The Rural Modern: Reconstructing the Self and State in Republican China by Kate Merkel-Hess (review)

The cover of this book captures the vision and disrupting narrative of this fine new study of intellectuals’ efforts to imagine and put into practice “an alternative, rural vision of Chinese modernity” (p. 14) in the 1920s and 1930s. A black-and-white drawing shows an aerial view of a village with characteristic sweeping roofs, trees, and a couple in traditional garb strolling past a gonggong yiyuan 公共醫院 (public clinic) toward a village square with a tall, modern clock tower.¹ Kate Merkel-Hess has provided a richly detailed and smoothly written account of the writings, textbooks, magazines, schools, experimental villages and counties, and fraught collaborations with the Nationalist government that rural reformers dreamed up and tried out in the global moment of rural modernization that gripped not only Europe but also India, Japan, and China in the years between the two world wars. The result is a compelling challenge to the still-current teleology that looks at modern Chinese history in terms of explaining the rise, dominance, and endurance of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). Instead, Merkel-Hess offers an alternative narrative that not only returns to our attention a widespread, diverse, and popular set of efforts to revitalize rural China as a way to modernize the nation but also changes how we look at both the famous rural revolution of the Chinese Communists and the state-building efforts of the Nationalists under Chiang Kai-shek 蔣介石. Like the clock tower in a traditional-looking village, this new narrative disrupts the revolutionary story of communism and the account of urban modernity of the Nanjing government.

Merkel-Hess’s story revolves around the Rural Reconstruction Movement (Xiangcun jianshe yundong 鄉村建設運動) that was nationally prominent from 1933 to 1937. She follows in particular the work of James Yen (Yan Yangchu 晏陽初) in his Chinese Mass Education Movement (MEM, Zhonghua pingmin jiaoyu cujinhui 中華平民教育促進會) in Dingxian 定縣, Hebei Province, and the experimental county of Jiangning 江寧 run by the Nationalist government outside Nanjing. She also focuses on Liang Shuming’s 梁漱溟 Shandong Rural Reconstruction Institute (Shandong xiangcun jianshe yanjiuyuan 山東鄉村建設研究院) in Zouping 鄒平, as well as several other local efforts, including the Xiaozhuang School (Xiaozhuang shifan 曉莊師範) outside Nanjing, run by the prominent reform educator Tao Xingzhi 陶行知 from 1927 until the government closed it (for fear of harboring leftists) in 1930. Merkel-Hess also looks at the self-government efforts of Yan Xishan 閻錫山 and Fu Zuoyi 傅作義 in several counties southwest of Hohhot in Suiyuan Province, which began as the Suiyuan New Agricultural Experiment (Suiyuan xin nong shiyanchang 綏遠新農試驗場) in 1929. This wealth of detail is organized around the broad trajectory of reformers’ efforts over a decade that moved from education and individual transformation to organizational issues and local self-governance relying on “expert” management.

After nicely situating this story in the context of China’s search for wealth and power in the twentieth century—the reformers answered Liang Qichao’s 梁啟超 call for “renovation of the people” (xinmin 新民) and explicitly cited Sun Yat-sen’s 孫中山 Three Principles of the People (Sanmin zhuyi 三民主義)—and in the global moment of the interwar period when the search for a rural modern extended from Ireland to the “Asian village” of Indian and Japanese efforts, the core chapters of the book are organized around three themes shared by all rural reformers: “their use of education to reshape rural selves, social structures, and local government” (p. 20). Throughout the book, Merkel-Hess builds graciously and substantively upon earlier works, such as Guy Alitto’s book on Liang Shuming and Charles Hayford’s on James Yen.² In each chapter, she indirectly engages the major literature from Chinese historical studies to theoretical models in suitably placed discursive footnotes.

Chapters 1 and 2 cover the first theme: the ideas and efforts to reform rural selves, one new reader at a time. Chapter 1 draws heavily from The Farmer’s Thousand-Character Reader, which MEM started publishing in 1927 to detail...