Eating Rice From Bamboo Roots

"This book charts the vicissitudes of a rural community of papermakers in Sichuan. The process of transforming bamboo into paper involves production-related and social skills, as well as the everyday skills that allowed these papermakers to survive in an era of tumultuous change. The Chinese revolution—understood as a series of interconnected political, social, and technological transformations—was, Jacob Eyferth argues, as much about the redistribution of skill, knowledge, and technical control as it was about the redistribution of land and political power.The larger context for this study is the “rural–urban divide”: the institutional, social, and economic cleavages that separate rural people from urbanites. This book traces the changes in the distribution of knowledge that led to a massive transfer of technical control from villages to cities, from primary producers to managerial elites, and from women to men. It asks how a vision of rural people as unskilled has affected their place in the body politic and contributed to their disenfranchisement. By viewing skill as a contested resource, subject to distribution struggles, it addresses the issue of how revolution, state-making, and marketization have changed rural China."

Spanning the whole of the twentieth century, How China Works examines the labour issues surrounding the workplace in China in both the Republican and People's Republic epochs. The international team of contributors treat China's twentieth-century revolution as an industrial revolution, stressing that China's recent emergence as the new workshop of the world was a gradual change, and not a recent phenomena led by external forces. Providing the reader with extensive ethnographic research on topics such as culture and community in the workplace, the rural-urban divide, industrialization, subcontracting and employment practices, How China Works really does ground the study of Chinese work in the daily interactions in the workplace, the labour process and the micropolitics of work.

A powerful work of grassroots history, tracing China's rural-urban divide back to the policies of Mao Zedong, which pitted city dwellers against villagers.

"Among the biggest challenges facing leaders of the newly established People's Republic of China (PRC) was how much they did not know. In 1949, at the end of a long sequence of wars, the government of one of the largest states in the world committed to fundamentally re-engineering its society and economy via socialist planning while having almost no hard, reliable statistical data about their own country. This book is a history of attempts made to resolve this "crisis in counting." Drawing on a wealth of official, institutional, and private sources culled from China, India, and the United States, the author explores the choices made and the effects they engendered through a series of vivid encounters with political leaders, professional statisticians, academics, ordinary statistical workers, and even literary figures. Early reliance on Soviet-inspired methods of enumeration became increasingly untenable in China by the middle of the 1950s. A series of unprecedented and unexpected exchanges with Indian statisticians followed, as the Chinese sought to learn about the then exciting new technology of random sampling. These developments were, in turn, overtaken by the tumult of the Great Leap Forward (1958-1961), when both probabilistic and exhaustive methods were rejected and statistics was refashioned into an essentially ethnographic enterprise. The author argues that this history, usually narrowly described as a universal, if European history, cannot be understood without acknowledging Soviet and Indian influences which not only revises existing models of Cold War science but also globalizes the wider developments in the history of statistics and data. For historians of China and social science, and political scientists, sociologists, and anthropologists studying modern China"--

This book observes the growing importance of individual well-being for collective health in socialist China and the limitations this brought on the authorities. Engaging with contemporary popular media discourse—including handbooks and magazine articles on health and health practices—to demonstrate how biomedical knowledge was ingrained in the readership, this book uncovers the detailed path to health propagated by state media for the Chinese population. This authority-sanctioned discussion opened up a space for talking about a body entwined with production and the personal experience of daily life. Nutrition, exercise, and rest were the main fields in which the party– state encouraged and accommodated healthy behavior to foster a strong population in the wake of the building of the "New China." These three case studies highlight the network of social groups, institutions, and experts involved in the production and implementation of health knowledge as well as the continuity of health discourse itself. Through a thorough exploration of these three pillars of health and the emerging debate on civilization diseases, this book unearths the often-ignored limits of state control over human bodies.

Maoism at the Grassroots challenges state-centered views of China under Mao, providing insights into the lives of citizens across social strata, ethnicities, and regions. It reveals how ordinary people risked persecution and imprisonment in order to assert personal beliefs and identities, despite political repression and surveillance.

Water for All chronicles how Bolivians democratized water access, focusing on the Cochabamba region, which is known for acute water scarcity and explosive water protests. Sarah T. Hines examines conflict and compromises over water from the 1870s to the 2010s, showing how communities of water users increased supply and extended distribution through collective labor and social struggle. Analyzing a wide variety of sources, from agrarian reform case records to oral history interviews, Hines investigates how water dispossession in the late nineteenth century and reclaimed water access in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries prompted, shaped, and strengthened popular and indigenous social movements. The struggle for democratic control over water culminated in the successful 2000 Water War, a decisive turning point for Bolivian politics. This story offers lessons for contemporary resource management and grassroots movements about how humans can build equitable, democratic, and sustainable resource systems in the Andes, Latin America, and beyond.

This new social history of Maoist China provides an accessible view of the complex and tumultuous period when China came under Communist rule.