This book is a landmark study of how rural China is ruled and of how state power entwines the countryside. The strengths of this path-breaking work are far too numerous and nuanced to do justice to it here. The authors argue that rural people, including village and county leaders and ordinary farmers, had their life chances shaped, disrupted and sometimes ruined by the system of authoritarian state of power originally created by the Mao-led Communist Party. The deep imprint of this system influenced habits of party rule long after Mao was gone.
Between 1978 and 2005, Edward Friedman, Paul G. Pickowicz and Mark Selden made over 30 research trips to Wugong village, in Raoyang county, Hebei province, where they engaged Communist Party leaders, village leaders, and ordinary farmers about how state power impacted everyday life and political reputations won in struggles to defend the nation against foreign aggressor states. The book's narrative of how state power actually works in the rural interior is unique and compelling, largely because it is grounded in finely textured, wonderfully nuanced stories of how rural people received, collaborated with, and occasionally resisted the appropriation schemes of urban-based Communist rulers. Friedman, Pickowicz and Selden show that village dwellers coped as best they could with the radical political changes imposed by Mao and his followers.
In the Prelude, we learn that Wugong, which was located in a poor soil zone of the North China Plain, became a model village, in part because Wugong's patrons and promoters had ties with political networks extending upwards in Hebei province, and even to the CCP Politburo in Beijing. The book helps us grasp the delicate act in which village party leaders had to engage in order to sustain their connections with Mao era state power and thus retain the designated model status that brought state patronage to them, their families and lineages, and their village level supporters. Through careful research in print sources and through interviews with people from different walks of life the authors help us see how villagers actively attempted to survive the ordeals of political life in an authoritarian system influenced by premises and policies borrowed from the Soviet Union under Stalin – and by Mao's virulent brand of war communism.
Chapters two and three show how villagers, with the support of Liu Shaoqi and reformers, pulled back from the big, rigidly managed collective units implicated in the disaster of Mao's Great Leap famine, once again taking up household based farming and market exchange – all of this while Wugong's party leaders resisted reform, “hewing to the Leap's giantism” (p. 15). Chapter two shows how Geng Changsuo, the Wugong party chief, strived to win national model village recognition from Mao and the state centre, resisting the reintroduction of household plots and promoting class struggle. The authors show how the party-state provided the patronage services (irrigation services and agricultural machinery) making it possible for Wugong's grain yields to soar and for Wugong's residents to claim 446 jin of grain quickly after the Great Leap – an astonishing figure compared to that of poor, outlying villages, whose tillers were still diminished and stuck in submarginal economies. The latter saw powerful commune leaders as privileged and corrupt.
Chapters four and five delve into the impact of the Socialist Education Movement in Wugong, demonstrating how the renewed Maoist push for class-struggle diluted the reforms that had led to the post-Great Leap rebound. The movement was powered by renewed militia vigilantism. It served mainly the powerful and labelled those who supported household farming and sidelines as anti-socialist. In Wugong it gave rise to torture of leaders accused of favouritism and corruption by malcontents. In villages like Zoucun, where party leaders and villagers desired to climb out of poverty through petty-trade, the “socialist educators” sent from the upper reaches of the party-state removed the entire leadership. Yet Wugong's united leaders managed to survive without serious penalty. In the end, they were alienated by the Liu-backed attempt to scapegoat them for the Leap disaster.
Chapter six provides an amazing analysis of the socialist state support underlying the march of this model village towards “self-reliance” and prosperity in the years building to the Cultural Revolution. The state sent in specialists to address Wugong's chronic water problem. By 1965 the village was connected to the state's electric power grid, which aided the development of modern irrigation and also brought lighting to villagers' homes. The state also provided Wugong with large outlays of chemical fertilizer, which poorer, non-model villages could neither access nor afford. These advantages, plus favourable weather, allowed Wugong to soar economically in the years 1963–65, when 740 jin per mu grain yields amounted to “more than four times the county and three times the Hebei average” (p. 78). Wugong leaders attributed this rise to Mao's collective transcript, but people in poor outlying villages saw through this claim and resented the privileged order of the power-favoured model village.
Chapters seven and eight constitute the heart of the book. The richness of these chapters alone make Revolution, Resistance, and Reform in Village China a must read for all students of the Mao era – especially of the complex political violence and unfathomable cruelty of the Cultural Revolution. In chapter seven, the authors reveal the political targeting and killing of professors and high school teachers unleashed by pro-Mao, anti-Liu Shaoqi party forces in the 1966, when Red Guard factions took advantage of PLA splits to establish an anarchy powered by public humiliation, torture, and murder. In this early phase of the Cultural Revolution, Red Guard Rebels attacked Nankai University faculty and burned books that were not explicitly sanctioned by Mao, and youthful zealots engaged in war on the culture of village dwellers, destroying images of Buddhist and Taoist deities, Confucian books, lineage genealogies, banning magic shows and pictures of fairies, and outlawing “feudal” dowries.
Wugong party boss Geng Changsuo, his spouse, and their allies were dragged out for public criticism and verbally abused, and repeatedly scorned for their ties to Hebei provincial secretary Lin Tie. Friedman, Pickowicz, and Selden inform us that the criticisms of the Red Guards seemed misplaced to villagers, who were more concerned with Boss Geng's unwavering commitment to deliver state dictated grain quotas upward at their expense than with the propaganda of Red Guard militants.
The Cultural Revolution split villagers into competing factions, and spawned a militant Jinggangshan Rebel group determined to aid the Nankai Red Guards in their attempt to strip Wugong of its model status and bring down Boss Geng. The radicals not only orchestrated denunciations of Geng but also covered his abode with white paper, signifying that Geng was a dead man whose reign had ended. The authors show that Boss Geng, despite the flaws in his work style, was able to weather the radical assault, in part because Geng had kept the village from disintegrating into violent splinter groups and in part because this particular local party leader had delivered substantial gains to the village (420 jin per capita was not bad at all for village China in this period). Fortunately, too, Boss Geng was in Raoyang – not in a pure-red, Mao ordered volcanic place like Baoding, where political madness and murder occurred on a scale far greater than in Raoyang–Wugong. The comparison with radical politics in other Hebei localities makes the story of Wugong more understandable, more convincing.
Chapter seven also takes up the topic of “cultural resistance.” Whereas Wugong villagers gave in to many of the militant attacks on popular culture, their counterparts in non-privileged, poorer outlying villages strived to maintain marriage and mourning rituals in the face of growing militant attacks on the sacred.
Chapter eight sifts through the economics and politics of Mao's war communism. With the Soviet Union threatening the PRC, Mao initiated a new Great Leap in agricultural and industry, and the centre reverted to grain first agricultural policies, to class struggle, and to stress on self-reliance, all of which shrivelled rural commerce, diminished off-farm income, and further impoverished household economies. The renewed campaign emphasized water development, higher yields, and better health care arrangements. But water resources were jeopardized, and health care was extended to only a privileged few.
In ascertaining how the war communism of 1960–70 gave rise to “militarism, nativism, leadership worship, and anti-intellectualism” (p. 141), Friedman, Pickowicz, and Selden show how Maoist fundamentalism was in reality an unadulterated political cruelty that tore basic human rights to shreds. So many suffered, so many went mad, so many died under Mao and his clever but utterly irrational bid for state power.
In writing about counterrevolutionaries who were sent from Beijing to prisons in the rural interior, the authors document the terrible human price of Mao's revived war communism. In Hengshui, a former medical student was driven mad by torture resulting from a false accusation of theft, made by a hated, imprisoned party leader. Another young prisoner was left to freeze to death and then killed for allegedly cursing Jiang Qing. Prison leaders, under pressure to meet quotas, sometimes killed prisoners who had been sentenced to life (p. 147). Lawlessness and vigilantism reigned. The so-called hit-one campaign splintered villages, and hardened party leaders in the poorest, economically marginalized villages suffered imprisonment. A climate of terror, confusion, and vendetta enveloped the countryside.
Chapters 11, 12 and 13 provide an insightful macro cum micro picture of the complex political changes enveloping village China in the years bridging Mao's demise and Deng's ascent. Here the authors make two important contributions to our understanding of contemporary Chinese politics. We discover that local party leaders like Boss Geng had to walk a political tightrope between radicals and reformers in the years 1976–80. Hence they endorsed reforms streaming from Beijing while simultaneously maintaining their ties to anti-market, anti-money, anti-incentive pro-Mao politicians who stifled educational and technological changes aimed at benefiting ordinary villagers. In this turbulent, uncertain period, Boss Geng and his allies worked within the party system of state power to survive and garner benefits for their network (p. 239). Evidently, Geng's household network was able to achieve upward mobility in the last days of Mao rule and the first years of the Deng reform – his spouses and children won industrial jobs, military posts, and administrative positions in an emerging trans-village political economy with ties to Raoyang, Baoding, Shijiazhuang, Tianjin, and Beijing, and, we learn, this “upwardly mobile household network of Boss Geng mirrored the privileged state hierarchy” (p. 195). The poorest villagers in Wugong, and the poorest villages in the Wugong-led commune were left out of this ascent. They resented Wugong's power-derived fortunes, and ridiculed its model status, but had to proceed with caution because the entire period was still punctuated by militia violence and vigilante repression against enemies of the privileged party hierarchy.
Chapter 14 focuses on how the living “debris” of the political past complicated reform. This chapter shows how people in villages made poor by Mao's anti-market irrationalities reclaimed their household vegetable plots, rediscovered sidelines, and rejuvenated their local markets, and how party leaders in Wugong and Hebei province sought to slow and contain innovative reforms that promised greater prosperity and joy. This Maoist reaction, which would not acknowledge the efficiencies of household agriculture and petty-trade, was responsible for Wugong falling behind other villages when it came to producing wealth.
The final chapter details the ways in which the CCP held on to power, and how this process slowed education reform and gave rise to alienating corruption. It focuses on everything from pop music to railway development to Wugong's links to expanding national and global markets. The part dealing with Hebei student and netizen retaliatory attacks on the 27th Army soldiers responsible for the bloody suppression of the June 3–4 1989 Democracy Movement, which Wugong township leaders apparently saw as a source of moral decay and political chaos, is novel and highly informative. The authors also show that rural dwellers attempted to sustain deep historical roots through eternal mourning rites and burial practices, and that villagers' desires to fully recover these sacred family performances outlasted the efforts of the party-state to obliterate them. This chapter, as most of the book, reminds us that China's rural people have paid a dear price to move themselves and their country away from political savageries and social losses that younger generations should not forget.
