. 43. Leo Ou-­fan Lee, Shanghai Modern: The Flowering of a New Urban Culture in China 1930–­ 1945 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 52–­55; Culp, Articulating Citizenship, 44–­45, 48; Theodore Huters, “Culture, Capital, and the Temptations of the Imagined Market: The Case of the Commercial Press, ” in Beyond the May Fourth Paradigm: In Search of Chinese Modernity, ed. Kai-­Wing Chow et al. (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books/Rowman & Littlefield, 2008), 42. 44. Culp, Articulating Citizenship, 19, 35, 43, 49–­50, 53. 45. Christopher A. Reed, Gutenberg in Shanghai: Chinese Print Capitalism, 1876–­1937 (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2004), 197; Robert Culp, “ ‘China—­the Land and Its People’: Fashioning Identity in Secondary School History Textbooks, 1911–­37, ” Twentieth-­Century China 26.2 (April 2001): 17, 19; Robert Culp, “Teaching Baihua: Textbook Publishing and the Production of Vernacular Language and a New Literary Canon in Early Twentieth-­Century China, ” Twentieth-­ Century China 34.1 (November 2008): 15–­17, 23–­25. 46. Yan Yangchu, Pingmin jiaoyu de zhenyi (The True Significance of Mass Education) (Beijing: Zhonghua pingmin jiaoyu cujin hui, n.d.), 1. Tang Maoru states that three million copies were sold between 1923 and 1926 (which means that the Yan Yangchu pamphlet listed above was likely published in 1926 or 1927). Another reference from Yan, quoted by Don-­Chean Chu, says “four or five million” by the late 1920s (41). 47. Referenced in Chu, 40. This was true of all publications during this period. It is estimated that each newspaper copy was read by between ten and fifteen people. See Henrietta Harrison,

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“Newspapers and Nationalism in Rural China 1890–­1929. ” Past & Present 166 (February 2000): 195. 48. Tang Maoru, 3; Nongmin gaoji wenyi keben dinggao (Farmer’s Advanced Literature Textbook, Final Version). Vol. 1, 2. n.d., file 137, RG 236, Second Historical Archives of China (SHAC); “Chinese Mass Education Movement: A Summary, 1934, ” 2–­3, Folder 87, Box 8, Series 601, RG 1, RF, RAC. 49. Zhonghua pingmin jiaoyu cujin hui, Nongmin qianzi ke (The Farmer’s Thousand-­ Character Reader), 4 volumes, 3rd revision (1931), Vol. 3, 23. 50. Zhonghua pingmin jiaoyu cujin hui, Nongmin qianzi ke (1928), Vol. 2, 49. 51. Zhonghua pingmin jiaoyu cujin hui, Shimin qianzi ke (Townspeople’s Thousand-­Character Reader), 4 volumes, 41st edition (Shanghai: Shangwu yinshuguan, 1929 [1927]), Vol. 1, 50–­51. 52. “Tanhua: Guoqing yu nongren” (Chit-­Chat: National Day and Rural People), Nongmin 2.23 (October 10, 1926): 2. (Cover is mislabeled as issue 21). 53. Zhonghua pingmin jiaoyu cujin hui, Shimin qianzi ke, Vol. 4, 22–­23. 54. Ibid., Vol. 3, 50–­51. 55. Zhonghua pingmin jiaoyu cujin hui, Nongmin qianzi ke (The Farmer’s Thousand-­ Character Reader), 4 volumes (Shanghai: Shangwu yinshuguan, 1930), Vol. 4: 7, 13, 25. 56. Zhonghua pingmin jiaoyu cujin hui, Shimin qianzi ke, Vol. 2: 22–­23. 57. Ibid., Vol. 2: 10–­11, 40–­41; Vol. 3: 36–­37, 44–­45; Vol. 4, 36–­37. 58. Zhonghua pingmin jiaoyu cujin hui, Nongmin qianzi ke (1931), Vol. 3, 25. 59. Ibid., Vol. 3, 18–­19. 60. Y. C. James Yen, The Mass Education Movement in China (Shanghai: Commercial Press, 1925), 14–­15; “Jottings, ” The Chinese Recorder, July 1924, 477. 61. Wang Xiangcen, “Heze shiyanxian Baozhenxiang xiangnong xuexiao” (Heze Experimental County’s Bao Village Township Rural School), Xiangcun jianshe xunkan 4.14 (1934): 12. 62. Hayford, xiii, 238–­39n9; Hsüeh-­wen Wang, Chinese Communist Education: The Yenan Period (Institute of International Relations, 1975), 159. 63. Yan Zhenxi, 8. 64. For pamphlets about the MEM, see Box 130, IIRR, CUL. For pamphlets produced by the MEM for rural readers, see Box 132, IIRR, CUL. The Chinese titles of these works are Nongcun jiating hui gongzuo jieshao (An Introduction to the Work of the Rural Family Association) and Chengshi pingmin jiaoyu dagang (A Plan for Urban People’s Education). 65. Xi Zhengyong, 87–­88. 66. “Statement of Receipts and Expenditures for the Year Ending December 31, 1931, ” attached to November 24, 1932, letter from Roger S. Greene to R. H. Tawney, Folder 70A, Box 7, Series 601, RG 1.1, RF, RAC. 67. “Chinese Mass Education Movement: A Summary, 1934, ” Folder 87, Box 8, Series 601, RG 1, RF, RAC. 68. Wang Lin, Junren qianzi ke (The Serviceman’s Thousand-­Character Reader), Vol. 1 (Shang­ hai: Shangwu yinshuguan, 1927), 36. 69. Yang Xiaochun, Xiangnong de shu (The Farmer’s Book) (Zouping, Shandong: Xiangcun shudian, 1936 [1934]), 14, 21, 64, 68, 69, 95. 70. “Pingmin xiaoxi: Benbao xiaolu yuefa kuanguang” (MEM News: This Publication’s Increasing Circulation), Nongmin 3.3 (March 21, 1927): 3. I follow the naming conventions of the publications themselves, as each included an English title on its cover page.

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71. “Letter Report of November 14, 1927, to President Ray Lyman Wilbur of Stanford University from Dr. Yen, ” Box 1, IIRR, CUL. 72. James Yen, “Dr. Yen Describes Work of Mass Education in China, ” UNESCO Courier 1.2 (1948): 7; “Y. C. James Yen’s Speeches UNESCO—­August 25, 1947, ” 5, Box 89, IIRR, CUL. 73. Laowang literally translates to “Old Wang, ” but in this case the word indicates not age but rather familiarity, so I have chosen an English colloquialism that I hope evokes that feeling. 74. See, for instance, Gail Hershatter’s discussion of the relationship of urbane knowledge and consumption in Dangerous Pleasures, 129–­31. 75. “Laowang de gushi” (Old Wang’s Story), Nongmin 2.2 (March 11, 1926): 5; “Laowang de gushi, ” Nongmin 2.3 (March 21, 1926): 5; “Laowang de gushi, ” Nongmin 2.5 (April 11, 1926): 5. 76. “Laowang de gushi, ” Nongmin 2.7 (May 1, 1926): 5. 77. “Laowang de gushi, ” Nongmin 2.13 ( June 30, 1926): 5; “Laowang de gushi, ” Nongmin 2.14 ( July 11, 1926): 5. 78. “Laowang de gushi, ” Nongmin 2.15 (July 21, 1926): 5; “Laowang de gushi, ” Nongmin 2.16 (August 1, 1926): 5. 79. Shao Teh-­hsing and Pearl S. Buck, “Lao Wang, the Farmer, ” The Chinese Recorder, April 1926, 238–­39, 243; Peter Conn, Pearl S. Buck: A Cultural Biography (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 89. In February 1932, The Chinese Recorder published another Lao Wang story by Shao Teh-­hsing called “Lao Wang’s Old Cow” (102–­7), trans. Pearl Buck. 80. Xiaochun, “Lao Wang di shibai” (The Failure of Lao Wang), Shandong minzhong jiaoyu yuekan 2.2 (November 1934): 77–­84. This was probably Yang Xiaochun. For more on Buck’s characters, see Richard Jean So, “Fictions of Natural Democracy: Pearl Buck, The Good Earth, and the Asian American Subject, ” Representations 112.1 (Fall 2010): 96–­99. 81. The earlier Lao Wang stories were all authorless. Presumably, they were written by the editors of the publication or by other MEM staffers. 82. See, for instance, Qu Zhengang, “Ni zui xihuan du Nongminbao de na yilan? Weishenma?” (What Is Your Favorite Column in The Farmer, and Why?), Nongmin 3.33 ( January 21, 1928): 12. 83. “Shuxin: Yige xiangcun pingmin xuexiao biyesheng de xin” (Letters: Letter from a Graduate of a Rural People’s School), Nongmin 1.10 ( June 1, 1925): 4. 84. Quoted in Gail Hershatter, The Gender of Memory: Rural Women and China’s Collective Past (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011), 101. 85. Mary Brown Bullock, The Oil Prince’s Legacy: Rockefeller Philanthropy in China (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2011), 93. 86. Hayford, 49–­52. 87. Hu Tianxi, “Diandiandidi, sheshechu fenjin er wukui de rensheng” (Bit by Bit, Reflecting a Progressive Life Lived without Regret), http://www.cd93.gov.cn/maoyisheng.htm, accessed on February 15, 2008. 88. Alice Yen Hing with Stacey Bieler, “Alice Huie Yan, ” Biographical Dictionary of Chi­ nese Christianity, http://www.bdcconline.net/en/stories/y/yan-alice-huie.php, accessed on July 1, 2014. 89. Huang Luyin, “Funü de pingmin jiaoyu” (Women’s People’s Education), Jiaoyu zazhi 19.9 (September 20, 1927): 3–­4. 90. “Duiyu Gaotoucun jiaoyu tanhua hui yihou de xiwang” (Our Hopes Following a Dis­ cussion of Gaotoucun’s Education), Nongmin 6.24 (February 1, 1931): 1. 91. Gamble, Ting Hsien, 162.

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92. Huang Luyin, “Funü de pingmin jiaoyu, ” 5; Huang Luyin, Funü shenghuo de gaishan (Im­ proving Women’s Lives) (Dingxian: Zhonghua pingmin jiaoyu cujin hui and Jingjin yinshuju, 1930), 6; Yen, China’s New Scholar-­Farmer, 32. 93. Li Zonghuang, Kaocha Jiangning Zouping Qingdao Dingxian jishi (Report of Investigations of Jiangning, Zouping, Qingdao, and Dingxian) (Nanjing: Zhengzhong shuju, 1935), 314. 94. Ibid., 315. See also Zhonghua pingmin jiaoyu cujin hui, Nongcun jiatinghui gongzuo jieshao (An Introduction to the Work of the Rural Family Association) (1933), 7–­8, for another reference to this tiered organization. For more on the mobilization of rural women through home economics education, see Helen M. Schneider, Keeping the Nation’s House: Domestic Management and the Making of Modern China (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2011), 146–­47. 95. Kay Ann Johnson, Women, the Family and Peasant Revolution in China (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), 52. 96. Xu Xiuli and Yu Keping, 137. 97. See, for instance, Chen Hengzhe, “Dingxian nongcun zhong jiandao de pingjiaohui shiye” (Visiting the MEM’s Undertaking in the Dingxian Countryside), Duli pinglun 51 (1933): 18–­24. 98. Du Shuchu, 39. 99. Du Fangqin, “Women and Gender in the Rural Modernization Movement: A Case Study of  Ding County (1912–­1937), ” in Women in China: The Republican Period in Historical Perspective, ed. Mechtild Leutner and Nicola Spakowski (Münster: Lit Verlag, 2005), 419. 100. “Jueding yi Hengshanxian wei shiyanxian” (Decision to Make Hengshan County an Ex­ perimental County), Minjian 3.1 (1936): 31. 101. Du Fangqin, 419. 102. J. P. McEvoy, “Jimmy Yen: China’s Teacher Extraordinary, ” in Dr. Y. C. James Yen: His Movement for Mass Education and Rural Reconstruction, ed. John C. K. Kiang (South Bend, IN: John C. K. Kiang, 1976), 94–­95. 103. Qin Shao, Culturing Modernity, 5. 104. Yen, “New Citizens for China, ” 272. 105. George W. Shepherd, “Tinghsien’s Challenge to the Church of Today, ” The Chinese Recorder, June 1933, 391. 106. “Xinwen: Xiangcun jiaoyu xiaoxi” (News: Rural Education News), Nongmin 2.6 (April 21, 1926): 3; “Pingmin xiaoxi: Baoding pingjiao fada” (MEM News: Baoding Mass Education Develops), Nongmin 3.6 (April 21, 1927): 4. 107. “Pingmin xiaoxi” (MEM News), Nongmin 4.17 (November 11, 1928): 5. 108. “Jiangxi gexian pingmin jiaoyu jinqing” (The Recent Situation of People’s Education in All Counties in Jiangxi), Nongmin 2.3 (March 21, 1926): 3; “Xiangcun pingmin jiaoyu xiaoxi: Hunan xiangcun pingjiao de fazhan” (Rural MEM News: The Development of Hunan Rural People’s Education), Nongmin 2.4 (April 5, 1926): 4; “Shanxi jiaoyuting shishi pingxiao: Ling gexian zhiding jingfei banli” (The Shanxi Department of Education Implements People’s Schools: Orders Each County to Allot Funds to Manage), Nongmin 4.6 (April 21, 1928): 9. 109. Hayford, 118. 110. Yen, “New Citizens for China, ” 270; Yen, China’s New Scholar-­Farmer, 1. 111. “Chinese Mass Education Movement: A Summary, 1934, ” 1–­3, Folder 87, Box 8, Series 601, RG 1, RF, RAC. 112. Duanqi xiaoxue guoyu keben (Short-­Term Primary School Chinese Textbook), n.d., file 101, RG 236, SHAC; Zhonghua pingmin jiaoyu cujin hui, Nongmin qianzi ke ceyan neirong

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ji shuoming shu: Genju nongmin qianzi ke disanci gaizheng shiyan yongben (The Farmer’s Thousand-­Character Reader Test Content and Explanation: According to the Third Revision of the Farmer’s Thousand-­Character Reader Experimental Useful Text) (Beiping: Zhonghua pingmin jiaoyu cujin hui, 1935). 113. Deng Runhua, “Wo weishenma ai kan nongminbao?” (Why Do I Love Reading The Farmer?) Nongmin 3.1 (March 1, 1927): 20–­22. Chapter Two 1. Beipingqu lian xiangcun fuwutuan, 1. See the section titled “Jixian dui” ( Jixian Group) for the photograph. 2. Roy Hofheinz Jr., The Broken Wave: The Chinese Communist Peasant Movement, 1922–­1928 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1977), 147. 3. Lynda S. Bell, 142–­43. 4. Anthony Giddens, Modernity and Self-­Identity: Self and Society in the Late Modern Age (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991), 5. 5. Tao Xingzhi, “Chuangzao yige sitongbada de shehui—­zhi Tao Wenmei” (Creating an Open and Accessible Society—­to Tao Wenmei), in Xingzhi shuxin ji (Tao Xingzhi’s Collected Letters) (Hefei: Anhui jiaoyu chubanshe, 1983), 28; Yang Xiaochun, Xiaozhuang yisui (A Year in Xiaozhuang) (Shanghai: Ertong shuju, 1935 [1928]), 6. 6. Liang Shuming, “Shandong xiangcun jianshe yanjiuyuan gongzuo baogao” (Report on the Work of the Shandong Rural Reconstruction Institute), in Xiangcun jianshe shiyan diyiji (The Rural Reconstruction Experiment, Vol. 1), ed. Zhang Yuanshan and Xu Shilian (Shanghai: Zhong­ hua shuju, 1936 [1934]), 33. 7. “Chinese Mass Education Movement: A Summary, 1934, ” Folder 87, Box 8, Series 601, RG 1, RF, RAC. 8. Yu Bida, “Nongren de changchu he duanchu” (The Peasant’s Strengths and Weaknesses), Nongmin 2.24 (October 20, 1926): 2. (This issue was misprinted, along with the previous two is­ sues and the one that follows it, as 2.21, though the issue numbers—­58 through 61—­and the dates are correct.) 9. Yan Zhenxi, 20. 10. Qiao Qiming / C. M. Chiao, “Jiangning xian zhunhuazhen xiangcun shehui zhi yanjiu” (A Study of Shunhwachen Rural Community Interests, Kiangning, Kiangsu) (Nanjing: University of Nanking, College of Agriculture and Forestry, 1934), 8. 11. Cited in Stephen Turner, “A Life in the First Half-­Center of Sociology: Charles Ellwood and the Division of Sociology, ” in Sociology in America: A History, ed. Craig Calhoun (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 115, 153, 115–­54. 12. Charles A. Ellwood, The Social Problem: A Constructive Analysis (New York: Macmillan, 1915), 222, 224. The Chinese version is Charles A. Ellwood, Shehui wenti: Gaizao di fenxi, trans. Wang Zaoshi (Shanghai: Shangwu yinshuguan, 1922). It is an interesting side note that MEM educator Qu Junong also (much later) translated a work by Ellwood: A History of Social Philosophy (Shehui zhexue shi) (Beijing: Beijing zhongxian tuofang keji fazhan youxian gongsi, 2007 [1946]). Qu, a prolific translator (he translated works by Kant and Locke, to name two), also translated two books of plays written by Rabindranath Tagore: Chun zhi xunhuan (The Cycle of Spring) (Shanghai: Shangwu yinshuguan, 1921) and Taige’er xiqu ji (Tagore’s Collected Plays) (Shanghai: Shangwu yinshuguan, 1924).

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13. See, for instance, Philip A. Kuhn, Rebellion and Its Enemies in Late Imperial China: Mil­ itarization and Social Structure, 1796–­1864 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1970); Susan Mann, The Talented Women of the Zhang Family (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007); Bryna Goodman, Native Place, City, and Nation: Regional Networks and Identities in Shanghai, 1853–­1937 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995); Joseph Esherick, The Origins of the Boxer Uprising (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987). 14. Li Hsiao-­t’i, Qingmo de xiaceng shehui qimeng yundong: 1901–­1911 (Lower-­Class Enlightenment in the Late Qing, 1901–­1911) (Shijiazhuang: Hebei jiaoyu chubanshe, 2001), 66. 15. For instance, see Matthias Petzold, “The Social History of Chinese Psychology, ” in Psychology in Twentieth Century Thought and Society, ed. Mitchell G. Ash and William R. Woodward (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 215–­16. 16. Alitto, 113, 142–­43. 17. Yang Xiaochun, Xiaozhuang yisui, 48, 83, 88, 90–­91; “Wuxi minzhong chayuan gaikuang” (A Brief Account of Wuxi’s People’s Teahouses), Wuxi jiaoyu zhoukan 277–­280 (August 1934): 1–­4 (of section with “minzhong chayuan gaikuang” overlay). 18. Chen Lijiang, Minzhong  jiaoyu (Mass Education) (Shanghai: Shangwu yinshuguan, 1936), 363–­64, 371. 19. Shi Zhongyi, Jiu nongcun de xin qixiang (The Old Countryside’s New Atmosphere) (Suzhou: Suzhou zhonghua jidujiao qingnianhui, 1933). 20. Shi Zhongyi, “Xiangcun qingnian de zuzhi wenti” (The Problems of Rural Youth Organizing), Xiangcun jianshe 3.17 (February 21, 1934): 6. 21. Shi Zhongyi, Jiu nongcun, 68–­74. 22. Chu, 95. 23. Li Jinghan, 71–­73. 24. Tao Xingzhi, “Shenma shi shenghuo jiaoyu?” (What Is Life Education?), in Tao Xingzhi jiaoyu lunwen xuanji (Selected Essays on Education by Tao Xingzhi) (Chongqing: Minlian shuju, 1947 [1946]), 12; Tao Xingzhi, “Huxiao xuanyan” (A Manifesto in Defense of [Xiaozhuang] School), in Tao Xingzhi jiaoyu wenxuan, ed. Zhongyang jiaoyu kexue yanjiusuo (Beijing: Jiaoyu kexue chubanshe, 1981), 117. 25. Philip Kuhn, “T’ao Hsing-­chih, 1891–­1946, ” Papers on China (East Asian Research Center, Harvard University) 13 (1959): 166; Yusheng Yao, “Rediscovering Tao Xingzhi as an Educa­ tional and Social Revolutionary, ” Twentieth-­Century China 27.2 (April 2002): 87, 89–­91; Xin Yuan and Xie Fang, Tao Xingzhi yu Xiaozhuang shifan (Tao Xingzhi and the Xiaozhuang Experiment) (Yangzhou: Jiangsu jiaoyu chubanshe, 1986), 1. 26. Chu, 7, 17–­18. 27. Tong Fuyong and Hu Guoshu, Tao Xingzhi zhuan (Biography of Tao Xingzhi) (Beijing: Jiaoyu kexue chubanshe, 1991), 50–­51; Chu, 34, 36–­37. 28. Kuhn, “T’ao Hsing-­chih, ” 183. 29. Tao Xingzhi, “Wo jiao ji suo dao de difang—­zhi Tao Wenmei” (The Path Where My Feet Have Been—­to Tao Wenmei) (Autumn 1923), in Xingzhi shuxin ji (Tao Xingzhi’s Collected Letters) (Hefei: Anhui jiaoyu chubanshe, 1983), 8–­9. 30. Tao Xingzhi, Zhongguo jiaoyu gaizao (Reforming Chinese Education) (Shanghai: Yadong tushuguan, 1928), 136. 31. Xiaoping Cong, Teachers’ Schools and the Making of the Modern Chinese Nation-­State, 1897–­1937 (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2007), 95. 32. Xin and Xie, 5.

188

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33. Interview with Liang Peikuan, Beijing, July 23, 2012. See also Alitto, 145n23. 34. Liang Shuming, “Banxue yijian shulüe” (Outline for Education), in Liang Shuming jiaoyu wenji, ed. Song Enrong (Nanjing: Jiangsu jiaoyu chubanshe, 1987), 7; Li Dazhao, 146–­50; Alitto, 136, 145, 149–­52. 35. Liang Shuming, “Canguan Nanjing Xiaozhuang xuexiao de suojian” (Observations on Visiting Nanjing’s Xiaozhuang School), in Xiaozhuang pipan (A Critique of Xiaozhuang), ed. Tao Xingzhi, Sun Mingxun, and Zai Zian (Shanghai: Shanghai ertong shuju, 1934), 6–­7; Liang Shuming, “Banxue yijian shulüe, ” 10–­11. 36. Tao Xingzhi, “Diernian de Xiaozhuang” (The Second Year at Xiaozhuang) (June 1929), in Tao Xingzhi jiaoyu wenxuan, ed. Zhongyang jiaoyu kexue yanjiusuo (Beijing: Jiaoyu kexue chubanshe, 1981), 105. 37. Tao Xingzhi, “Chuangzao yige sitongbada de shehui—­zhi Tao Wenmei, ” 28; Kuhn, “T’ao Hsing-­chih,  ” 170; Yusheng Yao, 94–­95. Some translations are Kuhn’s. 38. Tao Xingzhi, “Zai laoli shang laoxin” (On Being an Intellectual on the Basis of Labor), in Tao Xingzhi jiaoyu wenxuan, ed. Zhongyang jiaoyu kexue yanjiusuo (Beijing: Jiaoyu kexue chubanshe, 1981), 79. 39. Xiaorong Han, Chinese Discourses on the Peasant, 1900–­1949 (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2005), 128–­29; Tagore, Rabindranath Tagore on Rural Reconstruction, 69. 40. Liang Shuming, “Canguan Nanjing Xiaozhuang, ” 9–­10. 41. Suzanne Pepper, Radicalism and Education Reform in Twentieth-­Century China: The Search for an Ideal Development Model (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000 [1996]), 93–­94; Tao Zhixing, “Zhonghua jiaoyu gaijin she sheli shiyan xiangcun shifan xuexiao diyiyuan jianzhang cao’an” (Draft Regulations for the First Experimental Rural Teacher’s School Established by the Chinese Educational Improvement Society), Xin jiaoyu pinglun 3.3 (1926): 14. 42. Xin and Xie, 5. 43. Ibid., 6. 44. Chu, 51–­52. 45. Yang Xiaochun, Xiaozhuang yisui, 6. 46. Chu, 89, citing William H. Kilpatrick’s unpublished diaries. 47. Fang Yuyan, Xiaozhuang yinian jihua (One Year’s Plan for Xiaozhuang) (Shanghai: Ertong shuju, 1933), 6–­8. 48. Cheng Benhai, Zai Xiaozhuang (In Xiaozhuang) (Shanghai: Zhonghua shuju, 1930), 7; Yang Xiaochun, Xiaozhuang yisui, 3. For more on Cheng’s work in Guangdong, see Cheng Benhai, Xiangcun shifan jingyan tan (Talking about the Rural Pedagogy Experiment) (Kunming: Zhonghua shuju yinxing, 1939). 49. Tao Xingzhi, “Shiyan xiangcun shifan xuexiao da kewen” (Answers to Visitors’ Questions [about] the Experimental Rural Normal School), from Tao Xingzhi jiaoyu wenxuan, ed. Zhongyang jiaoyu kexue yanjiu (Beijing: Jiaoyu kexue chubanshe, 1981), 54. 50. Yang Xiaochun, Xiaozhuang yisui, 3, 19–­20. 51. Liang Shuming, “Canguan Nanjing Xiaozhuang, ” 12–­13. 52. Yang Xiaochun, Xiaozhuang yisui, 15. 53. Liang Shuming, “Canguan Nanjing Xiaozhuang, ” 16–­17. 54. Yang Xiaochun, Xiaozhuang yisui, 37–­38. 55. Liang Shuming, “Canguan Nanjing Xiaozhuang, ” 12–­14; Kuhn, “T’ao Hsing-­chih, ” 177–­78. 56. Liang Shuming, “Canguan Nanjing Xiaozhuang, ” 14; Wang Xiunan, “Jieshao geming de Xiaozhuang xuexiao” (Introducing the Revolutionary Xiaozhuang School), in Xiaozhuang pipan

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(A Critique of Xiaozhuang), ed. Tao Xingzhi, Sun Mingxun, and Zai Zian (Shanghai: Shanghai ertong shuju, 1934). 26–­27. For Kilpatrick observation, see Chu, 95. 57. Chu, 94, citing Kilpatrick’s unpublished journals. It is unclear with the use of “child” whether Kilpatrick was referring to students in the local schools or simply to the young normal school students. It seems likely it was the former. 58. Yang Xiaochun, Xiaozhuang yisui, 38–­39. 59. Zhao Zhenya, “Zenyang xie riji?” (How Do I Write a Journal?) Nongmin 10.8 (Au­­gust 19, 1935): 47–­48. 60. A modern example of this phenomenon is Liu Dapeng, the local scholar who is the subject of Henrietta Harrison’s The Man Awakened from Dreams: One Man’s Life in a North China Village, 1857–­1942 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005). 61. Fang Yuyan, 34–­38. 62. Ibid., 80–­85, 134–­36. 63. Yan Yangchu, “Dingxian shiyanqu gongzuo gailüe” (Outline of the Work at the Dingxian Experimental District), in Yan Yangchu Quanji (The Complete Works of Yan Yangchu), Vol. 1., ed. Song Enrong (Changsha: Hunan jiaoyu chubanshe, 1989), 410. 64. See, for instance, David Landes, The Wealth and Poverty of Nations: Why Some Are So Rich and Some So Poor (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1999 [1998]), 50. 65. Tao Xingzhi, Zhongguo jiaoyu gaizao, 32. 66. Ibid., 137. 67. Yang Xiaochun, Xiaozhuang yisui, 44. 68. Tao Xingzhi, “Huxiao xuanyan, ” 117–­19; Yeh, Alienated Academy, 178. 69. See, for instance, Zhou Enlai, “Zhou Enlai tongzhi gei zhonggong zhongyang de dianbao” (A Telegram from Comrade Zhou Enlai to the CCP Central Committee), in Tao Xingzhi jiaoyu wenxuan (Tao Xingzhi’s Selected Essays on Education), ed. Zhongyang jiaoyu kexue yanjiusuo (Beijing: Jiaoyu kexue chubanshe, 1981), foreword. 70. Kuhn, “T’ao Hsing-­chih, ” 163–­64. 71. Xiaoping Cong, 12, 143. 72. Hong Dianyang, “Dao Xugongqiao qu” (Going to Xugongqiao), Jiaoyu yu zhiye 115 (1930): 37; Yang Xiaochun, Xiaozhuang yisui, 48–­49; Jiang Henyuan, Shiliunian lai zhi zhonghua zhiye jiaoyu she (Sixteen Years of the Chinese Vocational Educational Society) (Shanghai: Zhonghua zhiye jiaoyu she, 1933), 41; Wang Ying, “Dao Xugongqiao qu” (Going to Xugongqiao), Jiaoyu yu minzhong 4.9/10 (1933): 1863–­64. 73. Liang Shuming, “Beiyou suojian jilüe” (Observations of Northern Travels), in Shuming sahou wenlu (Shanghai: Shangwu shudian, 1930): 217–­19. 74. Margo S. Gewurtz, “Social Reality and Educational Reform: The Case of the Chinese Vocational Education Association 1917–­1927, ” Modern China 4.2 (April 1978): 158, 161–­62, 169–­ 70; Chen Mianjie, “Lun Jiang Wenyu zhiye jiaoyu sixiang ji qi xiandai yiyi” (On Jiang Wenyu’s Vocational Education Thought and Its Meaning Today), Jiaoyu yu zhiye 27 (September 2007): 8–­10; An Yu and Shen Rongguo, “Cai Yuanpei yu zhonghua zhiye jiaoyu she” (Cai Yuanpei and the Chinese Vocational Education Association), Zhiye jiaoyu shiliao 2008.7: 159–­60; Wen-­hsin Yeh, “Huang Yanpei and the Chinese Society of Vocational Education in Shanghai Networking, ” in At the Crossroads of Empires: Middlemen, Social Networks, and State-­building in Republican Shanghai, ed. Nara Dillon and Jean C. Oi (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008), 25–­44, 35–­ 37; Schwarcz, 46; Paul J. Bailey, Reform the People: Changing Attitudes towards Popular Education in Early Twentieth-­Century China (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1990), 208.

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75. Jiang Hengyuan, “Zhonghua zhiye jiaoyu she zhi nongcun gongzuo” (The Chinese Vocational Education Society’s Rural Work), in Xiangcun jianshe shiyan diyiji (The Rural Reconstruction Experiment, Vol. 1), ed. Zhang Yuanshan and Xu Shilian (Shanghai: Zhonghua shuju, 1936 [1934]), 39–­40; Zhang Yuanshan and Xu Shilian, “Xu” (Foreword), in Xiangcun jianshe shiyan dierji (The Rural Reconstruction Experiment, Vol. 2), ed. Zhang Yuanshan and Xu Shilian (Shanghai: Zhonghua shuju, 1938 [1935]), 22. 76. Jiang Hengyuan, Shiliunian lai zhi zhonghua zhiye jiaoyu she, 33, 41; Jiang Hengyuan and Yao Huiquan, “Zhonghua zhiye jiaoshe nongcun gongzuo baogao” (Report on the Rural Work of the Chinese Vocational Education Society), in Xiangcun jianshe shiyan dierji (The Rural Reconstruction Experiment, Vol. 2), ed. Zhang Yuanshan and Xu Shilian (Shanghai: Zhonghua shuju, 1938 [1935]), 240. The three Jiangsu locations were Huangxu (established in 1929), Shanrenqiao (1931), and Gugaozhuang (1931). The Zhejiang project was at Baisha outside Ningbo. 77. Yao Huiquan and Lu Shu’ang, Shiyan liunian qiman zhi Xugongqiao (The End of Xugongqiao’s Six-­Year Experiment) (Shanghai: Zhonghua zhiye jiaoyushe, 1934), 2. 78. Ibid., 1; Jiang Hengyuan and Yao Huiquan, 243; Liang Shuming, “Beiyou suojian jilüe, ” 217; Jiang Hengyuan, Xugongqiao (Shanghai: Zhonghua zhiye jiaoyushe, 1929), 1. 79. Yao Huiquan and Lu Shu’ang, 25. 80. Liang Shuming, “Beiyou suojian jilüe, ” 222–­23. 81. Jacob Eyferth, Eating Rice from Bamboo Roots: The Social History of a Community of Handicraft Papermakers in Rural Sichuan, 1920–­2000 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, Harvard University Press, 2009), 93–­94. 82. Yi, “Xugongqiao yinxiang ji” (Impressions of Xugongqiao), Mawen 21 (1934): 9; Jiang Hengyuan, “Zhonghua zhiye jiaoyu she zhi nongcun gongzuo, ” 39–­40. 83. Mary Brown Bullock, An American Transplant: The Rockefeller Foundation and Peking Union Medical College (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980), 172–­74; C. C. Ch’en, “Scientific Medicine as Applied in Ting Hsien: Third Annual Report of the Rural Public Health Experiment in China, ” The Milbank Memorial Fund Quarterly Bulletin, 11.2 (April 1933): 115; C. C. Ch’en, “Public Health in Rural Reconstruction at Ting Hsien: Fourth Annual Report of  the Rural Public Health Experiment in China, ” The Milbank Memorial Fund Quarterly 12.4 (Octo­ ber 1934): 16. 84. Jiang Hengyuan and Yao Huiquan, 246, 248–­49. 85. Ibid., 241. 86. Andrew J. Nathan, Chinese Democracy (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1985), 51–­52, 55; Lloyd Eastman, The Abortive Revolution: China under Nationalist Rule, 1927–­1937 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1974), 148–­50. 87. Wang Hui, “Zhang Taiyan’s Concept of the Individual and Modern Chinese Identity, ” in Becoming Chinese: Passages to Modernity and Beyond, ed. Wen-­hsin Yeh (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 232, 234, 251. Chapter Three 1. Mi Digang and Yin Zhongcai. Zhaicheng cun (Zhaicheng Village) (Beijing: Beijing Zhonghua baoshe, 1925), 9; “Jiaoyubu, nongcun xiju yanjiu sheji” (Education Department, Rural Opera Research Plan), SHAC 236.140. 2. Zou Shuwen, Xin shenghuo yu xiangcun jianshe (The New Life Movement and Rural Reconstruction) (Nanjing: Zhengzhong shuju, 1935), 4, 19–­20.

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3. Christina Gilmartin, Engendering the Chinese Revolution: Radical Women, Communist Politics, and Mass Movements in the 1920s (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 168. 4. Quoted in James W. Heinzen, Inventing a Soviet Countryside: State Power and the Transformation of Rural Russia, 1917–­1929 (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2004), 137. 5. Tagore, Rabindranath Tagore on Rural Reconstruction, 73. 6. For instance, see Zanasi, “Western Utopias, ” 367–­70. 7. Lanxi shiyanxian minjiaoguan, “Lanxi shiyanxian zhi minzhong jiaoyuguan” (Lanxi Experimental County People’s School), Zhejiangsheng minzhong jiaoyu fudao banyuekan 2.24 (1936): 1417. 8. Yan Zhenxi, 20. 9. Yen, “New Citizens for China, ” 275. 10. Cheng Jiesheng, “Zuijin yinian nian zhi Guangxi guomin jichu jiaoyu shiye” (The Undertaking of National Basic Education in Guangxi during the Most Recent Year), Shandong minzhong jiaoyu yuekan 7.1 (February 25, 1936): 71–­89; charts facing 86 and 87. 11. Deborah Fitzgerald, Every Farm a Factory: The Industrial Ideal in American Agriculture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003), 25. 12. Stephen L. Morgan, “Transfer of Taylorist Ideas to China, 1910s–­1930s, ” Journal of Management History 12.4 (2006): 408–­24; Reed, 219. 13. Bryna Goodman makes the point that pie charts, graphs, and so on were a way for urban Native Place Associations to make clear that they could manage their membership (contra the state). Goodman, Native Place, City, and Nation, 297. 14. Robert Darnton, “Epistemological Angst: From Encyclopedism to Advertising, ” in The Structure of Knowledge: Classifications of Science and Learning Since the Renaissance, ed. Tore Frängsmyr (Berkeley: Office for History of Science and Technology, 2001), 54–­55. 15. See, for instance, Laura Hostetler, Qing Colonial Enterprise: Ethnography and Cartography in Early Modern China (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001); Johannes Thomann, “Square Horoscope Diagrams in Middle Eastern Astrology and Chinese Cosmological Diagrams: Were These Designs Transmitted through the Silk Road?, ” in The Journey of Maps and Images on the Silk Road, ed. Philippe Forêt and Andreas Kaplony (Leiden: Brill, 2008), 111–­14. 16. “Gesheng jiaoyujie zaxun” (Provincial Education News), Shenbao 10.18381 (May 2, 1924), Domestic News 2; “Gesheng jiaoyujie zaxun” (Provincial Education News), Shenbao 10.18401 (May 30, 1924), Domestic News 2. 17. “Benxiao xingzheng zuzhi xitongbiao” (An Organizational Chart of This School’s Administration), Jiangsu shengli dier nüzi shifan xuexiao xiaoyouhui hui kan 16 (1923): 11–­12; “Shengli disan zhongxuexiao tongji tubiao” (Provincial Third Middle School Statistics Chart), Shanxi jiaoyu yuekan 40 (1924): 20–­21. 18. Shi Zhongyi, Jiu nongcun, 23. 19. “Jiangsu Weitingshan nongcun fuwuchu shijiu niandu gongzuo baogao” (A Report on the 1930 Work of the Rural Service Center in Weitingshan, Jiangsu), Cunzhi 2.6 (1931): 2–­5. 20. Louis Menand, “An Introduction to Pragmatism, ” in Pragmatism: A Reader, ed. Louis Menand (New York: Vintage Books, 1997), xxiv–­xxv. Direct quote from Menand, citing George Herbert Mead, “The Mechanism of Social Consciousness, ” Journal of Philosophy, Psychology, and Scientific Methods 9.15 (1912): 406. See also Gary A. Cook, George Herbert Mead: The Making of a Social Pragmatist (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1993). 21. Suiyuan sheng zhengfu xiangcun jianshe weiyuanhui, Suiyuan de xiangcun jianshe (Suiyuan’s Rural Reconstruction) (Guisui: Suiyuan sheng zhengfu xiangcun jianshe weiyuanhui, 1937), 1–­3, 6–­7, page 9 facing, 10.

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22. Xue Jianwu, Zouping minjian wenyiji (A Collection of the Zouping People’s Art and Literature) (Taibei: Maoyu chubanshe, 1948), 1. See also “Changshi: Jiating weisheng” (Common Knowledge: Family Health), Nongmin 2.9 (May 21, 1926): 4, for another example. 23. Jiang Hengyuan, “Zhonghua zhiye jiaoyu she zhi nongcun gongzuo, ” 40. 24. Sun Fuyuan (as Fuyuan), “Dushu yu qiuxue” (Study and Knowledge-­Seeking), in Chuji zhongxue wenxuan (Introductory Middle School Anthology), ed. Zhou Leshan (Shanghai: Guangyi shuju, 1933), 267, reprinted in Sun Fuyuan, Sun Fuyuan ji qi zuopin (Sun Fuyuan and His Works) (Hong Kong: Tao zhai shuwu, 1976), 27; Shang Jinlin, “Foreword, ” in Sun Fuyuan sanwen xuanji (Selected Essays of Sun Fuyuan), ed. Shang Jinlin (Tianjin: Baihua wenyi chubanshe, 1991), 11. 25. Qin Shao, “Tempest over Teapots: The Vilification of Teahouse Culture in Early Repub­ li­can  China, ” Journal of Asian Studies 57.4 (November 1998): 1024–­25; Qiao Qiming / C. M. Chiao, 13. 26. Li Zonghuang, 11–­12; Hua Jinji, “Wuxi shehui jiaoyu shilüe” (A Brief History of Wuxi’s Social Education), Wuxi jiaoyu zhoukan 277–­280 (August 1934): 1–­2 (of baogao section); Xu Xiuli and Yu Keping, 109. 27. “Dafu liangwei duzhe de laixin” (Answering Two Readers’ Letters), Nongmin 9.12 (March 18, 1934), 93–­94. 28. David Johnson, Spectacle and Sacrifice: The Ritual Foundations of Village Life in North China (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2009), 168; Esherick, Origins of the Boxer Uprising, 63–­65. 29. Andrea S. Goldman, Opera and the City: The Politics of Culture in Beijing, 1770–­1900 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2012), 4–­5, 65–­66, 91. 30. See, for instance, Li Hsiao-­t’i, Qingmo de xiaceng shehui qimeng yundong, chapter 5, “Xiqu” (Chinese Opera), 163–­233. 31. Chen Lijiang, 390; Ko, 54. 32. Arthur Henderson Smith, Village Life in China: A Study in Sociology (New York: F. H. Revell Company, 1899), 66; Pomeranz, 93; Eugenia Lean, Public Passions: The Trial of Shi Jianqiao and the Rise of Popular Sympathy in Republican China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), 50, 55, 63, 66. 33. David Holm, Art and Ideology in Revolutionary China (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), 45–­ 47, 66–­71; Mark Selden, China in Revolution: The Yenan Way Revisited (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1995), 127, 209, 211–­12; Hsüeh-­wen Wang, 168; Perry, 95–­96. See also Chang-­tai Hung, “The Dance of Revolution: Yangge in Beijing in the Early 1950s, ” The China Quarterly 181 (March 2005), 83. 34. Hsiao-­t’i Li, “Making a Name and a Culture for the Masses in Modern China, ” positions: east asia cultures critique 9.1 (Spring 2001), 49–­58, 60–­61. 35. Holm, 20–­21, 23, 26, 51–­52; Franklin W. Houn, “The Stage as a Medium of Propaganda in Communist China, ” The Public Opinion Quarterly 23.2 (Summer 1959): 225; Edgar Snow, Red Star over China (New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1968 [1938]), 119–­25; Chang-­tai Hung, War and Popular Culture: Resistance in Modern China 1937–­1945 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 222–­25; Hershatter, Gender of Memory, 103; William Huizhu Sun, “The Peasants’ Theatre Experiment in Ding Xian County (1932–­37)” (PhD dissertation, New York University, 1990), 247–­48; Brian James DeMare, Mao’s Cultural Army: Drama Troupes in China’s Rural Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 84–­85, 99; Perry, 95–­96. 36. Kate Merkel-­Hess, “Acting Out Reform: Theater and Village in the Republican Rural Reconstruction Movement, ” Twentieth-­Century China 37.2 (May 2012): 161–­80; Nedostup, 249–­ 50, 369.

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37. Hsiao-­t’i Li, “Opera, Society and Politics: Chinese Intellectuals and Popular Culture, 1901–­1937” (PhD dissertation, Harvard University, 1996), 208–­9, 217, 222. 38. Wei-­pang Chao, “Yang-­ko: The Rural Theatre in Ting-­Hsien, Hopei, ” Folklore Studies 3.1 (1944): 18, 24–­25. 39. William Huizhu Sun, 45–­46, 140. 40. Hsun-­Yuan Yao, 66; Letter from James Yen to Mrs. Auchincloss, April 15, 1931, Box 1, IIRR, CUL. 41. Yan Zhenxi, 7–­8; Zhonghua pingmin jiaoyu cujin hui, Yishu jiaoyu (Art Education) (Zhonghua pingmin jiaoyu cujin hui, 1934), 5; “Dingxian xiazi changqu diaocha gongzuo shiwei ji” (A Complete Record of the Investigation of Dingxian’s Blind Singers), SHAC 236.141. 42. See Sidney Gamble, Chinese Village Plays from the Ting Hsien Region (Amsterdam: Philo Press, 1970). The Chinese version was authored only by Li and Zhang: Li Jinghan and Zhang Shiwen, Dingxian yangge xuan (Folk Plays from Ting Hsien) (Taibei: Dongfang wenhua shuju, 1971 [1933]). 43. Holm, 119. It was the former incarnation on which the CCP built its famous yangge dances, though Holm claims there were connections between the two yangge. See Holm, ch. 4. 44. Qu Junong, “Xu” (Preface), in Li Jinghan and Zhang Shiwen, Dingxian yangge xuan (Folk Plays from Ting Hsien) (Taibei: Dongfang wenhua shuju, 1971 [1933]), 2–­3, 6. 45. Li and Zhang, “Xuyan” (Foreword), in Li Jinghan and Zhang Shiwen, Dingxian yangge xuan (Folk Plays from Ting Hsien) (Taibei: Dongfang wenhua shuju, 1971 [1933]), 3; Hayford, 128. 46. Bonnie S. McDougall and Kam Louie, The Literature of China in the Twentieth Century (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), 175–­76. 47. “Jiaoyubu, nongcun xiju yanjiu sheji” (Education Department, Rural Opera Research Plan), SHAC 236.140. 48. Ibid.; Hayford, 131. 49. Xiong Foxi, Guodu ji qi yanchu (Crossing Over and Its Performance), (Shanghai: Zhengzhong shuju, 1947 [1937]), 1–­2, 6–­7, 17, 26–­28, 37–­38, 44. 50. S. Y. Ch’u, “Mass Education Movement, Education Division, Semi-­annual Report, ” July 1–­ December 31, 1935, pp. 18–­19, Folder 79, Box 8, Series 601, RG 1, RF, RAC; Julean Arnold, “The Mass Education Movement in China, ” June 20, 1932, Folder 70, Box 7, Series 601, RG 1.1, RF, RAC. 51. Xiong Foxi, 2–­4; Siyuan Liu, “ ‘A Mixed-­Blooded Child, Neither Western nor Eastern:’ Sinicization of Western-­Style Theatre in Rural China in the 1930s, ” Asian Theatre Journal 25.2 (Fall 2008): 280, 283, 286. 52. Zhang Yuanshan and Xu Shilian, Xiangcun jianshe shiyan dierji, 19. 53. Pan Yichen, “Women zenyang gan xiju yundong: Dui xiangjian shifan huajuzu tongxue jiang” (How Are We Running the Drama Movement? A Discussion of the Student Rural Reconstruction Pedagogy Drama Troupe), Xiangcun yundong zhoukan 3 (April 19, 1937): 3–­4. 54. Gu Zhifang, Zhongguo xiandai wenxue congshu mu (Bibliography of Modern Chinese Literature) (Fujian: Fujian jiaoyu shubanshe, 1993), 586. I have not located an extant copy of the collection. 55. Yang Xiaochun, Xiaozhuang yisui, 12; Tao Xingzhi, “Diernian de Xiaozhuang, ” 107. 56. Pan Yichen, 3–­4; Wang Xiunan, “Xiaozhuang xuexiao yu zhongxin xiaoxue” (The Xia­ ozhuang School and the Central Primary School), in Xiaozhuang pipan (A Critique of Xia­ ozhuang), ed. Tao Xingzhi, Sun Mingxun, and Zai Zian (Shanghai: Shanghai ertong shuju, 1934), 45; “Shandong xiangcun jianshe yanjiuyuan xiaozhi, xiaoqi, xiaozhang, zhuren, xiaobu bianzhi ji bufen tongxue lu deng” (The Shandong Rural Reconstruction Institute School Properties,

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School Flag, Principal, Directors, Departments, and Students), Zouping County Archives (ZP), Zoupingxian zhengxie wenshi ziliao, A.010. 57. Lan Mengjiu, “Disiqu xiangnong xuexiao gongzuo baogao” (Report of the Work of the Fourth District Rural School), Xiangcun jianshe 1.21–­30 ( July 21, 1932), 61–­62; Wang Xiangpu, “Xiangjian shiqi Zouping nongcun xuanzhuang, wenti huodong de piangduan huiyi” (Fragmentary Memories of Rural Reconstruction-­Era Zouping’s Rural Propaganda and Literary Activities), in Liang Shuming yu Shandong xiangcun jianshe, ed. Shandongsheng zhengxie wenshi ziliao weiyuanhui and Zoupingxian zhengxie wenshi ziliao weiyuanhui ( Jinan: Shandong renmin chubanshe, 1991), 180–­81. 58. Pan Yichen, 3–­4. 59. Li and Zhang, “Xuyan, ” 2. 60. Zhonghua pingmin jiaoyu cujin hui, Nongcun xiju yu nongcun jiaoyu (Rural Opera and Rural Education) (n.p.: Zhonghua pingmin jiaoyu cujin hui, 1933), 3. 61. Nedostup, 249–­50. 62. Zhonghua pingmin jiaoyu cujin hui, Nongcun xiju yu nongcun jiaoyu, 13–­14. 63. “Biaoyan huaju de jingguo” (The Experience of Performing Spoken Drama), Nongmin 9.5 ( January 28, 1934): 37–­38. 64. “Dafu liangwei duzhe de laixin, ” 93. 65. Siyuan Liu, 273, 278, 294–­95; William Huizhu Sun, 96, 155. 66. William Huizhu Sun, 98–­99, 250–­52. 67. “Minguo ershisannian, xiju sheji gongzuo baogao” (1934, Report on Opera Planning Work), 1934, SHAC 236.141; Chen Zhice, “Nongmin youxing gongyan huaju” (Peasant Performance Tour of Spoken Drama), Minjian 1.5 (1934): 6. Chen’s account mirrors the handwritten text in the previous document, with some changes and deletions. 68. “Xiju yanjiu weiyuanhui gongzuo baogao: Liunian jihua diyiqi diyinian, xiju yanjiu weiyuanhui gongzuo baogao” (Report on the Work of the Opera Research Committee: Report of the Opera Research Committee on the First Period of the First Year of the Six-­Year Plan), 1933, SHAC 236.141. Cultivating Mandarin rather than local dialect through theater is also mentioned in Zhonghua pingmin jiaoyu cujin hui, Nongcun xiju yu nongcun jiaoyu, 15. 69. Zhonghua pingmin jiaoyu cujin hui, Nongcun xiju yu nongcun jiaoyu, 2. 70. Gamble, Ting Hsien, 329–­30. 71. Ibid., 330. 72. “Minguo ershisannian, xiju sheji gongzuo baogao” (1934, Report on Opera Planning Work), 1934, SHAC 236.141; “Xiju yanjiu weiyuanhui gongzuo baogao, ” 1933, SHAC 236.141; Gamble, Ting Hsien, 334. 73. William Huizhu Sun, 128–­29. According to Jonathan P. J. Stock, actresses starting taking to the stage in rural areas in the late nineteenth century (Stock, “Learning Huaju in Shanghai, 1900–­1950: Apprenticeship and the Acquisition of Expertise in a Chinese Local Opera Tradition, ” Asian Music 33.2 [Spring–­Summer, 2002]: 3); Jiang Jin describes the “feminine transforma­ tion” of Chinese opera in the Republic when female audiences and then performers reshaped the theater, making actresses a more common onstage sight ( Jiang Jin, Women Playing Men: Yue Opera and Social Change in Twentieth-­Century Shanghai [Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2009], 32–­39). 74. Chen Zhice, 9. 75. Jia Enfu, Dingxian zhi (Taibei: Chengwen chubanshe, 1969 [1934]), 307; “Minguo ershisannian, xiju sheji gongzuo baogao” (1934, Report on Opera Planning Work), 1934, SHAC 236.141; Chen Zhice, 7.

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76. “Xiju yanjiu weiyuanhui gongzuo baogao, ” 1933, SHAC 236.141. 77. Ibid.; Chen Zhice, 8. 78. “Minguo ershisannian, xiju sheji gongzuo baogao” (1934, Report on Opera Planning Work), 1934, SHAC 236.141. 79. Chen Zhice, 10; William Huizhu Sun, 161–­63. Sun notes that the play was among the most popular of Xiong’s dramas in Dingxian. For a description of the “Grandpa” fox spirit in North China, see Xiaofei Kang, The Cult of the Fox: Power, Gender, and Popular Religion in Late Imperial and Modern China (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006), 92–­95. 80. “Minguo ershisannian, xiju sheji gongzuo baogao” (1934, Report on Opera Planning Work), 1934, SHAC 236.141. 81. Ibid.; Jia Enfu, 324; Chen Zhice, 8–­9. 82. Schmalzer, 3, 13, 17–­19. 83. Zanasi, Saving the Nation, 3, 54–­55, 68–­7 1. 84. Hayford, 170. 85. John Fitzgerald, “Warlords, Bullies, and State Building in Nationalist China: The Guangdong Cooperative Movement, 1932–­1936, ” Modern China 23.4 (October 1997): 421–­22, 424. 86. Zanasi, Saving the Nation, 133–­34, 143. 87. “Xiaofei hezuoshe shi zenme yihui shi?” (What Is a Consumer Cooperative?), Nongmin 7.13 ( January 13, 1932), 4. 88. H. S. Yao and Zhonghua pingmin jiaoyu cujin hui, Foundation for Rural Economic Reconstruction (Dingxian: Chinese National Association of the Mass Education Movement, 1936), 14. 89. Chinese National Association of the Mass Education Movement, The Ting Hsien Experiment in 1934 (Peiping: Chinese National Association of the Mass Education Movement, 1934), 23, 25, 39; Hayford, 170–­73. 90. Li Zonghuang, 5. 91. Xu Xiuli and Yu Keping, 147. 92. Fan Yunqian, “Luxi zai hou ji ying banli nong zhen yu banfa yaodian” (Western Shandong’s Postdisaster Urgent Agricultural Relief and Strategic Methods), Xiangcun jianshe ban­ yuekan 5.3 (1935): 1–­6. 93. Xu Xiuli and Yu Keping, 147–­48. When I visited Zouping in 2012, locals repeatedly attributed today’s cotton weaving factories, some of them Sino-­Japanese joint ventures, to the legacies of the cotton cooperatives that the institute established in the 1930s and the city’s resulting strength in this economic area. 94. Yang Xiaochun, Xiaozhuang yisui, 64. 95. Mark C. Elliott, The Manchu Way: The Eight Banners and Ethnic Identity in Late Imperial China (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001), 91. 96. Xu Yinglian, Li Jingxi, and Duan Jili, Quanguo xiangcun jianshe yundong gaikuang (Description of the National Rural Reconstruction Movement) (Zouping: Shandong xiangcun jianshe yanjiuyuan chuban gushou, 1935), 813; Chen Wensheng and Yang Jizhi, “Fu Zuoyi dui Suiyuan de zhili” (Fu Zuoyi’s Governance of Suiyuan), Lantai Shijie 9 (2006): 60; Ma Hanmei, “Fu Zuoyi yu Suiyuan jingji wen jiao shiye de fazhan (1931–­1937)” (Fu Zuoyi and the Development of Suiyuan’s Economic, Cultural, and Educational Initiatives [1931–­1937]), Neimenggu daxue xuebao 40.1 (2008): 69; Justin Tighe, Constructing Suiyuan: The Politics of Northwestern Territory and Development in Early Twentieth-­Century China (Leiden: Brill, 2005), 79–­81; Donald Gillin, Warlord: Yen Hsi-­shan in Shansi Province 1911–­1949 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1967), 123. 97. Tighe, 86.

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98. Ibid. 99. Suiyuan sheng zhengfu xiangcun jianshe weiyuanhui, chapter 1, p. 4; Xu Yinglian et al., 814, 817–­19; Tighe, 143; Ren Jiansan, “Suiyuan xin nong shiyan chang bennian fen gongzuo jihua gailun” (An Introduction to the Plan for This Year’s Work of the Suiyuan New Agricultural Experiment), Xin nongcun 21 (1935): 2. 100. Xu Yinglian et al., 813, 816, 818. 101. Tighe, 104. 102. Suiyuan sheng zhengfu xiangcun jianshe weiyuanhui, chapter 1, p. 4; Tighe, 103, 131. 103. Xu Yinglian et al., 816, 818. 104. Ren Jiansan, 2. 105. Tighe, 102–­3. 106. James P. Leibold, “Rethinking Guomindang National Minority Policy and the Case of Inner Mongolia, ” in China Reconstructs, ed. Cindy Yik-­yi Chu and Richardo K. S. Mak (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 2003), 108, 114–­15. 107. Tighe, 133–­34; Xu Yinglian et al., 813. 108. Xu Yinglian et al., 817–­18. 109. Ren Jiansan, 2, 6. 110. Xu Yinglian et al., 822–­31; Tighe, 88; Ren Jiansan, 8. 111. Ren Jiansan, 7, 26–­27. 112. Chang Liu, 131–­33. 113. “Jiaoyubu, nongcun xiju yanjiu sheji” (Education Department, Rural Opera Research Plan), SHAC 236.140. 114. S. Y. Ch’u, “Mass Education Movement, Education Division, Semi-­annual Report, ” July 1–­December 31, 1935, pp. 18–­19, Folder 79, Box 8, Series 601, RG 1, RF, RAC. 115. For a longer explanation of the process of tutelage, see, for instance, Louise Edwards, Gender, Politics, and Democracy: Women’s Suffrage in China (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008), 168–­72. The notion that citizenship participation required particular training was, of course, not unique to China, nor was Sun the first Chinese leader to propose its necessity. Liang Qichao and others made such proposals in the last decade of Qing rule as well. (For instance, see Joan Judge, Print and Politics: “Shibao” and the Culture of Reform in Late Qing China [Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996], 111.) 116. Pepper, 112. Chapter Four 1. Dispatch 1265 from Ministry of Industry, December 23, 1931, 17-­21-­013-­02, Institute of Modern History Archives, Academica Sinica (IMH); From representative Li Yangming to Ministry of Industry, October 16, 1933, 17-­21-­013-­02, IMH. 2. Fu-­Liang Chang, When East Met West: A Personal Story of Rural Reconstruction in China (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1972), 42–­43. 3. James C. Thomson Jr., While China Faced West: American Reformers in Nationalist China, 1928–­1937 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1969), 97. 4. David Hinton, “Introduction, ” in The Selected Poems of  T’ao Ch’ien, by T’ao Ch’ien, trans. David Hinton (Port Townsend, WA: Copper Canyon Press, 1993), 5, 11. For a translation, see 70–­73. 5. Alitto, 175; Li Defang, Minguo xiangcun zizhi wenti yanjiu, 76–­78; Lü Zhenyu, “Xiangcun zizhi wenti (shang)” (The Problems of Rural Self-­Governance [Cont’d.]), Cunzhi yuekan (Village

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Governance Monthly) 1.6 (August 15, 1929): 1; Joshua A. Fogel, The Cultural Dimension of Sino-­ Japanese Relations: Essays on the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1995), 51–­52; Bill Brugger and David Kelly, Chinese Marxism in the Post-­Mao Era (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990), 20. 6. Wm. Theodore de Bary, trans., “Introduction, ” in Waiting for the Dawn: A Plan for the Prince, by Huang Tsung-­hsi (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), 18–­19, 51–­52, 55. 7. Philip A. Kuhn, “Local Self-­Government under the Republic: Problems of Control, Autonomy, and Mobilization, ” in Conflict and Control in Late Imperial China, ed. Frederic Wakeman Jr. and Carolyn Grant (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975), 264–­69, 275, 283. 8. Seung-­joon Lee, Gourmets in the Land of Famine: The Culture and Politics of Rice in Modern Guangdong (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2011), 138, 143–­44. 9. Sidney Gamble, North China Villages: Social, Political, and Economic Activities Before 1933 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1963), 39, 41–­42; Philip Kuhn, “The Development of Local Government, ” in The Cambridge History of China, Vol. 13, ed. John K. Fairbank and Albert Feuerwerker (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978), 347–­48. 10. Edwards, 170–­7 1. 11. R. Keith Schoppa, Blood Road: The Mystery of Shen Dingyi in Revolutionary China (Berke­ ley: University of California Press, 1995), 34. 12. Chang and Gordon, 110. 13. William Rowe, Saving the World: Chen Hongmou and Elite Consciousness in Eighteenth-­ Century China (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001), 187–­89. 14. For more, see Margherita Zanasi, “Fostering the People’s Livelihood: Chinese Political Thought between Empire and Nation, ” Twentieth-­Century China 23.1 (November 2004): 6–­38. 15. Cheng Benhai, Zai Xiaozhuang, 6–­7. 16. “Zhongyang nongye shiyansuo: Zhangcheng (Central Agricultural Experimental Station: Charter), ” June 19, 1933, 8, 17-­21-­001-­001, IMH. 17. From representatives of Xiaoling and Yingling to the Ministry of Industry, December 14, 1931, 17-­21-­013-­02, IMH. 18. From representative Li Ximing, etc., to the Ministry of Industry, September 26, 1933, 17-­21-­013-­02, IMH. 19. Maryruth Coleman, “Municipal Politics in Nationalist China, 1927–­1937” (PhD dissertation, Harvard University, 1984), 84, 87, 90–­93. 20. For a brief summary of the work at Lanxi, see Lanxi shiyanxian minjiaoguan, “Lanxi shiyanxian zhi minzhong jiaoyuguan. ” 21. Ma Junya, “Minguo shiqi Jiangning de xiangcun zhili” (The Rural Governance of Republican Jiangning), in Zhongguo nongcun zhili de lishi yu xianzhuang: Yi Dingxian, Zouping, he Jiangning weili (China’s Rural Governance in the Past and Nowadays: A Comparative Analysis of the Case of Dingxian, Zouping, and Jiangning Counties), ed. Xu Xiuli (Beijing: Shehui kexue wenxian chubanshe, 2004), 355–­56. 22. “Shiyebu zhongyang mofan nongye tuiguang qu gongzuo gaiyao” (Summary of the Ministry of Industry’s Work in the Central Model Agricultural Extension District), in Xiangcun jianshe shiyan disanji (The Rural Reconstruction Experiment, Vol. 3), ed. Jiang Wenyu and Liang Shuming (Shanghai: Zhonghua shuju, 1937), 115–­20. 23. Zou Shuwen, “Guoli zhongyang daxue nongxueyuan ershisan niandu nongye tuiguang gongzuo” (The Agricultural Extension Work of National Central University’s Agricultural College in 1934), in Xiangcun jianshe shiyan disanji (The Rural Reconstruction Experiment, Vol. 3), ed. Jiang Wenyu and Liang Shuming (Shanghai: Zhonghua shuju, 1937), 124–­25; Jiangning zizhi

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shiyanxian Hushuzhen nongmin diya diakuan suo ershisanniandu yingye baogao (Business Report for 1934 for the Jiangning Self-­Governing Experimental County Hushu Village Rural Mortgage Credit Office) (n.p.); Jin Baoshan, “Neizhengbu weishengshu xiangcun weisheng gongzuo baogao” (A Report on the Rural Sanitation Work of the Ministry of Industry’s Sanitation Office), in Xiangcun jianshe shiyan diyiji (The Rural Reconstruction Experiment, Vol. 1), ed. Zhang Yuanshan and Xu Shilian (Shanghai: Zhonghua shuju, 1936 [1934]), 118–­19; Chen Bangxian, Qixia xinzhi (New Gazetteer for Qixia Village) (Taibei: Chengwen chubanshe, 1983 [1934]), 140–­44, 146. 24. Nedostup, 119. 25. Coleman, 88. 26. Mei Siping, “Liangnian lai zhi Jiangning shiyanxian” (Two Years at Jiangning Experimental County), Wenhua yuekan 1.15 (1934): 44; Chen Yi, 11; Mei Siping, “Jiangning shiyanxian gongzuo baogao” (A Report on the Work of the Jiangning Experimental County), in Xiangcun jianshe shiyan dierji (The Rural Reconstruction Experiment, Vol. 2), ed. Zhang Yuanshan and Xu Shilian (Shanghai: Zhonghua shuju, 1938 [1935]), 301. On Mei’s defection, see Rana Mitter, Forgotten Ally: China’s World War II, 1937–­1945 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2013), 197, 199, 205–­6, 215–­16. 27. Li Zonghuang, Foreword, 3. 28. Li Zonghuang, Foreword, 3; Xu Xiuli and Yu Keping, 89; From representatives of Xiao­ ling and Yingling to the Ministry of Industry, December 14, 1931, 17-­21-­01-­02, IMH; Sun Zhongshan, Sanmin zhuyi (The Three Principles of the People), in Guofu quanji, Vol. 1, 152. 29. From representatives of Xiaoling and Yingling to the Ministry of Industry, December 30, 1931, 17-­21-­013-­02, IMH; From representatives of Xiaoling and Yingling to the Ministry of Industry, January 5, 1932, 17-­21-­013-­02, IMH. 30. From representative Li Yangming, etc. to the Ministry of Industry, September 26, 1933, 17-­21-­013-­02, IMH. 31. Ibid. 32. Ibid. 33. From the Ministry of Industry, January 30, 1934, 17-­2-­013-­02, IMH. 34. Nedostup, 153, 157, 167. 35. Coleman, 256, 259–­60. 36. On the failures specifically with cooperative societies, see, for instance, Wang Ke, “Zhudong de zhengfu yu beidong de minzhong” (Active Government and Passive Peasants), Lishi jiaoxue 2008.2: 77–­80. 37. Gu Shijian, “Jian xi Nanjing guomin zhengfu de xianzheng shiyan” (A Superficial Analysis of the Nanjing Government’s County Government Experiment), Tianzhong xuekan 18.1 (February 2003): 87. 38. Chu, 99, quoting Kilpatrick’s unpublished journals. 39. Gamble, Ting Hsien, 133–­35. 40. Alitto, 166. 41. See, for instance, Liang Shuming, “Banxue yijian shulüe, ” 10–­11. 42. de Bary, 52. 43. Liang Shuming, “Xiangcun jianshe shi shenme?” (What Is Rural Reconstruction?), Xiangcun jianshe 2.30 (1933): 2. 44. Alitto, 166. 45. Xin Zhang, Social Transformation in Modern China: The State and Local Elites in Henan, 1900–­1937 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 138–­39; Alitto, 149.

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46. Wang Hongyi, “Huifu minzu zixinli zhi yanjiu” (Research on Restoring National Self-­ Confidence), in Wang Hongyi xiansheng yiji (Collected Writings of Mr. Wang Hongyi), ed. Chu Chengzhi (Taipei: Shandong wenxian she, 1978), 46. 47. Xu Xiuli and Yu Keping, 123; Li Defang, Minguo xiangcun zizhi wenti yanjiu, 80, 84, 91. 48. Alitto, 145–­47. 49. Interview with Liang Peikuan, Beijing, July 23, 2012. 50. Xu Xiuli and Yu Keping, 5, 65–­66, 107–­8. 51. Li Zonghuang, 96. 52. Wang Xiangcen, “Heze shiyanxian, ” 11. 53. Alitto, 243; Shantung Institute of Rural Reconstruction, Rural Reconstruction in Tsouping (Tsouping, Shantung: Shantung Institute of Rural Reconstruction, 1935), 5. 54. Li Zonghuang, 80. 55. Wang Xiangcen, “Heze shiyanxian Baozhenxiang xiangnong xuexiao (xiabian)” (The Rural School in Baozhenxiang in the Experimental County of Heze [Part 2]), Xiangcun jianshe xunkan 4.25 (1935): 21, 23. 56. Yang Xiaochun, Xiangnong de shu, 14–­15, 59, 68–­69. 57. Shandong daxue zhexuexi biyesheng lai Zouping shehui diaocha qingkuang (A Social Investigation by Shandong University Philosophy Department Graduates Visiting Zouping), ZP, Zoupingxian zhengxie wenshi ziliao, A.097, 1987; Juan Wang, “Liang Shuming’s Rural Reconstruction Theory and Experiment” (MA thesis, Boise State University, 1995), 62–­64; Alitto, 268–­69. 58. Xin Zhang, 143–­45. 59. Li Nai, “Zouping ernianlai de xiangcun qingnian xunlian zhi wojian” (My Observations of the Two Years of Rural Youth Training in Zouping), Xiangcun jianshe 5.10 (December 30, 1935): 1–­6; Wang Jianwu, “Yi Zouping shiyanxian ziwei xunlian ji diwuxiang xiangxue” (Remembering Zouping Experimental County’s Self-­Defense Training and Fifth Township’s School), in Liang Shuming yu Shandong xiangcun jianshe, ed. Shandongsheng zhengxie wenshi ziliao weiyuanhui and Zoupingxian zhengxie wenshi ziliao weiyuanhui ( Jinan: Shandong renmin chubanshe, 1991), 190. 60. Li Nai, 1–­6. 61. Liang Shuming, “Xiangcun qingnian de xunlian wenti” (Problems with Rural Youth Train­ ing), Xiangcun jianshe 4.12 (November 21, 1934): 2–­3. 62. For a discussion of various village crop-­watching practices in Zouping, see Gamble, North China Villages, 69; for more on the emergence and functions of crop watchers in north China, see Pomeranz, 88–­89. On the night watch and the village guard, see Gamble, North China Villages, 109–­15. Gamble writes that the village guard was resuscitated in 1926 (see 112). In some areas, the police forces were professionalized, with payments collected from villages to pay for a district police force. Prasenjit Duara argues that in some places it was the boundaries of crop-­ watching activities that defined the village (Culture, Power, and the State: Rural North China, 1900–­1942 [Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1988], 198). 63. Wang Jianwu, 192. 64. Wang Jianwu, 197. The translation of lüyan uses an archaic meaning of the term. It is likely that the song’s authors meant “the common people, ” but listeners may have also heard the subtext of spatial delimitation of this “common people” as something local and related to a kind of neighborhood community, so I chose to use the archaic meaning in the translation in order to flag this for Anglophone readers.

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65. See, for instance, Kuhn, Rebellion and Its Enemies. 66. de Bary, 52. 67. Quoted in Alitto, 268–­69. 68. “Gesheng sheli xianzheng jianshe shiyanqu banfa” (Method for Establishing Provincial Experimental Districts in County Governance Reconstruction), Zhongyang zhoubao 269 (1933): 2–­5. 69. Alitto, 234. 70. “Mass Education Movement, Hopei Provincial Institute for Social and Political Reconstruction, 1933, ” Folder 77, Box 8, Series 601, RG 1, RF, RAC. 71. Yan later claimed that he and Gan Naiguang had formulated the plan together during Gan’s visit to Dingxian. See Materials on “Tell the People” (Dictated by Dr. Yen)—­1944, Box 103, IIRR, CUL, p. 2 of section “Hsien Government. ” 72. Morris Bian, The Making of the State Enterprise System in Modern China: The Dynamics of Institutional Change (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009), 154–­59; Lane J. Harris, “Defining the Nationalist Party Center: The Text and Context of Gan Naiguang’s Outline of Sun Wenism, ” Southeast Review of Asian Studies 34 (2012): 90–­93. 73. Alitto, 246–­47; C. C. Ch’en, “Public Health in Rural Reconstruction at Ting Hsien, ” Folder 77, Box 8, Series 601, RG 1, RF, RAC, 2. 74. “Gesheng sheli xianzheng jianshe shiyanqu banfa, ” 2–­5. 75. Shandong daxue zhexuexi biyesheng lai Zouping shehui diaocha qingkuang (A Social Investigation by Shandong University Philosophy Department Graduates Visiting Zouping), ZP, Zoupingxian zhengxie wenshi ziliao, A.097. 1987. 76. Yen, “New Citizens for China, ” 275. 77. Gamble, North China Villages, 45–­49, 53–­60. 78. Chang Liu, 73. 79. Gamble, Ting Hsien, 142, 148; Edwards, 170. 80. Kuhn, “Local Self-­Government under the Republic, ” 259. 81. Gamble, Ting Hsien, 141–­42. 82. “Mass Education Movement, Hopei Provincial Institute for Social and Political Reconstruction, 1933, ” Folder 77, Box 8, Series 601, RG 1, RF, RAC. 83. C. C. Ch’en, “Public Health in Rural Reconstruction at Ting Hsien, ” Folder 77, Box 8, Series 601, RG 1, RF, RAC, 2. 84. Yan Yangchu, “Dingxian shiyanqu gongzuo gailüe, ” 395–­96, 402–­4. 85. Ibid., 407. 86. Chen Zhushan, “Cong xianzheng jianshe de shiming shuodao Dingxian de xianzheng” (Extrapolating from the Mission of County Government Reconstruction to Speak of Dingxian’s County Government), Minjian 2.11 (1935): 5. 87. Liang Shuming, “Zoupingxian xianzheng jianshe shiyanqu jihua zhailu” (Excerpt of the Plan for the Zouping County County Reconstruction Experimental District), in Liang Shuming, Xiangcun jianshe lunwen ji diyiji (Collected Essays on Rural Reconstruction, Vol. 1) ( Jinan: Shandong xiangcun jianshe yanjiuyuan, 1934), 98–­100. This analysis is supported by Alitto, 246–­48. 88. Liang Shuming, “Zoupingxian xianzheng jianshe shiyanqu jihua zhailu, ” 97, 100–­102. 89. Liang Shuming, “Xianzheng jianshe shiyanqu shiyan jihua xuyan” (Introduction to the Plan for the Experimental District in County Governance Reconstruction), in Liang Shuming, Xiangcun jianshe lunwen ji diyiji (Collected Essays on Rural Reconstruction, Vol. 1) ( Jinan: Shandong xiangcun jianshe yanjiuyuan, 1934), 95–­96.

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90. Kuhn, “T’ao Hsing-­chih, ” 185, 189. 91. “Mass Education Movement, Hopei Provincial Institute for Social and Political Reconstruction, 1933, ” Folder 77, Box 8, Series 601, RG 1, RF, RAC. 92. Thomson, 58–­121. For further discussion of the Lichuan experiment, see Liu Jiafeng, 160–­79, and Pepper, 105–­8. Other discussions of social reform in Jiangxi in this period include Stephen Averill, “The New Life in Action: The Nationalist Government in South Jiangxi, 1934–­ 1937, ” The China Quarterly 88 (December 1981): 594–­628, and Arif Dirlik, “The Ideological Foundations of the New Life Movement: A Study in Counter-­Revolution, ” Journal of Asian Studies 34.4 (August 1975): 945–­80. 93. Liu Jiafeng, 95–­100, 105; Laura Tyson Li, Madame Chiang Kai-­shek (New York: Open City Books, 2006), 102–­3; Pepper, 105–­8; Thomson, 58–­66, 74–­75, 77–­80. 94. Fu-­Liang Chang, 23–­24, 37; Shepherd, quoted in Thomson, 83. 95. Thomson, 95. 96. Zanasi, Saving the Nation, 167; Chen Ruzhen, Zheng Wei, and Shi Zhongyi, “Weitingshan nongcun fuwuchu shibanian shieryue baogao” (December 1929 Report on the Weitingshan Rural Service Center), Suzhou qingnian 74 (1930): 13–­14; “Hangzhou jidujiao qingnianhui Dingqiao nongcun fuwuchu kaimu zhisheng” (The Opening of the Hangzhou YMCA’s Dingqiao Rural Service Center), Tonggong 147 (1935): 25–­27. For more on the structures and details of re­ form work in Lichuan, see Xu Baojian, “Lichuan shiyanqu yinian lai gongzuo gaikuang” (A Summary of the Work in Lichuan Experimental District One Year On), in Xiangcun jianshe shiyan disanji (The Rural Reconstruction Experiment, Vol. 3), ed. Jiang Wenyu and Liang Shuming (Shanghai: Zhonghua shuju, 1937), 455–­7 1. 97. Thomson, 118–­19. Chapter Five 1. “Mass Education Movement, Hopei Provincial Institute for Social and Political Reconstruction, 1933, ” Folder 77, Box 8, Series 601, RG 1, RF, RAC; “Chinese Mass Education Movement: A Summary, 1934, ” Folder 87, Box 8, Series 601, RG 1, RF, RAC. 2. For instance, Andrija Štampar, a Croatian public health expert who was later the first chairman of the World Health Organization; Dr. Ludwik Rajchman, later the chairman and founder of  UNICEF; Dr. Victor Heiser and many others associated with the Rockefeller Founda­ tion, such as Alan Gregg, John B. Grant, and Selskar Gunn. See Victor Heiser, An American Doctor’s Odyssey: Adventures in Forty-­Five Countries (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1937 [1936]), 293–­94; Chen, Medicine in Rural China, 1; M. D. Grmek, “Life and Achievements of Andrija Štampar, Fighter for the Promotion of Public Health, ” in Serving the Cause of Public Health: Selected Papers of Andrija Štampar, ed. M. D. Grmek, trans. M. Halar (Zagreb: Andrija Štampar School of Public Health, Medical Faculty, University of Zagreb, 1966), 17. 3. Zanasi, “Exporting Development, ” 144; Mitchell, 15, 54–­55. 4. For instance, see “Kuliang Religious Education Conference, ” The Chinese Recorder, October 1933, 685, in this case identifying specifically the MEM’s iteration of rural reform. 5. “Nongcun xiaoxi: Quanguo xiangcun jianshe yundong” (Rural News: The National Rural Reconstruction Movement), Nonglin xinbao 10.21 (1933): 8–­9. 6. Sun Xiaocun, “Zhongguo xiangcun jianshe yundong de gujia” (An Appraisal of the Chinese Rural Reconstruction Movement), Dazhong shenghuo 1.4 (1935): 93. 7. Liang Shuming, “Xiangcun jianshe shi shenme, ” 3.

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8. Alitto, 269–­72. 9. Zhang Yuanshan and Xu Shilian, Xiangcun jianshe shiyan diyiji (The Rural Reconstruction Experiment, Vol. 1) (Shanghai: Zhonghua shuju 1936, [1934]), 4; Zheng Dahua, 124–­25. 10. See, for instance, “The Rural Reconstruction Movement in China, ” by C. W. Chang, 1950, Box 2, IIRR, CUL, 5. Though broad, the conference’s attendees were not exhaustive, and the result has been that some reconstruction projects are not included in summaries of the movement. 11. Zhang Yuanshan and Xu Shilian, Xiangcun jianshe shiyan dierji, 1. 12. “Quanguo xiangcun gongzuo taolunhui disanci dahui jingguo” (The Third Meeting of the National Rural Work Discussion Society), in Xiangcun jianshe shiyan disanji (The Rural Reconstruction Experiment, Vol. 3), ed. Jiang Wenyu and Liang Shuming (Shanghai: Zhonghua shuju, 1937), 49; Yung-­chen Chiang, 52. 13. C. C. Ch’en, “Ting Hsien and the Public Health Movement in China, ” The Milbank Memorial Fund Quarterly 15.4 (October 1937): 380. For more on the work in Hengshan, see Hayford, 187–­88. 14. For instance, see “Xiangyun xiaoxi: Xiangcun gongzuo taolunhui dierci kaihui zhaoji tonggao” (Rural Movement News: Announcement of the Rural Reconstruction Discussion Society’s Second Convention), Xiangcun jianshe xunkan 4.1 (August 1, 1934): 10–­11. 15. Examples of these identical reform songs can be found in Shandong daxue zhexuexi biyesheng lai Zouping shehui diaocha qingkuang (A Social Investigation by Shandong University Philosophy Department Graduates Visiting Zouping), ZP, Zoupingxian zhengxie wenshi ziliao, A.097, 1987; and in Duan Shengguo, “Pingmin jiaoyu cujin hui Gaotou yanjiu cun pingmin xuexiao pingmin shiyan xiaoxue gequ” (The MEM Gaotou Research Village People’s School Experimental Elementary School Songs), in Yan Yangchu yu Dingxian pingmin jiaoyu (Yan Yangchu and Dingxian’s People’s Education), ed. Li Jidong (Shijiazhuang: Hebei jiaoyu chubanshe, 1990), 409–­10. 16. “Mass Education Movement, Hopei Provincial Institute for Social and Political Reconstruction, 1933, ” Folder 77, Box 8, Series 601, RG 1, RF, RAC. 17. Ibid. 18. Seymour Topping, “Education Special S. Y. Chu Interview—­Bishan, ” Box 3, IIRR, CUL; “Y. C. James Yen’s Speeches UNESCO—­August 25, 1947, ” Box 89, IIRR, CUL, 6. 19. See, for instance, Lam, 142–­70; Ekbladh, “To Reconstruct the Medieval, ” 187. 20. “Yen Speech to Graduation Class 1945, ” handwritten note to S. Y. Chu from Yan, Box 3, IIRR, CUL. 21. Nick Cullather, The Hungry World: America’s Cold War Battle against Poverty in Asia (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010), 78–­79; Nicole Sackley, “The Village as Cold War Site: Experts, Development, and the History of Rural Reconstruction, ” Journal of Global History 6.3 (November 2011): 490–­92. 22. Zanasi, “Exporting Development. ” 23. Chalmers Johnson, 17. 24. “The Reminiscences of Doctor John B. Grant, ” Oral History Research Office, Columbia University Library, 1961, 325A. 25. Ross Terrill, R. H. Tawney and His Times: Socialism as Fellowship (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1973), 71. 26. Letter from James Yen to Stanford University President Ray Lyman Wilbur, Novem­­ ber 14, 1927, Box 1, IIRR, CUL, 9.

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27. The early twentieth-­century view of China as particularly undeveloped was layered over a nineteenth-­century vision of it as a place of particular need, as Henrietta Harrison discusses in “ ‘A Penny for the Little Chinese: The French Holy Childhood Association in China, 1843–­1951, ” American Historical Review 113.1 (February 2008): 72–­92. 28. Keh-­chang Fu, “Rural Factors in the Chinese Revolution: Theoretical Contributions from ‘The Chinese Rural Economy Research Association, ’ 1928–­1935” (PhD dissertation, Univer­ sity of Wisconsin–­Madison, 2005), 157–­58, 162. 29. Kirby, 146–­47. For a discussion of this report within the Chinese education world, see Pepper, 37–­38. 30. C. H. Becker, M. Falski, P. Langevin, and R. H. Tawney, The Reorganisation of Education in China (Reprint, Taipei: Ch’eng Wen Publishing Company, 1974 [1932]), 11. 31. Ibid., 23. 32. Ibid., 24. 33. Ibid., 24, 28. 34. Ibid., 194–­95. 35. Bullock, Oil Prince’s Legacy, 4. 36. Ibid., 98. 37. Letter from Thomas B. Appleget to Roger S. Greene on April 17, 1929, Folder 69, Box 7, Series 601, RG 1, RF, RAC; Letter from Roger S. Greene to R. H. Tawney on December 24, 1932, Folder 70A, Box 7, Series 601, RG 1.1, RF, RAC; Materials on “Tell the People” (Dictated by Dr. Yen)—­1944, Box 103, IIRR, CUL, p. 7 of section “Financial Contributors to the Chinese Mass Educational Movement. ” 38. The Rockefeller Foundation was not at all times the largest donor to the MEM’s causes, though its grants made up a considerable portion of the operating costs in Dingxian. See, for instance, “Proposed Budget of the Chinese National Association of the MEM, July 1937–­June 1938, ” Folder 80, Box 8, Series 601, RG 1.1, RF, RAC. 39. Socrates Litsios, “Selskar Gunn and Paul Russell of the Rockefeller Foundation: A Contrast in Styles, ” in Philanthropic Foundations and the Globalization of Scientific Medicine and Public Health, ed. Benjamin B. Page and David A. Valone (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 2007), 45. 40. “Mass Education Movement—­ Peking, ” extract from report of visit to China by S. M. Gunn, June 9–­July 30, 1931, Folder 70, Box 7, Series 601, RG 1, RF, RAC; Yung-­chen Chiang, 68; Litsios, 46. 41. Quoted in Bullock, Oil Prince’s Legacy, 97. 42. “The Reminiscences of Doctor John B. Grant, ” Oral History Research Office, Columbia University Library, 1961, 325. Also quoted in Litsios, 54. 43. For instance, Andrija Štampar, a Croatian public health expert who worked with the Rockefeller Foundation in the early 1930s and later worked for the League of Nations and the World Health Organization (and was the league’s advisor to the central government when it was planning its Jiangxi rural outreach efforts), noted in a 1932 talk in Dingxian that he was unimpressed by the recently constructed hospital in Dingxian—­a structure about which health department head Chen Zhiqian had sent glowing reports to the Milbank Memorial Fund, which supported the health efforts in the county. It was not apparently built along the lines of the most modern international models. (Fu-­Liang Chang, 43; Letter from Andrija Štampar to John Kingsbury, March 6, 1932, and Letter from Grant to Victor G. Heiser, April 7, 1932, Folder 605, Box 75, Series 601, RG 2-­1932, RF, RAC.) The Rockefeller Foundation sponsored Štampar in the United

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States from October 1931 to January 1932. Štampar was in China from 1933 to 1936. (See Serving the Cause of Public Health: Selected Papers of Andrija Štampar, ed. M. D. Grmek, Zagreb: Škola narodnog zdravlja, “Andrija Stampar, ” Medicinski fakultet, 1966, 37–­39.) 44. Becker et al., 193–­94. 45. For instance, see Letter from Gunn to Mason, April 20, 1935, Folder 71, Box 7, Series 601, RG 1.1, RF, RAC. 46. Letter from Gunn to Mason, May 29, 1933, and Letter from Gunn to Mason, Decem­­ ber 4, 1933, Folder 125, Box 12, Series 601, RG 1, RF, RAC; “Mr. Gunn’s Program for China, ” from report of Committee on Appraisal and Plan, approved at Trustee’s Meeting, December 21, 1934, Folder 143, Box 14, Series 601, RG 1.1, RF, RAC, 105. For further discussion of Gunn’s thinking, see Yung-­chen Chiang, 64. 47. H. D. Fong, Reminiscences of a Chinese Economist at 70 (Singapore: South Seas Society, 1975), 63; “North China Council for Rural Reconstruction, Report, 1936, ” Folder 112, Box 11, Series 601, RG 1.1, RF, RAC; Yung-­chen Chiang, 68–­69. 48. “The Reminiscences of Doctor John B. Grant, ” Oral History Research Office, Columbia University Library, 1961, 460B. 49. Ho, 53–­56. 50. Tomoko Akami, Internationalizing the Pacific: The United States, Japan, and the Institute of Pacific Relations in War and Peace, 1919–­1945 (New York: Routledge, 2002), 4, 47, 117–­18; Frank Rawlinson, “An International Forum: The Institute of Pacific Relations, ” The Chinese Recorder, September 1925, 580, 583, 588; L. T. Chen, “Some Impressions of the Institute of  Pacific Relations, ” The Chinese Recorder, September 1925, 589; Institute of Pacific Relations, The Study of International Affairs in the Pacific Area: A Review of Nine Years’ Work in the International Research Program of the Institute for Pacific Relations (New York: Institute of Pacific Relations, 1936), 33–­34. For more on the Wilsonian “moment” in China, see Manela. 51. Taylor, 5–­7. 52. “National Council for Rural Reconstruction, Second Annual Report, 1937–­1938” (section “Memorandum on the Program of Work of the National Rural Service Training Institute, 1938–­ 1939”), Folder 112, Box 11, Series 601, RG 1, RF, RAC; Yung-­chen Chiang, 68–­69. 53. Yung-­chen Chiang, 69. 54. “North China Council for Rural Reconstruction Budget and Comments, 1937, ” Folder 114, Box 11, Series 601, RG 1.1, RF, RAC. 55. Hayford, 184. 56. Alitto, 282, 292n17. 57. “National Council for Rural Reconstruction, Second Annual Report, 1937–­1938, ” Folder 112, Box 11, Series 601, RG 1, RF, RAC. 58. Chen Duxiu, “Kangzhan yu jianguo” (Resistance and Reconstruction), Zhenglun (Han­ kou) 1.9 (April 25, 1938): 1–­2. Around the same time, Chen pitched the idea of “a program of agrarian reform” to General He Jifeng. See Lee Feigon, Chen Duxiu: Founder of the Chinese Communist Party (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983), 222. 59. He Jian, “Kangzhan yu xiangcun jianshe” (The War of Resistance and Rural Reconstruction), Xiandai duwu 4.3 (1939): 7–­10. 60. Yan Yangchu, “Kangzhan jianguo de jiben wenti” (The Fundamental Problem of the War of Resistance and Reconstruction), in Yan Yanchu Quanji (The Complete Works of James Yen), ed. Song Enrong, Vol. 2 (Changsha: Hunan jiaoyu chubanshe, 1989), 106. 61. Mei Siping, Kangzhan zhong qingnian zenyang zixiu (How to Self-­Cultivate Youth Amid the Anti-­Japanese War) (Chongqing: Duli chubanshe, 1938).

n o t e s t o pa g e s 1 5 5 – 1 5 8

205

62. “National Council for Rural Reconstruction, Second Annual Report, 1937–­1938, ” Folder 112, Box 11, Series 601, RG 1, RF, RAC. 63. Ibid., subsection “Memorandum on the Program of Work of the National Rural Service Training Institute, 1938–­1939”; “National Council for Rural Reconstruction, Annual Report 1939–­1940, ” Folder 112, Box 6, Series 601, RG 1, RF, RAC. Xie Guanyi (Hsieh Kuan-­I) published his survey of Dingfan as “Tingfan, a Graphic and Statistical Survey”; an extant copy has not been located. In 1942, Dingfan was renamed Huishui County, which has been its name to the present day. In the 1950s, Huishui was designated a self-­governing minority Miao district under the Communist government. On Chen’s resignation, see Hayford, 195. 64. “The National Council for Rural Reconstruction, Third Annual Report, 1938–­1939” (subsection “The Rural Service Training Institute”), Folder 112, Box 11, Series 601, RG 1, RF, RAC. 65. “National Council for Rural Reconstruction, Second Annual Report, 1937–­1938, ” Folder 112, Box 11, Series 601, RG 1, RF, RAC. 66. Ibid., subsection “Memorandum on the Program of Work of the National Rural Service Training Institute, 1938–­1939”; “The National Council for Rural Reconstruction, Third Annual Report, 1938–­1939” (subsection “The Rural Service Training Institute, National Council for Rural Reconstruction, Annual Report, 1938–­39”), Folder 112, Box 11, Series 601, RG 1, RF, RAC. 67. “National Council for Rural Reconstruction, Fourth Annual Report, 1939–­1940. ” This source identifies Chu’s study as “A Study of a Bi-­Racial Community—­Pai-­King” and Hsü’s as “An Analytical and Interpretative Study of the Han-­Yi-­Miao Chai. ” Extant copies have not been located. 68. “National Council for Rural Reconstruction, Second Annual Report, 1937–­1938” (subsection “Memorandum on the Program of Work of the National Rural Service Training Institute, 1938–­1939”), Folder 112, Box 11, Series 601, RG 1, RF, RAC. 69. “National Council for Rural Reconstruction, Fourth Annual Report, 1939–­1940”; Fong, 63. 70. “The National Council for Rural Reconstruction, Third Annual Report, 1938–­1939” (subsection “The Rural Service Training Institute”), Folder 112, Box 11, Series 601, RG 1, RF, RAC. 71. “Memorandum on the Program of  Work of  the National Rural Service Training Institute, 1938–­1939, ” Folder 112, Box 11, Series 601, RG 1, RF, RAC; “The National Council for Rural Reconstruction, Third Annual Report, 1938–­1939, ” Folder 112, Box 11, Series 601, RG 1, RF, RAC; “The National Council for Rural Reconstruction, Fourth Annual Report, 1939–­1940. ” 72. “The National Council for Rural Reconstruction, Third Annual Report, 1938–­1939, ” Folder 112, Box 11, Series 601, RG 1, RF, RAC. 73. “Institute of Rural Research and Training, Annual Report, 1940–­41, ” Folder 112, Box 11, Series 601, RG 1, RF, RAC. 74. “National Council for Rural Reconstruction, Fourth Annual Report, 1939–­1940”; Paul B. Trescott, “H. D. Fong and the Study of Chinese Economic Development, ” History of Political Economy 34.4 (2002): 789–­90, 797–­99; Fong, 30, 51. For more on Fang’s economic ideas, see Zanasi, “Far from the Treaty Ports. ” 75. Cable, Gunn to Rockefeller Foundation, April 3, 1936, Folder 71, Box 7, Series 601, RG 1, RF, RAC; Letter from M. C. Balfour to Gunn and Appleget, January 13, 1941, Folder 150, Box 15, Series 601, RG 1.1, RF, RAC. 76. Materials on “Tell the People” (Dictated by Dr. Yen)—­1944, Box 103, IIRR, CUL, p. 5 of section “Problems and Difficulties (cont’d). ” 77. Letter from Gunn to Raymond B. Fosdick, February 8, 1937, Folder 72, Box 7, Series 601, RG 1, RF, RAC.

206

n o t e s t o pa g e s 1 5 8 – 1 6 2

78. Excerpts from John B. Grant’s diaries, Folder 144, Box 14, Series 601, RG 1.1, RF, RAC. 79. Benjamin B. Page, “Evaluation and Accountability, ” in Philanthropic Foundations and the Globalization of Scientific Medicine and Public Health, ed. Benjamin B. Page and David A. Valone (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 2007), 8. 80. Litsios, 52. 81. “National Council for Rural Reconstruction, Fourth Annual Report, 1939–­1940. ” 82. Hayford, 187–­93; “Institute of Rural Research and Training, Annual Report, 1940–­41, ” Folder 112, Box 11, Series 601, RG 1, RF, RAC. 83. Seymour Topping, “Education Special S. Y. Chu Series—­College of Rural Reconstruction, ” Box 3, IIRR, CUL, 1. 84. Letter from Hugh Hubbard to Donald Gilpatric, May 18, 1948, Box 33, IIRR, CUL; Hayford, 192, 194–­95; Wang Guo, “Chuangzao xin shijie—­Lu Zuofu de chengxiang yiti jianshe” (Creating a New World: Lu Zuofu’s City-­and-­Countryside Reconstruction) (PhD dissertation, Beijing University, 2013). 85. “Chinese Mass Education Movement: A Summary, 1934, ” Folder 87, Box 8, Series 601, RG 1, RF, RAC. 86. Ibid. 87. Letter from Grant to Victor G. Heiser, June 10, 1933, Folder 70A, Box 7, Series 601, RG 1.1, RF, RAC; Letter from Gunn to Max Mason in New York, March 24, 1935, Folder 71, Box 7, Se­ ries 601, RG 1.1, RF, RAC. 88. “The National College of Rural Reconstruction, ” Box 3, IIRR, CUL. 89. Yan Yangchu, “Choubei Zhongguo xiangcun jianshe xueyuan de yijian” (Ideas in Preparation for a Chinese College of Rural Reconstruction), in Yan Yanchu Quanji (The Complete Works of James Yen), ed. Song Enrong, Vol. 2 (Changsha: Hunan jiaoyu chubanshe, 1989), 111. 90. K. C. Wang, trans., “General Plans for the Present Stage of Local Reconstruction, ” Box 3, IIRR, CUL, 1–­13; Seymour Topping, “Education Special S. Y. Chu Series—­College of Rural Reconstruction, ” Box 3, IIRR, CUL, 2. 91. “Chinese Mass Education Movement: A Summary, 1934, ” Folder 87, Box 8, Series 601, RG 1, RF, RAC; and “Outline Budget for First Year, 1934–­35, ” Folder 78, Box 8, Series 601, RG 1, RF, RAC. 92. Ibid. 93. Letter from Hugh Hubbard to Donald Gilpatric, May 18, 1948, Box 33, IIRR, CUL; Hayford, 207; Sili xiangcun jianshe xuexiao (“Ershijiunian qiyue ershiqiri disici yuanwu tanhuahui tongguo”), 25-­00-­17-­2-­1, IMH; Sili xiangcun jianshe xuexiao (“Ershijiunian qiyue ershiqiri disici yuanwu tanhuahui tongguo”), 25-­00-­17-­2-­1, IMH; Sili xiangcun jianshe xuexiao (“Nongye zhuanxiuke”), 25-­00-­17-­2-­1, IMH; Seymour Topping, “Education Special S. Y. Chu Series—­ College of Rural Reconstruction, ” Box 3, IIRR, CUL, 1–­2; “A Chronological Summary of the Program of the Chinese Mass Education Movement (1940–­October 1949), ” Box 3, IIRR, CUL; “The National College of Rural Reconstruction, ” Box 3, IIRR, CUL. 94. Seymour Topping, “Education Special S. Y. Chu Series—­College of Rural Reconstruction, ” Box 3, IIRR, CUL, 3. 95. K. C. Wang, 2; Letter from Isabel Crook to James Yen, November 12, 1981, Box 3, IIRR, CUL; Letter from Hugh Hubbard to Dwight W. Edwards, May 3, 1948, Box 3, IIRR, CUL; Seymour Topping, “Education Special S. Y. Chu Series—­College of Rural Reconstruction, ” Box 3, IIRR, CUL, 3; Seymour Topping, “Education Special S. Y. Chu Interview—­Bishan, ” Box 3, IIRR, CUL, 1–­2; Sili xiangcun jianshe xuexiao (“Wei zhun han yi sili zhongguo xiangcun jianshe yucai

n o t e s t o pa g e s 1 6 2 – 1 7 1

207

yuan tianshe nongtian shuili zhuanxiuke zhu zhuoyu fa zhu jingfei yian fuqing chazhao tian”), November 1942, 25-­00-­17-­2-­1, IMH; Sili xiangcun jianshe xuexiao (“Sili zhongguo xiangcun jianshe yucaiyuan”), February 8, 1943, 25-­00-­17-­2-­1, IMH. 96. Seymour Topping, “Education Special S. Y. Chu Series—­College of Rural Reconstruction, ” Box 3, IIRR, CUL, 1. 97. Letter from Gunn to Appleget, May 2, 1939, Folder 72, Box 7, Series 601, RG 1.1, RF, RAC. 98. For instance, see Hayford, 185. 99. Ibid., 193–­95; Alitto, 283–­84, 293–­94, 305. 100. Odd Arne Westad, Decisive Encounters: The Chinese Civil War, 1946–­1950 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003), 55. On the construction of his legacy as the progenitor of rural reconstruction, see, for instance, Chen Anren, “Duiyu xiangcun jianshe pai zhi zhuzhang tichu xiangcun nongye jianshe zhi yijian” (Opinions Regarding the Rural Reconstruction Faction’s Views on Advancing Rural Agricultural Reconstruction), Minzhu wenhua 5.4/5 (1946): 18–­20; or Huang Juan, “Liang Shuming zuzhi xiangcun jianshe pai” (Liang Shuming’s Organization of the Rural Reconstruction Faction), Yi zhou jian 1 (1946): 9. Conclusion 1. Quoted in Hayford, 210. 2. Hayford, 194. 3. Alitto, 89–­90. 4. A process best articulated by Scott in Seeing Like a State. 5. Staples, 4. 6. Cullather, 77–­79; Sanjeev Khagram, Dams and Development: Transnational Struggles for Water and Power (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2004), 35. 7. Alitto, 322–­25, 328, 340–­41. 8. Letter from James Yen to Gerard Swope, February 2, 1949, Box 34, IIRR, CUL; Hayford, 207, 209, 214–­16, 219, 223–­25. 9. Hayford, 228. 10. “International Mass Education Movement, ” Box 13, IIRR, CUL, 4. 11. “Assessment of IIRR Program—­Dr. Harold Capener IIRR Report 1977, ” Box 154, IIRR, CUL, 3; “Assessment of   IIRR Program—­ Marian Fuchs-­ Carsch August–­ September 1980, ” Box 154, IIRR, CUL, 4–­5; “Assessment of IIRR Program—­Ross E. Bigelow—­April 30–­May 7, 1983, ” Box 154, IIRR, CUL, 7; “International Mass Education Movement, ” Box 13, IIRR, CUL, 5, 7; “Grant Proposals and Reports to USAID—­First Interim/Progress Report for July 1, 1987– ­June 30, 1988, ” Box 154, IIRR, CUL, 2. 12. See Barry Naughton, Growing out of the Plan: Chinese Economic Reform, 1978–­1993 (Cam­ bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 144–­58. 13. See Shen Duanfeng and Liu Guoqing, “Shehuizhuyi xin nongcun jianshe yanjiu pingshu” (Review on Construction of New Socialist Countryside), Guizhou shifan daxue xuebao (shehui kexue ban) 1 (2008): 28–­33, 29. 14. Day, 155, 161–­62, 164–­65. 15. Daniel A. Bell, The China Model: Political Meritocracy and the Limits of Democracy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015); Sungmoon Kim, Confucian Democracy in East Asia: Theory and Practice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 76–­77.

Glossary of Chinese Terms

baojia 保甲 Beibei 北碚 Beipingqu lian xiangcun fuwutuan 北平區聯鄉村服務團 bushizi de tongku 不識字的痛苦 Chen Zhice 陳治策 Chen Zhiqian (C. C. Chen) 陳志潛 Chen Zhushan 陳筑山 cu 粗 cun 村 cunzhipai 村治派 dadao diguozhuyi 打倒帝國主義 dan 旦 danjue 旦角 daoshi 導師 difang 地方 difang jianshe 地方建設 difangxing 地方性 difang zizhi 地方自治 Dingfan 定番 Dingxian 定縣 Dongbuluogang 東不落崗 dushu 讀書 fazhan 發展 fengjian 封建 Fu Baochen (Paul C. Fugh) 傅葆琛 funü gongzuo 婦女工作 fuzu gaoshang kuaile 富足 高尚 快樂 gaijin 改進 gaizao 改造 Gan Naiguang 甘乃光

210

glossary of chinese ter ms

geming xian gexin 革命先革心 gewu 格物 gongxing shijian 躬行實踐 guodu 過渡 guoyu 國語 He Lian (Franklin L. Ho) 何廉 Hebei xianzheng jianshe yanjiuyuan 河北縣政建設研究院 Heze 菏澤 hezuoshe 合作社 huabei nongcun jianshe xiehui 華北農村建設協會 huaju 話劇 hualian 花臉 huo de jiaoyu 活的教育 huxiangshe 互相社 huxianye 狐仙爺 Jiangning 江寧 jianguo 建國 jianshe 建設 jianshe shehuizhuyi xin nongcun 建設社會主義新農村 jiansheting 建設廳 jianshe zazhi 建設雜誌 jiaohua 教化 jiating zhufuhui 家庭主婦會 jiejianhui 節儉會 jinbu 進步 jingweidui 警衛隊 kangzhan 抗戰 kangzhan jianguo 抗戰建國 kexue de tounao 科學的頭腦 kunjue 坤角 laoli 勞力 laoli shang laoxin 勞力上勞心 laonong 老農 laowang 老王 laoxin 勞心 leiyü 雷雨 Li Jinghan (Franklin Lee) 李景漢 Liang Shuming 梁漱溟 lin 鄰 lü 閭 Lü Zhenyu 呂振羽 lüyan 閭閻 Mei Siping 梅思平 Mi Digang 米迪剛 minsheng 民生 mu 畝

glossary of chinese ter ms nongcun fuwuchu 農村服務處 nongcun wenti 農村問題 nongcun yundong 農村運動 nongmin 農民 nongmin kunjue 農民坤角 nongmin qianzi ke 農民千字課 Pan Yichen 潘一塵 pingminhua 平民化 pingmin qianzi ke 平民千字課 pingminxing 平民性 pohuai 破壞 Qu Junong 瞿菊農 quanguo xiangcun jianshe xiejin hui 全國鄉村建設協進會 quanmin wuzhuang 全民武裝 quxue zuoren 去學做人 reli 熱力 rencai 人才 Shandong xiangcun jianshe yanjiuyuan 山東鄉村建設研究院 shehuihua 社會化 shehui jiaoyu 社會教育 Shi Zhongyi 施中一 sui 歲 Suiyuan xin nong shiyan chang 綏遠新農試驗場 Sun Fuyuan 孫伏園 suzhi 素質 Tang Maoru 湯茂如 Tao Xingzhi 陶行知 tuhu 屠戶 Wang Hongyi 王鴻一 wo shi yige ren 我是一個人 wusan can’an 五三慘案 xiandai guojia 現代國家 xiandairen 現代人 xiandai shehui 現代社會 xiandai shenghuo 現代生活 xiangcun gongzuo taolunhui 鄉村工作討論會 xiangcun jianshe 鄉村建設 xiangcun jianshe lilun 鄉村建設理論 xiangcun jianshe taolunhui 鄉村建設討論會 xiangcun jianshe yundong 鄉村建設運動 xiangcun xiandaihua 鄉村現代化 xiangcun yundong 鄉村運動 xiangcun ziwei 鄉村自衛 xiangyue 鄉約 Xiaoling 孝陵 Xiaozhuang 曉莊

211

212

glossary of chinese ter ms

xiaxiang 下鄉 xiju jiaoyu 戲劇教育 xinli jianshe 心理建設 xinmin 新民 xin shenghuo 新生活 xin xiangcun jianshe yundong 新乡村建设运动 Xiong Foxi 熊佛西 xiushen 修身 xiuxian jiaoyu 休閑教育 Xu Shilian (Leonard S. Hsü) 許仕廉 Xu Yali (Alice Huie Yen) 許雅麗 xuexiao yu shehui, dachengyipian 學校與社會, 打成一片 Xugongqiao 徐公橋 xunzheng 訓政 Yan Yangchu( James Yen) 晏陽初 yang 洋 Yang Kaidao (Cato Young) 楊開道 Yang Xiaochun 楊效春 yangge 秧歌 yinghua xianzi 櫻花仙子 Zhaicheng 翟城 zhang 丈 Zhang Guoben 張國本 zhen 鎮 zhengfu 政府 zhengge de shehui 整個的社會 zhengxin 正心 Zhonghua pingmin jiaoyu cujin hui 中華平民教育促進會 Zhonghua zhiye jiaoyu she 中華職業教育社 zhongyang nongye shiyansuo 中央農業實驗所 zhuang 莊 zi fanxing 自反省 zijiu 自救 zizhi 自治 Zouping 鄒平 zuo 做 zuoren 做人 zuoren he zuoshi 做人和做事 zuzhi 組織 zuzhi xitong biao 組織系統表

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Index

Page numbers in italic refer to illustrations. agricultural credit and marketing cooperatives, 101–­3, 106 agricultural development in Suiyuan province, 104–­5 agriculture: commodification of, 16; reform of, 100–­103 Alitto, Guy, 12, 126 American influence/Americanization: MEM and, 29, 33, 59; reform activities and priorities and, 18, 81, 148, 149 Asiatic/Asian village, 14, 146, 168 authoritarianism of reformers: GMD, 82, 117–­22, 138; overview, 12–­13; reform opera, 96. See also top-­down approach banditry, 105, 118, 123, 127, 156–­57, 160 baojia system, 104, 107 Becker, C. H., 148 Beiping District Allied Rural Assistance group, 55 bottom-­up approach: to rural mobilization, 115–­ 16; to rural reconstruction, 21–­22, 117 Britain, Chinese laborers in, 33 Buck, Pearl S., 45–­46 “Butcher, The” (Xiong), 94 Cai Yuanpei, 74 CCP. See Chinese Communist Party Chang Fuliang, 137 Chen Duxiu, 154 Cheng Benhai, 67 Chen Jitang, 115 Chen Zhice, 49, 93, 98, 99 Chen Zhiqian (C. C. Chen), 155, 203n43 Chen Zhushan, 49, 134

Chiang Kai-­shek, 115, 116, 137, 160 Chinese Communist Party (CCP): developmentalism and, 169; international concern about, 141; mobilization of women by, 49; mobilization through theater and, 91; peasant power and, 2; rural reconstruction and, 9–­10, 165–­66; Tao Xingzhi and, 72 Chinese Laborers Weekly (newspaper), 34 Chinese Village Plays (Gamble, Li, and Zhang), 92–­93 Chinese Vocational Education Society (CVES), 56–­57, 73–­77 Chu, S. Y., 146 citizenship: literacy education and, 27, 35; relationship of citizen to state, 116–­17; in textbooks, 39; training for, 134; tutelage in, 108, 114; visions of, 112. See also self-­governance collaboration between Nationalists and reformers: in Dingxian and Zouping, 130–­36; focus of reform and, 140–­41; funding, siting of projects, and, 145; overview of, 112–­13; reasons for, 136–­38; scale of projects and, 117–­22; village contestations, 113–­17 Commercial Press, 36 commodification: of agriculture, 16; of rural life, 6, 171 “commonerization,” 64–­65, 72 community mobilization and cultural settings, 90 Confucian ideas: education and, 172; rural communities and, 72; self-­transformation and, 59–­60, 64 “Constructing a New Socialist Countryside” policy, 5 cooperative movement, 101–­3, 106

236 countryside: calls to go to, 55–­57; as collapsing, 16–­17; commodification of rural life, 6, 171; foreign visitors to, 147; neglect of, 5; organiza­ tional charts in, 84–­85; as place of retreat, 113; rural area ills, 2, 5, 15–­16; teachers for rural schools, 63, 65–­66, 74, 126; in twenty-­first century, 170–­7 1. See also mobilization of countryside; rural people; villages critics of rural reform, 147–­48 Crossing Over and Its Performance (Xiong), 94, 98–­99 cultural context, reformers as ignoring, 98–­101 cultural forms, delivering political messages through, 91–­93, 95–­96 cultural settings and community mobilization, 90 cun, 107. See also villages CVES (Chinese Vocational Education Society), 56–­57, 73–­77 Dalton Plan, 60–­61 Darnton, Robert, 85 Daughter’s Association, 48–­49 Day, Alexander, 171 de Bary, William Theodore, 124 development, reconstruction as watchword for, 10 developmentalism, 140–­41, 146–­47, 168–­69 Dewey, John, 34, 36, 61, 63, 72 Dingfan, experimental county of, 155–­57 Dingxian: agricultural outreach in, 31; county reform in, 132–­34; courtyard classroom in, 32; critique of adult education in, 148–­49; health program in, 30–­31; hospital in, 203n43; MEM move to, 26–­27, 29–­31; mobilization of women in, 47–­50; NCC and, 153; as rural reform model, 51–­53; theater reform in, 91–­93; vocational education in, 76; war with Japan and, 153 Dongbuluogang: opera in, 96–­97; theater troupe in, 98–­99, 100 Duara, Prasenjit, 13, 199n62 Eastern and Western Cultures and Their Philosophies (Liang Shuming), 63–­64 Eastern Miscellany ( journal), 94 education: centrality of, in model village, 23; for citizenship, 108, 114, 134; Confucian notions of, 172; Dalton Plan for, 60–­61; focus on, 20; government intervention compared to, 126–­27; League of Nations analysis of, 148–­49; leisure/living, 89; Liang Shuming and, 63–­64; MEM model of, 51–­53; as process of self-­ transformation, 61; Qing reform of, 32, 36, 47–­ 48; reforms centered on, 31–­32, 126–­27; at Suiyuan experimental projects, 105–­6; Tao Xingzhi and, 63; vocational, 73–­77; of women, 47–­48. See also literacy education; social education Educational Reform of 1922, 63

index Ekbladh, David, 168 elites: “commonerization” and, 64–­65, 72; as foreigners, 55, 56, 65, 71; funding of schools by, 32; as moral and social exemplars, 29, 59; oversight and guidance by, 108; self-­transformation of, 56–­57, 61–­62, 78 elitism: meritocratic, 171; of reformers, 12–­13 Ellwood, Charles A., 58–­59 evidence of rural collapse, 17 experimental counties: Dingfan, 155–­57; Hengshan, 49–­50, 144, 159; overview of, 145, 163; self-­governance and, 130–­36; Xindu, 144, 159. See also Jiangning, experimental county of experimental projects, 8–­9 Eyferth, Jacob, 76 Fang Xianting, 157, 158 Farmer, The (newspaper): distribution and content of, 43, 52; “How Do I Write a Journal?,” 68; “The Peasant’s Strengths and Weaknesses,” 58; quotes from, 48, 96–­97, 101–­2; “What Is Your Favorite Column, and Why?,” 46; “Why Do I Love Reading The Farmer?,” 53 Farmer’s Book, The (textbook), 102–­3, 127 Farmer’s Thousand Character Reader, The (textbook), 23, 24, 25, 26, 36, 38, 41 Faure, David, 17 Fei Dasheng, 56 Feng Guifen, 114–­15 Feng Rui, 30 “Ferry, The” (Xiong), 93–­94 feudalism, 114 footbinding, 90, 92, 95, 132 Ford, Henry, 50–­51 foreign involvement in rural reform: international development experts, 145–­50, 153; overview of, 140–­41; Rockefeller Foundation, 150–­52, 157–­58, 160, 162; shift in focus and, 167 France, Chinese laborers in, 33 Fu Baochen, 33–­34 Fu Zuoyi, 82, 103, 104, 105 Gamble, Sidney, 31, 92–­93, 98 Gan Naiguang, 131 gender: dominant discourse on, 48; in theater, 98–­99. See also women geographical allocation of projects, 144 Giddens, Anthony, 56 global dimensions of rural modern, 14–­18 GMD. See Nationalist (Guomindang) Party Goldman, Andrea, 90 “Good Old Wang” story in The Farmer, 44–­45, 45 government. See Nationalist (Guomindang) Party Graff, Harvey, 28 Grant, John B., 147, 151, 152, 158, 160

index Guangxi, mass education efforts in, 82–­84, 83 Gunn, Selskar, 151, 158, 160, 162 Guo Huilin, 69–­70 Han Fuju, 27, 125, 154 Hayford, Charles, 52 Hebei County Government Reconstruction Research Institute, 132 He Jian, 154 He Lian, 151, 152, 153 Henan Institute, 128 Hengshan County, experimental program in, 49–­50, 144, 159 Hershatter, Gail, 19, 47 Heze County, 126 Housewife Association, 48 Huang Yanpei, 74, 75, 163 Huang Zongxi, 114, 124 Hubbard, Hugh, 52 Huie, Alice (Xu Yali), 47, 49, 50 identity: as fluid, 59; reciprocal reconstruction of, 57 illiteracy, ignominy of, 44–­46, 45 Immigration Act of 1917 (US), 34 India: organization of villages in, 81; postwar development in, 168; rural reconstruction in, 15, 16–­17 individual: functionalist view of, 78; in organizational charts, 85, 88; role of, in nation, 166–­67. See also self Institute of Pacific Relations, 152–­53 international development approach to change, 168, 169 international development experts, 140–­41, 145–­ 50, 153 International Institute of Rural Reconstruction, 170 International Mass Education Movement, 170 Ireland, rural reconstruction in, 15 Japan: rural reconstruction in, 15; War of Resistance against, 154–­55 Japanese invasion: of North China, 153; of Shandong, 130, 153–­54 Jiangning, experimental county of: Central Agri­ cultural Experiment in, 110, 117–­18, 121; education for women in, 49; Ellwood influence on, 58; inspiration for, 61, 111; religious festivals in, 96; self-­governance and rural reform efforts in, 118–­22; temple lands in, 122 Jiangxi Rural Service Centers, 111 Jining station of NCC, 153, 154, 155 Kilpatrick, William, 66, 68 Kuhn, Philip, 114, 135

237 land reclamation efforts, 105 land seizures, 117–­18, 121, 122 “Lao Wang, the Farmer” (Buck), 45–­46 Lao Wang genre of stories, 44–­46, 45 League of Nations, Becker Commission, 148–­49, 151 Lean, Eugenia, 91 Leibold, James, 105 “leisure/ living education,” 89 Liang Qichao, 1–­2, 196n115 Liang Shuming: after end of movement, 163–­64; CCP and, 169; county reforms and, 134–­35; cri­tics of, 147; experimental districts and, 131; on focus of rural reconstruction, 141, 166–­67; on local power structures, 133; Mao and, 9; mobilization of rural people and, 132–­33; opportunities offered to, 125; on pillars of Shandong pro­j­ ect, 57; reforms of, 12; Rural Reconstruction Move­ment and, 142–­43; schools and, 126, 160; self-­transformation and, 59; Tagore and, 16; Tao Xingzhi and, 65; Village Governance and, 86, 113–­14, 125–­26; Village Governance Faction and, 115–­16; village security and, 123, 124, 127–­28; Wang Hongyi and, 63–­64; Xiaozhuang School and, 65, 67; on Xugongqiao, 74, 76. See also Shandong Rural Reconstruction Institute Liang Shuming Center for Rural Reconstruction, 176n18 Liang Zhonghua, 161 Lichuan County, 137–­38, 139 Li Dazhao, 2 Li Hsiao-­t’i, 59 Li Jinghan, 30, 61, 92–­93, 95–­96 lin, 106 literacy education: citizenship and, 27, 35; Liang and, 27; MEM and, 26–­29, 34–­35, 53; in model village, 23; self-­transformation and, 58; vision for rural reform and, 53–­54; for women, 47 Liu Shihou, 70 Liu Xiang, 159 local dimensions of rural modern, 14–­18 localism, 3, 9, 115 local power structures, 28–­29, 71–­72, 99–­100, 106–­7, 133 lü, 106–­7 Lu Yin, 47, 48 Lü Zhenyu, 113–­14, 115, 125, 165 Lu Zuofu, 159–­60 Mao Zedong: Liang Shuming and, 163; mobilization of rural people and, 2; rural reconstruction textbooks and, 9; rural turn of CCP and, 165; Thousand-­Character Reader and, 41 Mass Education Movement (MEM): agricultural bureau of, 100–­101; on cooperatives, 102; critics of, 58, 147–­49; CVES and, 75; Dingxian research

238 Mass Education Movement (MEM) (cont.) institute and, 133–­34; drama council of, 97–­100; education model of, 50–­53; funding for, 140, 159, 169–­70; GMD and, 135–­36; influence of, 128; on interest in rural reconstruction, 139; large-­scale reform and, 131; literacy and, 26–­29, 34–­35; local power structures and, 28–­29; long life of, 158–­59; National College of Rural Reconstruction and, 160–­62; NCC and, 152, 157–­58; origins of, 33; overview of, 11–­12; protests against, 32–­33; relocations of, 26–­27, 29–­31, 155, 159; Rockefeller Foundation and, 150, 151; on role of elites, 108; Rural Reconstruction Movement and, 7; slogan of, 28, 28; social education and, 97; Tao Xingzhi and, 63; texts of, 23, 24, 25, 26, 31, 35–­39, 40, 41–­ 43, 53–­54; theater reform and, 93–­94, 96; theater troupe of, 80, 92; visitors to Dingxian and, 51; women in, 47–­50. See also Farmer, The; Yan Yangchu Mead, George Herbert, 36 Mei Siping, 120, 155 MEM. See Mass Education Movement Mi Digang, 26, 80, 125 Milbank Memorial Fund, 203n43 military settlements, 82, 103, 105 militias, 123–­24, 127–­30 Mitchell, Timothy, 140–­41 mobilization of countryside: bottom-­up approach to, 115–­16, 117; initiatives for, 7–­8; rural people, 2–­3, 80, 132–­33; top-­down approach to, 13; women, 46–­50 model counties, 130–­36. See also experimental counties; Jiangning, experimental county of models of reform, 50–­53 model village: description of, 23, 41; illustrations of, 24, 25; in Suiyuan Province, 103–­7; in twenty-­first century, 172 modernity: definitions of in Republican China, 19; rural versus urban, 3–­5, 9, 14, 26, 36; self and, 11, 18–­22, 56; as state of being, 57 modernization of China: big projects and, 1–­2; GMD and, 10, 167–­68; humanizing of, 167; industrialization and institution building as, 11; rural reconstruction and, 3, 11; as spreading efficiently and scientifically, 164; as urban modernization, 5 Montessori, Maria, 61 mu, vii Mumford, Lewis, 84 Nanjing government. See Nationalist (Guomindang) Party Nantong, 51, 179n2 nation: as made of villages, 80–­82, 124–­25, 133; in reform dramas, 94; role of individual in, 166–­ 67; sacrifices of people on behalf of, 122

index National Christian Council, 136, 137 National College of Rural Reconstruction (NCRR), 160–­62, 169 National Day, 37–­38, 42 National Economic Council, 145 nationalism: localism and, 115; in MEM literature, 42–­43; plays and, 95; textbooks and, 36 Nationalist (Guomindang) Party (GMD): anti-­ Communist efforts and, 146–­47; antisuperstition campaigns of, 92; authoritarianism of, 82, 117–­22, 138; centralized agenda of, 115; concern for local culture of, 131; industrialization and, 146; mobilization of women by, 49; reconstruction and, 10; “resist and reconstruct” policy of, 154; as rulers of China, 3; rural poverty and, 101; state-­building approach of, 103–­4, 107–­8, 135–­38; The Three Principles of the People Thousand-­Character Reader, 42; top-­down approach by, 110–­12; view of modernization of, 167–­68; village militias and, 124, 129; Xiaozhuang School and, 8, 72 NCC. See North China Council for Rural Reconstruction NCRR (National College of Rural Reconstruction), 160–­62, 169 Nedostup, Rebecca, 119–­20, 121–­22 New Culture Movement, 35, 90, 91 New Journal of Agriculture and Forestry, 142 New Life Movement, 81, 128 New Rural Reconstruction Movement, 6, 13, 170–­7 1 nongovernmental organizations, turning into county governments, 112, 145. See also specific organizations North China Council for Rural Reconstruction (NCC): activities of, 155, 156–­57; locations of research of, 153; members of, 151–­52; relocations of, 155–­56, 157; Rockefeller Foundation funding of, 150, 157–­58; Sino-­Japanese war and, 154 opera: in Dingxian, 91–­93; in Jiangning, 96; reform of, 90–­91; talking, in countryside, 96–­101; yangge, 91, 92–­93, 95–­96, 98 opium smoking, 89, 92 organizational charts: countryside and, 84–­85; Guangxi mass education efforts, 82–­84, 83; history of, in China, 85–­86; overview of, 84; of Weitingshan reform project, 87 organization of villages: cooperative movement, 101–­3; opera and theater reform, 90–­101; social education, 80, 81–­82, 89, 97; Suiyuan experiments, 103–­9 outreach efforts and teahouses, 60 pamphlets of MEM, 41–­42 Pan Yichen, 66, 94–­95

index

239

Parkhurst, Helen, 60, 69 “Peach Blossom Spring” (Tao Yuanming), 113 peasants. See rural people Peking Union Medical College (PUMC), 30–­31, 47, 150 Peng Pai, 55–­56 Peng Yuting, 128 people: approaches to modernization of, 12–­13; recommendations for transformation of, 1–­2; tutelage and reconstruction of, 10–­11. See also rural people people’s livelihood, as pillar of nation-­building, 110, 116, 120–­21, 167 People’s Republic of China (PRC), 5, 47 People’s Schools, 31, 41, 43, 52, 99–­100 People’s Thousand-­Character Reader, The, 36–­37 Philippines Rural Reconstruction Movement, 170 pinyin system, vii Plunkett, Horace, 177n35 Poland China boar, 100 power: coercive, to enforce reform, 112, 117, 132, 135, 138; dispersed, 124; local, 28–­29, 71–­72, 99–­100, 106–­7, 133. See also authoritarianism of reformers; top-­down approach PRC (People’s Republic of China), 5, 47 precolonial past, views of, 16–­17 PUMC (Peking Union Medical College), 30–­31, 47, 150

MEM by, 28, 32–­33; remaking of, 108; role of, in nation, 166–­67; self-­transformation of, 78; technical knowledge of, 76; theater reform and, 97–­98; voices of, 19–­20; women, 46–­50 rural reconstruction: agenda for, 20; approaches to, 11–­12, 21–­22; boundaries of, 6–­10; change in targets of, 141–­42; contradictions and tensions in, 172; GMD concerns about, 138; historical context for, 10–­14; as method of mass mobilization, 82; methods and rhetoric of, 107; Nationalist policy making and, 103–­4; outcome of, 22; polarization of reformers, 165–­66; remaking of rural people and, 108; Republican-­era values in, 166; self-­governance as goal of, 70, 110, 166, 171–­72; shifts in models of, 4, 12–­13; terms and ideas of, 15, 177n35; in twenty-­first century, 170–­7 1; view of people in, 9–­10; as vision of new China, 3, 4–­5, 13–­14. See also foreign involvement in rural reform Rural Reconstruction Movement: founding of, 142; influence of, 139; interconnections of, 143; Liang Shuming and, 142–­43; Nationalist ideas and, 140; overview of, 7; Rockefeller Foundation and, 150–­52; Rural Work Discussion Association and, 143–­45 Rural Service Centers, 137 Rural Work Discussion Association, conferences and meetings of, 143–­45 Russia, mass literacy efforts in, 34–­35

Qing Dynasty, 90, 114 Qin Shao, 51 Qu Junong, 93, 186n12

Schmalzer, Sigrid, 100 Scott, James, 16 Second Sino-­Japanese war, 153–­54 self: modernity and, 18–­22; process of self-­ transformation, 56–­57; relationship to society, 84 self-­defense organizations, 123 self-­defense training, 105 self-­governance: authoritarianism of state and, 117–­22; experimental counties and, 130–­36; as goal of organization, 89, 108–­9; as goal of rural reconstruction, 70, 110, 166, 171–­72; local, 113–­17; Tao Xingzhi on, 70–­7 1; village solidarity increased through, 17–­18; visions of, 112; in Zouping, 123–­30. See also citizenship self-­improvement, discourse on, 129 self-­reflection at Xiaozhuang School, 68–­69 self-­transformation/self-­reform: components of, 72; GMD commandism and, 112; Liang Shuming and, 64; organizational charts and, 88–­89; persuasion and, 117; processes of, 56–­57; as replaced by developmentalism, 141–­42; in Republican China, 58–­62; Tao Xingzhi and, 65; transformation of society and, 86, 89; waning focus on, 162–­64, 167; Xiaozhuang School and, 72–­73; Xugongqiao project and, 77

reformers: elitism of, 12–­13; as ignoring social context, 98–­101; polarization of, 165–­66. See also authoritarianism of reformers; collaboration between Nationalists and reformers; elites research institutes in experimental districts, 131–­32, 133–­34 “resist and reconstruct” policy, 154 Rockefeller Foundation, 150–­52, 157–­58, 160, 162, 201n2, 203–­4n43 romanization of Chinese terms, vii rulers, relationship between ruled and, 114 rural cosmopolitanism, 15, 16, 140 rural credit societies, 106 rural leadership, cultivation of, 154–­55, 160–­62, 163, 167 rural modern: global and local dimensions of, 14–­18; women in, 46–­50 rural people: concepts of time of, 70, 90; economic reforms and, 170–­7 1; The Farmer and, 43; focus of reform placed on, 26, 31, 58, 142, 165–­66; gaining trust of, 71–­72; illiteracy of, 34; mobilization of, 2–­3, 80, 132–­33; protests against

240 Shandong Rural Reconstruction Institute: The Farmer’s Book, 42; Farmer’s Thousand-­ Character Reader and, 41; founding of, 27, 65, 125; governance by, 131–­32, 135; location and curriculum of, 126; Rural Reconstruction Movement and, 7; spoken drama at, 95; village self-­defense and, 127–­29 Shao Teh-­hsing, 46 shehui jiaoyu (social education), 80, 81–­82, 89, 97 Shenbao (newspaper), 85 Shepherd, George W., 51, 137 Shi Zhongyi, 60–­61 Sichuan Provincial Government, 162 Smith, Arthur Henderson, 91 social context, reformers as ignoring, 98–­101 social education (shehui jiaoyu), 80, 81–­82, 89, 97 social institutions, mobilization of rural people through, 80 social laboratory, reform project as, 146 Social Problem, The (Ellwood), 58–­59 social progress, as linked with literacy, 27, 46 social reform, 58–­60 social surveys: in China, 55; in Dingfan, 156; in Dingxian, 31; social survey movement, 2 society, influence of, on mind, 86, 102 soldiers, textbook for, 41, 42 Song Meiling, 136 sources of influence for reform, 18 Soviet Union, organization of peasants in, 81 Štampar, Andrija, 203–­4n43 Staples, Amy, 168 state, relationship of citizen to, 116–­17 sui, vii Suiyuan, rural reconstruction project in, 12, 82, 86, 88, 103–­8 Sun Fuyuan, 89 Sun Yat-­sen: on national reconstruction, 8; people’s livelihood and, 167; political tutelage of people and, 10–­11, 108, 112, 114; psychological reconstruction and, 2, 59; rail lines and, 1; reconstruction and, 10; self-­governance and, 114, 116; Three Principles of the People, 116–­17, 118, 120, 121; Wang Yangming and, 62 Tagore, Rabindranath, 16–­17, 65, 81, 168 Taiping Rebellion, 123 Tao Xingzhi: after end of movement, 163; on bandits, 123; belief in self-­transformation of, 78; on “commonerization,” 64–­65; education reform and, 63; Liang Shuming and, 65; life and education of, 34, 62; peasants and, 64; plans for self-­improvement of, 69; reform project of, 60; rural tutors and, 12, 49–­50; schools and, 126, 135, 160; on self-­governance, 70–­7 1; textbooks and, 36, 42; on theater, 94–­95. See also Xiaozhuang School

index Tao Yuanming, 113 Tawney, R. H., 147 Taylor, George E., 7, 152–­53 teahouses, 60, 66, 89 textbooks: citizenship and, 39; content of, 37–­39, 41; The Farmer’s Book, 102–­3, 127; The Farmer’s Thousand Character Reader, 23, 24, 25, 26, 36, 38, 41; nationalism and, 36; for rural people, 37; thousand-­character readers, 36–­37, 42; uses of, 41 theater: in Dingxian, 91–­93; MEM and, 92, 93–­94, 96; Pan and, 94–­95; reform and, 80, 89, 90–­91, 95–­96 Thousand-­Character Reader, 35–­36 Three Principles of the People (Sun), 116–­17, 118, 120, 121 top-­down approach: to cooperatives, 103; in Jiangning, 96; to mobilization of countryside, 13; to model villages, 103–­4, 107; to national development, 167–­68; organizational charts and, 86, 87, 88; to rural reconstruction, 110–­12, 138, 141–­42; to village self-­defense, 124. See also authoritarianism of reformers “To the Countryside” (play), 95 Townspeople’s Thousand-­Character Reader, 38–­39, 40, 41 training: for citizenship, 108, 114, 134; for leaders, 141–­42, 152, 153, 160–­62, 163, 167; for self-­ defense, 105 United China Relief, 162 urban modernization, focus on, 5 Village Governance ( journal), 113, 125, 142 Village Governance Faction, 115–­16, 125 villages: Asiatic/Asian, 14, 146, 168; government of, 133; housewife clubs in, 48; Liang on reconstruction of, 142; model village, 23, 24, 25; power structures of, and literacy education, 28–­29; reconstitution of, 16–­17; schools as synonymous with, 127; self-­defense in, 123–­30; self-­governance and, 17–­18, 113–­17; self-­ transformative ethic and, 135; as settings for rural education, 64; as social laboratories, 146; views of, 168. See also countryside; organization of villages; rural people vocabulary of reform, 19 vocational education, 73–­77 Wang Hongyi, 63–­64, 113–­14, 115, 125 Wang Hui, 78 Wang Yangming, 62 warlords, 115, 123, 159 War of Resistance against Japan, 154–­55 Weitingshan, reform project in, 60–­61, 86, 87 Wen Tiejun, 170–­7 1

index Western view of “Asiatic village,” 14, 146 “whole society” reforms, 6 women: enrollment in NCRR, 161; in rural modern, 46–­50; on stage, responses to, 98–­99 Xiaozhuang School: activities and outreach of, 66–­68; closing of, 72; curriculum of, 12, 65–­66, 67, 94–­95; CVES and, 73; founding of, 8, 66; history of, 62; journaling and, 68–­69; Liang Shuming visit to, 65, 67; One Year’s Plan for Xiaozhuang, 69–­70; schedule of, 68, 70; self-­ transformation and, 56, 57, 72–­73; students of, 61; textbooks for, 42 Xie Guanyi, 157 Xiemachang, 159–­60 Xindu County, experimental program in, 144, 159 Xiong Foxi, 93, 97 Xugongqiao project for vocational education, 56–­57, 73–­77 Xu Shilian, 15 Yang, Marion, 47 yangge opera form, 91, 92–­93, 95–­96, 98 Yang Xiaochun, 66, 71, 102, 127 Yan Xishan, 73, 90, 103, 105, 124, 125, 165 Yan Yangchu (James Yen), 32, 50; on adult education, 147; after end of movement, 164; on concepts of time, 70; Cuba visit by, 146; on Dingxian research institute, 133; on The Farmer, 43; Ford and, 50–­51; in France, 33–­34; on goal of reconstruction, 166; on “housewife clubs,” 48; Liang Shuming and, 163; life and education of,

241 33, 34, 59, 157; literacy education and, 12, 26, 28, 31, 33, 59; mobilization of rural people and, 132–­ 33; on nation, 125; National Economic Council and, 145; NCC and, 157–­58; NCRR and, 160–­62; organizations founded by, 169–­70; on relocation to Dingxian, 27; Rockefeller and, 150; Rockefeller Foundation and, 158, 162; on rural model, 51; soldiers’ textbook and, 41; on village republic, 82; on War of Resistance, 154–­55; wife of, 47, 49; on youth and reform agenda, 134. See also Mass Education Movement Yan Yangchu Rural Reconstruction Institute, 176n18 Yu Bida, 58 Zanasi, Margherita, 140–­41 Zhang Jian, 179n2 Zhang Shiwen, 92–­93, 95–­96, 99 Zhang Taiyan, 78 Zhang Xueliang, 41, 160 Zhang Zuolin, 41 Zhao Shuideng, 49 Zhao Shuyu, 66 Zhou Meiyu, 47 zhuang, 107 Zhu Zhihui, 47 Zouping: cooperatives in, 102; county reform in, 132, 134–­35; self-­governance, education, and village self-­defense in, 123–­30. See also Shandong Rural Reconstruction Institute zuzhi (organization): in New Rural Reconstruction Movement, 171; of village and rural people, 21, 80–­81