Tradition, Modernity, and Communism:
In
his study of the new China established by the Communists, Maurice Meisner (1986)
insightfully finds that state power and social classes in the People’s Republic
began with a profoundly ambiguous relationship. The Communist party, which presided over the new state, had no
real tie to the proletariat it claimed to represent; the peasantry was without
formal political representation; and the bourgeois classes were represented
only in a most formal and meaningless sense.
Nevertheless, the lack of solid relations with social classes did not
ruin the party’s ambitious projects in social reforms. Instead, by 1952, the new state had
consolidated its control nationwide and had extended it down to the village
levels; agricultural and industrial production were also restored to the
highest pre-war level. Therefore, the
relationship established between state and society during this initial period
(1949-1952) attracted great attentions from multiple generations of scholars.
Both
C. K. Yang’s A Chinese Village in Early Communist Transition (1965) and
Vivenne Shue’s Peasant China in Transition: The Dynamics of Development
Toward Socialism, 1949-1956 (1980) showcased the changes that occurred in
Chinese rural areas in 1949-1952, in order to shed light on peasant-state
relations in the village. Their common
concerns provide a lens to study state and society relations established during
the transitional period. However, the
pictures Yang and Shue present are noticeably different. While Shue praises the flexibility of the
state in dealing with rural affairs, Yang demonstrates the fear and reluctance
of peasants facing horrifying state power.
This essay endeavors to explore the different representations of
peasant-state relations in these two books, and then to scrutinize the changing
views of the relationship between society and state in the scholarship on the
Republic.
Yang
and Shue are scholars belonging to two generations. Their divergence is primarily due to the different contexts these
two generations were facing. Therefore,
this paper will begin by situating Yang and Shue in their respective social and
academic environments. Next it will
examine how Yang and Shue depict the interactions between the state and the
peasantry during land reform. Finally,
it will review scholarly variations on the relationship between state and
society by examining Yang and Shue’s dissimilarities.
C.
K. Yang’s A Chinese Village is the outcome of his fieldwork in Nanjing
village in South China, which documents the village situation from the
pre-Communist era (1948-1949) to the early Communist transition up through the
land reform. Yang’s grassroot research
facilitates his investigating both the concrete processes of changes that have
happened at the village level since the coming of Chinese Communists and the
peasantry’s reaction to such revolutionary forces. Shue’s method is totally different from Yangs’. Heavily relying on the various provincial
newspapers, the national press, and local publications, Shue focuses on the
implementation of socialist development policies in the provinces of Hunan and
Hubei in the southern central region of China.
The 1949-1952 period is the first step of the transition Shue
examines. Although Shue takes a
top-down approach, her examination of the interaction between peasants and the
state is on par with Yangs.’ Both
authors are concerned about the peasant-state relations that were gradually
established after the advent of the Communists in the newly liberated rural
areas.
The
arrival of the Communists—or to put it another way, the victory of the Communist
party—set the context for the newly established relationship between state and
society. Different attitudes towards
this victory link with disparate perceptions of the nature of the new state,
and lead to diverging accounts of the peasant-state relations forged in the
newly formed state. Yang and Shue’s
version of peasant-state relations is deeply influenced by their respective
scholarly and social milieus attitudes toward the takeover by the Chinese
Communists.
Due
to the US government’s consistent support Guomindang and ideological repulsion
towards Communism in the 1950s and 1960s, the American public did not accept
the success of the Communist parties’ 1949 takeover. A. Doak Barnett’s important work on the Communist takeover (1963)
reflects such unenthusiastic attitudes.
The corruption and incompetence of the Guomindang led to a power vacuum,
and the Communists grasped the chance to take over. However, at the same time, some scholars strove to highlight the
efforts of Chinese Communists. In his diary
written in Peking around 1949, Derk Bodde (1950) shows the party’s deliberate
effort to take over the city and to restore order. Later on, when the antagonism toward China decreased, more and
more studies focused on the strategies and tactics of the Communist party. Susan Pepper’s monograph Civil War in
China (1978) is equally appreciative.
Pepper gives great credit to the party, and argues that through adapting
Marxist-Leninist thoughts to the Chinese environment, Chinese Communists won
the competition with Guomindang.
Yang and Shue
clearly have allied themselves with opposing camps. As a scholar that left China in 1951, it seems that Yang feels
more akin to Barnet. In his book, Yang
does not express much admiration for the Communists. In his portrait of the pre-Communist village situation, Yang
reveals the socio-economic crisis in Nanjing village, and argues that drastic
changes were inevitable. The Communist
revolution is one possibility, but not a necessary. Unsurprisingly, Yang is also consistent with Barnet (1964) in
describing the new state as a coercive power.
He highlights the violence used to initiate the transformation, and
depicts the submissive role of the peasants.
In
contrast, as a scholar in the generation after Yang, Shue is definitely a
follower of Pepper. Shue’s work
actually can be regarded as a continuity of Peppers.’ While Pepper shows that Chinese Communists gained the legitimacy
during the civil war, Shue demonstrates that the Communist party was able to
maintain this legitimacy by driving forward rural reforms for peasants. Moreover, Shue continues Pepper’s emphasis
on the party’s flexibility and pragmatism.
She shows how the new government strove to convince peasants that change
might benefit them, and then drew peasants into cooperation with the next
planned step, the village revolution.
Yang and Shue
were doing their research within different circumstances and with disparate
academic agendas. The result is that
their accounts of peasant-state relations are far apart. In the following section, their
dissimilarities will be analyzed in their studies on land reform—how the party
made its first move and what the villagers’ reactions were.
Yang’s
village and Shue’s fields all belong to late-liberated areas. Land reform was the major project that the
Communists carried at in these rural areas during 1949-1952. The two authors both treat land reform as a
crucial stage to understanding the new-established relationship between the
state and the peasantry. In this
section, I will first focus on several factors these two authors highlight as
the secrets of the success to land reform, and then discuss their different
perceptions of the nature of the new administration. Finally, their different portraits of the people under Communism
will be shown.
As
Meisner explains, in the new state creed entitled “On the People’s Democratic
Dictatorship,” Mao set forth two overriding objectives that were to mold the
nature of state and society during the transitional period: “establishing a
strong state power and a strong economy” (58).
Yang and Shue also notice that the reform was carried out along these
two directions. However, they
fundamentally differ on which of these two played a more prominent role. Yang believes that the newly established
direct control of the state over the village was the key to land reform, while
Shue regards material incentives as the secret to the success of the party’s
policies.
When
Shue phrases one aim of the party’s agrarian reform in the new territories as
“buying immediate peasant support with land” (41), it reveals that in Shue’s
view, material incentives were used by the party as its primary appeal to the
peasants. Shue admits that the party’s
basic strategy revolved around the management of village class struggle. However, the most effective way to do so is
not through propaganda and education, but rather by “directly interven(ing) to
manipulate the economic environment of peasants” (7). According to Shue, through a direct redistribution of property
from the richest to the poorest in the villages during land reform, the party
helped the villagers perceive that their own real interests coincided with
their designated class interests. The
new state relied heavily on “the natural, self-interested energies of peasants
to make village class struggle a reality,” and to lead to the successful land
reform (326). Therefore, it is clear
that Shue believes that land reform was a transformation satisfying peasants’
self-interest.
Yang is also
aware that during land reform the Nanjing peasants were mobilized initially
with material enticements, which successfully “aroused hatred among the poor
against the rich” (145). However, it is
obvious that Yang does not think that the party really cares about peasants’
interests. While Shue praises the new
government’s first reform, the proportional taxation, and believes it “won the
early active support of many” (30), Yang shows that taxes levied by the
Communists were “much heavier than those imposed by previous government” (155)
causing the peasants excessive burden.
To Yang, the state was primary an absolutely coercive and pervasive power,
instead of the persuasive rational actor appealing to peasants’ interests that
Shue depicts.
Violence was one
of the main aspects in Yang’s portrait of coercive state power. In contrast, Meisner points out that when
launching the land reform in late-liberated areas, the Communists were determined
to avoid the violence that had spoiled land reform during the civil war. In Shue’s description, the land reform was
carried on as modestly as the party hoped.
She uses the phrase “peaceful land reform” to characterize the
relatively little physical violence (82).
In Shue’s account, she explains that violence was first used to provide
public security, such as suppressing bandits after the liberation. Violence was not a topic for Shue during
land reform,.
However, violence
was a prominent aspect in Yang’s Nanjing village. Yang argues that when fully armed military soldiers entered
Nanjing as the agents of the new government, their guns were “symbolic of the
coercive nature of the new power” (169).
During land reform, there were families that experienced pillaged by
mobs aroused by the party. Nanjing
villagers also witnessed tragedies in two other families, in which the victims
were physical tortured by the government.
Moreover, Yang provides an example showing people’s fear of the harsh
dictatorship. During land
redistribution, when members in one lineage received more land than another,
traditional hostility was aroused, but villagers chose to give up organized
conflict. To explain the reason, Yang
directly points out that “villagers by this time had learned to appreciate the
violent character of the new power” (148).
Shue summarizes
the three possible means the party used to win peasant cooperation: normative
appeals, material incentives, and coercive measures. From the discussion above, it is obvious that Shue and Yang are
on two different wavelengths. While
Shue emphasizes that the party cleverly induced peasants to join in rural
reforms, Yang shows his antipathy for a government that was never chary of
using violence to maintain strict governmental over the villagers. Although both of Yang and Shue’s studies are
based on regional studies, in fact, neither of Yang and Shue leaves a
possibility that the peaceful or violent land reform is specific in their
fields due to the regional difference.
Instead, these authors clearly expressed their appreciation or disfavor
toward the new government.
Except for
violence, Yang also focuses on the strict control of the state over the new
local power structure. In her study,
Shue shows that official organizations, such as the party branch, the peasant
association, the youth league, and the women’s association, set the
institutional foundations for the party to “mobilize and channel peasant into
the drive for rural social revolution” (29).
Yang shares Shue’s emphasis on the important role played by these
grassroot organizations, but he uses them to underline the state’s penetrative
power. According to Yang, the striking
change in local power structure is not the shift from landlords and rich
peasants to the lower middle and poor peasants, but “the much closer
integration of the village into the national system of political power”
(174). Now every peasant in Nanjing
village experienced the national political power as a concrete reality that
controlled every aspect of peasants’ lives from their social and economic
status to their family life. The
village not only lost the relative autonomy it had enjoyed before, but also
became a part of the highly centralized state system, which in Yang’s view
ensured coercive state to control over the countryside.
The New
Administration
As
to the new administration, Yang stresses the rigidity and arbitrariness of its
land reform policy. Yang tells a story
about a poor widow who owns twenty mou of land. After the death of her son, the widow rented
out all her land. And then according to
the official rigid class line, the widow was listed as a landlord, because all
her income was from “exploitation”.
Although both a senior official and a village head tried to help the
widow, neither of them could break through the rigid regulation. Moreover, an arbitrary amount of surplus
grain was named for each landlord to surrender, “according to his estimated
ability to pay” (145). The widow was
assigned an amount totally beyond her ability.
Yang
also shows deviations in Nanjing’s land reform to highlight the party’s
irrational practing=EN-US
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Yang
and Shue provide two wholly different portraits of the new state power. While Yang emphasizes the coercive power of
the government and its irrationality, Shue sings high praises for a party which
is not only flexible, but also deliberately includes peasants in reforms by
appealing to their interests. These
differences lead to the disparate views on the peasantry’s reactions toward
revolutionary change in villages.
Shue
does portray peasants’ initial anxieties about land reform. Shue also notices that the party faced
peasants who were unwilling or apathetic about land reform. However, Shue believes that “peasants
clearly responded well to the economic benefits of the reform” (p. 45), and they
were driven into reforms by the material incentives provided by the party’s
policies. In contrast, the villagers in
Yang’s Nanjing village were not cooperative with the party as their
counterparts in Shue’s areas. Yang
shows that some families benefited from land reform came to feel that the
Communist government served their interests.
But the new structural framework of the village lacked “a congruent and
stabilized ‘moral climate’ or corresponding system of internalized values in
the minds of the common people” (260).
The great majority of the villagers were left “apathetic, skeptical, and
submissive rather than showing any genuine enthusiasm and conviction toward
Communism” (199).
Focusing
on the countryside under Communist control, Yang portrays a picture in which
traditional society was conquered. The
kinship system and the semi-autonomous leadership of local gentry that
characterized the traditional village life had been destroyed. Yang is clear
that such destruction is necessary to solve the crisis in rural areas, but he
is distressed that the inevitable modernization must be carried out by the
Communists. In his version of
state-society relations during the early fifties, Yang entirely accepts a
totalitarian portrayal of Communist society that absolute state power conquered
and tightly controlled society.
Shue
definitely disagrees with Yang’s pessimistic description of the relationship
between peasants and the state. To
Shue, the new state is a constructive modern force. With the assumption that both the state and peasants are rational
actors, Shue holds that the party endeavors to use material incentives to gain
cooperation from the peasants. In
Shue’s view, the state does not conquer the society, but negotiates and compromises
with society. Meeting the needs of
society is one of the state’s interests.
Yang
was strongly influenced by the structuralism theory prevalent in his time,
which states that the social system determines a person’s behavior. Yang’s opinion that coercive state power
overwhelms society was in fact typical among scholars in his generation. As a scholar writing when the structuralism
was being challenged, Shue finds it possible to bring agency back to the peasantry
under Communism. Shue points out that
because the party’s policies appealed to peasants’ self-interests, land reform
was a compromise between the party and peasant society.
However,
while Yang believes that tradition has been destroyed, Shue only portrays the
peasantry as rational actors without any moral concerns. Late on, new scholars overcome these
deficiencies, and featured a new picture of state-society relations. Both Richard Madsen’s Morality and Power in a Chinese Village (1984) and Chinese Village, Socialist State (1991) coauthored by Friedman,
Pickowicz, and Selden demonstrate the
continuity of tradition in China through the Communist revolution. They show that the peasant’s
reinterpretation and tampering with the state policies happened at the same
time as government’s penetration into villages.
Shue’s
book is well written. She analyzes the
official documents very carefully and insightfully, and she pays attention to
the agency of both state and society.
However, her sources limit her discussion to an ideal situation of party’s
policy-making and implementation, instead of actual practices. Therefore, in her depiction, complex
practices have been lost to rational calculation, while the moral concerns are
missing entirely.
In
contrast, Yang’s fieldwork helps him access villagers’ actual experience under
Communism. His story demonstrates
peasants’ complicated reactions toward revolutionary force. As a matter of fact, Yang shows peasants’
loyalty to their clans, which were under the Communists’ attack. But his structuralistic framework makes him
ignore the data he collects.
Based on these
two studies, when studying Chinese state-society relations, on the one hand, we
should retain balanced focus attentions between the party and the common
people. Shue is better at this than Yang. On the other hand, we should put actual
practice and people’s lives at the center of our inquiry, just as Yang did in
his fieldwork. Analysis that is
divorced from the common people will only turn out to be idle theorizing. In present China the party still tries to
maintain its control over some areas of people’s lives, the painstaking study
of state-society relationships since the Communist takeover would remain
crucial to understand China’s past, present, and even future directions.
References
A. Doak Barnett. China on the Eve of Communist Takeover. New York: Praeger, 1963.
A. Doak Barnett. Communist China: The Early Years 1949-55.
New York: Praeger, 1965.
Derk Bodde. Peking Diary: A Year of Revolution. New York: Henry Schuman, 1950.
Edward Friedman, Paul G.
Pickowicz, and Mark Selden. Chinese Village, Socialist State. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991.
Richard Madsen. Morality
and Power in A Chinese Village.
Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984.
Maurice
Meisner. Mao’s China and After: a
History of the People’s Republic. New York: The Free Press, 1986.
Jonathan D. Spence. The Search for Modern China. New York: W W Norton & Company, 1990.
Vivienne
Shue. Peasant China in Transition: The
Dynamics of Development Toward Socialism.
1949-1956. Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1980.
Suzanne Pepper. Civil War in China: The Political
Struggle, 1945-1949. Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1978.
C. K. Yang. Chinese
Communist Society: The Family and the Village. Cambridge: The M. I. T.
Press. 1965.
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