Marketing and Modernization in Republican China’s Countryside: The Puzzling Case of Western Jiangsu

MARKETING AND MODERNIZATION IN REPUBLICAN CHINA'S COUNTRYSIDE: THE PUZZLING CASE OF WESTERN JIANGSU by Randy Stross Twenty years ago the Journal of Asian Studies published a three-part article by G. William Skinner, •Marketing and Social Structure in Rural China• (Skinner, 1964). Few works, either before or after, have exerted such a profound influence on modern China studies in this country. Using central place theory, Skinner created a breathtakingly comprehensive social geography of China where none had existed before. The article's wide-ranging scope and provocative contentions about historical developments from the Southern Song to the present draw the attention, of course, of historians. In fact, one can periodize our historiography into •pre-Skinner• and •postSkinner • eras by noting the frequent citations of the •Marketing• article in the work of historians since it first appeared. Skinner's typology of central places and their distribution has perhaps drawn the most attention, but •Marketing• also contains a section that discusses modernization in Republican China. I want to turn again to that section and show how my research indicates that the area around Nanjing does not fit the theory. A single test such as this is hardly significant, but I hope the case of Nanjing can be joined by the findings of research in other parts of China to help redefine the original theory, if that is needed, as our collective understanding of rural China advances. Among many topics, •Marketing• focuses on the transition from •a traditional agrarian society into a modern industrial society• and argues that basic alterations in the distribution of markets and the patterning of marketing behavior provide a sensitive index of progress in modernization (Skinner, 1964: 3). •Modernization• presents a problem of definition to which I shall return below, but the fundamental assumption here, that market patterns can serve as an index of social and economic change,inspired me to collect all the information about marketing I could while I investigated rural change during the Republican period in the counties of western Jiangsu province. I assumed, like Skinner and most economic historians, that the transformation of subsistence agriculture into commercialized agriculture is the single most portentous change in the countryside, for it supposedly spawns more changes that continually remake agricultural technique and the sociology of rural life. Thomas A. Smith's classic work on Japanese agriculture is typical of the economic history literature as a whole in attributing to commercialization momentous changes in the countryside: The more a peasant family bought and sold, the larger the area of its ecnomic life that was lifted out of the context of custom-bound social groups and subjected to the impersonal decrees of the market •••• This brief history ••• illustrates how pervasive change was, once started. It started but never ended with closer relations to the market, for buying and selling were merely surface indications of changes that went to the very heart of peasant life. Crops, labor organization, farming techniques, even the the view men took of such things as wealth, work, and neighbors changed with the altered relation to the market (Smith, 1959: 80, 86). I expected to- find commercialization setting into motion a similar chain of changes in western Jiangsu~ but as my investigation of the Republican period proceeded, I found that the commercialization of agriculture did not seem to have changed rural life in the manner predicted by theory. This was particularly surprising, for western Jiangsu seemed to be a propitious place to find such dramatic change: it included the rural town of Yaohuamen, near Nanjing, which Skinner used in •Marketing• as the only example of a rural place that underwent •true modernization.• Modernization Skinner's theory does not, however, provide a satisfactory definition of •modernization.• The explanation of Yaohuamen's modernity is based on two criteria: marketing and transport. First, the town was modern, Skinner says, because marketing was conducted on a daily basis and in permanent shops, not periodic markets. Moreover, the population of the town's trading area was more than twice the average for towns of similar size (Skinner, 1964: 221). But these observations hardly serve as evidence of •modernization,• for the argument would become tautological: market changes measure modernization, which, in turn...