In China's New Socialist Countryside: Modernity Arrives in the Nu River Valley, Russell Harwood explores the intent and impacts of major conservation and development projects in Gongshan county, northwest Yunnan. Located on China's border with Burma at the northern edge of the gorge of the Nu river – made famous by the plans to build a cascade of 13 hydropower plants which were first proposed, then suspended, and now seemingly resumed – the area is characterized by extremely mountainous terrain, poor infrastructure development, rich biodiversity, and an ethnically diverse population including members of the Nu, Dulong, Tibetan, Bai and Naxi ethnic groups, among whom illiteracy and poverty are pervasive. Harwood's study, based on 11 months of ethnographic research between May 2005 and January 2008, focuses on three major forms of state intervention: conservation programmes, including both the Sloping Land Conversion Program (SLCP) and increased policing of the boundaries of the Gaoligongshan National-Level Nature Reserve; strict enforcement of the national nine-year compulsory education policy; and the promotion of outward migration for work.
Harwood shows that local people are made appropriate targets for these interventions through the discursive framing of the “Nujiang issue,” wherein the “backward” and “low-quality” ethnic minority population, with their traditional and purportedly destructive shifting cultivation practices, are responsible for the area's environmental problems as well as its lack of development. The book's central argument is that the development interventions called forth by such a framing appear to create neoliberal subjects who take responsibility for cultivating themselves as market actors, but that these interventions simultaneously make them more integrated into and dependent on the Chinese Party-state. While market reforms seem to mean the withdrawal of the state, what is happening instead is state incorporation and increased government intervention into everyday lives, which happens partly through the reshaping of everyday aspirations and desires. Throughout the text, Harwood refers to these programmes of conservation, education and labour export as part of a larger “social engineering” project to transform low-quality subsistence farmers into higher quality workers who can better participate in the drive to grow China's economy. In this, Harwood employs a governmentality approach, arguing following the work of Gary Sigley that this is a distinctive form in which neoliberal rationalities are blended with authoritarian forms of government intervention.
Glossing authoritarian governmentality as “social engineering” fits with the straightforward prose and the general pitch of the book to a broad audience. As such, it would be quite usable for introducing undergraduates to concepts of political ecology and critical development studies, as well as a suite of important social issues in contemporary China including minzu politics, the discourse of quality (suzhi), rural–urban and geographical disparities, and migration. For specialists, the book largely reinforces existing literature about government interventions into ethnic minority peripheries. For example, like Janet Sturgeon, Harwood illustrates official prejudice that blames shifting cultivation for environmental degradation, which deflects attention away from government culpability for ecological harm. Similarities also include the analysis of narratives presenting local people as poor, backward and incapable of developing themselves, lazy and dependent on the government, as well as their out-competition by outside business migrants (a dynamic that is very important in Tibetan areas as well).
Some of the most interesting insights come from Harwood's brief observations about the ways in which projects intersect with or reinforce each other. For example, he notes that the successful education of parents' desires for their children to stay in school (along with the actual attempts to strictly enforce compulsory education) leads to financial burdens on households. At the same time, SLCP reduces labour requirements on agricultural fields, and both of these factors together help motivate rural–urban migration, which the local government sees as the key to the future. Furthermore, he observes that labour export presents a neat future solution for the significant population displacement that will eventually result from planned hydropower dam construction.
Despite the title, the book actually concerns itself very little with the Construction of the New Socialist Countryside as a specific national strategy launched in 2005, until the revealing and insightful conclusion. There, Harwood tells a story of how a project that he himself launched with a local teacher to build an all-weather concrete path to the local primary school gets encapsulated into the New Socialist Countryside campaign, and results in the village being designated a “model village”; thus this project “inadvertently made me complicit in the state engineering project ... [of] the socialization and political integration of China's ethnic minority population into the Chinese Party-state” (p. 186). Ultimately, then, it is this incorporation that he suggests lies at the heart of the new socialist countryside. I found myself wishing that Harwood had built more of his narrative around his own ethnography rather than devoting as much space as he does to secondary literature, and that he had elaborated on various issues he flags but never discusses, such as the “value system and livelihood structure” (p. 188) of local peoples. The book could also have benefited from a stronger editorial hand in eliminating repetition. Nevertheless it is a valuable contribution and will be of particular interest for use in the classroom.
