Dali L. Yang. Calamity
and Reform in China: State, Rural Society, and Institutional Change Since the
Great Leap Famine. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996.. Honolulu:
University of Hawai'i Press, 1995.
The 'Great Leap Famine'
(1959-1961), with a death toll of as many as 30 million human beings, was the
worst famine in recorded human history. As in many famines, those who starved
were overwhelmingly rural food producers with little or no access to political
power. The enormity of this event has made it a difficult object of study, both
because the suffering that it unleashed resulted in social chaos, and because
its archives remain closely guarded for the threat that they represent to the
continued legitimacy of the Chinese Communist Party. In Calamity and Reform
in China, Dali Yang makes use of recently declassified documents to chart a
'political geography' of rural China's institutions and history, from the
collectivization leading up to the Leap to the quiet revolution of economic
reform following its collapse. It is Yang's contention that the lack of
detailed knowledge of this geography – and the decollectivized 'household
responsibility system' (zeren tian) that took root there as a means of coping
with the post-Leap crisis – have obscured the role of institutional histories
during the Great Leap Famine in shaping post-Mao economic reforms from 1978 to
the present day.
Historically, the Leap and its
lengthy aftermath are treated as three distinct periods when viewed from this
institutional perspective. The first includes the rural collectivization drive leading
up to the Leap (1953-1957), the founding of the massive people's communes in
1958, and the famine that followed. Starvation begat political disillusionment,
and "it appears that the average Chinese unmistakably linked the famine …
with the Great Leap Forward and its associated policies." Starvation and
disillusionment begat a breakdown of social order, and China's leaders were
ultimately forced to confront numerous choices between idealism and pragmatism
as they groped toward reform. During the subsequent period of tenuous
liberalization and political struggle – what might be called the 'Mao-era'
period of post-Leap reform – Yang details the struggle between state and rural
society over the terms of economic distribution. Despite the ideological reservations
of Mao and others, localized resistance was able to win a decollectivized
"[production] team-based rural institutional set-up" (98) overseeing
distribution and accounting, and reduce the amount of resources extracted from
the rural sector to serve urban needs.
During the 'post-Mao' reform
period this quasi-liberalization, largely unofficial, created the foundation
for official state actors to themselves seek more liberal paths to reform. This
raises the issue that is at Calamity and Reform in China's conceptual
core: namely, to what degree these post-Mao reforms were 'path-dependent' upon
the pattern of an "interactive relationship between state and society that
… lies in the Great Leap Famine" (1). The analytical terms presented here
are those of 'cognitive bias' and 'institutional change'; the data are drawn
from recently-available statistics concerning the effects of the Leap on
China's provinces. By correlating China's political geography of provincial
organization and leadership with outcomes measured in terms of consumption,
mortality, and production, Yang convincingly shows that institutional
liberalization did occur 'differentially' (i.e. only in certain places)
following the Great Leap Famine, and that this created "incentives for decollectivization,
which became a reality when the Chinese leadership jockeyed for power following
Mao's death" (252). By linking disillusionment to famine, and
demonstrating that liberalization occurred most quickly in those provinces
whose mortality rates were the highest, Yang is able to establish a strong
correlation between the 'cognitive bias' of political fallout and a consciously
reformist path for change.
This conclusion, in turn offers
several paths of interpretation. On is that the Great Leap Famine, even more
than the mainly urban-centered Cultural Revolution, was responsible for
destroying the credibility of Maoism's claim to offer a historically
progressive vision of social change. Insofar as many of the markers of analysis
are rooted in political economic theory, this conclusion may even minimize a
sense of the degree to which the Leap completely paralyzed future hope among
many of those who experienced it. While one reviewer, commending Calamity
and Reform in China, noted that "the success of rural reform depended
on the initiative of [hundreds of] millions of ordinary peasants who had not
the slightest intention of making reforms but did so anyway" (Journal
of Asian Studies, 54,2:494-5), one is still left with the question of
whether the experience of change – economic and otherwise – within human
societies is best captured by an ostensibly 'institutional' history of reform.
In more concrete terms, this might mean that while peasants lack many of the
trappings of economic and political power, neither are they merely subjects of
that power's reach. Thus, numerous types of belief, organization, and
participation/resistance are just as important to social analysis as they are
to society.
Matthew Johnson
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