Philip C.C. Huang. The Peasant Economy and Social Change in
Huang adeptly
argues that changes in agricultural production and social stratification in
rural North China had already taken hold by the eighteenth century, well before
the arrival of Western imperialism. For
Huang, imperialism was a peripheral factor that “did not fundamentally reshape
the small-peasant economy, but only caused acceleration along the preexisting
patterns of involution and commercialization” (p. 121).
The author
combines detailed Mantetsu survery data on Hebei and Shandong villages with
Qing Board of Punishment records and his own field interview data to show that
beginning in the eighteenth century, population growth and commercialized
cash-cropping, particularly of cotton, fundamentally altered the nature of
China’s agricultural economy. Population
pressures caused agricultural involution (a decrease in the marginal output of
labor), and risky cotton farming offered financial gain for some families but
also threatened the survival of others.
Involution and commercialization resulted in the rise of managerial
farming and the “semi-proletarianization” of the peasantry. In essence, peasants who would otherwise be
idle or inefficient on their own small plots sold their labor to middle or rich
“managerial” peasants who could hire laborers in order to farm larger plots
more intensively.
With an eye toward
the comparative value of his analysis, Huang utilizes classifications such as
poor peasant, middle peasant, rich peasant, landlord, proletarianization, and
capitalist sprouts. In Chapter 10,
entitled, “The Underdevelopment of Managerial Farming,” he explores the
“failure” of managerial farmers to “make innovative investments” and asks why
the technological changes possible in the 1930s “were not made” (pp. 169,
179). The answer, Huang proposes, is
that in China, real riches and upward mobility resided not in the agricultural
sector, but in officialdom and bureaucratic positions. Once managerial farms grew to about 200 mu,
their rate of marginal return diminished.
Therefore ambitious farmers were better off using their profits to
become absentee landlords – a position that offered much more time to study for
the imperial examinations.
The value of
following Marxist logic and of asking why technological changes and capital
investments did not occur in China is undeniable: it sets up interesting
comparisons with England and broadens the potential readership and import of
the book. The potential problems of such
a framework are just as clear: why not say that China developed in its own way
instead of calling it “underdeveloped?”
And how useful is the term “semi-proletarianization” when there is
little evidence to suggest the genesis of a strong class mentality in rural
China? To be fair, attributing
underdevelopment to managerial farming is quite an improvement over previous
scholarship that blamed imperialism or vague notions of Confucian ideology. And call it what you will, but Huang
convincingly depicts the rapidity with which peasants could tumble down the
social ladder and tenuously scrape out a living tilling their own small plot
(made even smaller by the common practice of dividing inheritances among
brothers), working as hired laborers, and engaging in handicraft work.
The book’s
extensive tables (56 in all, ranging from “Agricultural Laborers Cited in
Homicide Cases in Hebei and Shandong, 1796” to “Draft Animals on Managerial
Farms in Five Hebei and Shandong villages, 1930s-1940s”) set a high standard
for socio-economic studies of rural China.
The author is on shakier ground, however, in his discussion of the
changes brought to rural China by the Communist Revolution and the founding of
the People’s Republic. Suddenly, tractors,
fertilizers, and the collective spirit led to increased productivity – under
the expert guidance of the state, underdevelopment gave way to rapid
growth. Nonetheless, this
oversimplification should not unduly blemish an otherwise excellent and important
monograph.
Reviewers praised
the book, which won the John K. Fairbank Prize of the American Historical
Association, for its richness and complexity.
Jonathan Spence called Huang’s work “the best sustained study of rural
north China yet written,” but questioned whether officialdom and the
bureaucracy were such a sure path to riches (“Turbulent Empire,” New York
Review of Books, Jan 16, 1986: 41-43).
Susan Mann also praised Huang’s “formidable talents” but noted that the
implications of differences between the Mantetsu villages were “not
systematically explored” (Journal of Asian Studies 45.3: 572-574).
Jeremy Brown
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