This book is remarkable on several counts. First, it is the product of collaborations among five women spanning 73 years. The project began in 1940 as a National Christian Council (NCC) village survey conducted by anthropologist Isabel Brown Crook and sociologist Yu Xiji; it was joined by historian Christina Gilmartin in 1994 and then, after Christina's death in 2012, by historians Gail Hershatter and Emily Honig. Yu Xiji died in 2006, and so Isabel Crook, now aged 98, is the only surviving member of the group of three authors. The book is remarkable also for the strong and penetrating analysis it makes of the confrontation between “insiders” and modernising “outsiders” in a Sichuan market village – a rural locality that had been somewhat “remote” until suddenly, in 1938, it came within easy reach of the Chongqing-based Nationalist government. Prosperity village's predicament was its entanglement in political webs cast by both local powerbrokers and agents of the reforming Kuomintang state. Another strong feature of the study is the vivid stories it tells about villagers. Brown and Yu were, as young women, the least threatening of the outsiders who moved into the village in the early war years; the rich collection of anecdotes they have used to illuminate their analysis is testimony to the regard and trust they won from local people during their 14-month stay in Prosperity. That, and the fact that rural women used the NCC's Prosperity office as “a type of women's teahouse” (p. 11) on market days, explains how the authors learned so much about gender roles and the lives of local women. The prominence given to women's stories makes this village study exceptional.
The chapters are organized under two broad headings: “Insiders” and “Outsiders.” The authors' basic purpose is to explain the failure of the outsiders' modernizing reforms in a rural community close to the national capital during the Sino-Japanese war. To that end, they have carefully mapped the socio-economic and political terrains of the territory into which urban reformers ventured after 1938. The mapping is largely based on the data collected by Brown and Yu during their visits to about 1,500 households in 1941–42. Supplementary archival research and village visits by all three authors in the 1990s and early 2000s enabled them to build the original enquiry into a “multilayered ethnographic history” (p. 2) of a marketing community in rural Sichuan, giving particular attention to the several layers of formal and informal power that bonded and bound the community. A major conclusion of the study is that the informal power of the Paoge (“Robed Brotherhood”) was, by the 1930s, stronger than that of the formal township government, that its tentacles enmeshed most insiders, both the well-off and the poor, and that it constituted the main obstacle to the outsiders' reform initiatives (pp. 121, 251).
Obstruction by the Paoge was by no means the sole cause of reform failure, however. The Nationalist government itself undermined its modernization agenda by being most visible to rural people as tax-collector and conscriptor of able-bodied young men. The Paoge added to the problem by fixing things so that its members and clients paid less tax than they owed and dodged conscription, leaving the burdens to fall more heavily on the powerless poor. In the area of administrative reform, the government underestimated the power of the local people it wanted to disempower. The first outsider to be appointed by the Chongqing government as Prosperity township head (xiangzhang) lasted just seven months, his successor less than five months. Guo Ankang, the third appointee in a year, more cleverly ingratiated himself with local elites and so lasted longer. But by war's end, Feng Qingyun, Prosperity's “most notorious power broker” and Paoge member, was head of the local government, and he remained in charge until executed by the PLA as a “political bandit” in late 1949 (p. 270).
Free of any association with tax collection and conscription, the NCC was able to build a positive image of the Christian church in Prosperity by launching initiatives in the areas of poverty alleviation, education and healthcare. Its most spectacular failure was the attempt to bring down inflated salt prices by establishing a salt cooperative. The rapid sale of shares in May 1941 raised hopes of a spectacular success. Soon, however, it became clear that Feng Qingyun had rigged both the share purchases in May and the mass withdrawal of shares that began in October. The withdrawals, of course, ruined the cooperative. The NCC had more success in the areas of healthcare and education, particularly when its reform initiatives dovetailed with those of the central government. When the school and clinic sought government funding, however, they invariably ran up against problems of official malfeasance, behind which was often the grasping hands of the Paoge society.
The authors tell the story of a celebration organized for 25–26 December 1941 by township head Guo Ankang, a committed Nationalist and Republican. The celebration was to commemorate the popular uprising in 1916 against Yuan Shikai's attempt to restore the monarchy. It included a performance of a modern play by schoolgirls from a Christian school in Bishan county town, and Prosperity's Wenmiao temple precinct had been spruced up for the event. When rain began to soak the audience, Pastor Xu invited everyone to move to the church where they could watch the play under shelter. The township government guards ordered everyone to move back to the temple grounds, and fired a volley of shots to emphasize their point. The performance was abandoned. Guo Ankang was enraged by what he saw as the Christians' cunning ploy to turn a Nationalist event into a celebration of Christmas.
In the NCC's view, Guo Ankang was “angry about the lack of clear boundaries between the church and state in Prosperity” (p. 180), but precisely how the NCC itself understood those boundaries is not really probed in this study. More tellingly, the anecdote illustrates the tension between the modernizing outsider, agent of the central state, and local people who just wanted a good night out; it is very likely that the play's audience had little idea of what their night's entertainment was meant to be celebrating.
Prosperity's Predicament very powerfully demonstrates the misunderstandings between modernizing outsiders and village insiders who, whether by choice or through fear, clung tightly to the “local,” unmodern though it might have been. The book is about just one village, and Prosperity market village in 1940–41 was, in several respects, far from typical. Its multi-layered power structure that was so adroitly manipulated by the Paoge was a product of its history, its ecology, its embeddedness in a marketing grid and its proximity to Chongqing during wartime. And yet in a range of different ways, a broadly similar tension – often “standoff” – between the state centre and villagers confronted modern state-builders, both Communist and Nationalist, all over China in the first half of the 20th century. The authors often make the point that their findings have a strong bearing on the ways in which the Communist Party penetrated and reconstructed rural China during and after the resistance war. They certainly do. This book deserves to be very widely read.
