In Chinese Village, Global Market, which is the outcome of more than a decade of collaborative research, Tony Saich and Biliang Hu offer a detailed case study of a village community in China's most dynamic economic region of the reform period, the Pearl River Delta. To refer to their site, Yantian, in Dongguan County of Guangdong Province, as a village is to engage with one of the central questions of this book: what happens to a community when it grows to the size of a mid-size city in a Western country, but retains the structures of a village? As seen in other parts of China, local society develops into two tiers, the permanent village residents with a village household permit, and the temporary migrants (many of whom live in Yantian virtually permanently), who constitute a much larger share of the actual local population.
Yantian village, in the pre-reform period, was dominated by the Deng lineage, and it is intriguing to see that in Yantian, as in other sites, the formerly dominant lineage has held on to prominence, supplying not only party secretaries but also most of the officeholders in the non-party bodies that have grown to administer the economic gains of the reform era—the village committee and the shareholding economic cooperative. To the extent that members of these bodies are elected, this is a function of an electorate restricted to those with a Yantian village residence permit. It is tempting to read this as saying that the Chinese lineage is so powerful a social reality that it will endure anything, including Maoism. To be fair, this is going beyond what Saich and Hu state. At this point, a historian might find it fruitful to go beyond the lineage genealogy compiled in the 1990s, which is used for the bulk of historical evidence. That said, the historical part of the analysis is not crucial to the argument. Lineage is also important in that it allowed soliciting investment from abroad. Just as important is the continued importance of the hukou. Is lineage replacing hukou as the most important factor? Does it provide access to different things these days?
One of the most interesting parts of this analysis is the update it provides on accepted narratives about land reform and land disputes: there are situations in which village collective members may welcome land being taken back into public ownership, because it generates higher rents that way. Hence the dividing line in Yantian is not between village residents who have been given land use rights in the 1980s and a local government that wants to take it away again, but between those who are original or approved village residents, and thus have access to land benefits, and those who moved to Yantian as economic migrants. Saich and Hu explore this divide in detail, as it affects healthcare, education, and village governance.
Consideration of those aspects in three chapters forms the second part of the book. The first part covers the economic evolution of Yantian from the reform period to its current position. If one reason why this study is important is the fact that it is a nuts-and-bolts account of the development of a particular locality, with all the particular aspects of the Pearl River Delta model, it is also important because of the bigger questions it raises. Chief among these is the definition of a migrant currently employed in China, and for how much longer it is sustainable in its present form. If migrant workers spend more time in their supposedly temporary abodes, and own no land in their villages of origin, what (apart from registration) keeps them there? Belonging? Are the policies that the central government is already adopting having any effect, and quickly enough to prevent social instability? There is also the question of whether the new structures of governance being created are alternative or complementary—is there a possible challenge to party rule? Not while both structures are dominated by the same lineage, it seems, and so the lineage makes an intriguing reappearance. And what of the anomaly that large parts of the population of Yantian are outside its representative governance structure, such as it is?
As to the significance of this study beyond China, there is the question, raised in the concluding chapter, of what happens in a low-wage economy when the wage gap narrows, and how the government can take action to preserve economic growth. The suggestion is that South China is experiencing a similar trajectory to that undergone by South Korea and Taiwan.
In sum, this deeply researched study is a timely addition to the literature, and a welcome example of equal cooperation between Western and Chinese scholars.
