How The Farmers Changed China: Power Of The People

by Kate Xiao Zhou

In this original and provocative book, Kate Zhou argues that Chinese farmers—who comprise one-fifth of the world's population—have been the driving force behind their country's phenomenal economic growth and social change over the past fifteen years. Guided by their own interests rather than by directives from Beijing, farmers have restored family autonomy in farming, created new markets, established rural industries that now generate over half of China's industrial production, migrated to cities despite rigid governmental controls, shaped their own family-size policy, and redefined the role of women.Drawing on rich primary source material and her own years of experience in the countryside, the author focuses on the farmers' initiatives and the stories of ordinary people who collectively have played a central role in the economic upsurge. She takes issue with most current interpretations, which credit China's economic success almost entirely to reforms put in place by the Chinese leadership. Indeed, Zhou argues that the farmers were effective precisely because their movement was spontaneous, unorganized, leaderless, nonideological, and apolitical. In stark contrast to the turmoil surrounding the Tiananmen Square protests, farmers have been gradually yet remorselessly leaching power away from the central government without overt confrontation or violence. Their “reform from below” may well have generated the most long-lasting and fundamental changes contemporary China has witnessed.

Genres: China, History, Economics

304 pages, Hardcover

First published April 18, 1996

Reviews

[Dave Burns · Rating 5 out of 5]

Full disclosure: I am married to the author.
No one who did not live in China during the late seventies and early eighties (and few of those who did) can understand the Chinese market reforms without reading this book.

[Michael Huang · Rating 4 out of 5]

In the late 1980s, if you watch the news program from Chinese central TV station, you’d hear a lot about the reform the Chinese communist party (CCP) did. One word that came up a lot is “bao-Chan-dao-Hu” (bao) loosely meaning the production targets of collectivized farmers are distributed to family units. And the TV will keep mention since the 11th party congress’s third plenum meeting (11-3) bao spread across the country. I had always believed that thanks to Deng, the reform allowed bao, and the rest is history. According to this book, that is not exactly how it panned out.

You see, the farmers (or peasants really since the people in the rural areas are not allowed to move to even county seat) didn’t like collectivization. And since 1956, they have already tried bao. They tried openly, secretly, or by bribing the local cadre. They also benefited from the relax in control during the cultural revolution to get bao in practice. Even by 11-3, the official documents still condemns bao as illegal. However, some leaders permitted it in the poorer part of their province. By 1983, Deng started to take credit (in his battle with more conservative branch of the party) for the improvements bao brought. In fact, the increase in productivity allowed peasants to start small rural enterprises, infiltrate to cities, provides moonlight opportunities for urban dwellers which eventually allowed even many private enterprises. In other words, farmers are the driving force behind the policy known as bao all along.

[Austin Barselau · Rating 5 out of 5]

HOW THE FARMERS CHANGED CHINA is an illuminating revisionist history of the sources of China’s economic development during the post-Mao years. Author Kate Xiao Zhou, a professor of Chinese politics and comparative politics at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, argues that, rather than being initiated by the Chinese state or the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), China’s rapid progress beginning in the 1970s and 1980s was driven by a “spontaneous, unorganized, leaderless, nonideological, apolitical movement” by farmers and that the state merely reacted to change rather than initiating it.

Through both her fieldwork and lived experience in China through the mid-1980s, Zhou shows that the newfound creative energies that emerged during post-Mao years – not Chinese political leaders themselves– undermined the state’s grip on the countryside and initiated the most dramatic elements of its development. Zhou argues that Mao’s “antirural” reforms turned China’s independent farmers into cadre-bound peasants by denying them land ownership, control over farming decisions, and social mobility out of the countryside. This stifled rural productivity during the 1960s and early 1970s. Mao’s death quickly led to the dissolution of “feudal” agriculture and the restoration of family-based farming that generated rapid increased in rural productivity. During these years, families experienced an “authentic liberation” by regaining control over production decision-making. Under the so-called household responsibility system (baochen daohu), farmers, newly restored the rights to develop their own private plots, had incentives to use newly available farming techniques and resources. This not only increased productivity and created new markets, but also released labor from work, meaning more labor became available for rural industrialization and urban migration. Zhou credits these developments with being more responsible than urban economic development for China’s progress during this period.

Zhou’s original thesis is that these developments in the countryside were organic and not spurred by top-down bureaucratic policymaking. As Zhou writes, Chinese political leaders went with the flow, rather than initiating the movement that generated China’s rapid economic growth in the years after Mao’s death. Released from the yoke of their collectives and grain procurement quotas, Chinese farmers displayed initiative and ingenuity, all while central leadership was preoccupied with urban matters. This silent movement, Zhou argues, had tremendous implications, including rapidly eroding in the state’s share of agricultural products market during the mid-1980s, increasing the mobility of labor between rural and urban areas, and even weakening the one-child policy. Zhou’s scholarship sheds light on the true power dynamics in China’s economic development, placing the countryside, specifically millions of family farmers, as the engine of that expansion.

[Paul · Rating 5 out of 5]

An extraordinary book. I will write a longer review later. The key idea - that China's economic transformation in the last 40 years has been driven, not by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) leadership, but rather by the actions of millions of rural farmers – who in the first instance acted against the ideology and wishes of the CCP. A uniquely creative insight into one of the most important issues in contemporary politics.