Liang the Rural Reformer (original) (raw)
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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 Journal of Peasant Studies, 2020
Rural development in the Chinese state's strategy has been a changing political-economic problematic. The state has practiced a strategic essentialism with regard to 'peasantry.' It has actively taken 'peasantry' as a temporary unifying master-category while at the same time working with the differences within the category for the long-term goal of transformation. The post-Mao contradiction, emphasizing the protection of the 'peasantry' while encouraging differentiation, offers contemporary struggles both opportunity and frustration. This essay examines how the rural has been conceptualized in reform-era policies and discusses two cases of scholar activism, the rural reconstruction movement and the food sovereignty network in China.
Democratic thought and practice in rural China
Democratization, 2005
Chinese democratization is usually thought of as a top-down process sponsored by a reformminded government and liberal intellectuals. At the turn of the millennium, however, no such development is in sight. Only recently have western scholars begun to look to the countryside for finding 'sprouts of democracy'. This study explores village self-government as a possibility of making local political practices the foundation of an emerging rights consciousness that becomes increasingly abstract and finally transgresses into the national sphere. Central to the argument is the dynamic of the village moral economy that produces a common good and 'collectivity'. These are serving as the pillars of all political claims that rise from the villages. In the process of appropriating an ongoing national discourse on political reform and democracy, China's peasants translate their entitlements derived from the moral economy of the village into rights, by way of informing a moral contract between them and authority. This contract may lay the ground for full-scale resistance, if the state and its cadres do not respond to the peasants 'rightful' demands. However, if it is honoured it can reinforce trust and secure the current regime's legitimacy.
Rediscovering Rural Reconstruction in China
New Worlds From Below: Grassroots Networking and Informal Life Politics in Twenty-First Century East Asia, The Australian National University Press, 2017
Ou Ning, “Rediscovering Rural Reconstruction in China”, New Worlds From Below: Grassroots Networking and Informal Life Politics in Twenty-First Century East Asia, edited by Tessa Morris-Suzuki, published by The Australian National University Press, Canberra, 2017.
Achievements, Contradictions and the Fall of the Rural Collectives in Songzi County, China
The literature on Chinese rural collectives offers different views on the causes of their demise in the early 1980s. Some argue it was a result of egalitarianism and inefficiency, while others emphasize the coercive nature of the decollectivization campaign. Using Songzi County as a case study, this article reviews both the achievements and problems of the rural collectives and concludes that they can claim some remarkable achievements. It also finds that work avoidance and inefficiency were caused by stratification rather than egalitarianism. While the demise of rural collectives was mostly due to political pressure from the government, the lack of socialist political process contributed to the peasants' passiveness in failing to resist this major institutional change. the editors and the anonymous reviewers of this journal, for their comments and suggestions.
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.