Peasants And Revolution In Rural China

This landmark study of Zengbu, a Cantonese community, is the first comprehensive analysis of a rural Chinese society by foreign anthropologists since the Revolution in 1949. Jack and Sulamith Potter examine the revolutionary experiences of Zengbu's peasant villagers and document the rapid changeover from Maoist to post-Maoist China. In particular, they seek to explain the persistence of the deep structure of Chinese culture through thirty years of revolutionary praxis. The authors assess the continuities and changes in rural China, moving from the traditional social organization and cultural life of the pre-revolutionary period through the series of large-scale efforts to implement planned social change which characterized Maoism - land reform, collectivization, the Great Leap Forward, and the Cultural Revolution. They examine in detail late Maoist society in 1979-80 and go on to describe and analyse the extraordinary changes of the post-Mao years, during which Zengbu was decollectivized, and traditional customs and religious practices reappeared.

This book explores rural political change in China from 1850 to 1949 to help us understand China's transformation from a weak, decaying agrarian empire to a unified, strong nation-state during this period.

This book explores rural political change in China from 1850 to 1949 to help us understand China’s transformation from a weak, decaying agrarian empire to a unified, strong nation-state during this period. Based on local gazetteers, contemporary field studies, government archives, personal memoirs and other primary sources, it systematically compares two key macro-regions of rural China – the North China plain and the Yangzi delta – to demonstrate the ways in which the forces of political change, shaped by different local conditions, operated to transform the country. It shows that on the North China plain, the village community composed mainly of owner-cultivators was the focal point for political mobilization, whilst in the Yangzi delta absentee landlordism was exploited by the state for local control and tax extraction. However, these both set the stage, in different ways, for the communist mobilization in the first half of the twentieth century. Peasants and Revolution in Rural China is an important addition to the literature on the history of the Chinese Revolution, and will be of interest to anyone seeking to understand the course of Chinese social and political development.

Kay Ann Johnson provides much-needed information about women and gender equality under Communist leadership. She contends that, although the Chinese Communist Party has always ostensibly favored women's rights and family reform, it has rarely pushed for such reforms. In reality, its policies often have reinforced the traditional role of women to further the Party's predominant economic and military aims. Johnson's primary focus is on reforms of marriage and family because traditional marriage, family, and kinship practices have had the greatest influence in defining and shaping women's place in Chinese society. Conversant with current theory in political science, anthropology, and Marxist and feminist analysis, Johnson writes with clarity and discernment free of dogma. Her discussions of family reform ultimately provide insights into the Chinese government's concern with decreasing the national birth rate, which has become a top priority. Johnson's predictions of a coming crisis in population control are borne out by the recent increase in female infanticide and the government abortion campaign.

When peasants live in complex agrarian societies with distinct hierarchies of power, how much are they able to shape their world? In this socio-economic, political, and anthropological history, Helen F. Siu explores this question by examining a rural community in Guangdong Province from the late nineteenth century to the present.

From Heaven to Earth combines information on events, processes and structures into a comprehensive introduction to the study of reform in rural China. It provides an invaluable complement to contemporary studies of China by economists and political scientists. Elisabeth Croll draws on her extensive research and frequent visits to China, and on her first-hand studies of villages in many different regions, to look behind the simplistic notion of 'reform' as merely a 'return to capitalism'. Taking a distinctively anthropological approach to the subject, she discusses the age-old peasant dreams of sons and land, and how they have been shaped and reshaped to affect the way in which Chinese peasants, men and women, think about time and change. More practically, the study focuses on rural development, emphasising that the peasant household lies at the heart of recent rural reforms, making for new relations between state and village, a new family form, modified gender relations and single or two-child families.

Between 1979 and 1989, rural life in China was transformed: the communes were dismantled, tiny family farms were created, government domination of commerce and enterprise was eased, and many entrepreneurial ventures were brought to life. China's rural reform was arguably the most massive single act of privatization in history. Although Deng Xiaoping's government claimed credit for the dramatic innovations, Daniel Kelliher shows that it was the peasants themselves--with no organization or legal political voice of their own--who instigated the most radical changes of the reform era. Drawing on his fieldwork in Hubei Province and neighboring provinces in south-central China, Kelliher traces the origins of reform in three areas--family farming, marketing, and private entrepreneurship--and details the local conspiracies, deceptions, and illegal experiments that peasants used to push state policy in new directions. He also addresses the larger issue of how disenfranchised peasants could affect politics at all under a strong state like that of China. Analyzing the evolution of state socialism in China, Kelliher explains how state ambitions for modernization in the post-Mao era made the state-socialist system vulnerable to rising peasant power. He also shows why the state seized upon economic privatization as a way of securing its political base among the peasantry. The book not only offers a wide-ranging portrait of rural politics in contemporary China but also uses the Chinese case to illuminate state-peasant relations, reform in state socialism, and privatization in other third world nations.