Chinese modernity and the peasant path: semicolonialism in the Northern Yangzi Delta

Abstract

Chinese Modernity and the Peasant Path: Semi-Colonialism in the Northern Yangzi Delta. KATHY LE MONS WALKER. Stanford CA: Stanford University Press, 1999; 330 pp. This is an ambitious book with a commendable agenda-a rigorous class analysis of the complex relations between indigenous elites, the local peasantry, national and international merchants, and the state in the cotton producing hinterland of treaty port Shanghai in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Writing against the grain of linear, positivist development theory, the author argues that . . . the very idea of development restrictively enforces a certain definition of modemity, [that] would only permit an examination of China in terms of negative analysis and residual categories (p. vii). For the most part the author succeeds in the agenda she sets. In the end the account of the development of class relations in the northern Yangzi delta from the late Ming dynasty (1368-1644 AD) through to the twentieth century Republic (1911-- 1949 AD) gives us a good feeling for the contingent nature of historical development in the region and a comprehensive assessment of the fluctuating interests and relative strength of the contending parties. author also makes her case for the need to recognize the importance and utility of the concept semicolonial. author's interpretive framework provides a number of excellent insights into the historical process. Some of these emphasize the particularity of the Chinese experience, some borrow from the anthropological and historical investigation of other cultures, and still others represent creative inferences derived from the source materials. For example, the author's account of the development of cotton textile development in the Ming dynasty and the changing patterns in household division of labor it entailed creatively explains the origin of the common saying, The men till and the women weave (pp. 50-51). Also of interest in light of recent world historical research is the author's recognition of the far reaching effects of cotton textile commercialization in the delta. This process not only propelled movement toward the formation of a national market structured on the exchange of grain for cotton cloth . . . by petty producers, but also stimulated demand for the international flow of silver as a commodity, and hence also drove the formation of a global monetary system (p. 34). She also demonstrates, contrary to the assumptions of modernization theory, that Third World modernities, emerging within the framework of im and colonialism have often entailed the extension, hardening and ever the resurrection of traditional fame (p. 93) of exploitation, such as indentured and other forms of disguised wage labor (p. 174). twentiethcentury reemergence of sharecropping in the delta is understood as one manifestation of the latter (p. 193). In the author's conceptualization, borrowed from Claude Meillasoux, these processes are part of a larger pattern in which wage labor first becomes indispensable to household subsistence. However, the continued coexistence of subsistence farming together with wage labor has the effect of subsidizing the industrial wage, leading to the subproletarianization of the vast majority of peasants (p. 174). author's analysis of usury capital is also quite insightful. She reads increases in the number of pawnshops in her historical records as expressing the growing power of trade-usury-landlordism (p. 126). She also shows how the institution of preharvest buying of the cotton crop extended the exploitation space of usury capital in the countryside, allowing larger firms to increase surplus appropriation and gain control of cotton supplies (p. 134). career of pioneer nationalist industrialist, ZhangJian, examined in some detail (Ch. 5), helps to illuminate the changing configuration of forces in the northern delta during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. …