Drawing on the original documents from local agricultural collectives, newly accessible government archives, and the author's fieldwork in Qin village of the Jiangsu province, this book examines the experiences of Chinese villagers during the collective and reform periods.
For seven years in the 1970s, the author lived in a village in northeast China as an ordinary farmer. In 1989, he returned to the village as an anthropologist to begin the unparalleled span of eleven years’ fieldwork that has resulted in this book—a comprehensive, vivid, and nuanced account of family change and the transformation of private life in rural China from 1949 to 1999. The author’s focus on the personal and the emotional sets this book apart from most studies of the Chinese family. Yan explores private lives to examine areas of family life that have been largely overlooked, such as emotion, desire, intimacy, privacy, conjugality, and individuality. He concludes that the past five decades have witnessed a dual transformation of private life: the rise of the private family, within which the private lives of individual women and men are thriving.
Village China Under Socialism and Reform offers a comprehensive account of rural life after the communist revolution, detailing villager involvement in political campaigns since the 1950s, agricultural production under the collective system, family farming and non-agricultural economy in the reform, and everyday life in the family and community. Li's rich examination draws on original documents from local agricultural collectives, newly accessible government archives, and his own fieldwork in Qin village of Jiangsu province to highlight the continuities in rural transformation. Firmly disagreeing with those who claim that recent developments in rural China represent a radical break with pre-reform sociopolitical practices and patterns of production, Li instead draws a clear history connecting the current situation to ecological, social, and institutional changes that have persisted from the collective era.
This portrait of social change in the North China plain depicts how the world of the Chinese peasant evolved during an era of war and how it in turn shaped the revolutionary process. The book is based on evidence gathered from archives and interviews with villagers and rural officials.
Originally published in the early 1970s, The Yenan Way in Revolutionary China has proved to be one of the most significant and enduring books published in the field. In this new critical edition of that seminal work, Mark Selden revisits the central themes therein and reconsiders them in light of major new theoretical and documentary understandings of the Chinese communist revolution.
First published in 1988, this book explores the socio-economic and political impacts of Chinese socialist movements, peasant initiatives, rural industrialization and economic reforms in China in the mid-twentieth century.
The rapid marketization of rural labor, agricultural products, and land has dramatically reshaped village life and its structures of governance. This volume, edited by Alexander F. Day, collects twelve key essays translated from Chinese on this transformation of rural society and governance over the past 20 years. These essays, originally published in the leading Chinese-language journal Open Times (开放时代), cover class differentiation, the atomization of rural society, the hollowing out of rural governance, land transfer, rural activism against marketization, lineage politics, the role of agricultural cooperatives, the transformation of small peasant farmers into wage labor, and the disintegration and expansion of peasant petitioning, all exploring the transformation in rural China during the post-socialist era.
As China's reforms take root, citizens are allowed, even encouraged, to be socialist and profit-driven at the same time. This book examines this precarious dyad, demonstrating what reform has done to China's political and economic mechanisms and how this dyad dominates the thinking of reformers.
Between 1979 and 1989, rural life in China was transformed: the communes were dismantled, tiny family farms were created, government domination of commerce and enterprise was eased, and many entrepreneurial ventures were brought to life. China's rural reform was arguably the most massive single act of privatization in history. Although Deng Xiaoping's government claimed credit for the dramatic innovations, Daniel Kelliher shows that it was the peasants themselves--with no organization or legal political voice of their own--who instigated the most radical changes of the reform era. Drawing on his fieldwork in Hubei Province and neighboring provinces in south-central China, Kelliher traces the origins of reform in three areas--family farming, marketing, and private entrepreneurship--and details the local conspiracies, deceptions, and illegal experiments that peasants used to push state policy in new directions. He also addresses the larger issue of how disenfranchised peasants could affect politics at all under a strong state like that of China. Analyzing the evolution of state socialism in China, Kelliher explains how state ambitions for modernization in the post-Mao era made the state-socialist system vulnerable to rising peasant power. He also shows why the state seized upon economic privatization as a way of securing its political base among the peasantry. The book not only offers a wide-ranging portrait of rural politics in contemporary China but also uses the Chinese case to illuminate state-peasant relations, reform in state socialism, and privatization in other third world nations.
How China Became Capitalist details the extraordinary, and often unanticipated, journey that China has taken over the past thirty five years in transforming itself from a closed agrarian socialist economy to an indomitable economic force in the international arena. The authors revitalise the debate around the rise of the Chinese economy through the use of primary sources, persuasively arguing that the reforms implemented by the Chinese leaders did not represent a concerted attempt to create a capitalist economy, and that it was 'marginal revolutions' that introduced the market and entrepreneurship back to China. Lessons from the West were guided by the traditional Chinese principle of 'seeking truth from facts'. By turning to capitalism, China re-embraced her own cultural roots. How China Became Capitalist challenges received wisdom about the future of the Chinese economy, warning that while China has enormous potential for further growth, the future is clouded by the government's monopoly of ideas and power. Coase and Wang argue that the development of a market for ideas which has a long and revered tradition in China would be integral in bringing about the Chinese dream of social harmony.