Village China Under Socialism and Reform, A Micro History, 1948-2008 (review)

Conventionally, most scholars of contemporary rural China have paid scant attention to the question of the ways in which the economic, political, and social legacies of the Chinese communist collective era continue to influence and shape the present. In this impressive four-part study, Li challenges such interpretations and documents with exceptional thoroughness the sixty-plus years of transformation of a rural district and Qin village located in the Yangzi Delta hinterland north of Shanghai. Li suggests that the two eras of post-Revolution and postmarket transformation China are connected in myriad ways. He focuses closely on local developments and the lives of villagers from the moment of the Communist Revolution and the collective era (1950-1978), tracking them through such epochal transitions such as Land Reform, the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution, and on to the era that saw the end of collectivization, including the 1990s market reforms and developments that continue to make China one of the most dynamic markets in the world. Li details the important role that the central government continues to play in rural China through regulation, subsidization, and planning throughout this history.

The data collected by Li sometimes explore and shed light on the unexpected. For example, as the extreme phase of the Maoist era Cultural Revolution died down in the early 1970s, and team members lost interest in political study, highly popular "political night schools" were instituted. In addition to teaching the prerequisite songs and popular slogans, these classes taught cultivation techniques for new varieties of crops, pesticide use, general literacy, and arithmetic. This literacy program aided many villagers decades later when the economic changes of the 1990s came to the village and enabled the now-literate villagers to handle their own book keeping in the small businesses that developed in the post-1992 market reform era. In systematically documenting of these multifaceted aspects of daily life at the village level, and retrieving remaining records, Li contributes to the larger field of rural studies that argues for the urgent preservation of rural documents. This is a crucial effort for village level materials are rapidly disappearing in China, where as the memory of the collective era fades, once important documents are deemed useless and are being burned as firewood.

A primary theme linking the four parts of Li's study deals with village-cadre relations and the personnel used for state penetration of all institutions of rural China. While programs to facilitate state control of rural society via state representatives sent into the villages go back to policies initiated in late imperial China and the Nationalist period (1911-1949), the Communist collectivization era allowed the state to extend its reach down to the level of the each household and indeed its individual members through the deployment of millions of grassroots cadres. But, as Li illustrates, the state was also unable to discipline these millions of cadres and their potential abuse of power and venal tendencies. The state came to depend on the villagers writing "people's letters" to the higher authorities keep the cadres in check. The shifts and maneuvers between deference and defiance of the villagers facing cadres from "outside," and their collective strategies for protest in the 1950s and 1960s provide important insights into the feisty spirit of villagers. The tensions between villagers and cadres based on mutual surveillance were, nonetheless, just as often offset by their shared economic interests and local social ties of cadres looking the other way when individual household plots were larger than decreed by the government, or grain output was underreported to reduce procurement burdens. Li suggests that these personal ties of grassroots cadres within the social web of local society enabled the survival of local descent (lineage) groups and their power relations that date back to the imperial era and that the Communist state was unable to eliminate them even during the Cultural...