Negotiating Socialism in Rural China: Mao, Peasants, and Local Cadres in Shanxi 1949-1953

摘要

In the annals of Chinese history, 1953 seems an unlikely choice as a year of great significance. But that autumn the Chinese Communist Party launched a mass campaign to build agricultural producers' cooperatives, signalling the beginning of the end for the private landholding system that had endured for millennia. The move to collective farming in Shanxi, the subject of Xiaojia Hou's excellent book, provided a model that was followed throughout the Chinese countrywide. In just a few short years peasants were forced to hand over their landholdings, setting the stage for the disaster of Utopian communes and the Great Leap Forward. Scholars have followed the Party line and seen the move to collective farming in 1953 as the logical next step following successful experiments with mutual aid teams. Hou's focus on Shanxi, the vanguard of collective fanning, demonstrates that collectivization was doomed from the start. Her close attention to how cadres doctored and exaggerated agricultural investigations makes this impeccably researched book a must read for scholars interested in the interactions of peasants and the Party in the countryside. Hou also provides one of the finest studies of cadres from the provincial level to the village level. Drawing on a diverse set of archival reports, oral history collections and a deep engagement with Chinese language scholarship, Hou brings to life an intermediary realm typically left out of top down and bottom up studies of rural China.