Democratic thought and practice in rural China (original) (raw)
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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 END OF VILLAGE DEMOCRACY IN CHINA
Journal of Democracy, 2023
Since Xi Jinping became China’s paramount leader in 2012, his top domestic priority has been the strengthening of the Chinese Communist Party’s power over government, economy, and society. This extends to village life, where a decades-long experiment with direct elections is being unwound by new efforts to establish Party control at the rural grassroots level. This essay draws on first-hand observation and Chinese sources to examine the ongoing CCP strategy for reestablishing party dominance over village affairs.
By shedding light on the enduring social identities of rural settlement communities, often referred to as “natural villages” (自然村) by the current Chinese government, this article provides a new approach to the formation of China’s rural collective land ownership system from the 1950s to the present. It reveals how a unique landholding structure, which I term “bounded collectivism,” was initially formed in southwest China as a result of the contestation and negotiation between the socialist state aiming to establish collective land ownership and rural settlement communities seeking exclusive control over land resources within their borders. Significant elements of that collective land ownership system would be perpetuated while accommodating “natural villages” in the three decades since the abolition of the communes and the creation of a system of household contracts. Key words: China, bounded collectivism, rural land ownership, natural villages, rural settlement communities
Parasites or Civilisers: The Legitimacy of the Chinese Communist Party in Rural Areas
BRILL eBooks, 2017
The Communist Party of China is fighting hard to redefine its basis of legitimacy and give village and township cadres and ordinary Party members a sense of purpose and direction. It is trying to redefine itself as an elite party whose cadres are better educated, more cultured and civilised, and have better organisational abilities than the rest of the rural population; but these views are being seriously challenged by the peasants. This paper is based on a study of Xuanwei County, Yunnan Province. The Communist Party of China (CPC) is fighting an uphill struggle to redefine its basis of legitimacy and give village and township cadres and ordinary Party members a sense of purpose and direction. This paper examines the arguments and cultural resources that the Party draws upon in this process. The focus is on the economically less developed rural areas of the country, with particular consideration given to Xuanwei County, Yunnan Province. 1 Questions of ideology generally receive little attention in studies of post-1989 China compared to "hard" issues such as economic performance and institutional change. However, one of the most provocative recent Chinese studies of rural affairs, China Along the Yellow River, by Cao Jinqing, highlights the crucial role of ideology and the closely-related question of legitimacy in deciding the fate of the Party-state. In a characteristic conversation between Cao and four county and township level officials, the question of values and motivation is raised, ABOUT THE AUTHOR
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.