Two revolutions : village reconstruction and cooperativisation in North Shaanxi, 1934-1945
Creators: name: Keating, Pauline B.
Publisher: name: The Australian National University
Year: 1989
Subjects: subject: Rural development China Shaanxi Sheng
subject: Villages China Shaanxi Sheng
subject: Shaanxi Sheng (China) Rural conditions

description: The broad aim of this enquiry is to assess the extent of revolutionary change achieved by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in strategic parts of the Shaanganning Border Region during the Sino-Japanese War. The study is built around the significant contrast between developments in the nine sparsely-populated counties which were directly administered from Yan'an city (the Yanshu counties) and the five populous counties to the north which formed the Suide subregion. Long-established differences in human settlement patterns, agricultural practice, modes of political control and, in the mid- 1930s, different levels of exposure to communist-led insurgency resulted in different sets of problems and different opportunities and challenges for the CCP in each of the two subregions. The Suide subregion, with its high tenancy rates, powerful landlords, fractious competition for land and an involuting agriculture more closely approximated conditions in other CCP bases than did the rest of Shaanganning. On the other hand, in the very secure, land-abundant parts of the Yanshu countryside in which any remaining landlords had been cowed there was the possibility of thoroughgoing and unprecedented village reconstruction through a migrant resettlement programme and some government munificence (relative to other places). Rural revolution is interpreted as meaning radical change in three analytically distinct spheres: peasant-state relations, peasant-elite relations and the horizontal relationships between village families. Land reform and the development of the economic infrastructure were, in CCP understanding, the precondition for significant changes in socio-political relations. And the migrant programme, the rural election movements, taxation policies and tenancy reform enabled the CCP to persist with its drive to restructure rural politics after land confiscations had been officially halted. The methods and consequences of the implementation of each of these reform strategies in Yanshu and Suide are examined in detail in this dissertation. The campaign to develop fannwork cooperation between peasant families was, in my argument, the most revolutionary of the CCP's various rural reform strategies because, for one thing, meaningful change in peasant-state and peasant-elite relations required the building of new and strong village organisations. Predictably, the cooperativisation movement took different forms in the Suide and the Yanshu subregions. The different ecologies and settlement patterns in the two places had produced locally-distinct cooperative customs between fann families, and the CCP's first-step strategy of reviving traditional customs underlined this fact. In both Suide and Yanshu, the drive to restore old cooperative practices was remarkably successful. But it proved more difficult to expand mutual-aid practices beyond family or kin-based groups, and to extend cooperation to tasks that had not, in the past, been undertaken cooperatively. The CCP had some success in building new (in contrast to traditional) mutual-aid teams in those parts of Suide where the power of the old elite had been broken. However, residents of those Yanshu hamlets which had been built up by means of a vigorous immigration programme over the previous six or seven years, and under CCP patronage, were far more responsive to CCP innovations in the area of farm work management than were fann families in more' solidary' villages. The cooperativisation movement in the Suide subregion was generally characterised by a 'top-down' building of model villages and a degree of regimentation. In the Yanshu counties, cooperative forms were more varied, more modest in scope and were more independent of central supervision and direction. Thus, a conclusion of my study is that the most successful of the early peasant cooperatives were those that were developed in an atypical countryside and in villages with atypical histories. There is not the same evidence of revolutionary change in the Suide villages.