The culmination of close to thirty years of research, this volume is one of the best accounts of rural politics in China that has ever been published. Covering the late 1950s through the 1990s, it is a sequel to the authors' prize-winning Chinese Village, Socialist State (1989), which focused on war and revolution in Wugong village (in Hebei Province) in the first half of the previous century. That study was a searing indictment of the violence and brutality of the Mao era, and its sequel continues the Wugong epic in this vein, albeit with a contemporary twist. On one side of the battlefield stand the revolutionaries, fundamentalist in their antipathy to the market, and on the other, the beleaguered economic reformers. At its core, this book is a thick description of the “clash” between these two “forces” (p. 1). Taken together, the two volumes represent an unprecedented achievement in the study of Chinese politics: a 70-year political history of a single village that is enmeshed in county, provincial, and national politics.

The word “village”—which also appears in the title—might be somewhat misleading in the case of Wugong, which was, by any measure, no ordinary rural community. More accurately, Revolution, Resistance, and Reform in Village China is a study of a model, Potemkin-like village and the “centrality” of such villages in rural development. Model villages in China, Edward Friedman, Paul Pickowicz, and Mark Selden note, were “vanguards in a strategy of political theater and resource allocation” (p. 1) whose influence went far beyond their small size. Unlike most villages in China, Wugong was smack in the middle of national politics for decades, peaking during the Cultural Revolution (1966–76), when it was nationally and even internationally known as “Little Moscow,” a model of “revolution, class struggle and socialist education” (p. 43). Designated by the center a “prized flagship” (p. 18) of socialism, Wugong attracted scarce resources that nonmodel villages could only dream about. Unsurprisingly, legions were resentful about the unfairness and hypocrisy in praising models for “self-reliance” while simultaneously showering them with preferential treatment. Nevertheless, outsiders were drawn to the village's revolutionary red light: Parents did their best to marry their children into Wugong, and intellectuals, students, reporters, foreign dignitaries (and, later on, Friedman, Pickowicz, and Selden) made pilgrimages to the area to see how its revolutionary leaders were building a successful collectivized economy. Poorer villagers, ignored, scraped by through their own wits and illegal black market trade—skills that helped them take advantage of new economic opportunities in the reform period.

In addition to its fascinating account of the complexities of achieving and maintaining “model” status, what makes this volume particularly powerful is its dual focus on village-level micropolitics and provincial- and national-level political struggles. The authors' hard-fought access to Wugong and its county government enable them to reveal wonderful details about power and economics, including prison life (who knew that political prisoners listened to Beatles songs, and Scottish and Indonesian tunes?), the contents of petition letters written by a local gadfly, entrepreneurship (peasants used government documents to roll homegrown cigarettes), execution quotas, and torture methods (peeling the skin off the back), as well as the networks—carefully cultivated by the village elite—linking the community to their patrons. As a model village, Wugong “caught the most wind” (p. 44) from national-level politics—sometimes for worse, but usually for better; even in the reform era, Wugong “benefitted from its networks” (p. 246). The book is particularly valuable in showing the limitations of concepts such as “institutions” in understanding Chinese politics: Family, lineage, and patronage networks have far more explanatory power.

One must use the term “benefit” with caution, however. The fruits of model status were high on the tree, and those with the tallest and most durable ladders (over several generations!) were village elites and their families and friends. Ordinary villagers, in contrast, did not fare very well either during the revolutionary 1960s and 1970s or the reform period, when their efforts to make money were stifled by conservative officials. This study is a brilliant analysis of politically driven stratification and the often maddening disconnect between “revolutionary fundamentalism,” preached by the center and supported by village elites, and what most people wanted out of politics and the economy. At the same time that revolutionaries (who were usually city folk and educated) asserted that “material success was counterrevolutionary,” villagers deeply desired to improve their lives and flatly rejected the command economy, which seemed to them “unfair” (p. 17). Peasants were “deeply alienated from collective work” and “mocked the collective regime” (pp. 155, 166). The concluding chapter on the reform era is a vividly wrought description of the opening and closing of opportunities and slowly emerging hope and wealth, all of which allow peasants to revive their local culture and pursue a more “ethical life” (p. 207).

As much as China scholars will appreciate the telling details about rural politics and the role of model villages in China, there is much about this book that will frustrate non-China specialists. It occupies a genre all its own. It is not anthropology, history, sociology, or political science as many would understand these disciplines, but somewhere in between (reflecting the authors' expertise). Disregarding most social science conventions, Friedman, Pickowicz, and Seldon do not engage any theories, the secondary literature on rural reform, or the comparative literature on village politics. Rather than a clear argument or explanation of what happened in Wugong, their narrative is goal-oriented, such as putting a “human face on conflicts that punctuated rural life” and “comprehending the complex human agency of villagers in a centralized authoritarian state” (p. 5). While highly commendable, these goals are no longer particularly novel. Since the reform period, China scholars have feasted on a bountiful harvest of new scholarship on rural life, none of which is content to portray villagers as passive pawns of state power. The authors do not draw upon, or compare their findings to, this large literature.

Revolution, Resistance, and Reform in Village China is a valuable book that will be of particular interest to those who read the authors' earlier volume on rural China (and are curious about the fates of the main characters) and those interested in the politics of model villages and battles over the course and pace of rural reform in a more conservative province. At the same time, the book would have been tighter and more accessible had the authors situated themselves more firmly in a discipline or a well-defined body of scholarly literature.