The “Liang Village Series”: Post-socialist Dynamics of Liang Hong’s Rural Investigation (original) (raw)

Liang the Rural Reformer

Dao Companion to Liang Shuming's Philosophy, 2023

This chapter provides an overview of the historical background as well as philosophical outlook behind the twentieth-century Confucian thinker Liang Shuming’s 梁漱溟 (1893-1988) engagement with the movement for “rural reconstruction” (xiangcun jianshe 鄉村建設) which took off during the 1930s in Republican China. After situating Liang’s turn toward the countryside and his activities in Shandong province as leader of the Institute for Rural Reconstruction in their broader socio-political context and his own trajectory as an intellectual and reformer, I describe and analyze the complex constellation of cultural, historical, social, political, and economic elements in his 1937 Theory of Rural Reconstruction (Xiangcun jianshe lilun 鄉村建設理論). In doing so, I pay particular attention to the relation between Liang’s idiosyncratic reinterpretation of premodern China’s social order as grounded in an affirmation of “reason” (lixing 理性) and his vision for a form of “national self-awakening” (minzu zijue 民族自覺) rooted in the countryside as a place where the traditional Confucian primacy “ethical relations” (lunli 論理) has supposedly been preserved. In conclusion, I argue that Liang’s idea of rural “collective life” (tuanti shenghuo 團體生活) as the basis for a wholly new form of society counts as a non-state-centered approach to modernization which continues to resonate in contemporary postrevolutionary China.

Introduction: Radical Rural Intellectuals

The Bishan Commune and the Practice of Socially Engaged Art in Rural China, 2020

In 2010, Ou Ning exhibited the notebook Bishan Commune: How to Start Your Own Utopia. 1 The notebook presents basic ideas and structures for the Bishan Commune, a utopian ideal of an alternative way of life far away from Chinese society and authorities. The notebook displayed Ou Ning's research into alternative communities, anarchism and the Chinese historical Rural Reconstruction Movement (RRM) of the 1930s. In 2011 Ou Ning and his colleague Zuo Jing began the work to establish the Bishan Commune in a village in rural China. The main questions of this book thus revolve around how an anarchist, utopian community unfolds to the backdrop of the political, social and historical landscape of rural China. Or more directly: How do you start your own utopia in the Chinese countryside? This book presents research into the lifecycle of the Bishan Commune as it was imagined and as it unfolded in Bishan Village; from the beginning of the project, with the creation of the notebook in 2010, to the establishment of the commune in Bishan Village in 2011, on to Ou Ning's move to Bishan together with his family in 2013, to the closure of the Bishan Commune project by the Chinese authorities in early 2016 and again on to Bishan Village after the departure of Ou Ning, with Zuo Jing maintaining his commercial activities in the village. 2 These periods of Bishan Commune reveal five different, but not strictly demarcated, phases of the project and offer ways in which to understand how urban artists engage in

Kevin O'Brien and Li Lianjiang, Rightful Resistance in Rural China

China Perspectives

Rightful Resistance in Rural China is a good example of the heuristic character of the inductive method in political sociology, that is to say, the manner in which a new social reality leads to an evolution in the theoretical framework of a discipline. The book is the product of an impressive 10 years of field work that began in 1994 and ranges from extensive quantitative studies conducted in partnership with Chinese universities to hundreds of semi-direct interviews with farmers and officials. The authors have also tapped greatly diverse primary sources, from government reports to villagers' complaints, press reports, and Chinese researchers' studies. But the work is presented mainly as an effort in conceptualisation and theorisation of a type of contentious action that can be defined in terms of neither institutional participation nor social movements, nor even of "everyday forms of resistance" theorised by James Scott, while presenting many characteristics of each of these forms of action. So what is it about? It is a fight to compel the authorities to narrow the gap between what they say and what they do in a context where rights that are recognized-more or less formally-are not guaranteed 1 .

Rural politics in contemporary China

Journal of Peasant Studies, 2013

Much news about today's China focuses on the urban. A milestone was reached in 2011, when the proportion of the PRC's 1.34 billion citizens living in cities reached 50%, the result of a remarkably rapid "great urban transformation" (Hsing 2010) that began in the 1980s. By 2025, China is projected to have 221 cities with over one million inhabitants. Still, with hundreds of millions moving to urban areas, hundreds of millions more will continue to live in the countryside and work in agriculture. The fact that more people in China make their home in cities than villages marks a historic shift. At the same time, it is the product of long-standing dynamics through which the urban and rural are mutually constituted by processes, politics, and ideologies that link, transgress, and span both (Murdoch and Lowe 2003; Davis 2004; McCarthy 2005). Even as China becomes more urban, the politics of its countryside will continue to be central to the PRC and around the world. This special issue addresses China's rural politics, broadly construed as the powerinflected processes and struggles that shape access to and control over resources in the countryside, as well as the values, ideologies, and discourses that shape those processes and struggles. Though scholarship on agrarian politics in China has taken off over the past three decades, the literature has tended to appear in area studies journals, or disciplinary outlets in which questions central to a single field are placed front and center. Our intention here is different. In commissioning a set of review essays on themes in critical agrarian-environmental studies, we sought to bring what China experts have uncovered into conversation with the China's rise has been fueled by more than 250 million migrant workers, members of the "floating population" (liudong renkou), whose labor in export processing zones, cities, and better-off villages has turned China into "the world's factory." The "household registration" (hukou) system, which has tied citizens to their place of birth since the 1950s, was relaxed in 1984 to allow peasants to move to urban areas. As the township and village enterprises that spurred economic growth and absorbed rural labor after "opening up and reform" (gaige kaifang) went bankrupt or were privatized in the late 1980s, the flow of migrant laborers increased. To this day, however, the hukou system denies "peasant workers" (nongmin gong) state services, such as access to education, health care and housing, which are reserved for urban citizens. 2 In addition, migrants continue to be looked down upon by urban residents, blamed for crimes, paid salaries late or not at all, and discriminated against (Solinger 1999; Yan 2003; Zhang 2002; Ngai 2005). As migration exploded in the 1990s, and the countryside was emptied of working age men and women, so too did a national ideology that valorized the urban and denigrated the rural, positing cities as the primary site of political, cultural, and economic worth (Bulag 2002, Cartier 2002, 2003, Ma 2005, Yeh 2013a). Cities became metonyms for development, and urbanization became a top goal of China's modernization strategy. Along with this, city dwellers were deemed to be of higher quality, or suzhi, than rural residents (O'Brien and Li 1993-94; Bakken 2000; Anagnost 2004; Murphy 2004; Kipnis 2006). This privileging of the urban and disparaging of the rural led to what has been called the "spectralization" (Yan 2003) of agriculture and the countryside, as villages became ghostly reminders of the past, a wasteland inhabited only by the 2 Note, however, that this varies by city, with some municipal governments (for example, Shanghai and Chengdu) providing more services than others (for example, Beijing). Thanks to Alexsia Chan, and her forthcoming Ph.D. dissertation at the University of California, Berkeley, for this point.

The reflective peephole method: Ruralism and awkwardness in the ethnography of rural China

The Australian Journal of Anthropology, 2011

Starting with Arthur Smith’s metaphor of the ‘peephole method’, this article explores the issues of ruralism and awkwardness which underlie much ethnographic fieldwork in rural China. In the first part, the continuing influence of ruralism—the idea that the Chinese countryside represents the ‘real’ China—is discussed. This idea is based on a radical conceptual separation of the countryside and the city, which denies modern everydayness to the countryside. If we accept that the modern everyday is now present in rural China and that ordinary people are aware of ruralism and its opposites (urbanism and modernity), we need to find research methods suitable to address the entanglement and the social uses of ruralist and modernist representations in everyday life. In the second part of the article, I argue that the ‘reflective peephole method’ could be such a method. Starting from the awkwardness I felt in my own fieldwork in south-western Hubei Province, I argue that the dilemmas of the ‘peephole method’ might be a good starting point for reflecting on the intensified ambiguity of moral discourse and action in contemporary rural China.

Karen Ferreira-Meyers, Book Review: Dong Guaqiang and Andrew G. Walder, A Decade of Upheaval: The Cultural Revolution in Rural China, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2022. NETSOL, 7/1, SRING 2022, pp.48-51. https://www.netsoljournal.net

NETSOL: New Trends in Social and Liberal Sciences, 2022

China’s history has always intrigued readers inside and outside the huge country. Dong Guoqiang and Andrew Walter propose a first and in-depth analysis of political conflict during the Cultural Revolution in a rural Chinese county, Feng County, which, according to the authors, “suffered from deep and enduring factional divisions and violent civil strife” (p. ix). The methodology the authors followed in their quest for reliable information includes purposefully identified contacts from existing networks of retired former activists, local officials, and soldiers. It also brings together data gathered from local collectors of Cultural Revolution memorabilia, and various documentary sources; for example, directives and notices from authorities in Beijing, similar types of documents from Jiangsu provincial authorities in Nanjing, prefectural authorities in Xuzhou, Feng County authorities, and internal bulletins and documents issued by the county’s interim authorities when Feng County remained under some form of military control between March 1967 and September 1969.

Review of Going to the Countryside: The Rural in the Modern Chinese Cultural Imagination, 1915–1965. Chinese Literature and Thought Today 54.3-4 (2024): 160-162

Chinese Literature and Thought Today, 2024

Modernity, as most students of literature may anticipate, is strongly associated with urban culture. The field of modern Chinese studies has indeed experienced an urban turn in its increased attention to urban and modern sensibilities, as evidenced by the outpouring of studies on such Shanghai writers as Eileen Chang. When rural China does come into the picture, it typically emerges as case studies in anthropology and sociology. Yu Zhang begs the differ. In her illuminating study, Zhang deftly traces cultural representations of “going to the countryside as a distinctively modern experience in China between 1915 and 1965” across the 1949 divide in order to bring “the rural back to the central concern of Chinese cultural studies." This is not only a compelling thesis but also an important contribution to modern Chinese literary and cultural studies.