City versus Countryside in Mao’s China: Negotiating the Divide by Jeremy Brown (review)

City versus Countryside in Mao’s China: Negotiating the Divide addresses the important question of how China’s Communist revolution produced systematic anti-rural discrimination, despite its professed commitment to balanced development. While many other scholars have examined the origins of rural–urban inequality, what sets this study apart is its focus on how people at the grassroots experienced, contested, and negotiated the boundaries between city and countryside. In constructing a historical narrative of Tianjin in the Mao era, Jeremy Brown relies on a diverse set of sources, including unpublished documents, personal diaries, and personnel records obtained from local archives and secondhand markets. Tianjin’s particular history and geographic location make it a unique case in many ways—for example, its proximity to Beijing meant that central leaders sometimes played a significant role in local politics—but the process of rural–urban alienation that Brown describes is certainly generalizable to other parts of China.

A major contention of the book is that the ideological and institutional foundations of anti-rural discrimination emerged at the very beginning of the Maoist period and became stronger over time, such that by the 1960s “revolution meant purifying urban spaces and dumping on rural ones” (p. 8). To illustrate this theme of villages as dumping grounds, Brown details several instances of state-sponsored migration: the return-to-village movements of the 1950s, the urban downsizing movement of the early 1960s, the Four Cleanups campaign of 1963–1966, and the deportation of political outcasts during the first three years of the Cultural Revolution, 1966–1968.

The book’s opening chapters are concerned with the Communists’ initial takeover of Tianjin and the institutional origins of the rural–urban divide. Brown shows that a directional push in favor of the city occurred almost immediately after the army took control of Tianjin. The city’s leaders criticized the Party’s rural attributes and privileged urban officials over those with rural backgrounds. They viewed urban officials as more technically adept, and they considered urban work to be different than rural work, that is, more centralized and rule-based. At the same time, the Party regarded the city as a corrupting environment, as illustrated by the execution of two high-level officials (of rural origins) whose decadent urban lifestyles became a focal point for the anticorruption campaigns of the early 1950s. This negative image of the city did not, however, detract from the idea that the city would play a leading role in the country’s modernization.

The 1950s saw increased state regulation of people’s daily lives—the subject of chapter 2—with the establishment of the hukou (household registration) and grain-rationing systems. Although it was not originally intended as a tool to control migration, the hukou system took on that function when it became clear that migration was threatening the state’s monopoly on grain. Linking household registration to rations allowed the state to partially stem the tide of migration, though never in a complete way. City officials resorted to shock mobilization tactics to deport migrants, but many people subverted the authorities, and urban-ites continued to help their rural relatives find jobs in the city. Despite the growing rural–urban divide, native place networks could not be severed, and many officials charged with returning migrants to the villages were sympathetic to family appeals.

The Great Leap Forward marks a turning point in the narrative. Tianjin, like many other cities during the Leap, experienced a population surge as factories rushed to hire migrant labor. When the famine occurred, urbanites and migrants had a much greater chance of survival because city officials rallied to protect them. They effectively ignored the plight of rural areas under Tianjin’s jurisdiction but lobbied Beijing for more grain when the city’s residents were faced with food shortages. The catastrophic failure of...