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Richard Madsen. Morality and Power in a Chinese Village. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984.

The impossibility of conducting field work in the People’s Republic of China before the late 1970s led to a shortage of reliable and detailed information about the fundamental changes taking place in the mainland. Anita Chan, Richard Madsen, and Jonathan Unger’s extensive interviews in Hong Kong with peasants and sent-down youth who fled one Guangdong village would do much to remedy this problem and provide a wealth of insights on rural life in South China between 1964 and 1982 (see Chan, Madsen, and Unger, Chen Village, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984).

Madsen’s solo interpretation of the interview data, Morality and Power in a Chinese Village, is a probing inquiry into the “excruciating moral decisions” villagers had to make vis-à-vis the shifting edicts and political campaigns imposed upon the village from above (p. 3). Madsen focuses on how village leaders struggled to maintain power through balancing the demands of two important constituencies: traditional-minded villagers and the ideological Party apparatus. This exploration leads to the author’s conclusion that peasants are essentially self-interested actors, but possess a “moral creativity” that at times lends itself to more collective pursuits (p. 8). Unfortunately, as a moral system Maoism proved to be too rigid to successfully guide the villagers to collective harmony.

Madsen divides Chen Village’s moral progression during the 1960s and 1970s into four parts. During the first stage, the village’s traditional Confucian moral paradigm collided with a Maoist model advocated by the strong socialist state. For the author, the struggle sessions of the 1965 Socialist Education Movement were often cruel but ultimately necessary in that they caused “fundamental changes in peasants’ traditional moral discourse” – changes that demanded fairness and impartiality from village leaders and created a civic identity beyond the family or village unit (p. 100). The second phase, a synthesis between Mao’s “serve the people” doctrine and traditional village interests, provided the best hope for a successful and stable moral base but was destroyed by the Cultural Revolution and Cleansing of the Class Ranks campaign (stage three). The “moral anarchy” of the Cultural Revolution then gave way to the utilitarian order of the 1970s, which stressed practical attention to economic growth but lacked a moral anchor.

This richly detailed micro-level portrait of village politics challenges those who would call Communist rule monolithic and centralized. For example, at the village level, classes were not “vast arrays of people spawned by nationwide economic forces” but simply “groups of individuals” (p.196). Thus, campaigns and movements conceived at the national level evolved and took on quite different forms when actually implemented in villages. Oftentimes peasants, sent-down youth and local leaders utilized campaigns to pursue their own personal ambitions or exact revenge upon their foes. The book’s analysis of the influence of village leaders in shaping and altering policy convincingly shows that Zhongnanhai-centered studies of elite Chinese politics fail to present a full or accurate picture. In Chen Village the Cultural Revolution had petered out by 1970 and demoralized villagers turned to more practical, self-interested economic pursuits well before Deng Xiaoping ascended to proclaim the primacy of utilitarianism.

Perhaps the most striking agents of change depicted in Morality and Power in a Chinese Village are the sent-down youth. While Madsen does not directly assess the impact of the teams of urban youth that descended upon Chen Village, the overall picture one gets is of a vitally important but almost wholly negative force – bad for the youth themselves and bad for the villagers. The first wave of ambitious, idealistic sent-down youth was central in bringing about what Madsen identifies as a key (but doomed) interlude in Chen Village’s history, the Maoist-Confucian synthesis. Yet the ultimate impact of the urban youth was disastrous – they were alienated from the peasants, more concerned with their own ideological purity than with improving the village, and generally disruptive.

Reviewers were unstinting in their praise of the book, which won the C. Wright Mills Award. However, one reviewer noted that Madsen’s repudiation of Maoism is a “universalistic claim…that certain kinds of moral order are in fact unworkable;” another hoped for more concrete economic data about Chen Village (Stevan Harrell, Journal of Asian Studies 45.3, 574-576; Hill Gates, Pacific Affairs 58.4: 690-691, respectively).

Jeremy Brown

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