Based on a combination of field and archival research, Jacob Eyferth's new study aims to “chart the twentieth-century history of a community of rural artisans” (p. 1), the titular papermakers of Jiajiang County in western Sichuan. The book promises coverage of an eighty-year span, but it is strongest on the period of the People's Republic, particularly the transition of the rural economy since the 1970s.
The central argument of the book concerns the “de-skilling” of the rural handicraft industry under socialism. Captivated by a desire to restructure the countryside, policy makers and technocrats progressively handicapped rural industries, turning skilled laborers into grain-producing peasants and enforcing a new divide between city and countryside. The dismantling of paper production had disastrous repercussions, not merely economic, on the elaborate social infrastructure of the papermaking industry.
The early chapters establish something of a baseline of presocialist production, albeit one that is never firmly set in time. The first of these outlines the technical process of papermaking, investment in equipment and supplies, and the roles of domestic and wage labor. The second presents prerevolutionary Jiajiang. Certain elements of this discussion, such as the difference between populous Hedong and rural Hexi districts, relate directly to the history of the papermaking villages, while others, such as the explanation of religious associations and the baojia system, seem rather tangential to the story at hand. The third outlines the web of obligations that ran throughout the production and marketing of paper. Most workshops produced on a small scale: few required more than seven full-time laborers, and more than half combined papermaking with farming (p. 69). Thin profit margins and high fluctuations of capital outlay were mitigated by a vital network of personal relations of trust between producers and marketers. Credit was available to those with a good reputation, while payments for sales were often made in bulk and in advance (yu huo). Those outside this network of trust operated at a distinct disadvantage.
Chapters 5–8 are the most clearly historical, and the heart of the book. Eyferth shows the papermaking industry generally prospering under Qing and Republican rule, the good times interrupted by warlord misrule and two agricultural crises, which drove up the market price for grain to nearly ruinous levels. The paper market was not greatly affected either by imperialism or by Guomindang attempts to introduce new production techniques or, in a taste of things to come, to centralize production on a larger scale. Ironically, the People's Republic implemented these same policies, and, with its control over the grain market, proved much more effective in doing so. Socialist planners saw no place for handicraft production, which they insisted was outmoded and inefficient, but, until 1958, they remained content first to squeeze producers into handing up more paper for less grain, and gradually to integrate them into a succession of larger cooperatives. From the time of the Great Leap Forward through the 1970s, however, papermaking ground largely to a halt, with grain production mandated either by the state or by necessity, driving the entire countryside into subsistence farming.
After 1978, the paper industry again became profitable, but the decimation of skills and the division of productive resources among households forced small producers to again band together. New technologies such as recycling waste paper pulp made the process cheaper, faster to turn a profit, and less labor intensive. A few particularly enterprising marketers established distribution networks on a national scale, although many of the markets remained local, using the same sort of advance credit arrangements that had characterized the industry in the 1940s. Compared to the revival of papermaking, new village-based industries, based on the factory model, fared poorly.
This study paints a rich and detailed picture of how a handcraft community weathered the quickly shifting winds of social and economic change. Eyferth writes with the authority and intimacy that can only come from fieldwork. However, the book is not without its problems, the greatest of which is the lack of a strong narrative to tie the chapters together. Despite Eyferth's concise and clear explication of what is at stake in skill, skill-transfer and de-skilling, this reviewer did not find these issues sufficiently compelling as an organizing problematic, and wished that other important insights, such as the state-led reversion to grain monoculture, or the maintenance of a new urban–rural divide, had been given more systematic attention. The level of detail is admirable, but at times overwhelming, particularly when brief deviations into suggestive questions (why workshops still vary so greatly in size, differences between development in Hedong and Hexi) are not pursued.
These problems aside, Eyferth's intriguing and unique study sheds new light on two vital yet poorly understood points of transition for the Chinese rural economy, and it lays a solid foundation for future scholars to build upon.
