Calamity and Reform in China: State, Rural Society, and Institutional Change since the Great Leap Famine (review)

592 China Review International: Vol. 5, No. 2, Fall 1998 seeking to Christianize, modernize, or Westernize China. No, Lian's "converted" missionaries were fundamentalist Christians ofstrong religious convictions. They were also Christians who were liberal and intellectually honest. More importantly, they were open and sensitive people who immersed themselves in Chinese life and drank ofits culture and ways. They respected and reciprocated with Chinese traditions, which became an integral part of themselves. In their years in China they learned and received as well as taught and gave; their horizons were infinitely broadened and their God was inclusively enlarged to embrace all peoples and all cultures. Franklin J. Woo Franklin J. Woo was the director ofthe China Program for the National Council of Churchesfrom 1976 to 1993. DaIi L. Yang. Calamity and Reform in China: State, Rural Society, and Institutional Change since the Great Leap Famine. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996. xv, 351 pp. Hardcover $49.50, isbn 0-8047-2557-8. Although China's reforms have already been intensively researched, DaIi L. Yang's study has brought new light to the origin of the institutional changes in China since 1978. Differing from the prevailing interpretation, which associates the rise of rural reform with the Cultural Revolution or with liberal leadership, Yang states that "it was the complex interactions between state and rural society in the context of the Great Leap Famine that determined die patterns of reform" (p. 9). According to Yang, the major components of rural society involve peasants and local cadres (p. 177), and he assumes diat die peasants and basic-level cadres pursue the common interests of a "corporate body." Unlike anthropologists who examine traditional rural society based on a lineage or family-centered community, Yang describes the peasant-cadre society as a society created by the communist state but which challenged the state control. The author thus provides us with a new theoretical framework for studying the mechanism of rural institutional change. y iversi y jj^ Qj1Jj165C government has never published official reports on the "Great Leap Famine," and therefore, to fill in the gaps in our knowledge or confirm the accounts ofa few witnesses, Yang has pulled together different sources. Since some primary materials are still not available, our work of synthesis on this hisofHawai 'i Press Reviews 593 tory cannot be definitive. But Yang's description ofthe calamity and his analysis ofpatterns offamine severity are most valuable. The strongest part ofYang's book is where he writes on the legacies ofthe Great Leap Famine: (1) The Great Leap Famine caused die state to retreat from the extraction ofagricultural products. Here Yang points out that "the major strands ofrural policy during die Cultural Revolution were the legacy ofthe Great Leap Famine rather then the outcome of agrarian radicalism" (p. 119). This pardy explains why the Cultural Revolution had less of an effect on agricultural production in China. (2) The Great Leap Famine furnished the structural incentives for political innovation or reform. After the Famine, peasants practiced different forms ofproduction, and one ofthese, "the household responsibility system, constituted a major component ofthe rural reforms" (p. 97). (3) To promote China's "open door policy" and his economic reforms, Deng Xiaoping insisted diat people should "seek truth from facts." This approach originated with his slogan ofdie 1960s diat "the color of the cat made no difference as long as it catches mice" (p. 89). Yang asserts that the rational-choice method is die best tool that the social sciences have acquired, and he uses it to seek die cause of rural reform in the beliefs and cognitive biases ofleaders and peasants in that period. He offers a powerful argument that "in precipitating the reform, the Great Leap Famine thus served a role for China that is similar to Japan and Germany's defeat in war" (p. 240). Consequently, it could be said that a reform is the reconstruction of rural society after the devastation of "war." The author points out that movements from cognitive change to institutional change, as in the transition from collective agriculture to household farming, "frequentiy involve political struggles, sometimes of a life-and-deadi nature" (pp. 243-244). On the one hand, as...