Edited by Linda Grove. Translated by Linda Grove, Li Dan, and Marcella Sigueria Cassiano. Lanham; Boulder; New York; London: Rowman & Littlefield, 2018. xliii, 269 pp. (Tables, graphs, maps, B&W photos.) US$85.00, cloth. ISBN 978-1-5381-1235-9.
Lengshuigou is a village in the North China Plain near the city of Jinan, the provincial capital of Shandong Province. It was studied by Japanese researchers in the early 1940s as part of the kanko chosa project on Chinese customary law, the findings of which have been widely used by such scholars as Philip Huang and Prasenjit Duara. Starting in the 1980s, Chinese scholars conducted follow-up studies utilizing a rich variety of archival, survey research, and ethnographic data. The present book was published in Chinese in 2013 by a team of sociologists from Shandong University and the Shandong Academy of Social Sciences who benefited from close proximity to and deep familiarity with the village. This translation was ably edited by Linda Grove, who writes a useful, perceptive preface.
Because of this long history of research, the book presents a comprehensive overview of a century of rural social change. There have of course been an enormous number of village studies published over the last three decades in English as well as Chinese. Those familiar with this literature will find little to surprise them about the major dimensions of political, economic, social, and cultural change in rural China. Most books, however, focus on one or another aspect of this change over a relatively limited timespan. No other single book combines all of these dimensions in a study that encompasses almost an entire century.
Although the general story told here will be familiar, the specific characteristics of Lengshuigou will provide food for thought about how contingencies of history and specificities of place give particular shape to general processes of change. Located near an important city, Lengshuigou has always been a relatively prosperous village, with relatively few class divisions. During the land reform of 1950 only 32 households were classified as landlords and 8 as rich peasants out of 400 to 500 households, and the landlords were not seen as “despotic.” More than 100 households were classified as “middle peasant” and most of the rest were “poor peasants,” with a minority labelled as “hired hands.” But even the poor peasants seem to have led fairly stable lives. The village has a long tradition of education, which resulted in village intellectuals whose writings produced valuable material for this book. In the 1930s and 1940s there was no active communist insurgency in the village.
The book is not a single history, but a kind of fractal history. Each chapter recounts the history of a particular dimension of social change: village politics and elites; lineage and family relationships; social structure and social life; cultural tradition and folk customs; social relationships and network structures; economic structure and development; transformation and future of the village.
The underlying sociological framework seems to be structural-functionalist theory: in “traditional” societies there is a particular equilibrium between family relationships and certain kinds of political and economic relationships, all under the canopy of a “Confucian” moral order that legitimizes this equilibrium and stresses harmony; but then with modernity, the equilibrium is disturbed and there is a search for new forms of equilibrium. An alternative theory might be forms of conflict theory—more popular now in the West—which would emphasize the clash of vested political and economic interests. But the absence of severe class conflict in this relatively prosperous village perhaps makes the conflict theory approach less relevant.
A major theme is that the social, political, and cultural integration of the traditional village has been replaced by a modern differentiation. Up until the communist “liberation,” village political and social life was integrated through its lineages, the predominance of which was justified through Confucian norms about the importance of extended family. Unlike many south China communities, Lengshuigou was a multi-lineage village, with ten lineages, each of which occupied a certain area, dominated by the large Li and Yang lineages. Although during the Republic, the Guomindang government imposed its own administrative structure on the village, the lineages retained a major role in the structure of power. In the Maoist era, the lineages were largely superseded by the structures of production teams, production brigades, and people’s communes, although the weakened lineages did not lose all of their influence. In the Reform era, the lineages regained more of their influence, but now, under the increasing mobility afforded by the market economy, the influence has waned. The old extended families have been mostly replaced by nuclear families. Lineage loyalties compete with friendships formed under the regime of production teams. New forms of affiliation are created as the younger generation finds work in the cities. In short, many forms of solidarity now compete with one another in an increasingly individuated society.
Similar differentiations take place in the structure of local elites. There are now different competing elites: political, economic, technical, intellectual. As for cultural habits, “villagers—especially the young—enjoy a lifestyle that is almost identical to their urban peers” (168).
As the authors portray it, the traditional village economy (contrary to the portrait of other scholarship that would stress the importance of marketing communities) was largely self-sufficient, based on subsistence farming. By the 2000s, however, that has changed radically. Instead of small-scale farming, the economy is dominated by a big dairy farm and an industrial park. Most of the young commute to jobs in nearby Jinan. Many village residents are now city people who move there because of its cheaper housing.
And in an epilogue, the authors tell us that the village will disappear by 2018 because its land is being requisitioned for a huge Jinan transit hub and the villagers will be moved into a high density apartment complex. The authors write that Lengshuigou’s residents are “deeply concerned about its future.” I would have liked to have seen more vivid examples of the contestations and conflict that these deep concerns have been taking—a deeper portrait of the jagged contradictions of neo-liberal capitalist modernity. Perhaps the book could have benefited from more of a Marxist analysis as well as a structural-functionalist one.
Richard Madsen
University of California, San Diego