Chinese Peasants Research Articles

The Transformation of Traditional Peasants: An Age–Period–Cohort Analysis of the Modernity of Peasants in China

Using the data of Chinese General Social Survey from 2010 to 2018, this study measured the modernity of Chinese peasants from four dimensions: equality and autonomy, positive attitude, general confidence, and open-mindedness. Hierarchical age–period–cohort models were introduced to assess the effect of age, period, and cohort on modernity and to further explore the heterogeneities in the effect of education and off-farm work experience on modernity among various birth cohorts. Age effects consistently show significance, with the level of individual modernity decreasing as age increases. However, the rate of decline gradually slows down. Period effects are generally significant and contribute to the advancement of modernity. Cohort effects are significant in most cohorts. The modernity of peasants born between 1941 and 1960 show a consistent decline, reaching its lowest point in the cohort 1961–1970 and then increasing steadily among those born after 1970. Possible explanations were proposed from the perspective of changes in the land property system and household registration system in China. We also found that the positive effect of education is stronger for younger cohorts, whereas the positive effect of off-farm experience is stronger for older cohorts. This study enriches Inkeles’s research on individual modernization and reveals the transformation process of traditional peasants in developing countries.

Chen Han-seng, the Institute of Pacific Relations, and Changing Ideas About the Chinese Rural Economy

Abstract The famous sociologist, economist, and historian Chen Han-seng was the founder of the Agrarian China Research Association, publishing influential studies on industrial production and class relations, and their effect on peasant living standards. Through the Institute of Pacific Relations (ipr), Chen engaged in a theoretical dialogue with liberal intellectuals and responded to American, British, and Soviet theories about Chinese society and rural China. Unlike American ipr scholars, such as John Lossing Buck, whose agenda was to investigate the consumer power of Chinese peasants, Chen’s study of living standards emphasized their production capability and the role usury played in it. And unlike the ipr British economists, such as R. H. Tawney, who were generally optimistic about Chinese rural industry, Chen’s research proved Chinese industrialization to be unsustainable and to lower peasant living standards. In reaction to these American and British scholars, Chen tactically changed his concept of “living standards” and developed his own theory of Chinese rural economics.

The Tension Between Chinese Peasants’ Family Capital Reproduction Strategies and Massification in Higher Education

This paper is focused on the tension between Chinese peasants' family capital reproduction strategies and the existing higher education system. Under an institutionalised urban-rural segregation, most rural residents are not entitled to some of the basic social welfare guarantees available to urban residents, such as pensions. As a preparation for the future of their children as well as for themselves, peasants have a strong urge to invest in their children's higher education as their family capital reproduction strategy. However, higher education institutions, without sufficient funding from the government, have to increase enrolment size and charge high tuition fees. Increase in the cost of higher education has strongly impacted on the family economy of rural residents, and the rapid expansion of the system has resulted in an employment crisis for college graduates. Bourdieu's theory of capital reproduction will be applied in the analysis of several cases of rural parents and their children who have participated in higher education. The research eventually leads to the conclusion that, under urban-rural segregation, Chinese peasants are compelled to convert their limited economic capital into academic capital, while the reversibility of this capital conversion is hardly objectively guaranteed.

Unplanned and Unauthorized Prosperity under the Planned Economy: A County-Level Revisit of Chinese Peasants’ Participation in Illegal Markets during the Cultural Revolution

In today’s China, legacies of the centrally planned economy under Mao Zedong’s rule are being rejuvenated, which coincides with the trend of reevaluating Mao-era history more positively. For example, Supply and Marketing Cooperatives, the forces of the planned economy that dominated Chinese peasants’ marketing and purchase of products, are regaining influence in rural China. Opposite to the Supply and Marketing Cooperatives were free businesses, which faced serious restrictions and crackdowns throughout the planned economy era. Although China deviated from the model of the planned economy decades ago, a lack of sufficient bottom-up evidence has prevented researchers from presenting a clear picture of rural residents’ experiences under the planned economy, such as how they suffered from and responded to the minimization of free rural markets. This deficiency in research foreshadows the revival of the Supply and Marketing Cooperatives in a glamorized form. Based on large numbers of primary and archival sources, this article pays a county-level revisit to Chinese peasants’ continuous attempts to trade their harvest freely, especially through participating in illegal markets, during the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976). Through exploring the unplanned and unauthorized prosperity in rural commerce that went beyond lawful boundaries, the research aims to reassess Chinese peasants’ authentic marketing experiences under the planned economy, so as to provide evidence-based references for reconsidering today’s popular reevaluation of Mao-era legacies molded by the planned economy.

Gradual Transition Process of Fertilizers and the Autonomy of Chinese Peasants after the Establishment of the People's Republic of China:

Gradual Transition Process of Fertilizers and the Autonomy of Chinese Peasants after the Establishment of the People's Republic of China:

Love and Gender Relations from the Perspective of Familism: Based on Fieldwork in Contemporary Rural North Zhejiang

Abstract In response to the academic debate about the “individualization” of the patterns of love and marriage in contemporary China, this article takes the spousal selection and marriage and love practices of peasants in northern Zhejiang since China’s reform and opening up as the basis of field study, and explores the roles and functions of love and gender relations and their relationship to ethical factors in the overall process of “spousal selection→marriage→family→giving birth.” We also find that although the “love” factor has become more and more important in the marriage practice of recent generations (especially among rural women) and has even become an indispensable key to starting marital family life, it has not fully established its own independent space and value. It has in fact been boosted, guided, and controlled by, and incorporated into, the traditional marriage and family pattern. This traditional pattern, with its own unique resilience, has integrated love into the family life cycle, gradually pulling it into the orbit of traditional marriage and family, and successfully carrying on the “sacred undertaking” of the ancestors. This overall characteristic is more pronounced in developed eastern coastal villages (among young women) than in less developed central and western rural areas (among young women). In terms of theory and methodology, the “individualization” of love and marriage among contemporary Chinese peasants needs to be put back into the framework of “familism” for in-depth reflection, rather than simply being understood from the standpoint of “individualization” and from the binary opposition between “individualism” and “familism.”

Pearl S. Buck’s Dual Narrative Dynamics: An Interpretation of the Conflict between Localism and Modernity

Pearl Buck is a famous cross-cultural female writer. As an American writer closely related to China, her trilogy of The Good Earth is well known for her depiction of Chinese peasants and “land worship”. However, there is a covert progression which is parallel with the plot of “family epic” in her works. Based on the dual narrative dynamics proposed by Professor Shen Dan, this paper illustrates the conflict between localism and modernity in Pearl Buck’s The Good Earth trilogy, and explores the profound thematic significance created by the dual narrative progressions. Pearl Buck’s consideration of the changes in society and people’s mentality in modern times is inspiring for the future study of contemporary works.

Chinese Peasants and Chinese Agrarian Capitalism: Simulacra of Agriculture in the Russian Far East

The article deals with the problem of object ambiguity in studies of the Chinese presence in the agriculture of eastern Russia. Although since the mid-2010s there has been an intense discussion about the scale, motivation, and influence of Chinese agro-producers on local communities in the Russian Federation, it most often focuses counterproductively on an ethnically and socially homogeneous object. The author shows that Chinese researchers use the category "peasants," although when describing Russian realities, it becomes only a simulacrum that allows to imagine nationalistic narratives about the success of the Chinese abroad, but analytically has no value. Since the mid-2010s, scholarly discourse in the PRC has focused more on corporate actors rather than peasants, but it presents the former as a homogeneous community of investors, at best differentiated by official typology (by the scale and nature of its ownership). A more specific definition of actors has been proposed in the English-language literature. Western researchers adopted the typology of agro-producers in the PRC to describe the Chinese presence in the eastern regions of Russia. However, this mechanical transposition was based on the analysis of media discourse, which created the illusion of the existence of a detached Chinese agrarian capitalism in Russia. The author of the article, noting the complexity of the object under study due to limited access to empirical materials, sees a way out of uncertainty through the analysis of the individual cases of producers or their types. This approach, in addition to specifying the object, makes it possible to show that Chinese producers are integrated into cross-border and local networks that are not ethnically homogeneous.

Taxation and Migration of Peasants: Evidence from the Tax-for-Fee Reform in Rural China

This paper studies the effect of rural taxation on Chinese peasants’ mobility towards urban areas. We find that the tax alleviation due to the tax-for-fee reform significantly reduces rural-to-urban migration, with a 10% decline in tax leading to a 10% reduction in migration. We provide compelling evidence that the result is not driven by unintended policy effects of the tax-for-fee reform in fostering rural non-agricultural job opportunities. The effect of taxation is more pronounced and precisely estimated on migration across provinces or at older ages. To the best of our knowledge this is the first study to identify the tax-induced migration among low-skilled and low-income laborers.

Heteronomous rationality and rural protests: Peasants’ perceived egalitarianism in post-taxation China

This study focuses on Chinese peasants’ behavioural logic after the abolition of agricultural taxes in 2006. The everyday words and deeds of the residents of an ordinary village in Gansu Province were observed and interpreted. Their behavioural logic can be conceptualized as ‘heteronomous rationality’, according to which one’s behavioural choice is based on whether one is treated equally and fairly in comparison with others. When deviations from this standard are observed, rural peasants are motivated to protest. This study further examines when and how this Chinese-style peasant egalitarianism was shaped.

Beyond the Steppe Frontier: A History of the Sino-Russian Border

Beyond the Steppe Frontier: A History of the Sino-Russian Border

Verbalization of the concept of "earth" in the Russian translated text of Mo Yan's novel "Tired of being born and dying"

The object of the study is the conceptual sphere of the novel "Tired of being born and dying" by the great Chinese writer, Nobel Prize winner Mo Yan, and its subject is the concept "earth". The purpose of the study was to identify the linguistic implementations of the concept of "earth" in the text and to determine the meanings that this concept is endowed with. It is suggested that in the translated text of the novel, the concept of "earth" continues to translate the meanings that the author of the work put into it. The concept is understood as a mental formation in which the experience, traditions of the people are concentrated, its history and mentality are reflected. The concept finds implementation in the language through a set of lexemes and combinations expressing certain semantics.  The scientific novelty of the study is that it for the first time examines the concept of "earth" in Mo Yan's novel "Tired of being born and dying" from the point of view of its role in the picture of the world of the Chinese peasant. Conceptual analysis has shown that the land for the Chinese peasant of the second half of the twentieth century is a source of well—being, a condition of well-being, an object of management and protection, the basis and part of life, connecting life and death, heaven and earth. As a result of the conducted research, it was revealed that the verbalization of the concept of "earth" is associated with the linguistic and cultural meanings that it expresses in a literary text.

Editor's Introduction

Editor's Introduction

Examining Chinese peasants’ transnational communication patterns and identity negotiations on an Algerian construction site

An increasing number of Chinese peasants are employed in globalised Chinese enterprises’ overseas projects; African countries are among their destinations. In this study, a cohort of Chinese peasants were interviewed to gain their perspective on their communication experiences in their everyday working and leisure life on an Algerian construction site. These peasants’ reflections, complemented by the observations of their Chinese professional co-workers, reveal that they remained strongly attached to their Chinese identity during their sojourn in the host country, and hoped that their contribution as skilled workers would be recognised and accepted there. To some extent, these peasants’ everyday life experiences in the host country changed their identity and extended their professional repertoire of skills and communication patterns. When talking about their future, however, the peasants expressed a desire to return to their homeland, remaining attached to their Chinese culture and identity. Enriched by these experiences, their value as skilled workers should be recognised when they return to rural China. The paper explores the Chinese peasants’ transnational communication patterns and their identity negotiations and transformations, and contributes to research into peasants’ communication practices in the context of migration.

On the Tragedy of Cao Yu’s Yuanye

In the realm of aesthetics, tragedy is known as “the highest stage and crown”, and its artistry is difficult to describe in simple words, as it mostly touches our senses and reveals the supreme value of beauty. Cao Yu wrote his play Yuanye against the backdrop of rural feudal society. The thesis will be based on Aristotle’s theory of tragedy and will talk about its tragic nature from three aspects. Firstly, Cao Yu has created many vivid and tragic minor characters; secondly, the realism and tragedy of the plot details build up multiple dramatic conflicts, amplifying the tragedy and giving the audience strong sensory stimulation to achieve resonance; finally, its profound theme of revenge is a manifestation of the inferiority of the Chinese peasants under the feudal society the - absurd tradition of “ The son must pay his father’s debts”, which amplifies the tragic effect of the whole play.

Book cover as intersemiotic translation: between image, text and culture

ABSTRACT This paper starts with an interest in the book cover of the English translations of the Nobel laureate Mo Yan. Except for the covers published by Penguin Books, the design of many other covers fails to convey the essential information of the text. Instead, they are translated from the cultural imaginings of the Chinese culture. Focusing on the relationship between the cover image, text and culture, this paper argues that book cover of translated literature, other than being text-to-cover translation, is also a translation of foreignness, whereby the literary representation of the other culture is being interpreted and constructed. On closer examination of the patterned images of Chinese women, peasants and chubby baby boys on Mo’s book covers, this paper explores how such graphical features can be tropes of exoticism under a seemingly perpetuated Orientalist framework and thus reinforce the stereotypical images of China. By highlighting the influence of culture on cover designs of literary translation, this study complements the binary text-to-cover intersemiotic framework with a cultural perspective and aims to reveal (at least partially) the interpretative mechanism underlying the visual representation of literary translation.

Denigrating Images of Migrant Workers in Two Chinese Soap Operas

AbstractThe emergence of migrant workers is a unique phenomenon in the process of China's modernization. Since the “new era,” the shaping of this group’s image in film and television has not only revealed mainstream society’s general understanding and evaluation of the group, but has also, to some extent, led to an even deeper discrimination against this group in China. Based on an analysis of a group of trans‐provincial female migrant workers in the 10‐episode soap opera Migrant Working Girls on a Guangzhou TV station in 1991, and an analysis of two male migrant laborers working in a small town in the TV series Ma Dashuai, which premiered in 2004, this article shows how migrant‐worker‐themed film and TV productions further amplify discrimination against this already marginalized group. These programs disparage the mentality of Chinese peasants and their rural lifestyle. This is mainly achieved by magnifying the migrant‐worker characters’ defects, presenting the countryside as a place the characters need to escape from, and treating the city as their only possible salvation.

Editor's Note

Editor's Note Frank Stewart There was a moment in the Chinese Communist Party's history when the citizens of the People's Republic of China were invited to openly give their opinions of China's advanced socialist culture. At the beginning of 1957, Chairman Mao spoke to the Supreme State Conference of the PRC and launched a campaign of freedom of speech in which he not only suggested, but also insisted that the country's people—especially writers, lawyers, intellectuals, and students—boldly express their candid opinions and criticism of the Party and its policies. "Let a hundred flowers bloom / Let a hundred schools of thought contend." He promised there would be no reprisals for speaking the truth. By summer, millions of letters had arrived criticizing the CCP and Mao himself. Thus, the Chairman discovered there were too many of what he called "poisonous weeds" among the flowers; taken aback at the outpouring of grievances, Mao called a halt to the Hundred Flowers Movement, declaring that "the snakes had been enticed out of their lairs." In the Movement's place, he initiated the Anti-Rightist Campaign to round up all the snakes. Half a million people or more were arrested, beaten, tortured, imprisoned in labor camps, or executed. Their families were also defamed and persecuted. One of many prominent figures caught up in the Anti-Rightist purge was Zhang Bojun, the minister of communications and chairman of the Chinese Peasants and Workers Democratic Party. Zhang was labeled the country's Number One Rightist, stripped of his ministerial post, and publicly disgraced. His family, too, did not escape the Party's wrath. Three years after Zhang Bojun was purged, his daughter, Zhang Yihe, was admitted to the Literature Department of the Chinese Opera Academy, on track for a career in the arts. In 1963, against her wishes, she was assigned to work in an opera troupe in Sichuan province. There, she wrote a passage in her diary that, when discovered, was reported as a criticism of Mao Zedong's powerful wife, Jiang Qing. In part because of her diary entry, and because she was the daughter of Zhang Bojun, Zhang Yihe was arrested; she was convicted in 1970 of being a counterrevolutionary and sentenced to twenty years in a rural labor camp. She was released after serving ten years, following the downfall of Jiang Qing. [End Page vii] Following her release, Zhang Yihe was allowed to work for the Sichuan Provincial Office of Culture. Later, she was hired as a researcher for the Opera Academy in Beijing, where she became a professor of theater arts. After she retired in 2001, she wrote two books of non-fiction dealing with the post-1949 lives of some prominent persons, one about several family friends and the other about well-known opera actors who had lived like celebrities before 1949. She also wanted to tell the stories of the women she had met in prison. She cast this work about the prisoners as fiction, but her novellas are thinly disguised memoirs; the protagonist in the stories is named Zhang Yuhe. The third of her novellas, The Woman Zou, is translated here by Karen Gernant and Chen Zeping for the first time in English. Their translations of her previous novellas were published for the first time in English in Red Peonies, the winter 2016 issue of Mānoa. The Woman Zou is set in a women's labor camp deep in the rural mountains. Some of the inmates, like Zhang Yuhe, are educated political prisoners, convicted of being "class enemies." Most inmates, however, are illiterate peasant women. Zhang Yuhe learns to survive by gradually becoming hardened by prison life. But she also experiences a liberation from her former, naïve life, in which it was possible to trust people not to denounce their friends and coworkers to the police. Over the course of the story, she befriends fellow prisoner Zou Jintu, whom she comes to cherish for the rest of her life. The story of their binding relationship forms one strand of the novella. Another strand tells the story of Zou Jintu's upbringing—her mother, father, and their devoted maid, Liu Jiu—and...

Circulation in Comparative and World Literature: How the Irish Literary Revival was Received by the Chinese May Fourth Generation

Abstract My article uncovers themes of circulation in comparative literature regarding how the early twentieth-century Chinese May Fourth generation read and translated the literature produced by the Irish Literary Revival, in a reciprocal process. I discern Postcolonial Modernism as the answer the Irish Revivalists discovered to the twin evils of Colonial Modernity and Capitalism Modernity and read this as an alternative modernizing model for the Chinese writers, one that does not automatically assume that the Irish, or the Chinese, are subaltern or “other.” I accessed archives in the databases of the Wan Qing qikan quanwen shujuku (1833–1911) 晚清期刊全文数据库 (Late Qing dynasty periodical full-text database 1833–1911), the Minguo shiqi qikan quanwen shujuku (1911–1949) 民 国时期期刊全文数据库 (Chinese Republican era periodical full-text database 1911–1949) alongside the Quanguo Baokan Suoyin 全国报刊索引 (National Newspaper Index). These Chinese-language journals formed a material link between the Irish Renaissance and the Chinese Enlightenment. I discovered many Irish Revivalist plays, once translated by Chinese intellectuals, took on new meanings, crossed class, gender, and racial boundaries and were performed by Chinese peasants throughout China, during the 1920s and 1930s.

Dislocation and displacement: An analysis of Wang Jiuliang’s Plastic China

This essay uses the concepts of place and space to analyze Wang Jiuliang’s environmental documentary film Plastic China (2016) by examining three kinds of dislocation and displacement: the importation of Western trash to China, Yijie’s migration from Sichuan to Shandong, and Kun’s transformation from an agricultural peasant to an industrial worker in post-socialist China. Building on previous scholarship on dirt, rubbish, and ruins, the essay explores how the film’s focus on trash—“matter out of place”—sustains a critique of global consumerism, capitalism, and eco-colonialism. Cinematic features, such as the spatial imbalance the film constructs between its human subjects and the plastics processing plant where they work, are discussed. Yijie’s longing for home, a preindustrial place untouched by modernization and globalization, is evoked by the use of nondiegetic music. Her desire to go to school, a major narrative theme, is interpreted to indicate her spatialized alienation and non-locatable subjectivity as a migrant child. Although Kun is a native of the town where the processing plant stands, he experiences displacement without moving, as his hometown has been ecologically degraded and thus rendered inhabitable by the intrusion of toxic trash. Both Yijie and Kun, representing millions of Chinese peasants uprooted from the soil, are trapped in a one-way, no-return journey from place to space.