Seattle: University of Washington Press in association with University of Washington Libraries, 2017. xi, 265 pp. (Tables, maps, B&W photos.) US$30.00, paper. ISBN 978-0-295-99942-5.
Few China scholars have had a larger impact than G. William Skinner, whose work on rural marketing and spatial order has provided scholars with a cogent model for thinking about social structure in China and beyond. It is well known that the original inspiration for Skinner’s model came from his dissertation fieldwork in Sichuan, carried out in the shadow of the advancing People’s Liberation Army and cut short after two and a half months by the PLA’s arrival. Skinner’s fieldnotes were confiscated by the new authorities, and Skinner himself always maintained that both his notes and the carbon copies he sent to his Cornell advisors were lost. Fortunately for us, they were not: when the editors (both of them former Skinner students) took custody of his papers, they found a full set of notes which, lightly edited and condensed, form the body of this book. The editors provide a short preface and helpful section summaries. The book also includes Skinner’s superb photographs, maps, an index, and a glossary.
Fieldnotes rarely merit publication. These ones do, for at least three reasons. Brief as they are, they provide a vivid picture of rural life in the Chengdu basin, just months before land reform brought irreversible change. They also give us a first-hand account of the Communist takeover, told by an open-minded and astute observer. Finally, they show us social science in action, as Skinner puts aside his earlier interest in child psychology and personality formation and quickly recognizes rural marketing as the best angle for an exploration of Chinese social structure. Skinner arrived in Chengdu in September 1949, having learned Mandarin (but not Sichuan dialect) during two years of Navy service. He spent October looking for a research site and discussing plans with Chinese scholars in Chengdu. Having settled on Gaodianzi, a market town a few miles south of Chengdu, he began fieldwork in mid-November. His early notes discuss the structures of rural life: land ownership and tenancy, farming, family composition, and domestic life. They include vivid descriptions of everyday technologies, dealing with such topics as food preparation, house construction and repair, and the work of the itinerant tailors, basket makers, barbers, etc., who pass through his hosts’ household.
It did not take Skinner long to find his topic: on the third day of his stay, Skinner notes “today was important: my first market day,” and from then on he appears to have attended the Gaodianzi market regularly. He did so primarily because this was where he met his informants: the local notables, leaders of the paoge secret society, students, and teachers who spent much of each market day socializing in the town’s restaurants and teahouses. On December 16, one month into his fieldwork and with the PLA rapidly advancing towards Chengdu, Skinner set out on bicycle to determine the size of the Gaodianzi market area. We do not know why he did so; his notes record his impressions and observations but are silent about his reflections and motivations. Nonetheless, one can feel his excitement as he finds out that market areas are spatially discrete. The insight that rural people always attend the same market, that in the course of months and years they become familiar with others who do the same, and that market areas therefore have to be understood as communities, was the first step towards a large and complex model of Chinese society in which the routine flow of retail goods forms a basic infrastructure which underpins all social organization. Markets, however, did not occupy all of Skinner’s attention. He conducted a household survey, collected information on local schools, and mapped local voluntary associations, including Confucian benevolent societies, religious brotherhoods, and the omnipresent “secret” society, the paoge. While “class” is not part of his vocabulary in these notes, he showed a keen awareness of the disparity in wealth and status between the wealthy and educated elite with whom he interacted, and the tenant farmers who lived together with his hosts, and whose lives he describes in moving details.
While Skinner worked frantically to complete his analysis, the PLA advanced and the Nationalists’ authority crumbled. He and his informants were less concerned about the PLA soldiers, whom they knew to be disciplined, than about marauding Nationalist soldiers and about fights between competing Nationalist factions. Skinner’s notes make frequent mention of the Nationalist soldiers billeted in his hosts’ home, of their panicked departure, and of the quiet and efficient way in which PLA vanguard units fill the resulting vacuum in the countryside days before they enter the provincial capital. The PLA’s official takeover provides a moment of high drama, coinciding with Chinese New Year and with the Dongyue temple festival, a two-day spectacle filled with processions, opera performances, and throngs of worshippers. A week later, Skinner was told that it was no longer safe for him to work in the countryside and he was put under house arrest in Chengdu; he was allowed to leave the country only in August 1950.
This book deserves to be read by all students of twentieth-century rural China, in particular those with an interest in Sichuan. It should be assigned to students preparing for fieldwork in China; Skinner’s acute observations and his strong sympathy for the people he studied (a sympathy which they apparently returned) remain a model almost seventy years after the fact. In teaching, it could be paired with Isabel Crook’s Prosperity’s Predicament, another study of rural Sichuan in the 1940s whose publication was delayed for almost seven decades.
Jacob Eyferth
The University of Chicago, Chicago, USA