Organizing Rural China—Rural China Organizing, edited by Ane Bislev and Stig Thøgersen. Lanham: Lexington Books, 2012. viii + 240 pp. US$65.00/£39.95 (hardcover), US$64.99/£39.95 (eBook).

Abstract

Organizing Rural China-Rural China Organizing, edited by Ane Bislev and Stig Thogersen. Lanham: Lexington Books, 2012. viii + 240 pp. US$65.00/£39.95 (hardcover), US$64.99/£39.95 (eBook).This edited collection represents research into the social and political organization of rural China conducted by a network of mainly Scandinavian and Chinese scholars between 2008 and 2011. The project investigated whether the institutions that govern rural life can underpin socially coherent communities that are both responsive to the states interests and able to follow a modernizing development trajectory. The title of the collection expresses the idea that some actors approach rural China from outside (top-down organizing) even as other actors are internal to rural society (bottom-up organizing). The introduction, by Ane Bislev and Stig Thogersen, lays out this problematic and the inside-outside division of views about it. There follow the results of the research project, 11 detailed studies of particular places or practices; these are bookended by chapters from Jonathan Unger, who underlines the continuities in political organization of rural China since the revolution, and Vivienne Shue, who provides the conclusion.The first set of studies examines outsiders' views of the institutions of rural life and their actions to remedy the supposed defects in those institutions. The principal outsider is, of course, the Party-state; its interests are in ensuring rural social order (social harmony, in the language of Hu Jintao) and in maintaining the conditions for continued capitalist industrial expansion (supplies of food and of rural migrant labor of appropriate quality). State officials and academics both fear that failed villages, socially fragmented and only poorly modernized, will become more common as social life becomes more individualized under the forces of the market; such villages are described in the chapter by Liu Yiqiang. Debates about these issues in China are constrained by rules about what can be said (the subject of Thogersen's chapter), but oscillate between blaming local cadres for rural problems and emphasizing the need for social unity as the key to development. This latter is the concern of Christian Gobel's chapter. Material processes of state intervention include sending down cadres to bring modern, rational modes of behavior into towns and villages (the contradictions of this are explored by Mâlfrid Rolandsen), as well as experiments in building institutions and providing training (described by Xu Yong and Ma Hua). The paternalistic state is abetted in these views and practices by an urban intelligentsia that often has little detailed knowledge about, empathy with or respect for peasants and their conditions.The second set of studies recounts examples of different kinds of rural organizations: long-established and new, formal and informal. The most obvious of these institutions are the two committees (village and Party), which are intended to operate as systems of top-down control, formalizing the distinction between leaders and the led. That distinction itself needs to be taught, however, and Mette Halskov Hansens chapter describes the ways in which rural boarding schools teach students how to act as cadres and as commoners. If formal state institutions (such as the marketized rural health-care system) are incapable of providing the services that villagers want, then people organize their own, unofficial systems that include spirit mediums and religious movements; Mikkel Bunkenborg describes just such a case. …