Achievements, Contradictions and the Fall of the Rural Collectives in Songzi County, China (original) (raw)
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The Power of the Strong?: Rural Resistance and Reform in China and Vietnam
China Information, 2000
This article examines the social bases of agrarian transformation during and after the communist-led collectivization of agriculture in China and Vietnam. The social science literature generally portrays rural people as passive, depoliticized and dependent. Nowhere is this more true than in studies of socialist societies that have been heavily influenced by totalitarian and authoritarian theories. The literature focuses on the initiative and power of supreme leaders, as well as party and state mobilization, to explain social and institutional change. This perspective, while not uncontested, holds generally for the subject reviewed here.' Our central thesis, in contrast, is that the cumulative weight of rural resistance eventually made it too costly, both economically and politically, for the respective states of China and Vietnam to continue collectivized agriculture. While recognizing significant differences in the structure and performance of collectivized agriculture in Vietnam and China, this study underlines strikingly similar tactics used by farmers to circumvent, resist and eventually, under politically fortuitous conditions, contribute to the elimination of the core institutions of collective agriculture and expand the scope of the market and household economies. We consider, in short, the interplay of resistance from below and the roles of party and state in generating fundamental social change. 1 Among the earliest and most eloquent to stress statist explanations for the Chinese reform process were Kathleen Hartford, "Socialist Agriculture Is Dead: Long Live Socialist Agriculture! Organisational Transformations in Rural China," in The Political Economy of Reform in Post-Mao China, eds. Elizabeth Perry and Christine Wong (Cambridge : Harvard Contemporary China Series, 1985) and Jonathan Unger, "The Decollectivization of the Chinese Countryside: A Survey of Twenty-Eight Villages," Pacific Affairs 58 (Winter 1985-86). For recent studies on the relationship between rural resistance and institutional reform, see the bibliographical appendix.
Reconstructing the Rural: Peasant Organizations in a Chinese Movement for Alternative Development
2013
This ethnography examines four peasant organizations affiliated with New Rural Reconstruction (NRR), an ongoing alternative development movement in China. NRR consists of a diverse network involving hundreds of organizations, loosely united by the goals of reversing the rural-to-urban flow of resources and "(re)constructing" sustainable, self-sufficient communities based on cooperation among peasant households, supported by agroecological skill-sharing and alternative marketing. While many NRR advocates draw ideas and inspiration from China's Rural Reconstruction Movement of the 1930s, the movement is better understood as a Chinese and postsocialist counterpart to the global wave of responses to neoliberalism associated with the Global Justice Movement (GJM). Both NRR and the GJM could be characterized as predominantly alternativist in their focus on fostering "alternative" economic forms (neither capitalist nor socialist), such as co-ops and "fair trade" networks. Another commonality with NRR is the GJM's revival of "the peasantry" as a central political subject. In contrast with mid-20th century Third Worldism, NRR and the GJM represent the peasantry as primarily oriented not toward modernization, but the defense or revival of traditional lifeways now valued as more sustainable than either capitalist or socialist models of industrial development. I argue that, under present conditions, "success" at reversing the rural-to-urban flow of resources through commercial means tends to require further integration into capitalist processes, both increasing vulnerability to global economic forces and undermining values such as equality, sustainability, and participatory democracy. On the other hand, these values continue to distinguish NRR-affiliated organizations from conventional capitalist enterprises, creating tensions that point toward possibilities of confrontation with their broader social conditions. I thus engage critically with economic anthropology and the interdisciplinary literature on alternative economic forms, peasant cooperation, "culture," and "value(s)." Drawing on a critical return to Marx in light of the failures of 20th century Marxisms, I introduce the concept of "alternativism" and a focus on the tension between alternative values and the capitalist form of commodity value. These innovations contribute to anthropological theory by providing tools for dealing with the post-1960s "epistemic impasse" of global political thought and the post-1990s situation, in which capital seems to be excluding an increasing portion of the peasant and semi-proletarian bodies it continues to dispossess from complete integration into wage relations, which Marx had seen as the fulcrum of capitalist society's self-overcoming.
Rural cooperatives appear to be flourishing in China. Yet this blossom has been controversial. Some contest whether specialized farmer cooperatives should be promoted. They are opposed to the implications and consequences that derive from the growth of such cooperatives. Many criticize that most of the cooperatives thus far developed are ‘fake’ cooperatives. Some propose comprehensive peasant associations in Japan, South Korea and Taiwan as a model for emulation. These contestations are about rural cooperatives, but also go quite beyond them. For those passionately involved in the support and critique of rural cooperatives, what is at stake is both rural sustainability and the possibility of China pursuing a third-way development. In the 1930s, rural cooperatives also blossomed in China, and it was accompanied by heated intellectual debates about the future of China. This paper will examine intellectual perspectives and debates both in the past and at present about rural cooperative development in China. Not only are there some remarkable intellectual parallels between the two, but also both movements have their own structural difficulties. In the face of the rapid agrarian change in China, the 1930s debate might still shed a light on today’s conundrum.
Journal of Peasant Studies, 2017
This paper examines the politics of possibility for rural activism in reform era China. By periodizing rural reforms from 1990, we explore the political-economic changes that have coalesced in the reform era, and how these changes condition forms and possibilities of activism. We argue that the current modernization–urbanization drive that emerged around 2008 is foreclosing opportunities for the pro-peasant cooperative forms that New Rural Reconstruction activists imagined earlier in the decade. Instead, as the process of capitalist agrarian change deepens in the countryside, food- and farming-related activism now resembles the state’s focus on markets and consumption, to the detriment of addressing social relations of production. Without a focus on distributional politics and power, this shift has the potential to further entrench existing inequalities within and across rural and urban spaces. The contextual work undertaken in this paper is currently absent from the emerging literature on China’s agrifood transformations.
Insurgent Notes: Journal of Communist Theory and Practice Feb 24, 2019
Maoists depict China’s neoliberal programs as exceptional deviations from ‘state socialism’, and those ‘policies’ can be ‘reformed’ into better projects to serve the interests of the masses. The unspoken premise of Maoist arguments is that the root cause of the problem of China’s transition to capitalism lies in neoliberalism, not in the CCP that has prepared the groundwork for capitalism envisioned by Mao and his cohorts since 1949. Consequently, those arguments let the dictatorship of the Chinese bourgeoisie off the hook. http://insurgentnotes.com/2019/02/review-zhun-xu-from-commune-to-capitalism-how-chinas-peasants-lost-collective-farming-and-gained-urban-poverty-2018/