A Century of Change in a Chinese Village is a book about Lengshuigou, a northern Chinese village located on the outskirts of Jinan, the capital of Shandong Province. Investigations carried out by Japanese researchers in the 1940s under the Japanese occupation provided rich information for major publications in the field of China studies, such as those by Phillip Huang (1985) and Prasenjit Duara (1988). Lengshuigou is now on the verge of disappearing as a result of urbanization and industrialization – it has a large dairy farm which is a major supplier of milk to Jinan, but most of the villagers are no longer engaged in farm work. This book, the outcome of a project carried out by anthropologists and sociologists from Shandong University, covers a time span from 1940 to 2012.

The book comprises eight chapters plus an introduction and an epilogue. Apart from the very clear second chapter which deals with “Changes in village politics and village elites” and chapter seven on “Economic structure and development,” all the other chapters cover overlapping themes with confusing titles: what is the difference between “Social structures and social life” (chapter four), and “Social relationships and network structures” (chapter six)? Moreover, “Transformation and future of the village” (chapter eight) is really only a summary which offers some speculation about the village's future. This lack of conceptual clarity remains despite Linda Grove's efforts to eliminate repetition and redundant content.

Pre-1949 Lengshuigou, which was formed by migrants from Shanxi and Hebei in the 14th century, was an “atypical” Chinese village in a number of ways. First, it was a very large village which even in the early 1940s had a population of around 1,800. Second, it was traditionally a relatively well-off village as most of the villagers tilled their own land and only 20 households were classified as landless. It was also characterized by very low land concentration. Third and relatedly, many of the village's inhabitants were traditionally well educated. Finally, the village had ten lineages and therefore ten surnames. In a typical southern clan village, there is usually only one lineage, one surname, after which the village is named (e.g. Gao or Wang Village).

Despite these unique characteristics, Lengshuigou in the Mao era had a lot in common with the rest of rural China, including the fact that the number of students attending school “swelled” (p. 12) during the Cultural Revolution, that the “development of rural medical and health services was one of the outstanding achievements of the period from 1949 to the launching of reform in 1978” (p. 13), and that the Township and Village Enterprises (TVEs) developed during the collective period “provided the economic and institutional base for the takeoff of the rural economy during the Reform era” (p. 9).

It is worth noting that the villagers actually resisted the household responsibility system (p. 51), a measure imposed by the post-Mao regime to dismantle the collective system for ideological reasons. The Shandong University research project on Lengshuigou also confirms the argument that the collective provided the initial stage of later economic take-off in rural China: “The commune created a new large-scale unit that was much better prepared to invest in production than the small, individual households of the small peasant economy” (p. 211), not only with regards to the improvement of a variety of crops, farming implements and cultivation technology irrigation, but also scientific farming technology. Mechanization was already developed in Lengshuigou during the collective period and the large scale of collective labour made land-levelling projects possible, which led to better irrigation and mechanization of farming, an achievement described by William Hinton in other contexts. During “the Learn from Dazhai” years, 400 mu of land were thus levelled (p. 212), 105 wells were drilled, 1,000 metres of pipes and 4,100 metres of channels were completed for irrigation, an addition of 2,100 mu of irrigation land, about 70 per cent of the village's total land during the collective period (p. 212). This kind of evidence contradicts the post-Mao Dengist propaganda, repeated again and again, that the collective system provided no incentive for the villagers to work and that the Chinese economy was on brink of disaster when Mao died in 1976.

Findings in Lengshuigou, such as “[u]nder the collective economy the state strongly encouraged the development of commerce and small-scale sideline industries” (p. 212) and the fact that the pig-bristle processing factory which still operates today was set up in 1964, also contradict the received wisdom on the collective system in the era of Mao.

Fast forward to the current situation of the village: Lengshuigou is about to disappear. A new East Jinan Passenger Terminal is under construction, and some of the village's land was requisitioned in 2015. By 2018 this place would be (the book ends with the year 2012) the biggest integrated transit hub in Shandong Province, with a population of 100 million. There were plans for the development of a huge commercial complex with schools and hospitals, and for the place to become a satellite hub of Jinan. The village was scheduled for demolition and villagers were said to be moved to high-density apartment complexes (p. 243).

For a book that was published in 2018, it is a pity that the Epilogue does not include any update since 2012. It is more than a pity that for a project based on such a well-researched and well-documented village, carried out by a well-resourced team so near the site, there is no attempt to answer in-depth conceptual questions about China's model of development. Though the testimonials provided by Shandong University's research show that production teams were like families within which all economic and production activities operated, there is no discussion of the connections and tensions between this kind of social relationship and lineage relationship. For instance, were production teams formed on the basis of lineages? Have there been lineage conflicts in the village? Did these conflicts, if any, manifest themselves differently at different periods such as the Japanese occupation, the Republic of China, the collective period and thereafter?

The book does mention that de-collectivization actually revived lineage ties, which are now being undone (and have indeed been undone) by the recent development of urbanization. But as a reader I would like to know how these changes are related to the changing economic structures and villagers’ values and beliefs.