Zhongguo nongmin fanxingwei yanjiu (1950–1980) (Counteractions of Chinese Peasants, 1950–1980) by Gao Wangling (review)

The central topic of this book is of major importance. Gao Wangling, a historian and professor at the People’s University, develops in this study a systematic reassessment of Chinese villagers’ reaction and response to the various transformations that occurred in the Chinese countryside from land reform to the beginning of the 1980s. Land reform, the creation of mutual-aid teams, the constitution of a state monopoly on agricultural production, the formation of semisocialist and then socialist cooperatives, and, finally, the creation of people’s communes, are here described and analyzed not as a process hastened by villagers’ enthusiastic support and eagerness to move even more quickly forward, but as policies carried out by national leaders in order to fight against the unanticipated resistance faced by each precedent move.

If various scholars have pointed out the unintended consequences of given official rural policies, if some have questioned the reliability of the figures put forward (concerning for instance productivity issues), Gao Wangling’s analysis is impressive in the chronological scope of the events embraced as well as in the variety of sources mobilized to ground the key perspective and conclusion of the author: the negative trends witnessed in agriculture were actually the outcome of a series of actions and behavior devised by villagers throughout China. They are labeled by Gao Wangling as fanxingwei 反行為 or counteractions.

In other words, far from depicting Chinese farmers as completely powerless to react to the changes imposed upon them, the author shows that they took a range of actions. These actions, largely invisible to outsiders to their own family or locality although widely shared from one locality to the other, were nonetheless effective in establishing a social reality that was not consistent with official expectations. As such, they induced in return a new reaction from above (that appeared sometimes as a desperate effort to limit peasants’ unapproved behavior), ending finally with the establishment of the production responsibility system at the beginning of the 1980s. In other words, Chinese peasants were actors of the social and economic transformations observed in the countryside, but not the actors officially depicted, that is individuals supporting the ongoing changes with an even greater enthusiasm than the cadres, but actors capable, despite the constraints faced, to reshape their environment and act upon the other party, the de facto partial decollectivization process that occurred at the beginning of the 1980s expressing the success of their fragmented and apparently insignificant efforts.

The author has obviously read the existing Chinese publications on the various topics and times analyzed in the book, but he does not discuss point to point with their authors. He rather tries to encompass the description of the various steps of collectivization and their consequences in a strong and powerful argument using a diversity of sources: official documents, whether public or confidential; local archives; oral history material. One of the very interesting qualities of this book is precisely the way these sources are confronted and combined to shed a new light on a situation that we thought rather well known and familiar. If the study is written in a clear academic style, it is not always conventional in its format: the author often dialogues with potential readers or scholars, anticipating the questions or objections they could raise, and developing adequate answers.

This book is divided into three parts: the first three chapters are a reappraisal of the consequences of each of the important steps that led to collectivization and to the creation of the people’s communes (with Chapter 1 dealing with land reform, Chapter 2 with mutual-aid teams and the first cooperatives, and Chapter 3 discussing the decline of production that then occurred). A second part, composed of a single chapter, focuses on the creation of people’s communes and the Great Famine. These first four chapters are very factual and confront a variety of data. Some of these data...