"Rural construction" is not unfamiliar in contemporary times. From the beginning of the last century to the 1930s, the rural construction experiments initiated by liang shuming, Yanyang and other primary intellectuals had a huge momentum, and the rural construction experiments initiated against the background of Christian churches were also an important force at that time. These rural construction groups have established more than 1,000 experimental areas in Hebei, Shandong, Jiangsu, Hunan, Henan and other places. With the outbreak of the All-out War of Resistance, the township construction groups gradually moved to the rear of the War of Resistance against Japanese Aggression and cooperated with the National Government in an all-round way to transform rural society in order to achieve the purpose of increasing taxes, expanding production, and mobilizing the people to serve the War of Resistance.
From 1940 to 1941, the Canadian anthropologist Isabe, the author of the book "XinglongChang", was in Xinglongchang, Bishan County, Sichuan
(Now part of Bishan District, Chongqing)
The social survey was conducted in this context on rural construction projects funded by the Christian Church.
With Xinglongchang as the main area, this book comprehensively describes the social structure and development dynamics of the town, the National Government and the All-China Christian Association
(Hereinafter referred to as the "Association")
The reform cause promoted by non-governmental organizations in the context of social unrest shows the confrontation between foreign reformers and local traditional forces on this small stage, analyzes the process and reasons why reform projects such as rural construction of foreign reformers have been defeated by local forces, and reflects the whole picture of China's rural society in the "national unification area".
"Customs, Transformation and Resistance in Rural China During Wartime: Xinglongchang (1940-1941)", by (Canadian) Isabelle and Ke Linqing Translator: Shao Da, Edition: Foreign Language Teaching and Research Press, November 2018.
Written by | Zhang Yiying (Lecturer, China Rural Construction College, Southwest University)
"Rural construction workers are often unable to anticipate the complex local environment in which they live in a foreign land, neither recognizing the power structure and vested interests hostile to reform, nor discovering and cultivating real allies to jointly cope with the challenges that arise at any time." ——" Customs, Transformation and Resistance in Rural China during Wartime: Xinglongchang (1940-1941)"
In the past, most of the research on the rural construction movement in the Republican period was based on the research framework of "revolution and reform", and basically believed that the reformist nature of the theory, line and method of rural construction was the root cause of the failure of the movement. For example, the Chinese Civilian Education Promotion Association, led by Mr. Yan Yangchu, who is more familiar to readers, initially carried out four major educations in Dingxian County, Hebei Province, focusing on "cultural education, livelihood education, health education, and civic education". When summarizing the Dingxian experiment, Zheng Dahua, a researcher at the Institute of Modern History of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, pointed out that the fundamental reason why Dingxian "the purpose of the rural construction movement to revive the rural economy has not been realized lies in its improved nature." Of course, the previous evaluation has a certain truth, but to some extent, it also obscures the complex environment and real problems faced in the rural construction experiment, and its experience and lessons are also inconsistent.
In my opinion, the significance of this book is not only the use of unusual fieldwork notes to vividly express the controversial problems faced by the rural areas in the rear areas of wartime China, as well as the dilemma of the National Government and rural construction groups to promote rural modernization, but also the problem awareness and perspective are different from previous research, and the author pays attention to outsiders and locals in the rural construction experiments of the state or civil society
(Modern & Traditional)
Conflict and collaboration. Therefore, this book is of great reference value for studying the history of the rural construction movement.
Isabel crook, a Native of Canada, was born in 1915 in Chengdu, China. He returned to China from Canada in the 1930s to conduct social surveys in China, experiencing the War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression, the War of Liberation, the Agrarian Revolution, and the founding of New China. From 1940 to 1941, Isabelle was invited to participate in a rural construction project initiated by the Christian Church at the XinglongChang (now part of Chongqing) in Bishan, Sichuan, and wrote the books "Xinglongchang - A Survey of peasant life in Sichuan during the War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression (1940-1942)" and "Customs, Transformation and Resistance in Rural China during Wartime - Xinglongchang (1940-1941)". There are also representative works such as "Shilidian - The Revolution of a Village in China" and "Shilidian - The Mass Movement of a Village in China" (co-authored with her husband).
National Government vs Foreign Churches
An outsider to the town of Koba in the southwest
The area described in this book, Xinglongchang, Bishan County, is a small town with only 82 households. "Field" is a unique feature of market trade in Sichuan. Li Jieren's famous novel "Backwater Weilan" describes the story of a town called "Tianhui Town" around Chengdu; american scholar Shi Jianya wrote "The Market and Social Structure of Rural China" based on field research data conducted in Sichuan from 1949 to 1950, and put forward the "grassroots market theory", which is based on the general trade structure of the field towns in Sichuan. It can be seen that Xinglongchang is a common microcosm of the life of rural social fields in Sichuan, and this achievement is also an important window for understanding the rural society in Sichuan after many years of warlord chaos and during the War of Resistance.
Today's Xinglongchang has become the seat of the town government of Daxing Township in Bishan, and the church where the author lived has become the seat of the town government building. Next to the building, two small houses of that year are left, reminiscent of the 1940 Xinglongchang "like a grocery store made of crowded gray tile roofs", these mottled green bricks seem to tell the surging social changes of Xinglongchang in the past hundred years; in the book, the author faithfully records the family trivia, neighborhood disputes, drug addiction, gambling, medical treatment, worship of gods and other folk customs in Xinglongchang, and seems to bring people to that era that is both noisy and bland.
Xinglong Yard stall drying, dustpan rice (1983).
According to the authors, most of the farmers in Xinglongchang at that time relied on agriculture and small handicrafts to survive, and the harsh macroeconomic environment brought many families to the brink of collapse. In terms of social governance, the land has been controlled by the three or three-way mixed identities of clans, landlords and brothers, who obtained authoritative governance status through income from clan assets, rent and underground economy into public services. Before 1935, Xinglongchang was not closely connected with the outside world, men, widows, etc. were doing business here, and when they rushed to the scene, men gathered in teahouses for recreation, and brothers actually held power and shouldered the responsibility of defending the safety of one side.
After 1935, with the entry of the Kuomintang Central Army into Sichuan, the Nationalist government controlled the units below the county level through the establishment of the administrative inspector system and the armor protection system, and in Xinglongchang, the appointment of these grass-roots officials was closely related to their clan, gentleman, education level and other backgrounds. As a result, the social structure of the Booming Field around 1940 was more complex, and the township government representing the reform forces and the local forces that could call the wind and rain were constantly clashing, as the book said, sometimes "the brothers are more authoritative than the township governments."
In order to support the War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression, the Nationalist Government seized the opportunity in Sichuan to strengthen its control over the grass-roots units through administrative reform, educational reform, suppression of bandits, and the suppression of the opium trade; at the same time, rural construction experts from various localities, such as Liang Shuming, Yanyang Elementary School, and religious groups, also "settled" in Sichuan or Chongqing, and the experiments of rural construction focusing on economy, education, health, and autonomy revived in the rear areas, and Xinglongchang was also among the transformations of these outsiders or foreign ideas.
It is in this context that the author of this book, Elizabeth, and the consultant Yu Xijie entered the prosperity field. Isabelle was born and raised in China into a family of Canadian missionaries; Yu Xijie, a primary school teacher from Zhejiang province with some medical training at Beijing Union Medical University, joined its rural renewal project while working for the All-China Council of Churches. Since the 19th century, Western missionaries have come to China in large numbers to preach in the hope of "conquering China for Christ", and most of the missionaries have adopted the traditional method of "direct preaching", and their enthusiasm has not been responded to by the Chinese, and sometimes even met with fierce opposition from the people. Although by the early years of the Republic of China, missionaries "penetrated into almost every corner of China," they did not achieve the desired results. Subsequently, Christianity began to adopt secular means of proselytizing, such as promoting agricultural improvement, establishing education and medical services, etc., and the Christian church began to integrate with rural construction. Isabelle was invited to join the project to help investigate the economic living conditions of 1,500 households in the township, funded by the All-China Council of Churches, which was funded by the All-China Council of Churches. Because of the female identity of Isabeu and Yu Xijie, it is easier to be accepted by local residents when investigating.
Brother Pao Forces
The dilemma of hasty reform
For Xinglongchang, the township governments representing the position of the National Government and the rural construction reformers of the Association for the Advancement of The Association are all foreign. The outline of the daily life of Xinglongchang can be expressed in the themes described in the book, such as agricultural labor, sideline production, local government and civil forces, reformers, marriage customs, and health. The authors cleverly describe how ordinary people struggle to survive through clever survival strategies in the face of constant conscription, taxation, banditry, and disease. In this survival strategy, the Pao brother group plays an important role.
Brother Robe is an important topic in this book, and he is also the actual ruler of XinglongChang. Professor Wang Di's new book, Brother Robe: Violence and Order in the Rural Areas of Western Sichuan in the 1940s, starts from microhistory and allows us to see the complex interior of rural society in western Sichuan, as well as the violence and order of an inland area during the Republic of China period. The image of the robe brothers is complex, they are both the ones who maintain the order in the local rural society and the opposite of the people - the use of violence to maintain order. Isabelle's book provides a more three-dimensional case for this.
Brother Robes: Violence and Order in the Rural Areas of Western Sichuan in the 1940s, by Wang Di, Edition: Peking University Press, October 2018.
Therefore, it is not difficult for us to imagine why Isabelle and Yu Xijie changed the township chief four times in the year and a half of XinglongChang. The Nationalist government hoped to gain more economic income from the rural society, and eventually appointed three local government leaders transferred from other places in turn, but each foreign township chief failed to defeat the local Paoge forces, and eventually ended his rule in Xinglongchang by transferring elsewhere.
The author thus argues that both the reform programs introduced by the National Government and church organizations in Xinglongchang have touched the local powerful
(Brother Robe)
benefits. First of all, the administrative reforms of the National Government, such as the removal of townships and the replacement of township chiefs, caused dissatisfaction among the townspeople. In the end, the withdrawal and merger of townships took considerable trouble to achieve, but the people of the two townships have been secretly competing, and there are many contradictions, and the traditional boundaries of life and the requirements of the modern establishment have begun to clash head-on.
Second, the civilian literacy campaign has had little success. The Nationalist government required illiterate people in Xinglongchang to attend a three-month literacy class held by the local primary school, but "the small farmers or sharecroppers did not want to come to the class at all." Strong resistance from residents, coupled with a lack of funding, has left the local primary school faculty with little success, and the author's association has made little progress in experiments in education.
Third, the promulgated marriage custom system is only a formality. The New Life Movement launched by the Kuomintang included the content of "changing old marriage customs". Among the old-style marriage customs of Xinglongchang, a series of bad customs such as early marriage, wedding ceremony, arranged marriage, and child brides are popular. The National Government has changed customs by issuing a series of decrees or publicizing them in newspapers, but the changes in these traditional customs have been very limited.
Ploughing and harvesting are busy at the same time (1983).
Only the HYA's experiments in health were relatively successful. The Nationalist government has made certain efforts in the construction of public health in Sichuan, and the Association has opened a clinic in Xinglongchang. The church clinic has established a good reputation among women because of several successful treatment cases, which has also created favorable conditions for the author's integration into the local society. Of course, the vast majority of the local people still "believe in witchcraft or medicine."
The REFORMSA also faced failures in the economic sphere. Take, for example, the Salt Cooperative, which received guidance and support from Yanyang primary township construction experts, whose purpose was to provide villagers with access to cheap salt in a mutually helpful manner. Salt, as an important circulating commodity, has always been controlled by a bully in Xinglongchang who "sells opium privately, makes friends with brothers, and monopolizes taxes." These local forces monopolize local tax revenues, and the transportation and marketing of the salt industry is an important part of the local governance system. As soon as the foreign ASSOCIATION organization intervened in the local governance or financial system, it was immediately secretly destroyed by the person, and eventually the salt cooperative was declared bankrupt after only 5 months of operation.
Many of the CONAAC improvement measures could not be implemented smoothly. Eventually they had to withdraw from The Boom Field. Professor Wen Tiejun stressed when referring to the book, "Xinglongchang first distinguished between outsiders and locals, which is in line with the fact that we have been introducing the theory of transaction costs into the study of rural construction, and any foreign subject, when it wants to enter the local society, in the face of scattered small farmers, there must be a dilemma that transaction costs are too high to be traded." The author believes that the failure of the series of modernization reforms carried out by the Nationalist government and the Association for the Advancement of The People's Republic of China was due to the resistance of local traditional forces. However, since the late Qing Dynasty and the Republic of China, the modernization we continue to pursue has always encountered various setbacks in the traditional local society, and the century-old dream of intellectuals to transform the countryside has not been realized.
Outsiders vs locals
The reconstruction of the countryside
Of course, the value of this book is not only to provide a new perspective on the plight of outsiders such as the National Government and the Association for the Advancement of The Advancement of The Association to transform rural society, but also to provide us with a comparative perspective on social reconstruction and social governance for us to understand the logic of revolution. Through an analysis of the fierce resistance of local forces in the face of the transformation of the National Government and non-governmental organizations in rural areas, the author recalls the successes and failures that the Chinese Communist Party experienced in the process of vigorously transforming the countryside, building the country, and collecting resources after 1949. Although the author does not continue to discuss how the Chinese Communist Party went deep into every village in Sichuan to mobilize the masses, break up private property, and disband the Pao Brothers, it only mentions at the end of the book that "with the sound of a gunshot, the life of the most notorious 'tumbler' in the history of Xinglongchang has finally come to an end." This sentence hides a rich connotation, the original conservative social structure of the improvisational field has been broken, the social governance system has undergone drastic changes, and the social structure and social order reconstruction have been completed through revolutionary means.
Although this book does not begin the process of change in the post-1949 booming field, we can shift our attention to the author's other two masterpieces, Shilidian - The Revolution of a Village in China, and Shilidian : The Mass Movement of a Village in China. In December 1947, the author and her husband, as international observers, came to Shilidian in Shidong Township, Wu'an City, Hebei Province, to observe and interview the entire process of the land reform review and the party consolidation movement under the leadership of the Communist Party of China, and jointly wrote the book. In Shilidian, the author witnesses how the Communist Party team, also as outsiders, led the local villagers to carry out the mass movement, and also described how the villagers, men, women and children, responded to the movement. As the author puts it, she hopes to "observe the land reform in Shilidian, to study the revolutionary movement that took place on the land of China, and to study its revolutionary dynamics," and hopes to do a "comparative study" of the "rural reform cause of the Kuomintang and the Communist Party" on the basis of the Xinglongchang survey. Although this comparative study is not complete, it is clear that the authors' input and choice of this study is not just a historical accident.
Professor Wang Qisheng stressed in the book "Revolution and Counter-Revolution" that the Chinese revolution in the 20th century should be examined in the context of The history of China in the 20th century, and examined from the broad perspective of social culture, not only to study "revolution", but also to study "non-revolution" and "counter-revolution". All parties involved in rural construction and transformation must face common problems such as how to overcome the transaction costs of decentralized small farmers and the challenges of existing local forces. Therefore, only by combining this book with "Ten Mile Shop" and the author's life experience, returning to the historical field where all forces are glued together, and comparing and studying the different ways of dealing with the same "outsiders and locals" problems, we can re-understand the history of revolution and rural construction.
Village activities.
It is precisely because of the research perspective of "Outsiders and Locals" in this book that the current research on the rural construction movement in the Republican period is being reinterpreted. Inspired by this, the author adopts the perspective of "foreign subjects and local society" to make a new interpretation of the rural construction experiments made by Mr. Yan Yangchu in the Republic of China period. This perspective will not only open the door to our re-understanding of the rural construction movement of the Republic of China, but also have great historical enlightenment for the dilemma of a large number of external subjects participating in rural construction under the background of the national rural revitalization strategy in the new era.
Despite the passage of time, in order to understand China's rural areas, peasants and agricultural problems, it is necessary to understand what kind of social environment farmers used to live in, as Professor Wang Di said, "this subculture is still lurking in Chinese society." Therefore, in the revitalization of rural areas in the new era, the various construction projects of the state and various enterprises and institutions in rural society are still facing the contradiction between the interests of farmers themselves, and the construction projects of these outsiders in the local society are still struggling, how to build a mechanism for the distribution of interests between "outsiders and locals" in rural construction, and how to cultivate the subjectivity of farmers, at this level, historical experience and lessons are still worth learning.
Finally, it is worth mentioning that the author promised to disclose all the investigation notes about Xinglong Field, and during the investigation of Zouping in Shandong Province, the author was fortunate to find a book written by the staff of the rural construction experiment that year, "Xinglong Field Perception". This diary complements the historical facts before Isabe arrived at the Xinglong Field, and has important reference value. With the discovery of the data of more participants in the Xinglongchang rural construction experiment, and the gradual disclosure of the research data of the Xinglongchang after the founding of the People's Republic of China by existing researchers, we believe that the research value and practical value of the Xinglongchang, as the epitome of the century-old changes in China's rural society, will become more and more important.
Author: Zhang Yiying
Editor: Dong Muzi Feng Xiaoyang
Proofreader: Zhai Yongjun