The Impact of Economic Reforms in the Chinese Countryside

Abstract

The economic reform policies of the past five years have brought far-reaching changes throughout the Chinese countryside. However, contrary to conventional models of the policy process in state socialist societies, wherein authoritarian elites impose their will on an inert or recalcitrant population, the rural reforms in China have seen policymakers struggling to adjust to, and keep up with, powerful pressures for change from below. (For different views of this policy process, see Unger, 1986, and Watson, 1986.) In consequence, the changes have far exceeded the initial expectations of policymakers; many of the implications were not anticipated and are still only partly understood. At this stage, it is difficult for a foreign analyst to draw a clear picture of Chinese rural realities. This article is being written, therefore, more to raise questions and provoke debate than establish firm conclusions. It argues that rural economic reform policies are in the process of transforming fundamentally the character of Chinese rural society. In so doing, they are transforming the structural and institutional matrix of rural politics, generating new patterns of power and new axes of political conflict and cooperation, and redefining issue agendas and rules of the political game. Most crucially, there is a strong tendency for the reforms to generate a process of dynamic rural capitalism