Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2020. xv, 213 pp. (Tables.) US$45.00, cloth. ISBN 978-1-5017-4884-4.
Taiwan, South Korea, and the People’s Republic of China are known, among political scientists, for rapid state-led modernization. The developmental state theory has received widespread recognition as an attractive explanation for these achievements. Yet, this important contribution by Kristen Looney, drawing on official reports and existing research and fieldwork (in the case of China), points to several shortcomings of this theory in regard to explaining rural development—specifically, that it ignores the role of modernization campaigns in the development of the countryside. Looney defines these campaigns as “policies that aim to transform the countryside through the intensive use of bureaucratic and popular mobilization” (5).
The book is organized into four chapters plus an introduction and a short conclusion. The first chapter discusses the developmental state theory, presents Looney’s argument and provides a theory on campaigns and their interplay with institutions. She argues that “[r]ural modernization campaigns are more likely to work, that is to produce compliance and positive outcomes, when the state’s goal is rural development rather than extraction, when the central government can control local authorities and when the campaign is carried out in partnership with rural citizens” (33). Following this chapter each of the three cases is dealt with individually. In all of these chapters she first provides a detailed analysis of the political economy at the outset of the rural modernization campaign before discussing the campaigns itself.
According to Looney, Taiwan’s community development campaign in the 1970s was the most successful campaign of the three. She suggests that the responsive approach of the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) to rural development was motivated by a will to avoid the mistakes that “had cost it the mainland” (60). Looney argues that the KMT could draw on many resources from the Japanese colonial period and highlights here in particular the importance of the farmers’ association (62ff). Still, the Taiwanese community development campaign was much more successful in improving the village environment than in improving agricultural production (76). In the 1950s and 1960s in South Korea, political neglect, urban bias, and US food imports had a detrimental effect on agriculture and rural livelihoods. The South Korean New Village movement in the early 1970s literally began with local officials handing out bags of concrete to villagers for them to build village infrastructure (107). The leaders of this movement were often activists and not rooted in the community. Interestingly, the government was not only implementing construction of rural infrastructure in a top-down, one-size fits all manner but was also choosing values for the population (103). In China, the New Socialist Countryside campaign started out in 2006 with a comprehensive set of social, political, economic, and cultural goals. Looney argues that the campaign eventually got out of hand and these goals were abandoned in favour of a massive rural construction movement (148). Popular participation in China was the weakest of the three cases. Still, she argues that the campaign had a positive impact on village infrastructure (151).
Looney not only expertly recounts the socio-economic context of the campaigns in Taiwan, South Korea, and China: through an analysis of the style of their implementation and outcomes we also learn how these campaigns ended up with such different results. A crucial explanatory factor for her was the institutionalized representations of peasant interests and the political embeddedness of the campaigns. For example, in Taiwan local elections and a national farming cooperative system, in which the interests of peasants had a strong voice, had a decisive influence on the goals, local adaptions, and outcomes of the campaign. Another example is cooperatives in China, which share little with their regional or international counterparts except for the name. They are strictly local and primarily an instrument of the government to facilitate economies of scale in agriculture. If we look beyond the claims of a historic representation of peasants by the Chinese Communist Party, there is no organization nationwide that represents the interests of the rural population. The New Socialist Countryside was a campaign primarily mobilizing local officials and it was influenced throughout by their political and economic priorities.
Of course, as with all great works, there are parts that may raise criticism. Looney starts from the assumption that there is an implicit standard for rural development on which the performance of the three campaigns can be ranked. However, going through the different cases, the reader will soon realize that very different connotations of development and modernization are at work here. In fact, in the Chinese and South Korean cases reaching urban or utopian standards of modernity was often more important than developing existing communities (see 151 and 107). From a technical perspective, these campaigns may all have contributed to improved standards of rural living, but in South Korea and China this frequently involved the demolition of the countryside itself. All of this is described in detail but the book would have benefitted from a more thorough discussion on the nature of development itself, especially after the term has come under much scrutiny following the work of Arturo Escobar (“The Invention of Development,” Current History 68, no. 631, 1999) and others.
However, this is only a small quibble regarding an otherwise excellent book. Looney sharpens our vision on how the role of rural development campaigns has shaped East Asia’s countryside. She shows how urban bias can co-exist with egalitarian land reforms and that it takes political will to tackle disparities in rural-urban resource distribution. The book is a major contribution to the discussion of the developmental state theory in East Asia. Written in a very accessible manner and clearly structured, it is an important source of reference for all scholars working on the rural political economy of either Taiwan, South Korea, or China. All case studies could also stand alone as reading material for a graduate course.
René Trappel
University of Freiburg, Freiburg