Prosperity's Predicament: Identity, Reform and Resistance in Rural Wartime China

摘要

This book is remarkable on several counts. First, it is the product of collaborations among five women spanning 73 years. The project began in 1940 as a National Christian Council (NCC) village survey conducted by anthropologist Isabel Brown Crook and sociologist Yu Xiji; it was joined by historian Christina Gilmartin in 1994 and then, after Christina's death in 2012, by historians Gail Hershatter and Emily Honig. Yu Xiji died in 2006, and so Isabel Crook, now aged 98, is the only surviving member of the group of three authors. The book is remarkable also for the strong and penetrating analysis it makes of the confrontation between "insiders" and modernising "outsiders" in a Sichuan market village - a rural locality that had been somewhat "remote" until suddenly, in 1938, it came within easy reach of the Chongqing-based Nationalist government. Prosperity village's predicament was its entanglement in political webs cast by both local powerbrokers and agents of the reforming Kuomintang state. Another strong feature of the study is the vivid stories it tells about villagers. Brown and Yu were, as young women, the least threatening of the outsiders who moved into the village in the early war years; the rich collection of anecdotes they have used to illuminate their analysis is testimony to the regard and trust they won from local people during their 14-month stay in Prosperity. That, and the fact that rural women used the NCC's Prosperity office as "a type of women's teahouse" (p. 11) on market days, explains how the authors learned so much about gender roles and the lives of local women. The prominence given to women's stories makes this village study exceptional.