History of China Since 1800 – S15: Rural Decline

Recap: Shanghai

Teaching of Western Civilization, from Frederick Schiff, Maskee: A Shanghai Sketchbook

Semi-coloniality: Oppression or opportunity?
Urban modernity: Hybrid and contested
Gender and city: Modernity vs. Moral corruption?

Flower Drum Song

Flower Drum Song: Lyrics

Speaking of Fengyang, let me tell you about Fengyang, Fengyang is truly a good place.
Since the rise of Emperor Zhu, there have been famines for nine out of ten years.
Dong de long dong qiang, dong de long dong qiang, dong de long dong qiang, dong qiang dong qiang.
Wealthy families sell cattle and sheep, while poorer families sell their sons.
I have no sons to sell, so I carry a flower drum and wander far and wide.
Dong de long dong qiang, dong de long dong qiang, dong de long dong qiang, dong qiang dong qiang.

With a gong in my left hand and a drum in my right, I hold the gong and drum to sing.
I don’t know any other songs, I only know how to sing the Fengyang Song.
Here comes the Fengyang Song~ yeah.
De lang dang, floating around, de lang dang, floating around.
Floating, floating, floating, floating, floating, floating, floating.

The Good Earth: Synopsis

Wang Lung, a poor farmer in rural China, marries O-Lan, a slave who becomes his partner.
Through hard work, he becomes prosperous and buys more land, but his sons are influenced by their wealth.
A famine forces the family to leave their land for city work, and upon returning, Wang Lung struggles with changes in his family.
His sons’ focus on luxury causes conflicts and disconnects them from their roots.
In the end, Wang Lung realizes that wealth does not guarantee happiness and reflects on the importance of the land.

The Good Earth

The Good Earth: Flower Drum Song

Myths of Chinese peasants

Imaginary nostalgia:

Writers reconstruct hometowns in their writings with bittersweet memories of the past and mixed feelings about the present.
They romanticize or fetishize what has been lost, creating an “.”
Feelings of estrangement, melancholy, rootlessness, and longing for an irretrievable past.

Victimhood Approach:

Representational space of the “old society.”
Peasants as culturally alien, passive, and ignorant victims of oppression.
Local customs are criticized as ugly, superstitious, and useless.
Reflection of self-empowerment of political and cultural elites.

Laboratory of modernity:

The rural is also seen as a self-reflexive space to critically engage with the Enlightenment agenda during the May Fourth period.
Homecoming is reimagined as a journey to address the “chaos” of the Republican era by observing and reflecting on local and particular social realities.

Key questions

Sidney D. Gamble Photographs Collection, Duke University Library

“China’s agrarian problem”: What is it? What explains rural China’s “backwardness”?
Urban-rural divide: What is it? How did it emerge?
State-society relationship: How did the modern state build legitimacy and authority?

Reflecting on the Nanjing Decade

Relative degree of consolidation, but fiscally weak & politically vulnerable
Not a monolithic state under Chiang Kai-shek leadership, but divided and contested
Uneven development: growth limited to urban China, little rural reform

Reflecting on the Nanjing Decade, continued

Templates for Chinese state building:

Propaganda state: mass campaigns, patriotic education
Developmental state: creation of national planned economy, work unit system, military-oriented heavy industry, building of national infrastructure
Campaign state: New Life Movement

Discuss: New Life Movement

Madame Chiang speaking at a New Life Movement rally, Sun Yat-sen Memorial Hall, Taipei, Taiwan.

Chiang Kai-shek: “Essentials of the New Life Movement”

Confucian Fascism?

National self-confidence as essence of fascism
Combining military discipline with classic Neo-Confucian view of community hierarchy and lineage solidarity
Fascist militarization as a way of teaching Confucian citizenship to the people
Unlike European fascism, inability and/or unwillingness to create a mass movement

Morality campaigns in contemporary China

Twelve core socialist values

National values

Prosperity
Democracy
Civility
Harmony

Social values

Freedom
Equality
Justice
Rule of law

Individual values

Patriotism
Dedication
Integrity
Friendship

Nationalist Revolution in the Hinterland

Where is Shanxi? Map

Mental Images of Shanxi

From banking center to industrial hinterland

Rishengcheng draft bank in Pingyao, Shanxi

Piaoyao (literally draft banks), started by merchants from Shanxi, active in northern China
Dominant financial institution before modern commercial banks
Single proprietaries or partnerships with unlimited liability
Inter-provincial remittances, delivery of gov tax revenue, bank drafts for traveling merchants, currency exchange, equity trade

Discuss: Life of Liu Dapeng

Who was Liu Dapeng?
What happened to Liu and his family?
What happened to his hometown and province?
What can Liu’s story tell us about rural life in early 20th century China?

Local authority in rural China: A rich tapestry

Pullers Mutual Aid Association in Shanghai

Local gentry
Lineages
Religious organizations
Extra-village relationships: irrigation associations, crop-watching networks
Secret societies

Between state and society

How to think about men like Liu Dapeng? Existing paradigms:

State vs. society: Gentry as resistance to overwhelming state structure
Gentry-society: Literati as mediators between state and society
State brokerage: Competition over legitimate authority among and between insiders and outsiders

Twin fiscal challenges

State brokerage lowers administrative costs, but has a principal agent problem: namely, how to control local agents in charge of maintenance of public services

Tax evasion:

Traditionally, tax responsibility linked to a stable and accountable community structure
Reliance on sub-adminitrative personnel (clerks and runners) for updating tax register, tax collection

Tax engrossment

Formal salary of county magistrate nominal
Real income from tacit right to retain surplus after tax submission to higher authorities
Magistrates contract out administrative functions to sub-administrative personnel (clerks and runners)

Nationalists’ rural reforms

Administrative:

New sub-county divisions: towns and townships
New personnel: ward headmen and other sub-magistrates appointed by province

Fiscal

Increasing use of tankuan, an ad hoc tax levied on the local community and apportioned by local headman

New state brokers

Traditional leaders:

Semi-private arrangement for collecting taxes, usually by local gentry and community leaders restrained by Confucian values
Leadership aspiration articulated through religious or lineage organizations
Middlemen for contract regulation and dispute mediation
Economic authority and political leadership linked

New leaders:

New entrepreneurial brokers: Clerks, tax farmers, seeking immediate gain at the expense of community interests
Political leadership removed from the community to expansionary and modernizing goals of the state

Summary: Transforming the Chinese countryside

State-building

Formal, bureaucratic, rational: state structure from the grassroots
New fiscal power: tax evasion and engrossment
Elimination of entrepreneurial state brokers
Village territoriality: From control over village leaders to control over bounded territories

Nation-building

Shifted loyalty: from family, lineage, and native place to nation-state

Modernization

Decline of traditional elites and Confucian values
Impact of imperialism and global trade

Modernization and its Discontents

Optimist view

Transportation improvement: Better access to market
Industrialization: cotton spinning, food processing, etc.
Growth of international trade, especially in regions producing export crops
Export of labor produced successful merchants and industrialists

Pessimist view

Commercialization of rural economy: From subsistence to dependence on industrial economy
Competition from foreign imports: sugar, hand-spun yarn, etc.
Increase in rent and tax faster than rising income
Downward mobility: from owner-cultivators to tenancy farmers to landless laborers
Warlord oppression: military destruction and tax increases

State involution?

The state was able to extract more resources, but unable to produce strong communities
Measures to strengthen control and cohesion – such as creation of towns and townships – did not strengthen community identity.
Attempts to control village political authority yielded new, more predatory brokers.

Discuss: China’s agrarian problem

Mao Zedong: A revolution is not a dinner party

A revolution is not the same as inviting people to dinner, or writing an essay, or painting a picture, or doing fancy needlework; it cannot be anything so reﬁned, so calm and gentle, or so mild, kind, courteous, restrained, and magnanimous. A revolution is an uprising, an act of violence whereby one class overthrows another. A rural revolution is a revolution by which the peasantry overthrows the authority of the feudal landlord class. If the peasants do not use the maximum of their strength, they can never overthrow the authority of the landlords, which has been deeply rooted for thousands of years.

Peng Pai: Real Pioneer of Agrarian Movement?

Peng Pai (1896-1929), native of Haifeng, Guangdong, pioneer of agrarian movement and founder of Hailufeng Soviet (1927-1928)

Pioneer of the Chinese agrarian movement, educated at Waseda University in Tokyo
Partitioned off his own land to local farmers and formed a farmers union
1926: Report on the Haifeng Peasant Movement
Nov 1927 to Jan 1928: Hai-lu-feng Soviet, the first Chinese Soviet territory in the mountainous Hakka speaking parts of Haifeng, Lufeng and Luhe counties in Guangdong

A forgotten base area: Hai-lu-feng Soviet

Building a rural insurgency

Role of provincial patriots: Not metropolitan elites, but rural educated youth
Not simply local peasants demanding justice and overthrowing existing communities
Party penetration depended on social capital of local, rural elites
Departure from orthodoxy: No base area, no Leninist organization, and little coherent ideology

Donggu vs. Jinggangshan base areas

Rural revolution: Not one model

Donggu Base Area

Established in Sep 1927 in Western Jiangxi
Led by locals: Lai Jingbang and Li Wenlin
Majority Hakka migrants during late Ming and early Qing
Instead of land reform, reliance on peasant associations and building local economy
Alliance with local bandits and secret societies

Rural revolution: Not one model

Jinggangshan Base Area

Established in fall 1928 in border region between Hunan and Jiangxi
Ethnically mixed between Han and Hakka settlers
Developed on the basis of military control imposed from the outside: Mao Zedong and Zhu De
Land reform: All land confiscated and redistributed per capita
Base area abandoned in Jan 1929

Enirclement Campaigns

Dec 1930: Chiang Kai-shek decided on eradicating the CCP
“Japanese is a disease of the skin, the communists are the disease of the heart”

The Long March

Map of CCP Long March

Liang Shuming: China’s Last Confucian

We want to stir up aspiration, place economics in this kind of human life, allow human life to drive economics, control economics, enjoy the use of economics, not to cause economics to control human life.

James Yen: National Association of Mass Education Movement

Missionary school in Sichuan, followed by education in Hong Kong and US (Yale 1918)
Volunteer in France during WWI, followed by graduate studies at Harvard
Founder of National Association of Mass Education Movement (MEM) in 1923

Sidney Gamble

Early survey of Beijing with Chinese students from the American–funded Yenching University
Social science in service of modernization and enlightenment

Mass Education Movement (MEM)

A radio receiver set up as part of the Ding Xian Experiment in 1935. When the picture was taken, lectures were being broadcast by the Mass Education Movement in an attempt to combat illiteracy.

MEM experiment in Ding County, Hebei
Led by Liang Shuming and James Yen
Four weaknesses of China: poverty, ignorance, disease, and misgovernment

Ding Xian 1000 Character School

Mass Education Movement (MEM): Four pillars

Ignorance: Village schools and cultural programs
Poverty: Farmers’ coop, improved techniques, seeds, and technologies
Health: Triage system with clinics
Politics: Hebei Institute for Political and Social Reconstruction (IPSR) in charge of county governance (taxation, land ownership, etc)

Mass Education Movement (MEM), continued

Emphasis on self-sustenance, but relied on volunteers and funding from Rockefeller Foundation
Ended by Japanese invasion in 1937

The making of Chinese peasantry: Summary

Social survey team in Ding County, Hebei

Dominant questions of the day:

What are the social, political, and economic conditions behind the “backward” behavior and worldview of the Chinese peasant?
How to change these conditions?

Summary: What is “rural China”?

Urban vs. rural dichotonomy: Not a reality, but a construction
Ideological simplifications: Modernization, Marxism
Regional variation and diversity: Size and scale of China defy simple generalization

Summary: The invention of the countryside

Incubator of a broad range of political views: from Marxism to modernization theory
New academic methods (surveys, interviews, etc.) from sociology, anthropology, and economics
China as social laboratory for modernization: How to use social science to engineer new citizens and social conditions?

Invisible China

China’s Urban-Rural Divide

2015 national census:

Only 3 out of 10 individuals in China’s labor force have ever attended high school.
More than 70 percent of China’s children have rural hukou status: China’s future workforce is predominantly growing up in rural villages, where educational outcomes are still lagging far behind.
Over half of rural babies are undernourished; 40% schoolchildren in many rural communities in southern China with intestinal worms; 30%+ of rural students have vision problems but do not have glasses.

China’s cities are small islands of prosperity in a massive country where more than half the citizens still struggle just to get by. So great is the urban-rural divide in China that the Invisible China has become invisible even to many Chinese. China’s inequality is wide, and it’s also geographical.

Unfinished experiment

Liang Shuming Rural Reconstruction Center, established in 2004 in Beijing

Xi Jinping as sent-down youth to the countryside