Anyone who is interested in processes of social change and the puzzling rise of the individual in rural China will find it interesting to read Yunxiang Yan's collection of ten previously published and repackaged articles (covering the period 1992–2005) with a new introduction and conclusion applying individualization theory to the materials.
The factors behind the rise of the individual and the impact on rural institutions are to be found everywhere in the ten thematically organized chapters, eight of which are largely based on Yan's fieldwork in Xiajia Village in Northeast China. Yan's original analysis of changing rural life conditions is subtle and persuasive. Chapter 1 deals with social stratification at the village level, noting the dramatic loss of rural cadres' status and power after decollectivization. Chapter 2 discusses how reforms and market forces transformed power relations in the village as cadres lost control over resources, while peasants became aware of the utility of defending their rights to pursue private objectives.
Relations within the family changed as intragenerational power relations became more important than intergenerational relations. Families became smaller, and the conjugal family replaced the extended family as the basic family unit (chapter 3). Kinship patterns were restructured, and community and kinship relations were increasingly incorporated into person-centered guanxi networks (chapter 4). Women acquired an active role in intragenerational relations, while guanxi relations became more discretionary as they became individualized.
Young people benefited from these developments, and their culture imitated the culture of young urbanites so that they became a social group in their own right (chapter 5). Further, young women exploited individual agency to create lives for themselves and to challenge the traditional patriarchal hierarchy through choice of partner, marriage negotiations, and family division. They also transformed the nature of bride wealth by insisting on individual property rights and by articulating their individual demands using the rhetoric of individualism (chapter 6). Although individualism is generally seen as a negative term, “having individuality” (有个性, p. 170) is considered positively (chapter 7).
Chapter 8 discusses personal accounting as a sociocultural practice that reveals the nature of the gift economy and guanxi from an individual perspective. Chapters 9 and 10 deal with consumerism, largely outside the rural realm, and they contribute less to the central thesis of the book.
When Yan applies individualization theory, particularly that of Anthony Giddens, Zygmunt Baumann, Ulrich Beck, and Elisabeth Beck-Gernsheim, to reassess his material, he finds five themes running though the original work: institutional changes that free the individual, the agency and autonomy of the individual, the role of the party-state in attempting to manage and control individualization, the absence of individualism in the process of individualization, and the influence of globalization, especially consumerism. They tally well with key arguments from individualization theory. First, individuals are exposed to detraditionalization or disembedment, that is, they are emancipated from traditional structures and institutions and are increasingly responsible for their own life projects. Second, quoting Bauman, this happens through “compulsive and obligatory self-determination” (p. 275) spurred by the engagement of the individual in new social institutions such as education, labor market, and the legal environment. Third, this does not necessarily mean that individuals are as unique as they would like to be. Rather, they are socialized into institutions that emancipate them but also capture them into new processes out of personal control.
Individualization is a puzzling challenge for the party-state and village authorities, argues Yan. While it attempts to manage or even control processes of individualization by drawing boundaries and regulating directions, the outcomes are by no means given. Yan's work is particularly interesting in this context because it demonstrates that China's rural citizens are perfectly able to cope with and exploit these complex socioeconomic and political processes for their own benefit.
The analysis and conclusions place the book at the forefront of a field of research that is relatively unexplored. Individualization and second modernity theory have been used only sparsely to examine the impact and possible consequences of the rise of the individual in China. Until now, only iChina: the Rise of the Individual in Modern Chinese Society (Mette Halskov Hansen and Rune Svarverud, eds. [Copenhagen: NIAS Press, 2010]) has attempted to look more systematically at processes of individualization through this theoretical lens. Yunxiang Yan and Ulrich Beck both contributed to that volume, as did this reviewer.
There is ample justification for Yan's approach, and the book adds new insights and theoretical dimensions to our understanding of rural social change. The target group is scholars working with different social theories, primarily in the China studies field. It could also be used as an advanced reader in both social and rural studies. The book will serve well as a firsthand account of China's dramatic rural change and, even more, as a primer into how different theories may tease out different understandings of the same empirical material. Finally, it presents excellent pieces of anthropological fieldwork.
