Shuxuan Zhou offers an intimate look into the lives and histories of a generation of working-class women who fell through the cracks of China’s national privatization policies and have, until now, also escaped the notice of scholars. From Forest Farm to Sawmill takes readers into the mountains of Fujian province to learn about workers’ perspectives on the transformation of China’s timber industry from the early PRC period to the present day. Even as Zhou astutely argues that too stark a contrast has been drawn between Mao-era and post-Mao-era policies, she also chronicles how privatization led to the abandonment of a generation of state employees and follows their impressively strategic pursuit of justice in the early 2000s. Zhou demonstrates through the case study of the Fujian timber industry that the Mao-era economic structure enabled the state to accumulate capital on the backs of labor and that gendered labor policies placed women workers in a yet further disadvantaged situation. Together, these economic policies laid the foundation for further expropriation and exploitation after the 1990s with the privatization of formerly state-owned land and industries and the emergence of state capitalism.
Zhou, a labor policy analyst, achieves these important insights by taking in the compelling personal stories she acquired through oral histories, interviews, and observations in the community she studies. Zhou integrates these stories with her extensive research using a wide variety of sources, including government documents, policy statements, speeches, newspaper articles, Chinese and western scholarship on economic transition, female labor, forest history, political economy, and comparative feminist theory. While this vast integration of scholarship and primary research is crucial to framing and analyzing the transformations of the Fujian timber industry during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, Zhou purposefully places this research in the background as a supporting structure. She then centers the stories and experiences of her subjects: the abandoned and aging, yet resilient and resistant, women workers of the phased-out Fujian forest industry. In so doing, Zhou not only rescues these experiences of China’s dramatic transformation from their former existence as marginalized and overlooked side effects, but also succeeds in amplifying the ways these women understood their own roles and contributions to China’s dynamic economic metamorphosis. By centering personal storytelling, we learn that these women actively seized an opportunity to escape extreme poverty in North China during the Mao era, engaged in full-fledged devotion to their work and the community they were transplanted to, and became disillusioned when the state abandoned them along with its founding principles during the Reform era. Their material needs and moral convictions gave them strength to actively redirect the path of their narratives toward the pursuit of justice. Their gains were real, even if partial and incomplete. Moreover, the process of pursuing justice enabled them to better see and assert the value of their roles in China’s transformed economy.
Zhou begins with an overview of the history of the Dragon Lake and Forest Farm and Shaowu State Sawmill. This history lays the groundwork for her argument that, with highly controlled labor and pricing policies during the Mao era, the Chinese government was able to accumulate capital at the expense of labor, which further enabled the government to launch stunning economic growth in the post-socialist era. Counter to popular narratives, she argues, China’s miraculous post-1978 economic boom occurred because of, not in spite of, Mao-era economic structures, as a “domestic capitalist class thrived on the appropriation of former state assets” (6). Women workers arguably contributed even more to this transformation because of the greater disparity between their compensation and the forms of labor they provided. Not only did the ways this labor benefitted the state go unrecognized, but when state industries disappeared through the process of privatization, the material guarantees that accompanied and justified low wages and price controls (such as employment-linked housing, daycare, and dining) also disappeared. The nationwide abandonment of socialist economic structures also meant the abandonment of entire populations of state-employed workers now left to fend for themselves in a new system that their labor and sacrifices had made possible, but that no longer supported them. Even though these workers became collateral damage amidst the nation’s pursuit of rapid growth and state capitalism, they found tools in their Mao-era experiences that would prove useful for dealing with their new context; they began to “speak bitterness” to government officials, assert their entitlement to compensation, and demand recognition.
Even though this story is about a forest farm and sawmill, it also is an excellent illustration of how the state-owned forestry industry created an urban–rural divide within seemingly rural places like the mountains of Fujian. While most of the book focuses on employees who worked for the state forest farm and sawmill, Zhou does not neglect the rural villagers native to the area who lost substantial portions of forests to Mao-era state asserted ownership of natural resources. She notes that these villagers also had to make way for state-escorted migrants from North China who were assigned the task of processing and exporting trees that were once theirs. Initially, these newcomers were unfamiliar not only with the local landscape, but also with forestry and timber trades. These state employees, who in most of the chapters are the doubly marginalized female sawmill workers, apparently enjoyed material benefits during the heyday of the sawmill that native villagers could not access. Tensions arose between these two groups, though they apparently had abated by the twenty-first century. Zhou describes local villagers as viewing the “trees as part of the fabric of their environment” (65) rather than as commodities until the 1980s market reforms. More on this perspective and the comparative experiences of these two populations during the Mao era and after would be helpful to better understand the broader social and economic landscape that surrounded the sawmill.
Zhou’s book is a deeply personal account; the author begins with the story of her grandmother, a migrant from North China and former sawmill worker. It also is a local history that traces the transformation of a particular mountain village that became a collectivized farm and sawmill, and was eventually marketed for real estate development and ecotourist educational experiences. One of the book’s major contributions is its impressive ability to use the personal and the local to elucidate often misunderstood Mao-era economic structures that affected the entire country. Furthermore, by unveiling the highly gendered policies that were pervasive at the time, Zhou brings to light the Fujian-specific details of a broader phenomenon of unacknowledged female labor that has been replicated in various forms across the globe. Understanding the value of their work became the foundation for collective action and strategies for coping with a new capitalist authoritarianism. Although they did not try to disrupt or dismantle the system that oppressed them, these aging women devised effective strategies to pursue justice and compensation, in part through the realization that many of their current challenges were echoes of the past rather than stark departures from it.
From Forest Farm to Sawmill makes analysis of structural economic change relevant and accessible by illustrating the impact of broad policy and economic changes on individual human experiences. This is a powerful approach that demonstrates the importance of taking the time to think about the real purpose of doing research. This book will be of interest to upper-division undergraduate students, graduate students, and scholars of women and gender studies, environmental studies, and modern Chinese studies from a variety of disciplines.
