In the early 2000s, the slogans painted across village walls in the North China hamlet of Zhaicheng were not Mao Zedong's faded red exhortations to embrace class struggle, but freshly painted blue characters. The words of Confucius, once reviled on village walls, now urged villagers to unite and find their power. That these blue slogans were found in Zhaicheng was no accident; the village lay in the heart of Dingxian, the experimental county where reformers led by Y. C. James Yen (Yan Yangchu) plotted a peaceful alternative to Mao Zedong's rural program of class division and class struggle. The result of their efforts, which inspired hundreds of projects in the nationwide Rural Reconstruction Movement of the 1920s and 1930s, is the subject of this outstanding book by Kate Merkel-Hess.
While Merkel-Hess notes that reformers working in the countryside had varied roots and ideologies, her research treats their many years of disparate experiments as a coherent movement, connected through ideas, journals, and a growing entanglement with the Guomindang state. Clearly written, with explicit links to historical and global contexts, The Rural Modern successfully reaffirms the Rural Reconstruction Movement as an alternative yet problematic vision for China's path to rural modernity. For while the village experiments were ultimately crushed by the Japanese invasion, Merkel-Hess demonstrates that military imperialism was only one of many challenges. The influx of foreign money and increased connections to the state undermined the movement's ideals of bottom-up transformation and true self-governance. During the final years of the war, reformers shifted to top-down change imposed through hierarchical administration and coercive measures.
This study is more about the educated reformers who dreamt of modernizing the countryside than about the villagers. During the early years of Rural Reconstruction, these reformers were intent on remaking themselves and their rural charges. Urban students labored in the fields in order to bring themselves closer to the common people, while at the same time developing rural cadres who might help carry out social change. Merkel-Hess argues that this reflects a flexible modern identity, one that posited a shared rural culture as the basis for a true national community. According to reformers, villagers had to first transform themselves in order to take part in this new rural modernity, and the process of transformation began with literacy. The ties between literacy and citizenship were made explicit in the publications of Yen's Mass Education Movement, which organized the Dingxian experiments. Works such as the Thousand-Character Reader taught citizenship and promoted modern concepts such as voting, patriotism, and hygiene, while the movement's newspapers told stories of Old Wang, whose inability to read caused him no end of shame and mishaps.
Critics chided this focus on literacy for ignoring the systemic problems of the countryside. But the educated men behind the Rural Reconstruction Movement also stressed the importance of organization, theorizing that social education through local institutions could help transform villagers by leading them to economic cooperatives and scientific farming. In Dingxian, reformers used teahouses, libraries, and opera houses as spaces for social education. Reformers in some areas relied on state power, suggesting the compatibility of autocratic methods and the formerly humanistic goals of Rural Reconstruction.
The conflict between the ideals of rural reformers and the dictates of the Guomindang state reached a breaking point over the issue of rural self-governance. This was a long-held goal for the countryside, but in practice the balance between village self-rule and the national priorities of the state was difficult to maintain; when the government moved to confiscate land from villages in the outskirts of Nanjing, the protests of local elites were largely ignored. Reformers, meanwhile, were growing ever closer to the state, accepting formal government positions after the Guomindang's 1933 call to establish experimental counties. Once ensconced in the bureaucracy, reformers increasingly turned to courts and the police to aid reform.
The collaboration between reformers and the Guomindang expanded the scope and power of Rural Reconstruction, but the involvement of the state and foreign NGOs such as the Rockefeller Foundation skewed the movement toward bureaucratic norms. Early reformers had promoted a humanistic model that focused on literacy to enable the self-transformation of Chinese villagers into modern rural citizens. With change coming painfully slowly and under increased pressure to find a scientific method to quickly carry out the transformation of the countryside, reformers shifted to training government and social leaders, who might then in turn reach out to the rural populace.
Reformers and their allies in the Guomindang retreated from directly reaching villagers, but the Communists marched forward with their own program of transformation through class struggle, launching land reform campaigns to solidify their hold over the countryside. As Merkel-Hess notes, Mao Zedong and his fellow Communists are minor players in her story, and it is refreshing to engage this still yet to be exhausted aspect of China's rural history. Utilizing a strong source base, Merkel-Hess demonstrates the full contours of the Rural Reconstruction Movement as an alternative to Mao's class-based but state-led vision of rural modernity. Ultimately, however, the work of the educated elites behind Rural Reconstruction ended in frustration, and the victory of the Communists in 1949 has cast a long shadow over their efforts to peacefully develop the countryside. The implications of their unrealized vision will have to be part of any rethinking of the Chinese revolution. Zhaicheng's blue slogans, for example, were painted by contemporary reformers attached to the James Yen Institute of Rural Reconstruction, started in 2003 as part of the New Rural Reconstruction Movement. One can only hope that attention to this topic will encourage humanistic and local attempts to address the many problems still plaguing the Chinese countryside. There may still be a need for blue slogans.
