Existing Theory

To be sure, the spread of similar institutions across the region led to extraordinary gains in agricultural production. In Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan, these included smallholder farming systems grounded in private property rights, comprehensive extension services maintained by technocratic bureaucracies and encompassing farmers’ organizations, and extensive state control over rice and staple foods. These circumstances enabled the transfer of resources throughout the economy and facilitated broad-based growth in agriculture. In the 1950s, production quickly returned to and then surpassed prewar peak levels. Agriculture’s average annual growth rate was 3 percent in Japan (1955–1970), 3.5 percent in South Korea (1954–1973), and 4.6 percent in Taiwan (1952–1967). In contrast, the global average for the period 1952–1971 was just 2.7 percent.Footnote ¹³

In China, the move away from socialist agriculture after 1978 brought sweeping institutional reforms and impressive production gains. Collective farms and the grain-rationing system were dismantled, household farming and rural markets were introduced, new economic activities were encouraged (for example, township and village enterprises), and technocrats at all levels of the party-state were promoted.Footnote ¹⁴ In many ways, China started resembling its neighbors, not least in terms of economic performance. China’s average annual growth rate for agriculture was 3.9 percent (1984–2006), again higher than the global average of 2.7 percent for that exact period. Even more noteworthy, during the early transition years (1978–1984), agriculture grew 10 percent annually, causing the share of the rural population living in absolute poverty to be cut in half—from 31 percent to 15 percent, or from 250 million people to 128 million people—a historic achievement in global poverty reduction.Footnote ¹⁵

These outcomes notwithstanding, the effects of initial conditions, land reform, and developmental states on the rural sector were far from uniformly positive. Regarding initial conditions, on the one hand, an important legacy of the region’s prewar (and pre-reform) rural modernization efforts was effective state penetration of the countryside. In Meiji Japan (1868–1912) as well as in colonial Taiwan (1895–1945) and in Korea (1910–1945), state authorities built advanced systems of transport, taxation, finance, education, and administration. In agriculture, they expanded on grassroots innovations and infrastructure, aiding the diffusion of technologies through cultivating landlords and state-controlled farmers’ organizations. And although many policies were met with resistance, local communities were brought into ever closer contact with the state.Footnote ¹⁶ Similarly, in China under Mao (1949–1976), the rural population was quickly incorporated into the state administration. By the mid-1950s, over 90 percent of administrative villages had functioning Chinese Communist Party (ccp) committees, and a comparable share of farm households had entered into officially mandated cooperatives (precursors to collective farms or people’s communes).Footnote ¹⁷ These institutions were at times strongly ideological and hostile toward science, but they also oversaw major advances in irrigation and green revolution technologies, such as improved seed varieties and chemical inputs.Footnote ¹⁸ Thus, in all these cases, later generations of modernizers benefited from preexisting resources for development.

On the other hand, throughout the Japanese empire, farmers suffered from exploitative tenancy relations and excessive state extraction, which offset the advantages of higher yields. In Korea, between 1915 and 1933, increased rice exports to Japan caused a 35 percent drop in per capita consumption and over the next decade, more than a million people affected by food shortages migrated to Japan or Manchuria.Footnote ¹⁹ The situation for Taiwan’s farmers was less precarious due to lower population density, fewer absentee landlords, and greater off-farm employment, but Japan still controlled Taiwan’s rural economy, especially rice and sugar, and tenant farmers paid at least half of their main crop in rent. The plight of tenant farmers in Japan was not much better. In the 1920s–1930s, faced with exorbitant rents and volatile prices, they formed thousands of tenant unions to curb the power of landlords and local political elites. But as most groups were suppressed or absorbed by the state, they were largely unsuccessful.Footnote ²⁰ Postwar efforts to rehabilitate the region’s rural institutions were consequently hindered by a certain level of public distrust. In South Korea, many people welcomed the collapse of the colonial agricultural bureaucracy, and it was not until the 1960s that a national farmers’ organization was reestablished (with minimal fanfare).Footnote ²¹ Likewise, in Maoist China, many development achievements were wiped out by excessive extraction, population growth, and political extremism. With the advent of reform, Chinese farmers celebrated the demise of institutions that symbolized past hardships. And attempts to adapt old institutions to the new economy, for example, by marketizing rural cooperatives, failed to gain traction.Footnote ²²

The contributions of land reform and decollectivization to rural development, while significant, have been exaggerated by scholars. In Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan, land reform turned most tenant farmers into land owners. It stabilized the countryside politically, improved the distribution of income, and compelled former landlords to transfer their wealth to industry, but the effect on agriculture was mixed. Whereas some studies assert that land reform raised agricultural output and incomes, others suggest that these outcomes were not due to land reform per se, and that its main effect was to reduce farm size (typically to less than one hectare). The reforms strengthened producer incentives in the short term, but extreme parcelization of land limited the prospects for long-term growth and forced many families to seek sources of non-farm income. Perhaps the biggest legacy of land reform was to lock in place the position of small farmers. It helped the region to avoid the problem of bimodal development (a wealth gap between large commercial farmers and small subsistence farmers) but also impeded mechanization and even modest economies of scale, causing growth rates to level off. The same was true in China, where decollectivization granted land-use rights to individual households, a change that promised greater freedom despite falling short of privatization. After an initial productivity burst, agricultural growth rates slowed considerably. The 3.9 percent average (1984–2006) mentioned above, though higher than most countries, was just one point above pre-reform levels (the annual average for 1963–1981 was 2.9 percent), indicating that smaller farms were not necessarily more efficient. Additionally, in the four countries, rural income growth was mostly tied to non-farm wages, and the reforms offered no solution to urban bias or to the rural-urban divide.Footnote ²³

There is a misconception that East Asia’s developmental states did not exploit agriculture, but the notion that they achieved “growth with equity” through an “agriculture-oriented” development strategy has a long history in development economics.Footnote ²⁴ Its influence is also evident in contemporary policy discussions in other regions. Ethiopia’s government, for example, has promoted an agricultural development-led industrialization policy said to have been inspired by the East Asian (as well as South and Southeast Asian) cases, where pro-poor, pro-rural policies preceded industrialization.Footnote ²⁵ To clarify, East Asia’s income distribution was, for a time, remarkably egalitarian. The degree of urban bias—as measured by rural-urban differences in capital stocks, government expenditures, public services, and price and exchange rate distortions—was also less severe than in other parts of the world.Footnote ²⁶ But still, urban bias was fundamental to East Asian agricultural policy.

The nominal and relative rates of assistance for agriculture (nra and rra, respectively), which compare domestic farm prices to international market prices and non-farm product prices, were negative in South Korea and Taiwan until about 1970 and in China until about 2000, implying that the main concern of these governments before then was to extract a rural surplus for industrialization.Footnote ²⁷ Agriculture in postwar Japan was protected from the outset, although prior to the war it was similarly exploited. In the 1870s–1890s, agriculture provided up to 91 percent of total direct taxes, amounting to roughly 15 percent of agricultural GDP, yet it received less than 2 percent of total government subsidies. In the 1900s–1930s, industry shouldered a larger tax burden, albeit usually no more than 2 to 4 percent of industrial GDP, and it continued receiving the lion’s share of government investment. The result was a serious deterioration in Japanese farmers’ relative income position. In 1885, farm households earned 24 percent less than non-farm households; by 1930, the difference was 68 percent.Footnote ²⁸

This pattern repeats in postwar South Korea and Taiwan, where in addition to direct taxes, farmers paid hidden taxes through an official rice-fertilizer barter system managed by the national farmers’ organization, which was essentially the only channel for buying or selling those items. These two countries furthermore imported massive amounts of cheap food from the US under its 1954 Agricultural Trade Development and Assistance Act (Public Law 480, or the Food for Peace program), as did Japan, which depressed domestic farm prices but appeased urban consumers, industrialists, and other groups interested in keeping food and wage costs down.Footnote ²⁹ And in China, rural reform resulted in less state control over agriculture, but also in a continuation of the developmental squeeze. For most of the 1980s and 1990s, only about 3 percent of central investment in China went toward agriculture, with the expectation that local officials would raise their own development funds. Many imposed onerous taxes on farmers and used the money for local industry rather than for public goods. The quality of rural roads, schools, and clinics declined, and the rural-urban gap widened. Heavy “peasant burdens” gradually gave rise to widespread social unrest.Footnote ³⁰

In summary, East Asia’s developmental states successfully stimulated agricultural production, but like developing countries elsewhere, they sacrificed farmers’ interests for industrialization. The institutions responsible for rural economic growth (local governments and farmers’ organizations) were used to implement discriminatory price, trade, and investment policies, leading to uneven progress along different dimensions of development. Growth in agricultural production was generally not matched by similar gains in rural incomes, welfare, and infrastructure. It should be noted that strong rural-urban linkages in Japan, Taiwan, and coastal China provided farmers with more economic opportunities than was the case in South Korea or in the Chinese interior. But in all these places, rising rural-urban inequality fueled popular discontent, and the difficulties of agricultural adjustment were magnified by the pace of economic change. In South Korea, for example, it took less than three decades for agriculture’s share of gdp to fall from 40 percent to 7 percent, compared with it taking a full century or longer to fall similarly in early industrializing countries.Footnote ³¹

A purely technocratic response to the agricultural adjustment problem would have been to create a more favorable policy environment for agriculture akin to that of the industrial sector: a state-led but market-conforming development strategy based on targeted investments, skills promotion, and other sector-based coordination and support measures. Instead, technocratic and mobilizational politics were fused together. The governments of Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, and China did not just offer a plan-rational fix to the rural problem—they harnessed the power of the masses to transform the face of the countryside.

The Rise of Campaign States

State-led campaigns are policies that rely on intensive mobilization to achieve dramatic change. Although bureaucratic mobilization is central to all campaigns, the degree of popular mobilization may vary based on campaign targets.Footnote ³² Early scholarship on Mao-era China classified campaigns as “ideological,” “struggle,” or “economic” in nature. Charles Cell accordingly defines the concept as “an organized mobilization of collective action aimed at transforming thought patterns, class/power relationships and/or economic institutions and productivity.” Cell further notes that despite having fuzzy parameters, all campaigns involve “increased intensity of activity beyond what is expected in regular work and living routines.”Footnote ³³ Similarly, Gordon Bennett describes the Chinese term yundong (campaign) as “a government-sponsored effort to storm and eventually overwhelm strong but vulnerable barriers to the progress of socialism through intensive mass mobilization and active personal commitment.”Footnote ³⁴

Writing from a broader historical perspective, Julia Strauss documents the many meanings of yundong—physical exercise, military operations, social movements, and efforts by the ccp and kmt (Kuomintang, or the Chinese Nationalist Party) to mobilize the populations they controlled. She explains that today, yundong, in the sense of campaign, refers to “the state’s extraordinary mobilization of people and resources to implement a specific program to accomplish particular goals in a defined period of time.” Moreover, campaigns constitute a “modality of policy implementation” that relies on the bureaucracy while also diverging from it in terms of “extraordinary mobilization, sharp focus, compressed time scale, and sidestepping rules.”Footnote ³⁵ Adding to this insight, campaigns are used to try to circumvent institutional constraints to change by reordering and augmenting existing power structures or by creating new structures that incorporate extra-institutional actors, such as local activists, organizations, and interest groups. Campaigns may therefore resemble social movements, but they differ because of the state’s preeminent role in their execution. And contrary to official claims of popular spontaneity, there is usually a coercive element dictating mass participation. This conceptualization can be usefully applied to cases that predate Chinese communism and to cases outside China.Footnote ³⁶

Building on these works, I define rural modernization campaigns as policies aimed at overhauling agrarian society through intensive bureaucratic and popular mobilization. Common in authoritarian states, though by no means limited to them, examples include land reforms, green revolutions, cooperative movements, collectivization schemes, and mass literacy, health, and sanitation drives. Rural modernization campaigns often exhibit both hard and soft qualities, combining infrastructural and economic goals with spiritual and moral ones. They can foster development by overcoming resource shortages and other barriers to change and promote legitimacy by extending ideological control and state patronage. Mobilization—defined here as an extraordinary, state-sponsored effort to activate and involve a population in the pursuit of certain goals—serves as the dominant mode of policy implementation. During campaigns, the state may employ such tactics as defining core tasks, dispatching work teams, empowering activists, identifying models, spreading propaganda, and exerting pressure to break up administrative routines and to overwhelm ingrained attitudes and behaviors. Footnote ³⁷

Japan provides the region’s earliest example of a campaign approach to development—beginning with the Local Improvement Movement at the start of the twentieth century, continuing with the Rural Revitalization Campaign in the wake of the Great Depression, and resuming after World War II with the New Village and New Life Campaigns. In Korea, the colonial government mounted its own Rural Revitalization Campaign in the 1930s. Following the peninsula’s division in 1945, the North orchestrated the Chollima (flying horse) Movement in the 1950s and 1960s, and the South carried out the Saemaul (new village, or community) Movement in the 1970s. In Republican-era China (1912— 1949), the ccp and kmt went head-to-head in their efforts to establish cooperatives, each claiming leadership over a national Cooperative Movement in the 1920s and 1930s. The kmt also conducted the New Life Movement during that same period (this name was later borrowed by Japan in the 1950s). After the 1949 revolution, the ccp launched hundreds of campaigns on the mainland (affecting not just the countryside, but virtually all sectors and populations), while the kmt, exiled to Taiwan, directed the People’s Livelihood Construction Campaign starting in 1955, followed by the Community Development Campaign beginning in 1965. And in all four countries, the entire bureaucracy was mobilized along with tenant farmers to execute a major land redistribution campaign.Footnote ³⁸ As an aside, in Western scholarship the term “land reform” implies something less revolutionary and less communist, which may explain why it is usually applied to cases that received US support (Japan, South Korea, Taiwan), and why so much of the scholarship has ignored land reform’s campaign features. As the region became more democratic, the line between campaigns and social movements blurred, and state-sponsored mobilization gave way to less interventionist policy measures, such as rural subsidies.Footnote ³⁹ But rural modernization campaigns live on in China, as evidenced by the Building a New Socialist Countryside and Rural Revitalization initiatives, which began in 2005 and 2017, respectively.

From the farmers’ perspective, these were campaign states rather than developmental states. Certainly, scholars have documented the region’s campaigns in greater detail than is possible here. Two noteworthy studies are Sheldon Garon’s work on Japan, which examines how campaigns were used from the early Meiji period onward as a social management tool, and Tyrene White’s work on China, which shows how campaign tactics were adapted in the post-Mao era to enforce the one-child policy.Footnote ⁴⁰ Yet campaigns have been conspicuously absent from research on East Asia’s political economy. To the extent that mobilization is discussed, it is as a background factor that enabled the rise of developmental states and imbued them with revolutionary legitimacy. According to Chalmers Johnson, who pioneered the developmental state concept, Japan had “an economy mobilized for war that never demobilized during peacetime.” He further states, “its leaders are somewhat akin to those of revolutionary mass movements.”Footnote ⁴¹ Still, Johnson is writing generally about the mobilization of industry and does not give the impression that campaigns mattered for the Japanese miracle. While few political economists would make that argument, treating mobilization as ancillary to technocratic norms also misses the point that rural policy, and indeed the history of East Asian agrarian change, is inextricably linked to campaigns.

This is not to suggest that campaigns always succeeded or benefited farmers, but they were not invariably harmful either. Campaigns occurring at the later stages of industrialization, when the transition from urban bias was underway, were especially influential. In each case—Japan’s Rural Revitalization Campaign, South Korea’s Saemaul Movement, Taiwan’s Community Development Campaign, and China’s Building a New Socialist Countryside—poor and isolated communities witnessed the arrival of electricity, paved roads, clean water, and upgraded housing, which led to vast improvements in productivity and quality of life.Footnote ⁴² Those outcomes would not have occurred so quickly, often in just two or three years, without the extraordinary pooling of state and community resources, including villagers’ own labor and capital. The use of campaigns at a time of industrial expansion also indicates that East Asian governments did not put much trust in surplus labor absorption or even in guided market forces to solve rural underdevelopment. Campaigns are therefore significant, empirically and theoretically, for their far-reaching effects on the countryside and the style of politics they embody. Delving into the origins of campaigns reveals that at the height of authoritarian developmentalism, there were other, less technocratic forces at work—and those forces were just as consequential for East Asian political and economic development.

Revolutionary (and Counterrevolutionary) Traditions of Technocracies

The bulk of research on developmental states provides a snapshot of these East Asian regimes during high-growth periods, depicting them as (mostly) modern Weberian bureaucracies based on hierarchical authority, legal rules, functional specialization, and meritocratic recruitment.Footnote ⁴³ Studies focused on the origins of developmental states take a longer view, although the effects of war and revolution on political development remain undertheorized or at least have not been fully explored beyond demonstrating that security threats contributed to elite cohesion.Footnote ⁴⁴ From imperialism and fascism in Japan, to Maoism in China, to right-wing authoritarianism in Taiwan and South Korea, revolutionary traditions greatly shaped these countries’ development trajectories, even as technocratic rule was being consolidated.

My argument rests on the idea that revolutionary traditions can exist under different types of regimes, including the conservative or reformist regimes of postwar Japan, Taiwan, and South Korea, which did not come to power via social revolution. As such, the meaning of “revolutionary tradition” used here is an inherited political strategy, practice, or impulse that developed in the context of war and was bound up with the pursuit of fundamental societal change, even if the change envisioned was to revive traditional morality, to rejuvenate the nation, or to prevent bottom-up communist revolution. As Arif Dirlik observes of the kmt’s 1930s’ New Life Movement in mainland China, a campaign that emphasized hygienic and behavioral reforms: “The contradictory claims of revolutionism and conservatism did not merely distort or cancel out one another; they were synthesized into an ideology of counterrevolution.”Footnote ⁴⁵ Mass mobilization was intended to transform society so that it would fully support rather than undermine existing bureaucratic structures. Despite this difference with the region’s communist revolutionary movements, the mobilization methods embraced by both left- and right-wing regimes were surprisingly similar and continued well into the postwar period.Footnote ⁴⁶

Of course, nowhere is the durability of revolutionary traditions more obvious than in China. Despite Deng Xiaoping’s repudiation of campaigns at the start of reform, they persist and continue to be used for policy enforcement, regional development, ideological work, crisis management, and anticorruption. As White and others note, the continuation of campaigns partly stems from path dependence and the Maoist imprint on political culture. It also reflects the regime’s confidence in mobilization as a check against bureaucratic ossification and as a practical method for effecting change. The communists’ penchant for mass mobilization developed during the Jiangxi Soviet and Yan’an periods, when they leaned on the peasantry for survival and guerrilla warfare. After 1949, wartime mobilization tactics were deployed for purposes of state-building, governance, and development. Maoist revolutionary politics oscillated between storming (subjecting the party to rectification by the masses) and engineering (subjecting the masses to party-controlled mobilization); and while the former impulse faded under reform, the latter survived.Footnote ⁴⁷

In 2005, Hu Jintao’s government unveiled Building a New Socialist Countryside, an ambitious effort to stimulate production, raise living standards, reform rural culture, beautify villages, and improve governance. The policy was never officially called a campaign, but it was understood and implemented that way. Plans that stressed speed and hard targets were drawn up, special committees were formed to realign bureaucratic interests, and cadre work teams were sent to the villages. Propaganda appeared on billboards, buildings, and fences. The phrase “building a new socialist countryside” could be traced to the revolutionary days of the 1950s. This slogan’s resurrection, which first gained prominence during the Great Leap Forward, signaled the policy’s importance. But a wariness of campaigns also surfaced in central leaders’ statements, including warnings against “overnight success,” wasteful exercises in “image engineering,” and actions “violating the wishes of the masses.”Footnote ⁴⁸ This tension between mobilization’s appeal and its potential excesses is important to understanding why, in the years since Mao, the ccp has repeatedly conducted campaigns without announcing them as such. A recent example is Xi Jinping’s Rural Revitalization Strategy, introduced in 2017, which outlined goals similar to the New Socialist Countryside, but with added emphasis on poverty eradication. An outgrowth of China’s war on poverty, the policy highlights how campaign-style governance has only become more pronounced under Xi.Footnote ⁴⁹

The institutionalization that occurs as a revolutionary regime matures does not mean that mobilization inevitably disappears. Examining the development of European Leninist parties, Kenneth Jowitt finds that even with more systematic social inclusion in politics, mobilization still served to tighten control over society and to address political challenges.Footnote ⁵⁰ Although Jowitt would likely classify the kmt as reformist rather than revolutionary, this insight aptly describes the party’s political development in Taiwan. In the early 1950s, Chiang Kai-shek’s defeated kmt regime reorganized itself based on the ccp ’s example of elevating the party above the state and military, becoming more Leninist than it was on the mainland.Footnote ⁵¹ It also mimicked the communists during land reform, employing similar propaganda and mobilization methods.Footnote ⁵² That pattern continued during the People’s Livelihood Construction Campaign, launched in 1955, which like the New Life Movement emphasized behavioral change, but also focused on mobilizing village labor for infrastructure development.Footnote ⁵³ Over the next two decades, as the regime became more institutionalized and inclusive, for example, by expanding elections and recruiting more Taiwanese into politics, it continued using mobilization to accomplish its goals. The Community Development Campaign of the late 1960s and 1970s is a case in point. It aimed to “eliminate dirt, disorder, and poverty, increase production and welfare, and promote a new morality” in the countryside. Ostensibly inspired by international notions of community-based, participatory development, the policy in practice relied on compulsory labor and other tactics that were unmistakably Leninist, such as work teams and the like. The regime’s fear of rural unrest and communist infiltration, which earlier provided motivation for land reform, once again triggered a big push in response to agriculture’s decline.Footnote ⁵⁴ The campaign thus fit with Chiang’s brand of right-wing authoritarianism, applying certain communist techniques to the decades-long fight against communism.

In South Korea, Park Chung-hee’s regime was both technocratic and mobilizational, with an increasingly professionalized corps of officials setting aside their normal administrative routines to connect with the masses and become conduits for campaigns. The Saemaul Movement of the 1970s was an all-out drive to overcome rural backwardness and to achieve collective prosperity. Cement and steel rods for village infrastructure projects were distributed, communal kitchens were constructed to free up women’s labor, and millions of people attended military-style trainings. Every day at 5:45 a.m., villagers woke to loudspeakers playing the “Song of Saemaul.” Supposedly penned by Park, the lyrics urged villagers to “work while fighting” and “fight while working,” with the implied enemy being communist North Korea. Photographs from the time show people assembled together, listening to lectures, planting rice seedlings, or building bridges underneath the Saemaul flag. In Park’s words, the campaign represented a “great leap forward”—without the tragic ending.Footnote ⁵⁵ It is unsurprising that scholars have drawn comparisons with Maoist China and the interwar fascist regimes of Europe and Japan.Footnote ⁵⁶ Like Mao, Park came from a rural, military background and believed in mass mobilization. Born in the colonial period, he was obsessed with turning South Korea into a second Japan. During World War II, he attended the Manchurian Xinjing Officers School and the Japanese Military Academy, after which he enlisted in the Japanese Imperial Army. These experiences informed his perspective on modernization.Footnote ⁵⁷ Building richer and stronger Saemaul villages—and later cities, factories, and schools—was essential to building a richer, stronger nation. The parallels to Japan’s “rich nation, strong army” ideal and more concretely to the objectives and methods of Korea’s colonial-era Rural Revitalization Campaign are striking.Footnote ⁵⁸ They reflect Japan’s dual status as a model and a rival and the enduring relevance of South Korea’s revolutionary traditions forged in opposition to colonialism and communism (even if Park was not exactly an anti-colonialist).

In Japan, rural modernization campaigns were directly linked to the rise of imperialism and fascism. The Local Improvement Movement, launched in 1900, sought to strengthen the village political economy and to foster emperor-centered nationalism so that the state could finance industrialization and imperial expansion. Although the campaign fell short of its goals (only about 10 percent of villages participated), it set a precedent for greater state intervention in the countryside.Footnote ⁵⁹ The Rural Revitalization Campaign, which began in 1932, aimed to defuse social tensions after the Great Depression devastated Japan’s silk and rice markets, but in 1937, it was repurposed to support the military occupation of China. Despite this controversial history, the campaign marked the beginning of agricultural protection in Japan and at least during the early years, it delivered many benefits to impoverished farmers, including debt relief, increased savings, better infrastructure, and new technologies. More importantly, by combining state and private efforts to realize a number of “lifestyle improvement goals,” it left a legacy of mobilization that lasted for decades following World War II.Footnote ⁶⁰

This brief overview of the traditions underpinning campaigns, like the developmental state literature, confirms that regime type matters for how development happens. But shifting the focus from industrial policy to rural policy shows a different side to these regimes—one that is more revolutionary and also more populist.

Rural Populism under Authoritarianism

Populism is not something typically associated with East Asia. Quite the opposite, the success of these states compared with failed developmental states is said to rest on the exclusion of the popular sector from national politics, which allowed conservative coalitions of the state and big business to make economic decisions without having to consider distributional consequences.Footnote ⁶¹ Far from being populist, East Asia’s development states were “bureaucratic authoritarian industrializing regimes” and “social welfare laggards.”Footnote ⁶² To protect central power holders’ authority, these developmental states relied on repression and corporatist co-optation, building extensive internal security organizations as well as monopolistic interest- and patronage-based associations for farmers, workers, and the private sector.Footnote ⁶³ Yet regardless of how one defines populism—as a movement, an ideology, a political style, or a set of policies—East Asia’s campaigns contained many populist elements.Footnote ⁶⁴

Throughout the region, political leaders embraced a personalistic ruling style and proclaimed anti-elitist and nationalist ideologies. They promised greater redistribution to the poor and called on the masses to remake their communities. But unlike more typical cases of populism, East Asia’s campaigns were initiated by incumbents rather than political outsiders, and they were rural in orientation. Borrowing from Samuel Huntington, they were about containing the green uprising. According to Huntington, in response to growing rural-urban disparities and political uncertainty, incumbents try to mobilize the peasantry within the existing system, thereby undercutting their political opponents and the potential for rural revolution.Footnote ⁶⁵

The South Korean case clearly illustrates this point. There, fears of political turmoil triggered the adoption of pro-rural policies. Dissatisfied with the government’s squeeze on agriculture, many farmers voted against Park at the ballot box and with their feet, supporting opposition candidates in the 1967 and 1971 presidential elections, and moving to cities where anti-Park sentiment was rising. Farmers’ grievances centered around low grain prices and surging production costs: fertilizer prices jumped 80 percent in 1964 alone, followed by a 44 percent increase in 1965. The biggest fallout occurred in the Cholla region, the so-called rice bowl of Korea, where Park lost twenty-three of thirty-four counties in 1967, a shocking defeat considering that four years earlier he had won them all. The countryside was supposed to be his stronghold, and although he ultimately carried these elections, losing Cholla was a warning that worsening rural conditions could endanger his rule.Footnote ⁶⁶ After minor policy adjustments failed to shut out the opposition, Park steered the country in a more authoritarian and populist direction—removing all electoral and legal constraints on his authority with the Yushin Reforms (October Restoration, 1972–1979) and mobilizing the entire rural population through Saemaul.

In the context of the Yushin Reforms, which otherwise depended on the state’s coercive apparatus, Saemaul employed a mix of propaganda and material rewards to create a rural populist base. Park’s son-of-the-soil image was reinforced by an endless stream of rural inspection tours and televised interactions with local Saemaul leaders. During the 1970s, approximately 200,000 activists in total were empowered to spearhead the implementation of rural development projects in their villages. In line with the campaign’s egalitarian ethos, these people were younger and better educated than traditional village elites, and roughly half were women. They wore caps emblazoned with the campaign’s logo, a green- and-yellow three-leaf bud representing the Saemaul spirit of diligence, self-help, and cooperation. They were also publicly exalted for leading their villages and the nation to prosperity.Footnote ⁶⁷ In stark contrast, Park lamented, “are the city people—it makes one doubt whether they are really citizens of the Republic of Korea—who by their weird and unruly behavior pour cold water on the Saemaul movement and dampen the enthusiasm of the rural people.”Footnote ⁶⁸ In addition to such populist rhetoric, selective assistance helped to generate mass support for the campaign. Villages demonstrating a stronger commitment, as measured by residents’ labor, cash, and material contributions, obtained more government resources. The dramatic transformation of villages receiving aid induced neighboring villages to participate, and a competitive emulation dynamic took hold.Footnote ⁶⁹

Through campaigns, East Asia’s farmers were activated rather than incorporated into national politics, which meant that instead of being mobilized electorally or granted more formal representation in the central government, they were recruited to carry out the regime’s vision of modernization.Footnote ⁷⁰ Popular participation was widespread but controlled, localized, and directed toward certain ends. Strategically, rural populism served to legitimize authoritarian rule (and to counteract urban opposition) while maintaining a narrow governing coalition. The apparent success of that strategy in Korea prompted an expansion of Saemaul from Korea’s villages to the whole country, although it became less effective over time. Eventually, unresolved economic problems led to antigovernment protests in the countryside and the ideology of minjung (mass democracy) spread across the cities, suggesting an untenable contradiction between state populism on the one hand and popular sector exclusion on the other.Footnote ⁷¹ Nevertheless, those forces did not become powerful until after Park’s death, and still today, Saemaul is commonly remembered as one of the country’s greatest achievements.Footnote ⁷²

In the other cases as well, populist mobilization was used to reassert state control and to consolidate political power during periods of uncertain change. As industrialization deepened, rising inequality and structural economic shifts created strong currents of rural discontent, which coincided with major leadership transitions at the top. In Japan, the tenant union and agrarianist movements peaked just as the military was trying to establish order following the 1932 assassination of Prime Minister Inukai Tsuyoshi.Footnote ⁷³ In Taiwan, the election of sympathetic legislators after 1969 altered public discourse about the countryside just as Chiang Ching-kuo was preparing to take over from his father.Footnote ⁷⁴ And in China, waves of spontaneous mass protests in the late 1990s and early 2000s raised the specter of rural crisis at the same time Hu was confirmed as Jiang Zemin’s successor.Footnote ⁷⁵

Chiang and Hu, in particular, were more populist than their predecessors in terms of political styles, economic policies, and attitudes toward participation. Chiang Ching-kuo supported the kmt’s Taiwanization, developing ties with farmers and encouraging them to join the party. He also appointed Taiwanese politicians to the cabinet, the provincial governorship, and the vice presidency.Footnote ⁷⁶ One of Chiang’s first policy actions was to abolish the exploitative rice-fertilizer barter system and declare a new mass “campaign to accelerate rural construction” (the Community Development Campaign).Footnote ⁷⁷ Hu was similarly concerned about the countryside because of his background working in three of China’s poorest provinces, Gansu, Guizhou, and Tibet. Premier Wen Jiabao had worked in Gansu, too, and skillfully cultivated a man-of-the-people public image. Under their leadership, agricultural taxes were terminated and numerous pro-rural initiatives were enacted as part of the New Socialist Countryside. Within a few years, the Hu-Wen populist coalition had distinguished itself from the elitist coalition associated with Jiang.Footnote ⁷⁸ Like Park, these leaders also appealed to farmers directly, imploring them to help execute state policies.

There were other reasons for the reversal of urban bias, such as concerns about food security and rural-to-urban migration, not to mention the declining cost of agricultural subsidies as the farm sector contracted. But while those factors may explain the timing or feasibility of intervention, they cannot explain the form. Campaigns were a reaction to domestic instability and proof that the region’s strong authoritarian states were not immune to societal pressures. They were a manifestation of populism, which, as others have shown, can arise in competitive electoral systems and in hegemonic party-states.Footnote ⁷⁹ For East Asia, populism represents a divergence from governance practices that have long defined the region: exclusion, repression, and corporatist social management. Populist mobilization coexisted with those practices but was intended to deal more effectively with the agrarian problem, both politically and in a more fundamental sense. As explained below, the idea that campaigns can solve rural backwardness derives from certain stereotypes about the countryside and, relatedly, from these countries’ efforts to learn from one another.

Policy Learning and the Agrarian Problem

The Japanese developmental state evolved from a series of economic and war-related crises that caused the country’s leaders and the public to equate growth with national security. As Johnson notes, its success was “the result of a tortuous learning and adaptation process” that unfolded over the course of fifty years (1920s–1970s).Footnote ⁸⁰ Although subsequent studies of the East Asian newly industrialized countries (nics, including Singapore and Hong Kong) confirmed the developmental state model, they also underscored its limited transferability. South Korea and Taiwan were able to emulate Japan because of their shared colonial history, common state-building patterns, and similar geopolitical concerns. They were furthermore “receptacles for declining Japanese industries,” part of an integrated product cycle that resembled “flying geese,” with technology moving from leader to follower countries.Footnote ⁸¹

Despite many obvious differences between China and its neighbors, early reformers in China looked to Japan and the East Asian nics for clues about how to introduce markets and build institutions while maintaining political control. Policy learning took off because it aligned with the ccp ’s traditional emphasis on experimentation and satisfied a hunger for practical knowledge as China emerged from a radical and isolationist period.Footnote ⁸² This is not to say that learning always succeeded. For instance, the central government’s plan to follow Japan by supporting domestic industry and limiting foreign investment was thwarted by local governments and diaspora capital, which pushed for greater liberalization.Footnote ⁸³ Yet China converged with the developmental state model in other ways: commitment to economic growth, merit-based recruitment of officials, and corporatist relations with industry. Learning was also evident in the rural sector, where in the 1990s, the Ministry of Agriculture launched a pilot program to “learn from the Japanese Central Union of Agricultural Cooperatives” and, more recently, promoted Japan’s “one village, one product” method of agricultural specialization.Footnote ⁸⁴ Again, these efforts have met with mixed success, but they show that these countries remain an important “cultural reference group” for China.Footnote ⁸⁵

The links between China’s New Socialist Countryside and South Korea’s Saemaul Movement are particularly notable. In 2005, Zheng Xinli, then-deputy director of the ccp ’s Central Policy Research Office, led a group of high-level officials to Korea. They planned to study the Saemaul Movement “in order to draft the 11th five-year plan, resolve the three rural issues [peasants, villages, agriculture], and promote rural economic and social development.” Zheng later submitted two reports to the State Council recommending ways that China might emulate Korea, for example, by focusing on village improvement and using selective rewards to spur mass participation.Footnote ⁸⁶ The next year, China’s government announced that it was sending thirty thousand civil servants to Korea for Saemaul training.Footnote ⁸⁷ In fact, during the New Socialist Countryside, millions of officials were required to learn about Saemaul and there was a burst of Chinese publications comparing the two campaigns.Footnote ⁸⁸ In a 2010 interview, Li Shuishan, an ethnic Korean born in China who worked in the Ministry of Agriculture, explained that Chinese observers intuitively understood Korea’s experience—that of a powerful state trying to modernize a densely populated countryside that had underdeveloped markets and scarce resources. The campaign approach, he added, was something the Chinese practically invented.Footnote ⁸⁹

The effect of policy learning on East Asia’s political economy has not received much attention due in part to the difficulty of separating learning from structural explanations of change. Was learning the reason that Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan enacted similar land reforms, or was US pressure and the communist threat more pivotal? Stated differently, did policy convergence stem from the circulation of ideas or was it the result of parallel developments rooted in structural circumstances? There is compelling evidence that China’s rural policy was modeled after Korea, but how can this influence be disentangled from pathdependent theories of campaign-style governance?

The argument is not that learning itself causes policy change, but rather that learning shapes leaders’ understanding of appropriate policy choices in the event of change. Whether those choices are adopted depends on a range of ideational and structural factors, but adoption is more likely if the policies succeeded in a familiar setting. Consistent with studies of policy diffusion in other contexts, East Asian policymakers relied on cognitive shortcuts, such as information availability, to narrow the field of possible responses to various challenges, and they copied one another because of perceived cultural affinities and policy successes.Footnote ⁹⁰ Even a cursory examination of each country’s rural policy literature reveals frequent exchanges within the region and a self-conscious identification with a broader East Asian model—an acknowledgement of similar experiences with land reform, rural cooperatives, the green revolution, and agricultural adjustment, and a deliberate attempt to learn through comparison.Footnote ⁹¹ East Asian sources, moreover, describe campaigns in the same way, as policies or movements (undo [Japanese], undong [Korean], yundong [Chinese]) capable of inspiring state-society cooperation and altering rural material and cultural conditions.

A key lesson exchanged about campaigns is that they can reshape culture to be more conducive to development, which differentiates them from ordinary policies. State modernizers in prewar Japan, drawing from Buddhism and Confucianism, believed that order and prosperity rested on instilling proper values in people, and they invested enormous resources in moral suasion. During the Local Improvement Movement (1900–1918), peasants were exhorted to be hard-working and frugal, a message that was conveyed through customs reform groups and other state-backed associations. The campaign popularized the philosophy of Ninomiya Sontoku, a nineteenth-century agricultural reformer who stressed the importance of self-help in overcoming poverty. Officials claimed that providing rural financial support without moral education would breed indolence and dependency, and that idea carried over into later campaigns.Footnote ⁹²

In Korea, the agrarian problem was also defined in cultural terms, first during the Rural Revitalization Campaign and then during the Saemaul Movement. As Park remarked, constructing a bridge “must be viewed from the psychological angle,” and “modernization starts with the spiritual modernization of individual farmers.”Footnote ⁹³ The Saemaul spirit was said to reflect Sontoku’s teachings and to serve as a kind of Protestant ethic (an analogy found in Japan, too).Footnote ⁹⁴ Taiwan’s officials likewise tried to “promote a new morality” during the Community Development Campaign. They organized life-basics courses on civilized behavior, for example, standing in line, wearing clean clothes, and eating at a table, and encouraged people to join activities that would promote healthy living and a collective ethos. These ideas can be traced to earlier kmt campaigns as well as to the Japanese and South Korean examples.Footnote ⁹⁵ Similarly, China’s New Socialist Countryside aimed to cultivate a new type of farmer who was professional and civilized both in habits and appearance. The campaign’s fixation on culture was less pronounced than in the other cases, but throughout the region, spiritual and economic mobilization went hand in hand.

Political elites wanted to change villagers’ behavior and restore their sense of community, which capitalism had supposedly eroded. These goals were predicated on stereotypical views of the peasantry as a backward social class and the village as a place where positive communal traditions, if revived, could conquer laziness, individualism, and other cultural tendencies inhibiting development. To clarify, the forward march toward advanced (state-guided) capitalism was not in question, but how agrarian society fit into that process was ambiguous. The countryside was both a victim of modernization and the missing link. While market-based solutions were considered insufficient, if not antithetical, to rural development in a smallholder society, state-led campaigns represented a promising alternative. Policymakers believed they could accelerate change and transform rural culture by transmitting the right combination of traditional and modern values. This view from the top, however flawed, originated in Japan before spreading to the rest of East Asia, and it helps to explain the appeal of campaigns in the region. Policymakers were also able to infer cultural change was happening, even if it was not, because of another attractive feature of campaigns—for the most part, they worked.