In this illuminating book, historian Huaiyin Li traces the political economy and social dynamics of Qin village in Jiangsu province in China over 60 years, from the start of the Communist era to the present. As he does so, he challenges conventional notions about state-society relations, state power, and economic development in China. Of particular interest to political scientists and economists should be his appreciation of how social factors and multilevel influences affect how formal institutions operate. He argues that, because these have not been adequately appreciated, scholars have often misunderstood the impact of formal institutional shifts; and he puts forth a modified portrait of change and continuity between the socialist era (from the 1950s to 1970s) and the subsequent reform era in China.
Beyond this overarching point, Li's book makes several more specific arguments. Some of these might valuably inform comparative political science studies of power relations, participation and governance, predation, and development in an authoritarian state. On power relations, Li argues against the common view that villagers were subservient and powerless under an oppressive socialist state, instead showing how they continually resisted the state using traditional and modern forms. Regarding governance, Li portrays the state as encouraging political awareness and oversight by the public, but using tools that are often inadequate and/or uninteresting to villagers. Complicating a simple view of the state as either predatory or developmental, Li argues that the state excessively extracted from rural areas like Qin village at the same time that it modernized the rural economy. Regarding development, Li argues that rural economic growth in the reform era was driven less by the much-emphasized introduction of market incentives than by the gradual policy shift towards serving, rather than overextracting from, rural areas.
The book tells its story in four parts, with the first focusing on grassroots resistance in the 1950s; the next two focusing on political, social and economic relations throughout the socialist era; and the last part focusing on the subsequent reform era in China. A challenge for readers will be to extract the themes and information of most interest from the rich content. Skimming the insightful conclusion first will assist in this.
In Part I, “Deference and Defiance in the 1950s,” Li shows how villagers and the state mutually resisted and accommodated each other during the first decade of the People's Republic of China. He documents how Qin villagers initially allowed the state to impose small-scale cooperatives because they were fairly consistent with traditional social arrangements, they did enhance productivity, villagers valued benefits to their social community as well as to themselves, and shirking could be controlled by social institutions. Later, however, villagers there and in the area resisted the large-scale collectivization, harvesting collective crops for private use, taking back farm animals and tools from the collectives, beating up cadre, and petitioning to quit the co-ops. It will surprise many that the local state responded with persuasion and accommodation rather than coercion. But later, as its power and penetration grew, the state's use of coercion grew too.
In Part II, “Power and Control Under Socialism,” Li explores politics throughout the socialist era, with attention to both formal and informal relations. Over the era, villagers increasingly moved away from invoking what Huaiyin Li describes as “righteous resistance” to what Kevin O'Brien and Lianjiang Li (2006) have called “rightful resistance.” This was partly a tactical choice. The former invokes traditional values and methods, which in Qin village took the form of first sending the neediest to resist (on the basis of a traditional right to survival) or pointedly staging a forbidden traditional festival even when it wasn't the traditional time for the festival. In contrast, “rightful resistance” uses the laws and terms of the state to more safely challenge the local officials, but not the state. Indeed, the state institutionalized tools for villagers to assist in keeping local officials in check; and villagers applied social pressures as well.
In Part III, “Individuals, the Family, and the Collective,” Li shows how collectivism, contrary to its objectives, contributed to rural inequities and stagnation in labor productivity. Especially important here is his carefully-mapped evidence that the state engaged in “excessive extraction” by taking away agricultural ‘surplus'—thereby hampering the collectives’ ability to accumulate capital and modernize labor inputs for the benefit of locals. The state further held back rural growth by preventing farmers from sideline work or migrating to find work. Moreover, collectivism enabled discrimination and favoritism by team leaders, and the supposedly egalitarian workpoint system actually created great inequalities between family groups. Nevertheless, the government led the construction of a modern flood-control and irrigation system, improved health care and education, and introduced new crop varieties locally.
In Part IV, “The Reform Era,” Li tracks the process of decollectivization, the retreat of the state from village politics and community life, and the limited introduction of new forms of local governance from the late 70s to the present day. He describes village politics as undergoing an imperfect transition from “government or the state's top-down control of the village to governance that involved the villagers' voluntary participation in the management of community affairs and advancement of public well-being” (p. 343). This was facilitated by the state's introduction of village elections, the retreat of the state, villagers' economic independence and villagers' increasing awareness of their rights and capacities. Continuities from earlier eras, like revived traditions, also are apparent in political, social, and economic realms.
Li himself is from Qin village. He grew up there until he was fifteen and maintained strong links to the community. The research behind the book is impressive, incorporating evidence drawn from government archives, records of local agricultural collectives, and extensive field research facilitated by his personal ties. Still, there are a few places where I found the evidence presented more suggestive than convincing. For instance, in chapters 5 and 8, Li concludes that certain corruption control measures were quite effective (pp. 135–6, 169). Yet, most of his documentation concerns the nature and implementation of the measures, and the limited evidence of their impact seems drawn from sources that could be biased. It might help if Li clarified the sources of interview information, some of which included former cadre who might be biased, and directly discussed the possibility that records might be skewed, false, or incomplete.
Finally, readers should be careful not to assume the story of Qin village is necessarily typical of China. Although Li believes that many of its experiences are, he does not provide evidence on other regions. Further research would be needed to determine if his findings hold across space, or just why there might be so much variation across space. This inherent limit of the case study does not detract in any way what Li does so impressively, which is to trace and interpret change and continuity across time in Qin village.
Overall, Li's complex portrait of Qin village contributes an original, insightful, and well-documented study to a growing body of literature that is challenging common views of the past sixty years in China. The book delivers a real sense of village life throughout the different eras and the context to understand it, making it an excellent tool for teaching as well as for comparative research. Indeed, Li's well-grounded and theoretically-interesting research should be useful in refining comparative theories on the authoritarian institutions, social institutions, public political engagement, and economic development.
