(Source)
 
Joel Andreas is an Associate Professor in Department of Sociology, Johns Hopkins University. He got a doctoral degree in sociology at the University of California, Los Angeles in 2003. Recently he published a book, Rise of the Red Engineers: The Cultural Revolution and the Origins of China’s New Class, which analyzes the contentious merger of old and new elites in China during the socialist era. 

Among books about rural development in China during the Mao Zedong era, Dongping Han’s stands out for two reasons. First, Han was born and raised in a village and worked for many years in a village machine shop before he went to college in 1978. Second, he is sympathetic with the project of collective rural development undertaken during the Mao era and, in particular, with the radical turn this project took during the Cultural Revolution decade (1966-76). In this book, a case study of the rural county–Jimo County in Shandong Province–in which he grew up, he develops a cogent argument about the contributions of the Cultural Revolution to rural development.

In alternating chapters, Han develops two theses, one about rural education and the other about village politics. In the chapters about education, Han first describes the backward state of rural schools before the Cultural Revolution and discusses the reasons most village children did not advance beyond the first few years of primary school, arguing that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) neglected rural education during its first decades in power. He then describes the massive expansion of rural middle schools and the development of rural-oriented vocational education during the Cultural Revolution decade. In the chapters about politics, Han writes that after the CCP came to power its rural cadres tended to adopt the autocratic style of the old rural political elites. This autocratic style, he argues, was effectively challenged by rebel organizations during the Cultural Revolution and as a result ordinary villagers gained the confidence to confront cadres who abused their power.

He ties these two threads together by discussing their impact on rural economic development. Before the Cultural Revolution, agriculture developed very slowly in Jimo County and although many small rural factories were built during the Great Leap Forward (1958-60), they virtually all shut their doors during the subsequent economic collapse. During the Cultural Revolution decade, Han shows, agricultural production began to substantially improve and rural industry took off in Jimo County. The expansion of rural schools, and especially the new vocational education programs, Han argues, provided village youth with the training required to modernize agriculture and develop small factories. This first generation of educated rural youth helped village production brigades begin to mechanize agriculture, develop irrigation on a large scale, introduce chemical fertilizer, and experiment with new seeds, crops, and methods, and they also staffed the more than 2,500 small factories and other enterprises set up by Jimo villages during the Cultural Revolution decade. The changes in village political culture wrought by the Cultural Revolution, Han argues, also played a role in this economic take-off. First, he writes, the Cultural Revolution revived collective endeavors, which had waned after the collapse of the Great Leap Forward, providing the organizational and financial foundation for mechanization, irrigation, and industrial projects. Second, rural cadres, chastened by the challenges to their authority during the early years of the Cultural Revolution, were compelled to prove their competence and diligence, and to involve villagers in production decisions.

Han marshals Jimo County statistics documenting the expansion of schools, mechanization, and agricultural production to bolster his arguments, but he underpins these numbers with detailed descriptions about changes in the economic, political and social life of the village. It is this meticulous description, clearly based on knowledge gained not by a few months of ethnographic investigation but through decades of living in the village, that make his arguments particularly compelling. One caveat readers should note: Jimo County, located near the port city of Qingdao, is in one of the more economically developed areas of the country. Although it was poor compared to some of its neighbors, it was in a much better position to modernize agriculture and develop industry than most rural counties.

Han concludes his book with a brief chapter about the post-Mao Reform era. The Qingdao area has done particularly well in recent decades and Jimo County has shared in this prosperity. Han, however, focuses on the negative consequences of decollectivization and market reform: The decline of rural health care, the stagnation of rural education, the deterioration of irrigation facilities, the loss of the public political space that had been provided by collective organization, growing corruption and abuse of power by cadres, and sharply increasing economic inequality. While he admits that Jimo has continued to develop during the era of market reforms, he clearly prefers the previous collective development path. But this chapter is only an epilogue; he does not seriously compare the development strategies of the two eras.

Han’s book is a partisan defense of the collective order and the Cultural Revolution, and he develops a very strong case. His insider status allows him to write with insight and authority and his strong point of view puts a sharp point on all of his arguments. While I find most of his arguments convincing, it seems to me that the structure of the book turns 1966 into a sharper dividing line than is warranted. The rural development strategy he identifies with the Cultural Revolution dates back to the beginnings of the collective era. The disastrous collapse of the Great Leap Forward nearly extinguished this strategy (Han’s account of Jimo County shows how traumatic the consequences of this collapse were), but by 1963 Mao Zedong had succeeded in bringing back this strategy, with its agricultural, industrial, educational, and health components. Although this strategy only began to get traction in many rural areas during the Cultural Revolution decade (as was the case in Jimo County), it would be a mistake to think of it as a product of the Cultural Revolution. With respect to political culture, the Cultural Revolution certainly shook up the party and state apparatus at all levels, but I am not convinced that the change was as dramatic as Han suggests. Many of the problems he describes before 1966 continued to exist afterwards and many of the positive qualities he attributes to the Cultural Revolution had roots in the earlier era. But these are questions of emphasis. Han has written one of the most important books on rural development and village political life during the Mao era; any serious student of this era will learn much from this book and will have to take its arguments seriously.