Social Change and Rediscovering Rural Reconstruction in China

Week 9 Required Reading: Ou Ning, “Social Change and Rediscovering Rural Reconstruction in China”, New Worlds From Below: Grassroots Networking and Informal Life Politics in Twenty-First Century East Asia, edited by Tessa Morris-Suzuki, will be published by The Australian National University Press, Canberra, 2017. Chapter 2 Social Change and Rediscovering Rural Reconstruction in China Ou Ning The Origins of the Rural Reconstruction Movement Rural reconstruction, one of the most important insurmountable problems in China’s relentless pursuit of modernity, has had its ups and downs over the last 100 years. It again has emerged as a lens through which to examine the role of different political and intellectual forces in China's process of social reform. This chapter explores this historical legacy and the recent re-emergence of rural reconstruction as a source of inspiration for Chinese social change.1 Chinese elites began exploring the concept of rural reform in the late Qing dynasty, when Mi Jiansan and his Japan-educated son Mi Digang, members of a distinguished local family in the village of Zhaicheng in Ding county of Hebei province, experimented with the idea of ‘village government’ (cunzhi 村治) in 1902, through literacy campaigns, civic education and local self- government. County magistrate Sun Faxu developed their idea further as he took the post of gov- ernor in neighboring Shanxi province, and it was later also embraced by the warlord Yan Xishan, who effectively controlled Shanxi in the Republican era and turned the province into a model of rural reconstruction. The ‘Village Government Group’ (cunzhipai 村治派) was established as a school of thought in 1924, when some north China landed gentry, including Wang Hongyi, Mi Digang, Mi Jieping, Peng Yuting, Liang Zhonghua, Yi Zhongcai and Wang Yike, launched the Zhonghua Daily (Zhonghua ribao 中华日报) and the Village Government Monthly (cunzhiyu- ekan 村治月刊). In 1925, the then four-year-old Chinese Communist Party, having realised the importance of farmers to its revolution, decided to mobilise support in the countryside with their 1 This chapter is a revised version of an essay first published in Ou Ning ed., The South of Southern: Space, Geog- raphy, History and the Biennale, (Beijing, China Youth Press, 2014) 1 ‘Letter to Farmers’ (gao nongmin shu 告农民书), encouraging the establishment of farmers' un- ions. The ensuing class struggles and land revolution provoked urban intellectuals into seeking different approaches to rural reform. The May 30 1925 shooting of protesters in the Shanghai International Settlement sparked a na- tionwide labor and anti-imperialist movement, and many parts of China saw a surge of rural reconstruction experiments. By 1934, official statistics show that there were more than 600 rural reconstruction groups and over 1,000 experimental across China.2 Newspapers and magazines were filled with reports, commentaries and debates on rural reconstruction. The two most influential experiments were those conducted by Liang Shuming's Rural Reconstruction Institute in Zouping county, Shandong province, and Y. C. James Yen's Mass Education Association in Ding county, Hebei province. Liang, inspired by the ‘Village Government Group,’ developed a Confucianism-based philosophy for rural reconstruction and thus was considered a member of the ‘Old Group’ (jiupai 旧派) while Yen, who was Christian and received funding from the United States, belonged to the ‘New Group’ (xinpai 新派). The Politics of Rural Reconstruction In the thirteenth volume of The Cambridge History of China, historian John K. Fairbank devoted a whole section, ‘The Rural Reconstruction Movement’, to the massive rural reconstruction campaigns of the time. Fairbank identified six types of campaigns: 1) Western-influenced (James Yen); 2) nativist (the ‘Village Government Group’, Liang Shuming and Tao Xingzhi, the found- er of the Xiaozhuang Normal College in Nanjing); 3) educational (James Yen and Tao Xingzhi); 4) military (Peng Yuting, who established a local defense regime in Zhenping county, Henan province); 5) populist (James Yen and Tao Xingzhi); 6) and bureaucratic (the two ‘experimental counties’ administered by the Nanjing authorities in Lanxi, Zhejiang province and Jiangning, Jiangsu province). But Fairbank’s volume overlooked several other important experiments — those carried out by Lu Zuofu's Chongqing Beibei Defence Bureau in the Gorges region along the Yangtze tributary Jialing River, Gao Jiansi's Jiangsu Provincial Institute of Education in Huangxiang, Wuxi, Jiangsu province, and Huang Yanpei's National Association of Vocational Education of China in Xugongqiao, Kunshan, Jiangsu province. The Cambridge History of China stated that all rural reconstruction experiments were linked in- extricably to politics: To revitalise the countryside through educational and economic reforms meant working out relationships of patronage and protection with political authorities. This was surely because any attempt to work with the peasantry in an organ- 2 Xiangcun jianshe jingyan [Lessons from Rural Reconstruction] (Shanghai: Zhonghua Book Company, 1935), 19. 2 ised project inevitably raised questions of political orientation and legitimacy, whether or not the project had any explicitly political aims or activities’.3 Owing to political uncertainty, these educational, social and economic reforms — though not without a local effect — were unable to provide a comprehensive solution to China's rural problems. Politics was not only a barrier to China's rural reconstruction but a key factor contributing to its ultimate failure. Yen first claimed that his experiment had nothing to do with politics, but had to admit later that, ‘given the circumstances, we couldn't keep ourselves away from politics’.4 Liang said that the ‘two major difficulties’ he encountered were ‘the inevitable need to rely on the authorities to push for social reform and farmers' indifference to the rural reconstruction movement’.5 Rural reconstruction was doomed to failure if it did not seek ‘a political solution’.6 In fact, the multitude of experiments that focused on local self-government, mass education and agricultural development were preceded by the brief existence in China of a utopian philosophy called ‘New Village-ism’ (xincunzhuyi 新村主义) — a mixture of Japanese writer Mushanokōji Saneatsu's idea of Atarashiki Mura (‘New Village’, 新しき村), Peter Kropotkin's theory of mu- tual aid, and Lev Tolstoy's view of labor and the North American practice of combining studies with part-time work. Mushanokōji’s philosophy was part of the ‘White Birch Group’ (Shirakaba-ha 白樺派), for the name of the literary magazine he founded in 1910 ‘White Birch’ (on this movement see also Chapters 1 and 3). In 1918, in the mountains of Miyazaki prefec- ture in Kyushu, members of the White Birch Group carried out their plan to build an intentional community without government, exploitation or social class and to live an idyllically pastoral life. Chinese writer Zhou Zuoren was a long-time subscriber to the commune's literary magazine Atarashiki-mura, expressing his support for the movement in his articles ‘Humanist Literature’ (Rende wenxue 人的文学) and ‘Japan's New Village’ (Ribende xincun 日本的新村), published in 1918 and 1919 in the influential magazine La Jeunesse, during China's New Culture Move- ment of the 1910s and 1920s. Zhou even visited Miyazaki himself and in 1920 founded a branch of the Atarashiki-mura commune in his Beijing home, attracting early communist leaders such as Li Dazhao, Mao Zedong, Cai Hesen and Yun Daiying. The same year, a similar and influential experiment was started in the village of Xiaowuying of Xihua county, Henan province, by Wang Gongbi, a member of the former Tongmenghui, a revo- lutionary alliance absorbed by the Kuomintang in 1912. Xiaowuying was soon renamed Youth 3 Philip A. Kuhn, "The Rural Reconstruction Movement," in John K. Fairbank and Albert Feuerwerker, eds., The Cambridge History of China, vol. 13, Republican China 1912-1949, Part 2 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 359. 4 Y. C. James Yen, "Pingmin jiaoyu yundong de huigu yu qianzhan," [The Past and Future of the Mass Education Movement] in Enrong Song, ed., Gaoyu renmin [To the People] (Guilin: Guangxi Normal University Press, 2003), 197. 5 Liang Shuming, Xiangcun jianshe lilun [Rural Reconstruction Theories] (Shanghai: Shanghai Century Publishing Group, 2006), 368. 6 Cao Lixin made an in-depth analysis of the political dilemma faced by the rural reconstruction movement in the Republican era in comparison with the rural revolution of the Communist Party of China. See Cao Lixin, "Zouxiang zhengzhi jiejue de xiangcun jianshe," [Rural Reconstruction: Toward a Political Solution] Twenty-First Century 91 (October 2005). 3 Village (qingniancun 青年村). Mao Zedong was also an admirer of ‘New Village-ism’, but chose the path of revolution in the end. It was only after the founding of the People's Republic of China in 1949 that Mao would transform this utopian philosophy into people's communes. The idealistic values of ‘New Village-ism’, unlike the pragmatic approach of the rural reconstruction movement, soon fell into decline in China. In fact, ‘New Village-ism’ was not only a Japanese import but a continuation of ancient Chinese Agrarianism (nongjia 农家), the most marginalised and overlooked of all the schools of thought, and one that dates back to the golden age of Chi- nese philosophy from 770 to 221 BC. Agriculturalism was discussed in a volume (‘Treatise

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