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THE TRANSFORMATION OF RURAL CHINA

Asia and the Pacific

Series Editor: Mark Selden, Binghamton University

Exploring one of the most dynamic and contested regions of the world, this series includes contributions on political, economic, cultural, and social changes in modern and contemporary Asia and the Pacific.

ASIA'S ENVIRONMENTAL MOVEMENTS
Comparative Perspectives
Yok-shiu F. Lee and Alviti Y. So, editors

CENSORING HISTORY
Citizenship and Memory in Japan, Germany, and the United States
Laura Hein and Mark Selden, editors

CHINA'S RETREAT FROM EQUALITY
Income Distribution and Economic Transition
Carl Riskin, Zhao Renwei, and Li Shi, editors

CHINA'S WORKERS UNDER ASSAULT
The Exploitation of Labor in a Globalizing Economy
Anita Chan

CHALLENGING THE MANDATE OF HEAVEN
Social Protest and State Power in China
Elizabeth J. Perry

PEASANTS WITHOUT THE PARTY
Grass-roots Movements in Twentieth-Century China
Lucien Bianco

THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF UNEVEN DEVELOPMENT
The Case of China
Shaoguang Wang and Angang Hu

THEATER AND SOCIETY
An Anthology of Contemporary Chinese Drama
Haiping Yan, editor

THE TRANSFORMATION OF RURAL CHINA
Jonathan Unger

WHAT IF CHINA DOESN'T DEMOCRATIZE?
Implications for War and Peace
Edward Friedman and Barrett L. McCormick, editors

WOMEN IN REPUBLICAN CHINA
A Sourcebook
Hua R. Lan and Vanessa L. Fong, editors

The Transformation of Rural China

Jonathan Unger

An East Gate Book

First published 2002

by M.E. Sharpe

Published 2015

by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017, USA

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business

Copyright 2002 Taylor & Francis. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.

Notices
No responsibility is assumed by the publisher for any injury and/or damage to persons or property as a matter of products liability, negligence or otherwise, or from any use of operation of any methods, products, instructions or ideas contained in the material herein.

Practitioners and researchers must always rely on their own experience and knowledge in evaluating and using any information, methods, compounds, or experiments described herein. In using such information or methods they should be mindful of their own safety and the safety of others, including parties for whom they have a professional responsibility.

Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Unger, Jonathan.
The transformation of rural China / by Jonathan Unger.
p. cm.(Asia and the Pacific)
"East gate book."
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-7656-0551-1 (alk. paper); ISBN 0-7656-0552-X (pbk.: alk. paper)
1. ChinaRural conditions. 2. ChinaHistory1949- 3. VillagesChina. 4.
Communism and argicultureChina. I. title. II. Asia and the Pacific (Armonk, N.Y.)
HN733.5.U54 2002
307.72'0951dc21
2002017527

ISBN 13: 9780765605528 (pbk)
ISBN 13: 9780765605511 (hbk)

For my wife and best colleague,
Anita Chan,
and for our daughter Carla

Contents

A debt of gratitude is owed to Mark Selden and Anita Chan for reading and critiquing all of the manuscript. The book has gained very considerably from their insightful comments and suggestions. A debt is owed, too, to Bennis Wai Yip So, who provided comments on .

A number of scholars have conducted research with me in the Chinese countryside, and they contributed to my knowledge of the sites we examined together. In particular, Jean Hung has collaborated with me in conducting interviews in a wide range of villages in Yunnan Province in 1988; Eva Hung, Lam Tao-Chiu and Anita Chan worked together with me in Xiqiao Township in Guangdong during 1997; and Zhu Xiaoyang and I conducted interviewing together in the countryside of Qinghai Province in 2000. Richard Madsen and Anita Chan have graciously provided their interview transcripts concerning Chen Village, a community about which we earlier co-authored a book.

Several scholars have also kindly shared their research findings with me. Gong Xiaoxia provided extensive notes on documentation regarding the Cultural Revolution in the countryside. Dai Jianzhong, X.L. Ding, Gao Mobo, Hua Linshan, Isabelle Thireau, Andrew Walder, Yan Yunxiang and Zhu Xiaoyang provided helpful information about the Cultural Revolution from their personal stores of knowledge. And Chris Buckley, Janek Rowinski and X.L. Ding provided valuable pointers to, or copies of, recent Chinese-language newspaper and magazine reports on rural China.

Portions of some of the chapters have appeared, in earlier versions, in articles that I have published, and I am grateful to several publishers for permission to make use of this material. For this, credit is due to The Journal of Peasant Studies (for some of the material that appears in ).

Susanna Sharpe copy-edited the chapters, Angela Grant prepared the book's Index and Heli Brecht almost single-handedly took charge of the book's production. Their contributions are gratefully acknowledged.

THE TRANSFORMATION OF RURAL CHINA

The Chinese countryside has experienced not one but two extraordinary transformations. In the 1950s it was plunged into revolutionary change, in which all of the former political institutions were overturned and the land tenure system was destroyed and replaced by collectives. Every village in China was dramatically affected by the two decades of at times radical Party programs that lasted until after Mao's death in 1976. As is well known, in an extraordinary turnabout a second transformation ensued under Deng, in which most of the programs of the Maoist period were reversed and villagers returned to family farming.

This book focuses on the most salient features and themes of each period, for it will be seen that the latter period grew out of the first in many important ways. To understand what is transpiring in China today, one must understand the shape of that previous period. In fact, as the final chapters of this book will show, the contours of the rural political system changed less in the post-Mao era than many observers have supposed.

The first four chapters probe the earlier period of collective agriculturehighlighting the institutions through which the Party dominated the countryside, the mind-set of the peasantry during the heyday of Maoism, and the tensions that developed over the years as a consequence of radical Maoist policies. The opening chapter explores the complex interactions between the Party-state's political machinery and China's fanners, while two of the following chapters ( focuses on the Cultural Revolution upheavals of 1966-68, when a wide variety of group antagonisms and conflicts were laid bare across rural China.

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