The Unknown Cultural Revolution: Educational Reforms and Their Impact on China's Rural Development (review)

Dongping Han believes that the Cultural Revolution, at least as it unfolded in many parts of the Chinese countryside, has gotten a bad rap. He takes the Deng Xiaoping regime and its successors to task for characterizing the Cultural Revolution (hereafter, CR) as a complete, unmitigated disaster for all of China. Quite to the contrary, Han argues, CR policies had very positive effects in Jimo, the rural Shandong county where he himself grew up and later conducted the dissertation research on which this volume is based.

Han notes that pre-CR education policies had the effect of siphoning talent away from the countryside, thereby weakening efforts at rural economic development. The great majority of rural children at best received only a few years of schooling while a select few were able to move up the educational ladder, eventually gaining access to universities and urban state-sector job assignments. The educational reforms of the CR broke this cycle. The decade witnessed a massive expansion of rural schooling at the primary and secondary levels as well as some reorientation of the curriculum toward practical applicability of knowledge in the rural setting. Policies requiring high school and college graduates to return to the commune or factory from which they were recruited and the transfer of educated urban youth to the countryside also increased the supply of better-educated people in rural China. Thus, one of the conditions necessary for sustained rural development was significantly strengthened.

A second strand of Han's analysis involves fundamental changes in village political culture and the consolidation of collective organization. He argues that villagers' habits of submissiveness, cultivated over millennia in traditional China's "officialdom culture," had persisted after the establishment of the PRC. Only during the CR were villagers empowered to challenge local officials and hold them accountable for their behavior. Longtime power holders were deposed—but only temporarily, as it turned out—and new village leadership groups were installed through the mechanism of Revolutionary Committees. Consolidation of the collective economy and political empowerment of ordinary villagers made it possible to undertake large-scale infrastructure projects, promote mechanization and scientific experimentation in agriculture, and launch many rural industrialization projects. These efforts resulted in a doubling of agricultural production during the CR decade. Rural industrial output rose from almost nothing at the start of the CR to constitute about a third of Jimo County's economy by 1976. Therefore, Han argues, the real origins of Chinese rural development lie not in Deng Xiao-ping's reforms of the late 1970s and 1980s, but rather in Mao's CR policies to expand and reorient rural education, to empower ordinary villagers, to consolidate the collectives, and to promote rural industrialization.

This volume is a useful corrective to the tendency to view the Cultural Revolution solely from the perspective of the well-educated urbanites whose harrowing stories are widely known in the West. The CR, of course, unfolded differently in different places and was experienced quite differently depending on people's social and political status and the interpersonal dynamics of particular settings. It is widely acknowledged that the CR had a profound (and, many would argue, mostly negative) impact on China's urban education system. Nevertheless, few readers will quarrel with Han's conclusions that CR policies greatly expanded educational opportunities for rural children and that reform-era policies have significantly eroded those gains.

Han's larger argument linking the expansion of education, the transformation of village political culture, and rural economic development, however, seems unlikely to persuade anyone who is not already fundamentally sympathetic to his position. Some skepticism is warranted, for example, about the depth and the long-term persistence of changes in village political culture. While most of Jimo's long-serving village cadres were deposed in the early stages of the CR, every one of them was eventually "rehabilitated...