Rapport från en kinesisk by

by Jan Myrdal

English, Swedish (translation)

Genres: China, History, Travel, Nonfiction, Anthropology, Asia, Sociology

320 pages

First published January 1, 1963

Reviews

[David · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read "Report from a Chinese Village" by Jan Myrdal while working on assignment at Nkumbi International College in Zambia. The college was administered by my employers, the Africa-America Institute (AAI, an organization that dealt with relations between America and Africa rather than the later confusing journalistic epithet used to identify Americans of African background). AAI was funded by USAID, the US Agency of International Development, and USAID vetted me and my wife before we were hired to go to Zambia.

Our small campus was situated on the confluence of two tributaries of the Lunsemfwa River. One of these tributaries wound around our camp toward the other side of the Great Northern Road where a Chinese military company of engineers had recently bivouacked. We had to breach their camp to get to our favorite bluff to cast our fishing lines into the slow moving creek. (After all, we were there first—we, meaning Dr. Phil Freund-- a fellow academic and white hunter type) and myself.)

Only once were we caught by Chinese army personnel trucks returning to barracks whereupon we just gawked at each other and drove on. (We were surprised by how many blue-eyed Chinese there were in this contingent.)

Our college had a barely sufficient library bulging with great books donated by such generous philanthropists as you often find from places like Darien, Connecticut, for instance, or Rye, New York. Among those books was Jan Myrdal's "Report from a Chinese Village”, which I carefully plucked from the shelf…(snakes!), and checked out.

It was a very informative ethnographic and economic treatise on what life was like in rural China. Jan Myrdal was the son of Gunnar Myrdal and Alva Myrdal, both Swedish Nobel Prize winners, who held what were then— and for many nowadays, radical political views.

Later, almost everything I read in periodicals such as “The New York Times”, “The Observer” or “The Economist” after our 2-year stint in Zambia clarified my view of how the Chinese people had suffered under the rule of feudal landlords. I had witnessed some of the same type of feudal system among Iranians in Western Azerbaijan, a system that the Shah was trying to change. Later, as Myrdal shows painstakingly well, the Chinese Communist Party tried to remedy that type of unjust hardship. Thanks to Jan Myrdal and despite my slightly negative experience with the Chinese army’s occupation of our "fishin’ hole", I understood the Chinese view a little better.

[Mark · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book offers a rare, seemingly impartial look at life in a rural Chinese village during the early 1960s. I admire the author's restraint in presenting the book as a record of people's lives, as told by themselves, without himself attempting to summarize or editorialize. Taken together, these brief autobiographical sketches provide a rich understanding of why the Chinese proletariat rose up in revolution against the landowners and ultimately adopted a communal approach to farming and social welfare and an essentially democratic approach to local governance. The changes brought about in the lives of these hard-working farmers is staggering: freedom from the exploitation and abusiveness of the feudal landlords; the opportunity to set up their own local government and see to it that resources were distributed equitably; the liberation of women from extremely oppressive traditions. For this village, at least, the communist revolution was a grass-roots movement of incredible transformative power.

"Looking back on my life, I can only say that everyone ought to take part in the revolution. It won't be a proper revolution if everyone doesn't accept his share of responsibility and look after it. Revolution is not a thing you can let others do for you. Even when you are as old as I, you must go on working in the revolution, for there is no pausing in revolution, even if it has different stages." -Mau Ke-yeh, cave-builder, farmer-revolutionary

In capturing the stories of these brave and profoundly virtuous farmers in their own words, Jan Myrdal created a work of remarkable value.

[Brian Griffith · Rating 4 out of 5]

In this study from the 1960s, Myrdal strives to capture the drama of village life. And since he's writing in the wake of the Great Leap Forward, we might expect an emphasis on grassroots politics. But I suspect the realities Myrdal describes are mostly older than any modern revolution. The casual approach to parenting, the neighborly approach to law enforcement, the grinding work and poverty, the women's desires for freedom -- all probably reflect realities little changed by the central government. The decency of these people comes from themselves, not from their rulers.

[Bob Newman · Rating 5 out of 5]

speaking out, looking back

As part of the great Pantheon series of books on communities around the world, Jan Myrdal's REPORT FROM A CHINESE VILLAGE stands out as a most powerful work. Constructed largely as a series of interviews in Studs Terkel style with the villagers themselves, it does not attempt to present the "All-China" picture either from foreign eyes or from the Beijing government's point of view. The villagers of Liu Ling in northern Shensi province speak for themselves. At the end of each interview, Myrdal includes a section entitled "people say of________", that is, the person just interviewed, in order to put the personal statement in village perspective. Myrdal's wife, Gun Kessle, provided excellent black and white photos and there are many revealing statistics throughout the text, mostly in table or chart form. I first read this book in the 1970s when China more closely resembled the society presented here. It impressed me then and it still impresses me as a work requiring great patience, great skill in constructing, and considerable literary talent to make it so eminently readable. There are a myriad works on China, but this one, along with William Hinton's three books and Edgar Snow's "Red Star over China" provide the most intimate picture of the great transformation that took place in 20th century China to make it the superpower of the 21st. The strength of all of these books is the identification that the authors have with the common man, the peasant villagers of China---such a huge percentage of mankind, so seldom heard from. Years later, this is still a most powerful book. The report may be old, but if you want to understand China today, you must read it.

[juno krumm · Rating 5 out of 5]

thorough, informative, humanizing

so, so interesting. a completely thorough ethnography of a rural Chinese village via a series of extensive interviews. the window into the villagers' daily life and their thoughts on the revolution which they were so deeply involved in was fascinating. before reading, I hadn't understood how similar the pressures were which caused the birth of capitalism in Europe and the birth of communism in China.

[Thom Dunn]

from the back cover: "In 1962 the Peking government broke all precedent when it gave permission to {Swedish} anthropologist Jan Myrdal and his photographer wife to settle down in the north Chinese village of Liu Ling. There they shared the villagers' intimate daily lives. They worked with them, ate their food, slept in their houses, while Myrdal meticulously recorded the "autobiographies" of Liu Ling's inhabitants exactly as they were told to him. The result is a human documentation of a revolution in process, something that has never been done before and may never be done again." cpw 1963.

[Goku42069 · Rating 4 out of 5]

P. Deece, holy cow (ed note: remember this pun for if you ever read a book about Indian agriculture) was the agriculture of western China backwards

[Gobro · Rating 4 out of 5]

Ottima l'idea di riportare Alla fine di ogni testimonianza le considerazioni degli altri abitanti del villaggio

[Nye Canham · Rating 5 out of 5]

If you don't tear up at the family that had 11 children and 10 of them died of disease, or the woman describing how she was sold, or Li Yiu-Hua pausing to note the KMT only beheaded one of his brothers, are you even human?

The interview with the "Sent Down Youth" worker is the most interesting, given how that topic is usually discussed by by Americans as being somewhere between torture and the literal experience of hell itself. Well, she volunteered for it and wanted to have a second go. Also fascinating how much of the economic and social processes of revolution were directed and developed at the local level.

The Chinese Revolution, alongside the construction of the American state, the Soviet experience, and the wave of anti-colonial revolutions from 1945 to the early 80s are the only historical events in the 20th century. Everything else has to be read through these four interlocking processes which brought the world under the dominion of one Hegemon, lifted more than a billion people from the most crushing, backwards poverty imaginable, and shattered the hold of Europe on the throat of humanity. When the final history of that age is written it will not be about Churchill or Raegan or Rock N Roll, but about the grain yield per acre in Shanxi from 1929-1962, and the cost per ton of steel in Pittsburgh in the same period.

And here we have the greatest of those processes, the liberation of China and the creation, by hand and plough, of a modern society in the space of a single generation, viewed at its earliest, lowest phase.

Michael Parenti once said, in a speech on the Sandinista literacy campaigns, "the revolution that teaches the people to read gets my support. Not blindly, not without criticism."

This was the revolution that taught the people to read, with all its imperfections.

[Todd · Rating 4 out of 5]

I appreciate Myrdal's commitment to representing the views of his subjects as accurately as possible. I think his introduction does a really good job of explaining his purpose and methods

The nature of the book does bog it down on some parts and make it a bit repetitive (by nature of Myrdal's method), which is a little bit boring to read sometimes

[Karsten Karpius · Rating 2 out of 5]

Myrdal var inte maoist när han skrev boken, det kom senare, men han tycker verkligen att kommunistkina är knäet på biet. Vilket gör att vissa frågor ställs kring både motiv och metod. Bybornas berättelser, vittnesmål, är iofs. historiskt intressanta men rätt träig läsning.

[Ada Beda · Rating 3 out of 5]

Intressanta perspektiv och vittnesmål över en intressant och relevant händelse, men snabbt vädigt repetativ.

[Melissa Boman]

läste inte hela men det räknas ändå bestämmer jag. lite intressant inblick ändå antar jag!

[Victoria · Rating 3 out of 5]

Engaging and interesting