The Rural Modern investigates Chinese rural reform projects in the first half of the twentieth century—efforts that were part of broader elite attempts to create a modern Chinese nation. Rather than focus on the better-known mobilization by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), Kate Merkel-Hess discusses the efforts of and the connections between loosely affiliated groups and individuals who initiated projects in the countryside from the 1920s to the 1940s. One primary argument is that these reforms shifted between the 1920s and early 1930s—when slower, incremental change and ideas of individual transformation were taken most seriously—and the late Republican period (1911–1949), when reformers and the Nationalist Party prioritized more rapid “economic development, technical expertise, and a top-down management of reform efforts”(p. 8).

Merkel-Hess is careful to explain that she is looking at the history of attempts to transform rural society on the part of reformers. She does not trace particular outcomes of these efforts nor the rural people's reactions to them, and she does not investigate the rural-urban differences during this period. The first two chapters pay particular attention to the educational reform projects of those who were, by the 1930s, loosely grouped around the Rural Reconstruction movement. Although some early reformers’ stated goal was that peasants experience self-transformation, what she narrates throughout were reforms to transform rural populations according to the expectations of the elite, pointing out that their efforts were also about better management of rural people. This becomes clearer in the last three chapters, when she moves away from a focus on educational reforms to a broader discussion of rural leadership and governance and an examination of how the Nationalist state became increasingly involved in rural reform projects.

Perhaps because these reformers and their efforts were not tightly organized or ideologically coherent, the book itself moves between different reformers and their projects in a slightly disorganized, and not strictly chronological, fashion. The book follows the reform agendas, rather than the reformers, and at points individuals are not fully introduced on first mention or organizations are introduced more than once. While her account mentions several different efforts, many only in a few pages, it returns throughout to the stories of three leading rural reformers: Yan Yangchu (James Yen), a founder of the Mass Education Movement (MEM); Tao Xingzhi, one of the initiators of MEM's rural education work and the founder of the influential Xiaozhuang School; and Liang Shuming, most widely known for his treatise describing an alternative, non-Western path for China's modernization. While these three appear at different moments in the text, any ideological, methodological, pedagogical, and organizational connections between them are not particularly well explained.

The first two chapters discuss the broader goals of these educational reformers and of rural improvement, with a relative focus on such educational efforts as literacy work and textbook development. The analysis of the rural-centered pedagogical materials is particularly well done, as Merkel-Hess explains that the textbooks and magazines the reformers developed emphasized the potentiality for a rural form of modernization. The texts sought to teach citizenship responsibilities to the newly literate and to inculcate them into the narrative of the national revitalization.

In chapter three, Merkel-Hess thinks even more specifically about concepts of modernity and provides a sense of other kinds of reform agendas, beyond literacy education, that were carried out on the ground in the late 1920s and 1930s. Through a well-argued discussion of Tao Xingzhi's efforts, she shows that while rural reformers worked to encourage peasant transformation, contact with rural peoples transformed the elite reformers themselves during the process. For example, the teachers at Xiaozhuang School engaged in practices of self-reflection, through daily journaling and planning for self-improvement, to create modern individuals. The chapter also presents other areas of reform work: cultural performances (like opera and street plays) to provide models of modern behavior, and agricultural and economic cooperatives. While the rural reformers hoped that the creation of cooperatives would “create communities of shared interest where people could practice making collective decisions,” (p. 101), in fact these efforts reflected an increasing preoccupation with organizing the rural populations in ways that were legible to the state. This chapter takes us from the beginning of the shift in rural reconstruction work to the deeper implication with the nation and to greater top-down development, a point that is discussed in the context of warlord Yan Xishan's “New Agricultural Experiment” area.

In Merkel-Hess's account, the 1930s marked a turning point in rural reconstruction work. The last two chapters deal with the accelerating movement toward top-down, and in some cases state-guided, development projects. After the Chiang Kai-shek–led Nationalist government established its capital in Nanjing in 1927, it made increasing efforts to expand control. In the 1930s, as the Japanese continued their encroachment, sites of rural reform became even more closely tied to the Nationalist state. Chapter four outlines the shifting ideas over village governance, as national-level technocrats came into conflict with rural reformers over the rural populations’ relationship to the central state and how to best find solutions to China's problems. In this chapter, she returns to the figure of Liang Shuming and his educational efforts in Shandong to make the schools the center of rural society and political reform.

While the rural reform movement in China had long been influenced by foreign ideas and global trends, Merkel-Hess argues that the pace of foreign influence and involvement increased in the 1930s as Chinese reformers aligned their work with the interests of foreign funders and foreign experts. More could have been made of those earlier foreign connections and influences to provide a better sense of the kinds of changes she wants to illuminate in later decades. The final chapter provides some examples of what she calls the shift to developmentalism, which she defines as “an agenda of reforms undertaken on behalf of the Chinese state but governed by supposedly international standards and practices” (p. 141). She argues that there was a greater emphasis on specialized knowledge—a universal sense of what “rural populations” needed—wielded by trained individuals, rather than by careful side-by-side work that had initially been practiced by educators such as Tao Xingzhi. The full-scale Japanese invasion of 1937 led to the greater “nationalization” of these reformers’ rural reconstruction work, as a stable countryside was deemed absolutely necessary for national survival. She uses this as evidence of how reform agendas shifted from education-centered self-transformation to top-down reforms, regulation, and economic growth.

While she does not specifically examine the Communist's rural work, in the end she makes the argument that there was overlap between the reformers’ efforts in the 1920s through the 1940s and the later efforts of the CCP. It could be argued that the Communists prioritized rapid economic development and top-down party leadership over real consensus building. On this point, it might have been helpful to provide a better sense of the exact overlap as well as any carry-over in personnel. Like the rural reformers before them, the CCP stated that they believed in transformation and self-leadership by the rural populations, but in both cases this has been an unrealized modernization goal for rural China.