This book examines the academic and policy debates over the direction of China's rural reform and in doing so also explores the theoretical framework of knotty global development problems, such as rural–urban migration, role of agriculture, citizen rights, communal goods and state–society relations. A welcome addition to current scholarship, this book will be of interest to scholars and graduate students studying any aspect of China's economic reform thus far as well as the future of China's economy, politics and society. The questions addressed by Day are at the heart of the debates about China's economic development policy, the fate of the “peasantry,” macroeconomic trends in urbanization and investment, and what a developed China will look like.
Tracing carefully the intellectual lineages of the major Chinese schools of thought on China's political, economic and social configurations, this book draws heavily upon Chinese-language debates and resources, supplemented with numerous key interviews. Day raises issues that apply to development and modernization challenges across the world as globalization raises issues of market access, opportunity, inequality, consumption, citizen rights and local empowerment. Day also shows the links and influences of prominent scholars of rural transformation, such as James C. Scott, Karl Polanyi, A.V. Chayanov, Proudhon and others (although often buried in the footnotes). Day contrasts the mainstream (or “neo-liberal”) Chinese economist view that champions increased government investment and continued interference in the economy with the “liberal” Chinese scholars who believe that reform-era problems “could only be solved by pushing market reforms further and giving citizens more rights” (pp. 7–8). Liberals see markets as necessary to liberate social forces and break state interference, while freedoms and modernization could be derailed by populist politics protecting rural citizens from the market (p. 48). Liberals critique Maoist politics of the peasant (p. 16) and used feudalism, the Asiatic mode of production, and the problems of peasant quality (suzhi) to argue that peasants needed liberation from traditional and populist collectives to transform themselves into entrepreneurial farmers (pp. 16, 18). Additionally, “[w]ithout democracy and the separation of state power from the economic field… power was ‘marketized’ (quanli de shichanghua) and people in positions of power were able to ‘plunder’ public wealth” (pp. 62–63). Interestingly, protesting peasants are conceived as acting as citizens only when they protest state taxation or state land grabs, that is, “when they act as members of society in tension with the state” not with the market (p. 69).
As the crisis of the “three rural problems” (sannong wenti: peasants, rural society and agriculture) deepened in the mid-1990s, this liberal view was critiqued by a diverse group of “new left” scholars. These scholars had varying analyses and solutions, using concepts of migrant labour, rural enterprises (TVEs), collective land or other cultural and institutional resources to work towards a rural political economy that would respond to peasant interests (pp. 83–84, 90). The new left opposed the liberals’ idealization of capitalism as a “largely power-free market,” and looked to Fei Xiaotong's early 20th-century work on village communities for a more gradualist and cultural approach and a development path different from that of the West (p. 80). For example, Renmin University professor Wen Tiejun founded the school of the “nativization” (bentihua) of social science to include historical trends and a kind of structuralist-cum-culturalist understanding of difference.
The “new Left” developed the “new rural reconstruction movement” (xing xiangcun jianshe yundong), not to be confused with the 2005 Chinese CCP policy “building a new socialist countryside” (jianshe shehuizhuyi xin nongcun). The new rural reconstruction movement, which had scarcely been discussed in English prior to the welcome publication of Day's earlier version of this chapter in 2008, attacked “the marketization of rural society – of land, labor and money – [for bringing] great suffering” and sought practical solutions using institutional and cooperative experiments to transform rural society and the rural–urban relationship (p. 164). The movement is too diverse to be done justice in a short review, but ranges from the use of culture as a mobilization tool, to the diversion of state investment in the countryside into public goods, to developing varied social institutions to protect the socially weak (pp. 170, 175). Day argues “that we should see new rural reconstruction as an active rural social protection movement against the complete marketization of social life through the building of new social and cultural relations of cooperation in the countryside” (p. 182). By accommodating but modifying markets, rather than rejecting them, new cooperatives could find a niche to survive in a political economy dominated by marketizing trends, and by doing so, develop the countryside in a more equitable and stabilizing way.
In the conclusion, which I highly recommend for all scholars of rural transformation, Day explores the key theoretical deficits and issues that must be resolved in the search for China's healthy economic future: understanding factors that shape the rural–urban flow of migrants, the failed integration of agriculture with capitalism (and the dis/advantages of rural autonomy from capitalism), conceptions of migrants and “peasants,” narratives of society (and its re-politicization), and the response of the state to rural crisis (p. 190). Day concludes that current debates of the possible in China may be constricting solutions – both the limits of “the Polanyian narrative of market invasion and social protection and the liberal narrative that pits society against the state” “enable political stances that avoid a direct engagement with the fact of China's integration into global capitalism” (p. 194). The clash of views is being played out in China today over the formulation of the new “building a new socialist countryside” policy, as stakeholders fight over turning peasants into consumers or creating a newly invigorated rural cooperative culture (pp. 196–7). Outcomes depend on “the state's new interest in the rural sphere, the reaction of local-level government officials, and whether the peasantry becomes a political actor that is able to exercise its social power effectively” (p. 197).
The book's organization unfortunately obscures its most important and powerful points, which emerge clearly only in the conclusion. The early outline of the broad issues would have foregrounded Day's contributions to the ongoing global conceptual and theoretical debates about peasants and modernization. Additionally, it would have been nice to have more detailed discussion post 2006, particularly on the “building a new socialist countryside” policy. However, do read this book for its powerful and nuanced argument about China's path ahead.
