Chinese Modernity and the Peasant Path: Semicolonialism in the Northern Yangzi Delta (review)

Chinese Modernity and the Peasant Path: Semicolonialism in the Northern Yangzi Delta. By Kathy Le Mons Walker (Stanford, Stanford University Press, 1999) 330 pp. $55.00

Chinese Modernity and the Peasant Path is an ambitious work. It provides not only a specific history of being and becoming in the Northern Yangzi Delta, the Nantong area, China, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, but it also casts doubts on how such histories could or should be written, challenging the conventional categories and assumptions. A major theoretical stance of the book is that the history of modernity is both historically specific and specifically historical. It is in this specifically historical formation that semicolonialism as a form of life was constituted by a unique combination of social and political forces--at once national and transnational, at once regional and colonial, and at once local and global.

The first part of the book provides a historical background, that is, an account of the agrarian class relations and peasant history during the Ming period, a description of the Northern Yangzi Delta in the larger context of Chinese society as a whole, and an introduction to the historical transformation of the region in the Qing period. The second part focuses on the emergence of semicolonialism as a set of localizing strategies that responded to the forces of capitalism in the political context of European colonial expansion. The author describes a local effort to produce a nationalist alternative to the colonial-capitalist development spreading out from Shanghai as a center of modern (Western) influence. This effort, which meant to establish advanced spinning mills in the greater Nantong area and monopolistically interlock them with peasant farming and textile production as a model of "self-reliance" signifying nationalism, failed to incorporate the interests of a newly emerged merchant class constituted by the larger forces of transnational capital.

This story reveals "a history of conjuncture"--to borrow a term from Braudel--that gave birth to the emergence of "modern landlordism" and the "subproletarianization" of peasants in this region. ¹ The modernizing process ended in what the author calls "repeasantization," in which the peasants "more fully than in the past functioned as poor, petty commodity producers on their own farms and as a disadvantaged wage labor force" (22). The category of class, as well as its associated notions of domination and exploitation, is central to the analysis, though the content of such a category, as the author rightly insists, must be enriched and reconsidered in the first place.

In short, this is a lucid, suggestive account of becoming modern in the Northern Yangzi Delta and a splendid attempt to show the plural effects generated by the capitalist penetration of Chinese local economy in Nantong. It is an important work that, informed by the intellectual questions of our time, has challenged our conventional understanding of the nature of modernity in China.

Xin Liu
University of California, Berkeley

Note

1. Fernand Braudel (trans. Siân Reynolds), The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II (London, 1972-1973; orig. pub. Paris, 1949), 892-900.

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