I

Contemporary Western language treatments of rural China in the early twentieth century have focused on the countryside itself rather than on Chinese conceptions of it. Most prominent has been the controversy over issues of rural development begun in the writings of Philip Huang and Thomas Rawski during the 1980s.Footnote ¹ Also in the eighties, Chinese academics demonstrated an interest in one thread of the arguments of the 1930s within China, that of the Marxist debate over the nature of the countryside. However, this interest exhibited itself in the form of brief summariesFootnote ² or collections of thirties literature.Footnote ³ More recently, in the context of renewed attention to the plight of the countryside, both government and academic figures in China speak of a ‘new rural reconstruction movement’, often making reference back to the activities of Liang Shuming among others, as they seek to remedy the economic and social gaps between city and country exposed in China's current rapid growth.Footnote ⁴ With one notable exception,Footnote ⁵ however, the dominant interest in the history of the Chinese countryside between the world wars has revolved around economic development and social and political processes rather than the implications of the intellectual prisms through which perceptions of these processes pass. The potential of the complex literature on rural China from the 1930s as a window into the variety of meanings of modernity has yet to be drawn out.

The 1980s controversy over China's rural economy played out within the bounds of the assumptions of development studies, while those assumptions themselves are part of a broader pattern of assumptions implied by the term modernity. There is a certain continuity between this contemporary debate and the earlier debate in China over the nature of the rural economy and society. Indeed a good part of the data for the more recent debate comes from studies done by 1930s researchers in China. The earlier debate, in the 1930s, produced detailed studies of the countryside in the context of a concern for change, and it also carried embedded within it modernist assumptions.

At the same time it was not inevitable that just this set of assumptions and images of modernity should prevail.Footnote ⁶ As I have argued in a study of Liang Shuming, a populist tendency of thought was also possible in China in the first half of this century.Footnote ⁷ And populism, in the Russian not the American sense, is characterised by a questioning of the modern notion of developmental progress. By looking back at some of Liang's arguments, it should be possible to recover lost alternative conceptions of modernity in China.

II

China between the two World Wars was a society at war.Footnote ⁸ World War One itself had had important effects on China albeit not directly and not in the countryside. The First World War affected China, neutral until nearly the end of the war, in its cities. The war's distraction of the European imperialism which had dominated modern, Western style industries and commerce since their beginnings in China in the nineteenth century, allowed an indigenous Chinese, modern economic sector to emerge.Footnote ⁹ Coastal cities began to see the development of modern urban social classes, however tiny in relation to the population as a whole, a bourgeoisie and a proletariat, and a new urban culture. At the same time, some 100,000 Chinese workers and students went to work in England and France, replacing the European labour drawn into war. Many of these returned to China after the war imbued with radical ideas.

The relative absence of European activity in East Asia during the war also gave Japan an opening to pressure China. Most famously, Japan, as an ally of Great Britain, used the occasion of the war to take over Germany's colonial concessions in China's Shandong province. And it was the failure of the great powers to return Shandong to China after the victory in World War One that sparked the watershed May Fourth Incident. With their demonstrations in 1919 against the post-war settlement, Chinese students turned from the Westernising and anti-traditional impulses of the New Culture Movement, which had coalesced earlier in the decade, to a new nationalism and anti-imperialism in the May Fourth Movement. Out of the May Fourth Movement of 1919 grew China's modern social movements and its modern political parties, the Nationalist party and the Communist party.

The period between the era of the First World War in China, with its changing urban social groups and attitudes, and the Second World War saw warlordism and civil war. The first had roots that went back to evolving regional loci of power and the decay of central authority toward the end of the last, Qing dynasty (1644–1911) and emerged in full flower by 1916. Warlordism gave way to civil war in 1927 as the Nationalist party defeated or came to terms with warlords and turned on the Communist party, its erstwhile ally. It was this that forced the Communists, who like the Nationalists had formed in an urban context and with an urban bias, to begin to look towards the peasantry. Recurrent warfare from the 1910s through the thirties and into the forties was accompanied in the countryside by rising banditry and the progressive collapse of social and cultural networks. Global economic depression in the 1930s brought severe economic dislocation and further social disintegration to a countryside already in decline.

While the effects of World War One in China were indirect and felt in the cities, World War Two had effects that were immediate, catastrophic, and engulfed the countryside as well as the cities. Having seized Manchuria as early as 1931, Japan launched an all out invasion of China in the summer of 1937. By the end of the war, China was a shambles with a death count of some ten million, second only to the Soviet Union.Footnote ¹⁰ Farms, factories, and transport were destroyed, and inflation stood at 230 per cent per year.Footnote ¹¹ Early in the course of the war, the Japanese military drove the Nationalist party out of the major cities along the coast and away from its political and social base. It was the war that gave the Communists the chance to emerge from the refuge in the hinterland of Yan'an, to which they had been driven by the civil war, into the wider rural areas the Japanese were unable to control. There they began the process, famously known as the countryside encircling the cities, that would culminate with the Communist victory over the Nationalists in 1949.

III

It was against this interwar background that Chinese intellectual and political attention increasingly came to focus on the countryside, resulting in a wave of books and articles concerned with rural society. A contemporary Chinese count found some ninety-two monographs published between 1927 and 1935 and enumerated 218 periodicals from 1933 to 1935 just dealing with the ‘land problem’.Footnote ¹² Writers converged on the issue of the countryside from a wide variety of perspectives, among them education and literacy, self-defence, health, local self-government, developmental issues, economic and social analysis, and folklore. The Chinese were following the 1930s analyses undertaken in Europe. There were reports on issues in other countries ranging from the Danish peasant cooperative movement to Yugoslav rural health. Issues did not dovetail neatly with political affiliations. Marxists argued among themselves and with the Communist party position, and writers affiliated with the right wing Nationalist party introduced the model of state farms from Stalin's Russia.

The turn toward specifically rural questions in itself was embedded in a relatively new way of conceptualising space in China. Scholars have argued that where later, twentieth-century perceptions would confront a gulf between the countryside and the cities, earlier the Chinese experienced an urban-rural continuum.Footnote ¹³ The essays in Town and Country in China: Identity and Perception, edited by David Faure and Tao Tao Liu, collectively present an excellent description of, and explanation for, this change.Footnote ¹⁴ Although the Chinese in the Ming (1368–1644) and Qing (1644–1911) dynasties knew that within the city walls there was a denser concentration of population, political authority, or commercial activity than in the villages, this was not what shaped their viewpoints. Architecture, life styles, and customs were similar in villages, towns, and cities. There were pockets of rural life within the city walls, and city elites preserved their connections and identities as landed gentry in rural native places.

Late imperial Chinese people did recognise a centre, but it lay not in the city but in the emperor, and the Chinese landscape involved a nested hierarchy of places.

It was late Qing constitutional reforms that started a process that unravelled this structure of authority, and by the 1920s and 1930s the Chinese experienced the relationship between villages and cities in a markedly different way. A sharp urban/rural divide as the dominant contrast is itself a modern concept in China. And within that concept, it was the Westernised city, especially Shanghai, that came to stand for the urban.Footnote ¹⁷

Shanghai's hybrid culture became emblematic of an enticing modernity, while the countryside appeared to be hopelessly backward.Footnote ¹⁸ At the same time, by the 1930s, Shanghai was symbolic of decadence and crime in contrast to an apparent pastoral innocence located in the villages. These ambiguities of imagination, not in themselves unusual in modern societies, were complicated by the positive valuation of revolution since the 1911 Revolution which had ended the last imperial dynasty. The affirmation of revolution and modern progress only served to make the backwardness of perceived unchanging pastoral villages all the more plausible, and the sort of romanticism of ‘the land’ found in European societies and in Japan was not a large feature in China. On the other hand, the progress and modernity represented by Western societies, and by their presence in cities such as Shanghai, were also connected to the negative images of imperialism, a problem all the more salient after the May Fourth Incident in 1919.

By the interwar period, the dominant conception divided China's space into cities and countryside. Although the meanings of these spaces, urban and rural, were in flux, the division itself was broadly established. It underlay Chinese writings about the countryside in the 1930s, including those of Liang Shuming. And intertwined with the urban/rural division was the notion of modernity. Modernity is a slippery term used in an array of ways and settings.Footnote ¹⁹ Rather than enter into the complexities of the associated terms, of modernity, modernism, modernisation, and anti-modernism, I would like simply to delineate three aspects which represent some of the assumptions of modernist discourse. First among these is the notion that history, and modern development in particular, is universally progressive and unilinear. A second characteristic of modernist discourse is the tendency to think in terms of binary oppositions, of modern and traditional, West and East, universal and particular, centre and periphery, industry and agriculture, and, of course, urban and rural. Here what is Western is also modern, universal, central, and urban, while what is not Western is understood as traditional, particular, peripheral, and rural. The context of imperialism made these binary associations unstable but no less powerful. How could China be both modern and Eastern? How could it reject Western imperialism and engage with universal values? A third major element in the discourse of modernity revolves around the nation. The modern nation state, made up of modern citizens, is taken to be both the outcome of, and the active subject in, a progressive history. These modernist images and assumptions can all be found in China in the 1930s debate over the nature of the Chinese countryside, and they are also assumptions which Liang Shuming challenged either directly or indirectly in his writings about rural China of the same period.

IV

Born in 1893 and hence a contemporary of Mao Zedong in age, Liang Shuming is best known as a neo-Confucian philosopher and by the 1930s a leader in the Rural Reconstruction Movement. In 1921, his first, and most famous, book compared Eastern and Western cultures and philosophies.Footnote ²⁰ In the latter part of the 1920s however, Liang's thought took an economic turn as he developed his ideas for a non-capitalist route to development starting from the countryside. Liang's turn coincided with a set of related debates which took place in Chinese journals, debates which began at the end of the 1920s and ranged for the next decade on topics stretching from questions of the historical periodisation of China's ancient society to the characterisation of contemporary economic and social conditions. The debate over the nature of the Chinese countryside was part of this larger field of scholarly controversies. It began formally in 1934, largely on the pages of the journal, China's Villages [Zhongguo nongcun].Footnote ²¹ Both the detailed surveys and the theoretical discussions of the debate were part of the context in which Liang wrote his major book, A Theory of Rural Reconstruction [Xiangcun jianshe lilun], published in 1937.Footnote ²²

Marxist categories of analysis were attractive to intellectuals across the political spectrum at the time as they tried to come to grips with the dissolution of the radical coalition, between the Nationalist and Communist parties, of the 1920s, the white terror and the beginning of civil war between the two parties in 1927. Historical materialism seemed all the more salient with the apparent collapse of capitalism in the Great Depression, its devastating effect on China in the 1930s, coupled with the direct imperialism of Japan in China's northeast. At the same time the Soviet Union presented an image of a successful society, whose five year plans and state farms appealed to very different ends of the political spectrum in China. While many of the generalisations produced in the debates sound overly familiar to us now, they were quite fresh at the time and stimulated new and detailed research and investigations.Footnote ²³ Liang Shuming was one of those who drew on this Marxist research, even as he questioned it.

Participants in the debate over the nature of China's countryside drew different conclusions from their investigations, but all placed China's rural society at a particular stage of developmental progress. One camp focused on the methods or forces of production in the villages and concluded that rural society was already at a capitalist stage. A related argument looked at the economy of China as a whole, found it to be controlled by capitalist imperialism, and from this concluded that China was already part of capitalist society, the village question being merely a part of this larger question. Yet a third camp found that China's villages were semi-feudal. More concerned with relations than forces of production, those who took this view argued that imperialism had not introduced capitalism into the countryside but rather sustained aspects of an older, feudal order there. Despite their differing implications for political action, all of these arguments assumed that China fit somewhere along a line leading from feudalism to capitalism and beyond to socialism. And if China seemed stuck, as in the last case, at a semi-feudal stage, the object was to bring China back onto the proper path of development. Thus while these writers were critical of capitalist imperialism, they also, as Tani Barlow suggests,Footnote ²⁴ colluded with it in appropriating basic assumptions of modernity.

V

Liang Shuming, by contrast, offered an alternative approach to these modernist assumptions. He consistently rejected the idea that human societies follow a path of ‘unilinear development’.Footnote ²⁵ In particular he argued that China was not following, and could not and should not follow, the path which had been made the norm by Western societies. Drawing on others’ investigations of economic conditions in the villages, produced in the course of the countryside debate, Liang concluded that the old rural structures had been destroyed by the impact of economic imperialism. The traditional self sufficient village economy had been redirected toward commodity production. Yet simultaneously, rural China was precluded from capitalist development by the same force of imperialism. In a capitalist economy the gap between backward China and the advancing West was simply too large to allow China to compete on even terms.

The problem of development went even further according to Liang Shuming. China's current crisis had been induced from the outside rather than developing out of its own internal circumstances. Here also Liang drew on insights from historical materialism but to very different effect from other historical materialists. In an account which clearly paralleled Marx's famous description in the ‘Preface’ to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, Liang claimed that societies were structured with three levels, a first level of social, especially economic, reality, a second level of a social order of law and custom to match the economic reality, and, thirdly, a level of subjective consciousness, which in turn matched the other two levels. Ordinarily, change originated at the basic socio-economic level, but the subjective level also played a role in adjusting the social order, whether rapidly or gradually, to fit the new economic reality. In modern China, however, Liang argued, new conscious demands had been induced by outside influences unrelated to internal structures, while outside forces simultaneously broke apart the internal integrity of the structure of society. Without a coordinated change in the economic reality, conscious demands for change only disintegrated the structure further. Chinese society was unable to produce constructive change, and the result was a structural vacuum where only sheer force, of which warlordism was a symptom, prevailed.Footnote ²⁶

These are some of the ways in which Liang Shuming argued that China could not follow a unilinear progress similar to the West's. If modernist thinking tends toward binary oppositions, then Liang's argument that China could not become modern in the manner defined by the capitalist West might lead to the conclusion that China could only remain traditional and Eastern. But while Liang did argue that historically China had been quite different from the West, he did not conclude that tradition still prevailed in the villages. The traditional structure of rural society had been broken, and instead of tradition or modernity, China's villages were faced with a different choice, a choice between extinction or some new kind of progress.

VI

Liang Shuming's hope for an alternative kind of progress relates to another binary opposition, that between city and country. In the debate over the nature of rural society, all the various sides assumed that progress centred on the cities which would lead the countryside into a modern, developed future. Those who held that the villages were semi-feudal came the closest to a different position in their concern for the political activity of the peasantry in addition to that of an urban proletariat. But they too assumed that the definition of future progress centred in the cities. Liang Shuming accepted the notion that the city dominated the country in the West's own modern experience, but he rejected that model for China and even argued that during the economic crisis of the thirties it was demonstrated that China's cities were dependent on the countryside rather than the other way around.

Liang Shuming rejected the urban centre-rural periphery dichotomy for China in a pun. In the unilinear model, industrial development took place in the cities while rural agriculture was peripheral to progress. Cities certainly were centres, Liang admitted, but China's future would arise not from ‘centres’, zhōngdiăn (中 點) in Chinese, but from the ‘centre of gravity’, zhòngdiăn (重 點).Footnote ²⁷ Cities had played a different role in China's history than they had in the West, and with the advent of imperialism, China's cities were in greater collapse even than the countryside. China's centre of gravity was in the villages.

With this image of a rural centre of gravity, Liang had a metaphor to fit his alternative to the modernist image of development. A centre of gravity turns attention away from the dichotomy of centres and peripheries to a whole field of weight. What Liang envisioned was neither a capitalist economy nor state socialism but a cooperativist economy arising out of a network of rural cooperatives. While village cooperatives would interact through markets, the villages would produce and exchange on the basis of felt communal needs and not for profit. Where industry had developed out of commercial capitalism in the cities of the West, Liang argued, industrial progress in China could only grow in the countryside from the demands and resources of agricultural cooperatives. This non-urban route to industrial development would also be a non-capitalist route.

VII

With a non-capitalist cooperativist economy, China would not be in competition with other, capitalist nations, a competition in which China was certain to fail. Liang Shuming was quite aware of the perils of the world of competing nation states, even were there no Japanese invasion of China. Here again he did not accept the modernist assumptions regarding the nation but rather envisioned a route that was not national. Prasenjit Duara, a scholar of Chinese history, has invited us to think critically about the assumption that the world must be made up of a system of nation states, where the nation is the unit of self aware action in the course of its linear history.Footnote ²⁸ None of the Marxist participants in the debate over rural society escaped this assumption. Whatever their estimations of the socio-economic character of the villages, they all accepted without question the image of a developed China where the primary focus of power and activity was the nation state.

Liang Shuming acknowledged that this image of the nation was indeed the basis of the contemporary international order. However, China historically had had neither nation nor state in the modern sense, Liang argued, and now, with power based solely on military force, China was incapable of acting as a subject in the system of nation states. Without some new form of modern progress, China's alternative in the political, as well as in the economic, realm was extinction. Again it was the creation of a new kind of society which Liang saw as the solution to this problem.

Neither a return to China's traditional forms nor the adoption of the nation state of the modern West was an option for China. With the traditional structure of society in complete collapse, there was no question of trying to revive it. But in this rupture with the past, in a break that in itself provided no shape leading to a future, Liang Shuming saw an unusual opportunity, an opening towards the creation of a completely new and better form of human society. In the absence of normal historical processes, this new society would have to be created self-consciously from the bottom up. It would be possible because, given the context of a release from the past and the availability of scientific technology, it could be grounded in the potential of human nature itself.

What Liang proposed was the development of new communities, which he called village schools, in which new habits of association would be fostered.Footnote ²⁹ These communities would be ‘schools’ because they would be held together, not by laws or mechanical institutional structures, but by mutual discussion and the application of thought to the solution of concrete problems. Cooperatives were the form these communities would take in economic terms. Active engagement and conversation, grounded in mutual respect, would engender a mutual understanding, a common sense of direction and the ability for self motivation. Shared, future oriented aspirations would give the community its cohesion.

Between 1931 and 1937, when the experiment was cut short by the Japanese invasion, Liang Shuming led an attempt to begin to put his ideas into practice. The Shandong Rural Reconstruction Institute attempted to foster the establishment of ‘peasant schools’, small communities within which, on the basis of face to face interaction, the then dead villages could accomplish their own resurrection. The schools’ heads were to be respected local figures, the teachers to bring skills and knowledge from the world beyond the villages, and the students to encompass the entire village population, most importantly the adults. Rather than removing students from the process of production to put them in traditional schools, teachers and students together would act to address immediate, felt needs of, for example, self defence, afforestation, seed improvement, or marketing cooperatives. In all of this, the teachers would help motivate, but not be a substitute for, the activity of the local society. Out of the very process of solving problems in the midst of daily life would grow the cohesion of the community and its ability for self-conscious activity. Education in this sense was a social movement, an ongoing process of self learning and improvement in an increasingly complex world.Footnote ³⁰

The very traits that characterised these communities also characterised the human psyche. What makes humans distinctively human, Liang argued, is their flexibility, their ability, in the context of a society with communication about skills, customs, aims, and ethics, to develop mastery of new circumstances in the midst of change. Individual and social life are both characterised by growth, active creativity, and constant renewal. Societies that are not based on coercion but on open and equal active communication both within the community and in dealings with other societies are the best, most closely human societies. It helped, but was not formally necessary for Liang, that Confucius, with his emphasis on growing, active life and ethical interrelatedness, had had early insight into human nature. Although the cultural norms and social structures that historically built on Confucianism had failed to engage these insights adequately and, in any case, had collapsed, remnants of a deeper Confucian sensibility remained in the Chinese countryside and could facilitate the self-activity of new village communities.

Where, in the West, Liang discerned exclusionary communities in which group solidarity was formed on the basis of what divided one community from another, Liang's new sort of group was to be inclusive in spirit. Thus as the little communities encountered problems too large for them to solve on their own, they would coalesce with other communities to form ever widening groups. At the level of the nation, then, larger scale interest groups could, similarly, form a national sense of direction out of interactive discussion and initiative in dealing with national scale problems. It was critical to Liang's conception that social cohesion and initiative be grounded in communication, conversation and mutual regard. Cooperative communities emerged precisely as social entities capable of an active subjective roleFootnote ³¹ in tackling concrete, immediate tasks in the villages, while at the level of the nation, their association would form an entity capable of acting like a nation state in the world system.

There are two things to notice here. First, the nation state was not a stopping point for Liang. Although circumstances now demanded a unit which could act for the nation, this was not an abstractly necessary or natural unit as modernist thinking assumes. Liang saw what might be called the nation as merely one step along a gradient of loci of human subjectivity from the individual through humanity. Secondly Liang's national actor was not to be grounded in a state but to grow up out of society. Given the extent of the collapse of the structure of society, any political or governmental activities imposed from without would deepen the crisis. The creation of a new locus of subjective activity would have to be built up from the most basic level of society in China's villages. The future alternative to the nation state was to be society rather than a state, nor would it necessarily always be a nation.

VIII

The case of Liang Shuming demonstrates that, while modernism certainly dominated the discourse in the 1930s debate over the nature of the countryside in China, at the same time, it was possible to be aware of and critical of that discourse. In his theorising Liang rejected the modernist image of a unilinear history inscribed with binary dichotomies and propelled by active nation states. Instead, at every turn, he tried self-consciously to rethink modernist assumptions and to envision an alternative progressive future.

Liang Shuming combined an analysis of what could happen in China with a vision of what should. Liang focused on the countryside instead of the city, and on society instead of the state, as the locus of constructive change, and conceived of a non-capitalist industrialisation. In the process, his approach not only challenged imperialism, as did other thinkers in the 1930s, but it also challenged the very terms of the debate itself, questioning its basic assumptions. In so doing, Liang escaped from the choice between developmental progress and mere nostalgia. Starting from a shared image of an urban/rural divide, Liang Shuming generated fresh possibilities of a progressive modernity that reshaped the relation of the country, the city, and the nation in the active creation of a future, good society.