Edward Friedman,
Paul G. Pickowicz, and Mark Sheldon, with Kay Ann Johnson. Chinese Village, Socialist State. New Haven: Yale University Press,
1991.
Chinese Village, Socialist State portrays the dynamic interaction between state
and society in China with the focus on how families, villagers and local
leaders wrestled with an emerging socialism. Through a decade-long research on
Raoyang villages on the North China plain, the authors tried to “look for the
invisible” and “fill in the picture obscured by official categories.” (xviii) Consequently,
the authors challenged the existing common wisdom that the socialist state has
remained secure because of rural support based on simple complacency.
With bottom-up
and long-term perspectives (since the late Qing until 1961), what this book
illuminates is the vicissitudes of state-society linkages. We can see a
contrast between early years of popular reforms and voluntary cooperation, and
the era of fundamentalist commitment to socialism. By the early 1950s, the Chinese
state permitted individual households to “develop household fortune” and social
changes occurred without breaking customary ways of thinking, life and
relationships. But the “honeymoon” was destined to be short-lived because the
ultimate goal of the state was the fundamental transition of China to a socialist
system. The authors shed light on how collectivization and the attack on
peasant culture, household farming, and commerce alienated rural population. By
inspecting the process of fundamental socialization, this book shows us the
irony that the peasant-supported revolution made peasants the very victims of
revolution.
Contrary to our
general assumption of revolutionary change after the fundamentalist turn, the authors
of this book argue that continuity rather than rupture defined this
period. Continuity in peasant culture,
new nationalism, personal bonds of loyalty, and persistent historical problems
existed in all the periods that this research focused upon. In particular, the
state’s war on village culture and the peasant household economy, contrary to
common expectation, strengthened the tie among villagers and patriarchal ways
in many rural families enabling them to survive this attack. The authors
indicates that “surprisingly little had changed” after the attempt at socialist
transition. (268) Ironically, this phenomenon constitutes the main reason why
villagers did not actively resist the state despite the unhappy results caused by
the state. The authors’ argument is that villagers facilitated patriarchal
authority and supported the state with anti-intellectual and anti-urban anger
because of their patriarchal strains of culture. The state actually acted on “Feudal-like
criteria” in spite of the policies of fundamental changes. (285)
Finally, key to
this book is the authors’ perspectives on society vis-à-vis the state. Although the authors do not deny the
existence of a strong state, what this book highlights is the strength of a society
that had their own agenda and maintained their own culture despite radical
changes in social surface. For this reason, this book conveys the dynamics of
the relationship between society and state more than older historiographies
that stressed the active role of a strong state.
This book can be
read as a powerful criticism of the Chinese socialist state and Chinese
Communist Party based on the direct contact with insiders, including the losers
and the excluded for a decade by the authors’ numerous visits and thousands of
hours of interviews and discussions, as well as the use of archival sources.
Whether Marxism was a merely “foreign economic dogma,” which the authors
conclude, may be questioned, as one of the reviewers points out. (Arif Dirik, The American Historical Review, 97.5) Nevertheless,
the rich narratives of how fundamentalist commitment to socialism, contrary to
its slogan, brought out political inequality and economic devastation even in
the “model villages” offers a strongly convincing argument for the failure of the
socialist state in China.
Contemporary
reviewers paid fairly high attention to this work and their response was
favorable in general by defining this book as “a landmark event”(Prasenjit
Duara, JSA 51.1) and as “one of the
most important works on Chinese rural trends.” (Martin King Whyte, China Quarterly, 129)
Ji Hee Jung
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