Village Society in the Early Twentieth Century

Abstract

The early twentieth century was an era of rapid and drastic transformations in Chinese history mainly because of the serious survival crisis that China was experiencing, and the Chinese villagers, who formed the great majority of China’s population at that time, actively participated in such transformations. They were the ones who launched the unsuccessful Boxer Rebellion at the very beginning of the twentieth century, and they also formed the core force that brought the Communist revolution to its triumph in 1949. Villagers acted either spontaneously or at the instigation of groups of reformers and revolutionaries, most of whom were of rural origins but had received education and accepted new ideas in urban centers. Throughout the early twentieth century, village China became the setting of all kinds of reformist and revolutionary movements aimed at bringing about multifaceted changes to China in general and rural China in particular. The size of the rural population, the significant influence the Chinese villages had had on the Chinese traditional culture, as well as the important roles the villages and villagers played in the modern transformations of China, are among the factors that have made the Chinese village society in the early twentieth century a subject of a large number of political, academic, and literary writings during and after the first half of the twentieth century. Those writings focus on many different topics, including the nature, structure, and culture of the village society; the performance of China’s rural economy; the relations between the villages and the cities; the relations between the intellectuals and the peasants; and the villagers as bandits, rebels, reformers, and revolutionaries. The authors of these writings were political leaders, scholars, novelists, and others, and they wrote for different purposes. Generally speaking, most of those who wrote about the villagers and villages during the early twentieth century were motivated by an intense desire to present justifications for the reformist or revolutionary agenda they were advocating, whereas those who wrote after the early twentieth century have shown a stronger interest in seeking interpretations than providing justifications. This bibliography includes not only academic studies of the Chinese village society of the early twentieth century, but also representative political and journalistic writings that are essential for understanding the major aspects and dynamic changes of village China in the early twentieth century.