China along the Yellow River: Reflections on Rural Society (review)

This is, by any standard, an unusual book. Abridged from the 775-page Chinese original, it is the diary/fieldnotes/journal of a Shanghai-based professor of sociology, compiled over several months of fieldwork in Henan Province. It is note-worthy for the author's astute observations and frank critique of the bureaucratic structure of rural life, as well as his proposals for structural and "cooperative" reform, which he fears might be received by his readers as the "dreams of a madman" (p. 240). In some ways, it is not hard to imagine the book in its present form being rejected for publication by an academic press in the United States since it lacks organization (other than chronological) and a theoretical perspective, but its publication is nonetheless welcome as much for what it reveals about the problems of conducting research in China in general as for the results of this author's individual research.

One problem with the book, no doubt in part the product of its having been abridged, is its tendency to flit from one place to another, making the book rather disorienting to read. We're here, we're there, we're somewhere else. What was that person's name? In whose company are we now? What community is this? But, as will be discussed below, this tendency to skip from snippet to snippet is also the result of the problems Professor Cao encountered trying to carry out research in the Chinese countryside.

As regards Cao's substantive findings, his data are especially rich on the difficulties faced by xiang (township) Party secretaries. He allows several of them to speak for themselves:

We're on tenterhooks all the time, and we're terrified of losing our jobs, so we've got to do what out bosses say though we know some of their instructions are quite unrealistic. Those above us lean on us, we lean on the village cadres, each level puts pressure on the one below, and so it goes on. . . . It's really difficult to be on the lowest rung, to be a xiang official. . . . You have to meet unrealistically high targets and you're subject to repeated inspections and appraisals. The result is either complaints from local people or the production of all sorts of false statistics.

(p. 94)

Xiang government is the foundation yet we are powerless to respond to conditions in our own xiang; we're only there to carry out orders from above whether or not they are appropriate to local circumstances. And when things go wrong we get the blame both from our superiors and the peasant. It is a thankless job.

(p-191)

Cao provides several examples of how official instructions conveyed from above requiring the peasants to experiment with growing new cash crops all ended in failure. In each case, where there was initial success everybody rushed to grow more, producing a glut in the market, falling prices, and losses for all involved. Xiang cadres know what local conditions are, and whether or not such measures are likely to succeed, but when they tell as much to their superiors, they are dismissed as "conservative" (p. 224).

Cao's account of the minimum expenses required for a xiang government to function is revealing. Between cadres' salaries, teachers' salaries, office expenses, transport and communication (the smallest, poorest xiang have at least three cars), petrol, and the all-important entertainment budget, expenses add up to 1,700,000 yuan, of which 60 percent is spent on education. "The revenues of a poor xiang which relies on levies from farming is really not enough, and it's common both for cadres not to get their wages on time, and for peasants to feel the levies are excessive" (p. 206).

Cao is especially good at getting his Party School contacts to discuss the problem of corruption...