At a time when many scholars blithely announce the end of peasant China, Alexander F. Day makes a strong case for the enduring centrality of the peasant, both as a topic of debate and as a real-life problem that may yet come to disrupt the political consensus of postsocialist China. This important and well-researched study charts Chinese debates on the peasant since the death of Mao—debates which, as Day shows, were always as much about the nation's past and future as they were about the plight of rural people. Day structures his discussion around the opposition between “liberals” and “new leftists”; a third group, the “mainstream economists” (more influential than either liberals or leftists, but less prominent in public debates) receives somewhat less attention. One can quibble with these terms: most of the protagonists reject them for themselves, and the positions taken are often too complex to fit these labels. They do however point to a real difference between those who see the problems of rural China as resulting from an incomplete transition to a market economy and advocate a further deepening of market reforms, including the wholesale privatization of land and the removal of restrictions on migration, and those who see the full integration of rural China into a market economy as neither possible nor desirable, and call for a rebuilding of cooperative structures to protect the rural population from dependency on a global market.
The first chapter of The Peasant in Postsocialist China discusses early reform-era attempts to come to grips with the Maoist past—now often understood as a misguided “agrarian-utopian” experiment—and with a rapidly changing countryside at the time of decollectivization. These debates inverted an earlier Maoist narrative on the “dual nature” of the peasant: while Maoists lauded the broad peasant masses for their selflessness and revolutionary fervor and attacked individuals who pursued private profit, the new discourse celebrated risk-taking farmer-entrepreneurs but saw peasants in general as egalitarian and fatalistic.
Qin Hui, the subject of Day's second chapter, provided a sophisticated historical underpinning for the view that China's problems were rooted in peasant egalitarianism. An agrarian historian and prominent public intellectual, Qin argued that the principal contradiction in Chinese history was not between rich and poor but between those with and those without power—in other words, between governing elites and peasant masses, who were to blame for their own powerlessness because of their willing submission to state power. What China needed was a heavy dose of enlightenment: separation of public and private spheres; withdrawal of the state from the economy; and individual legal rights, including property rights.
The new leftists, discussed in chapters 3 and 4, turned against the liberal endorsement of markets and property rights as the way out for China's peasants. Academic leftists such as Cui Zhiyuan, Gan Yang, and Wang Hui were heartened by the strong performance of Township and Village Enterprises (TVEs) in the 1990s, which they saw as proof for the possibility of a development based on collective ownership of means of production. These hopes did not outlast the late 1990s, when the focus of reforms shifted to urban areas, most TVEs went bankrupt or were privatized, and cash-strapped local governments dramatically increased rural tax burdens. In this situation, the agricultural economist Wen Tiejun coined the phrase of a “triple rural crisis” (sannong wenti) simultaneously affecting peasants (nongmin), agriculture (nongye), and the countryside (nongcun). Bland as it was, the sannong formula forced a realization that China's rural problem had a social and moral dimension: what was at stake was not just the efficiency of the agricultural sector but the livelihood of millions of rural people who could not yet be assimilated into the market economy and who risked becoming a marginalized and potentially disruptive underclass.
Chapters 5 and 6 discuss the unfolding of the sannong debate through the work of engaged journalists and rural sociologists, and the emergence of the “new rural reconstruction” (xin xiangcun jianshe) and “rights protection” (wei quan) movements, the former aimed at rebuilding cooperative structures, the latter at defending peasants against the arbitrary power of governments.
These are complex debates, and Day succeeds admirably in bringing out the various positions. At times, the lines are perhaps drawn too sharply: leftists and liberals certainly diverged in their evaluation of the Maoist past and their desires for China's future, but the solutions they proposed were pragmatic and overlapped in important ways. Whether one sees the illiberal state or neoliberal deregulation as the problem, one can certainly see the need for a dual protection against legal and social discrimination at the hands of the government and against the erosion of rural subsistence as a consequence of marketization. What impressed me most in this study is the fact that academics of diverse ideological commitments managed, through fierce disagreement and impassioned debate, to shape public opinion and ultimately alter government policy in ways that benefited the rural population. This fine study should be read by everybody interested in rural China and in the role that public intellectuals play in contemporary China.
