Peasant Power in China

Peasant Power in China PDF

Author: Daniel Roy Kelliher

Publisher:

Published: 1992

Total Pages: 296

ISBN-13:

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From 1979-1989 rural life in China was transformed: communes were dismantled and government domination eased. From field work in Hubei and south-central China, Kelliher traces the orgins of reform in family farming, marketing and private entrepreneurship and shows how peasants instigated reform.

Peasant Power in China

Peasant Power in China PDF

Author: Daniel Kelliher

Publisher: Yale University Press

Published: 1992-11-25

Total Pages: 292

ISBN-13: 9780300105650

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Between 1979 and 1989, rural life in China was transformed: the communes were dismantled, tiny family farms were created, government domination of commerce and enterprise was eased, and many entrepreneurial ventures were brought to life. China's rural reform was arguably the most massive single act of privatization in history. Although Deng Xiaoping's government claimed credit for the dramatic innovations, Daniel Kelliher shows that it was the peasants themselves--with no organization or legal political voice of their own--who instigated the most radical changes of the reform era. Drawing on his fieldwork in Hubei Province and neighboring provinces in south-central China, Kelliher traces the origins of reform in three areas--family farming, marketing, and private entrepreneurship--and details the local conspiracies, deceptions, and illegal experiments that peasants used to push state policy in new directions. He also addresses the larger issue of how disenfranchised peasants could affect politics at all under a strong state like that of China. Analyzing the evolution of state socialism in China, Kelliher explains how state ambitions for modernization in the post-Mao era made the state-socialist system vulnerable to rising peasant power. He also shows why the state seized upon economic privatization as a way of securing its political base among the peasantry. The book not only offers a wide-ranging portrait of rural politics in contemporary China but also uses the Chinese case to illuminate state-peasant relations, reform in state socialism, and privatization in other third world nations.

The Peasant in Postsocialist China

The Peasant in Postsocialist China PDF

Author: Alexander F. Day

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2013-07-18

Total Pages: 243

ISBN-13: 1107435293

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The role of the peasant in society has been fundamental throughout China's history, posing difficult, much-debated questions for Chinese modernity. Today, as China becomes an economic superpower, the issue continues to loom large. Can the peasantry be integrated into a new Chinese capitalism, or will it form an excluded and marginalized class? Alexander F. Day's highly original appraisal explores the role of the peasantry throughout Chinese history and its importance within the development of post-socialist-era politics. Examining the various ways in which the peasant is historicized, Day shows how different perceptions of the rural lie at the heart of the divergence of contemporary political stances and of new forms of social and political activism in China. Indispensable reading for all those wishing to understand Chinese history and politics, The Peasant in Postsocialist China is a new point of departure in the debate as to the nature of tomorrow's China.

Peasant Nationalism and Communist Power

Peasant Nationalism and Communist Power PDF

Author: Chalmers A. Johnson

Publisher: Stanford University Press

Published: 1962

Total Pages: 276

ISBN-13: 9780804700740

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This author researches the Chinese Communists' wartime expansion, according to the documentation recorded by Japanese intelligence, then compares that expansion with that of the Yugoslav Communists.

State and Peasant in Contemporary China

State and Peasant in Contemporary China PDF

Author: Jean C. Oi

Publisher: Univ of California Press

Published: 1991-08-12

Total Pages: 311

ISBN-13: 0520076370

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This is a study of peasant-state relations and village politics as they have evolved in response to the state's attempts to control the division of the harvest and extract the state-defined surplus. To provide the reader with a clearer sense of the evolution of peasant-state relations over almost a forty-year period and to highlight the dramatic changes that have taken place since 1978,1 have divided my analysis into two parts: Chapters 2 through 7 are on Maoist China, and chapters 8 and 9 are on post-Mao China. The first part examines the state's grain policies and patterns of local politics that emerged during the highly collectivized Maoist period, when the state closed free grain markets and established the system of unified purchase and sales (tonggou tongxiao). The second part describes the new methods for the production and division of the harvest after 1978, when the government decollectivized agriculture and abolished its unified procurement program.

China's Peasants

China's Peasants PDF

Author: Sulamith Heins Potter

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 1990-03-29

Total Pages: 382

ISBN-13: 9780521357876

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The revolutionary experiences of Cantonese peasant villagers are documented in the first comprehensive analysis of rural Chinese society by foreign anthropologists since the Revolution of 1949.

China's Peasants

China's Peasants PDF

Author: Sulamith Heins Potter

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 1990-03-29

Total Pages: 382

ISBN-13: 9780521355216

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This landmark study of Zengbu, a Cantonese community, is the first comprehensive analysis of a rural Chinese society by foreign anthropologists since the Revolution in 1949. Jack and Sulamith Potter examine the revolutionary experiences of Zengbu's peasant villagers and document the rapid changeover from Maoist to post-Maoist China. In particular, they seek to explain the persistence of the deep structure of Chinese culture through thirty years of revolutionary praxis. The authors assess the continuities and changes in rural China, moving from the traditional social organization and cultural life of the pre-revolutionary period through the series of large-scale efforts to implement planned social change which characterized Maoism - land reform, collectivization, the Great Leap Forward, and the Cultural Revolution. They examine in detail late Maoist society in 1979-80 and go on to describe and analyse the extraordinary changes of the post-Mao years, during which Zengbu was decollectivized, and traditional customs and religious practices reappeared.

Ideology, Power, Text

Ideology, Power, Text PDF

Author: Yi-tsi Mei Feuerwerker

Publisher: Stanford University Press

Published: 1998-10-01

Total Pages: 333

ISBN-13: 0804765197

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The division between the scholar-gentry class and the “people” was an enduring theme of the traditional Chinese agrarian-bureaucratic state. Twentieth-century elites recast this as a division between intellectuals and peasants and made the confrontation between the writing/intellectual self and the peasant “other” a central concern of literature. The author argues that, in the process, they created the “peasantry,” the downtrodden rural masses represented as proper objects of political action and shifting ideological agendas. Throughout this transition, language or discourse has been not only a weapon of struggle but the center of controversy and contention. Because of this primacy of language, the author’s main approach is the close reading or, rather, re-reading of significant narrative fictions from four literary generations to demonstrate how historical, ideological, and cultural issues are absorbed, articulated, and debated within the text. Three chapters each focus on one representative author. The fiction of Lu Xun (1881-1936), which initiated the literary preoccupation with the victimized peasant, is also about the identity crisis of the intellectual. Zhao Shuli (1906-1970), upheld by the Communist Party as a model “peasant writer,” tragically exemplifies in his career the inherent contradictions of such an assigned role. In the post-Mao era, Gao Xiaosheng (1928—) uses the ironic play of language to present a more ambiguous peasant while deflating intellectual pretensions. The chapter on the last of the four “generations” examines several texts by Mo Yan (1956—), Han Shaogong (1952—), and Wang Anyi (1954—) as examples of “root-searching” fiction from the mid-1980’s. While reaching back into the past, this fiction is paradoxically also experimental in technique: the encounter with the peasant leads to questions about the self-construction of the intellectual and the nature of narrative representation itself. Throughout, the focus is on texts in which some sort of representation or stand-in of the writer/intellectual self is present—as character, as witness, as center of consciousness, or as first-person or obtrusive narrator. Each story catches the writer in a self-reflective mode, the confrontation with the peasant “other” providing a theater for acting out varying dramas of identity, power, ideology, political engagement, and self-representation.

Women, the Family, and Peasant Revolution in China

Women, the Family, and Peasant Revolution in China PDF

Author: Kay Ann Johnson

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2009-02-15

Total Pages: 292

ISBN-13: 0226401944

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Kay Ann Johnson provides much-needed information about women and gender equality under Communist leadership. She contends that, although the Chinese Communist Party has always ostensibly favored women's rights and family reform, it has rarely pushed for such reforms. In reality, its policies often have reinforced the traditional role of women to further the Party's predominant economic and military aims. Johnson's primary focus is on reforms of marriage and family because traditional marriage, family, and kinship practices have had the greatest influence in defining and shaping women's place in Chinese society. Conversant with current theory in political science, anthropology, and Marxist and feminist analysis, Johnson writes with clarity and discernment free of dogma. Her discussions of family reform ultimately provide insights into the Chinese government's concern with decreasing the national birth rate, which has become a top priority. Johnson's predictions of a coming crisis in population control are borne out by the recent increase in female infanticide and the government abortion campaign.