Gao Village: A Portrait of Rural Life in Modern China

三十．三十書系

by Mobo Gao

This book is about Gao Village, in Jiangxi province, where the author was born and brought up, leaving when he was twenty-one to study English at Xiamen University. Since emigrating to Australia in 1990, he has returned every year to Gao Village, where his brother still lives.
Several accounts of village life in China have been published, but all have been by Western or urban Chinese scholars. Mobo Gao's account is in every sense one from the inside. Though written as an academic work, it does not eschew personal stories and experiences relevant to the themes addressed. These cover a forty-year period and fall into four distinct themes; the village before and after land reform; the commune system; the dismantling of the communes; and the unfolding impact of the market economy, including increased migration to urban areas, from the late 1980s onwards.

Genres: China, History, Nonfiction, Anthropology

286 pages, Hardcover

First published March 11, 1999

About the author

Professor Mobo Gao's research interest includes studies of rural China, contemporary Chinese politics & culture, Chinese migration to Australia and Chinese language. Professor Gao's publications include four monographs and numerous book chapters and articles. One of his books, the critically acclaimed Gao Village, is a case study of the village that he came from. His latest book The Battle of China's Past: Mao and the Cultural Revolution is a reassessment of the Mao era and the Cultural Revolution.

Reviews

[Will]

I read this comprehensive, personal study of a small village in rural China as part of my sociology class on social inequalities in China. Gao, who was born in the village that shares his surname, was the only village child to attend college, and if not for the affirmative action policies put in place during the radical era of the Cultural Revolution (not an entirely negative campaign, though it did kill hundreds of thousands and erase centuries of Chinese culture and architecture), he wouldn't have gone at all.

Gao studies Gao Village from a sociological and analytic perspective, but the narrative's explanation of healthcare, education, corruption, the collective era, migrant labor, wealth, and industry has a personal touch. The villagers are Gao's family, and he makes that clear; but he expresses the plethora of difficulties rural Chinese faced and still face before, during, and after the collective era. Some of his anecdotes are familiar and positive, while others are critical of Chinese Communist Party policies. However, Gao succeeds in creating an account of his village and the trials it faced in the last tumultuous century. Recommended.

[Lyset]

發現現在有的學者超級雞賊。在寫作的時候特意強調自己的著作不涉及意識形態的討論，卻習慣性利用「特例」與社會長期批判的「非正確」觀點背後已被證實真實存在且具有廣泛性的現象相聯繫，試圖強調「特例」的存在以發起對「非正確」觀點的隱形反駁。我為啥說是隱形反駁？因為有相當一部分讀者習慣性將書中的「特例」誤作「常態化」——事實是，書中已經發生的事情並不具有「常態化」的性質。在非黑即白思想的推動下，觀點也隨之趨於「偏執」，成為學術切磋時的「絕對真理」——高默波的《高家村》就是一個典型，今晚讀完他這本著作著實讓我大開眼界。汪暉作為左派學者，甚至親自下場為這本書寫序和稀泥進而為高這種雞賊學者的「翻案」行動站台，這與北大中文系的孔慶東頗為類似，二者在我看來極其可恥。