Abstract During the period of national economic readjustment, supply and marketing cooperatives, by undertaking self-operated business, opened up a limited space for market regulation outside the system of planned commodity circulation. In the early 1960s, faced with new conditions in the exchange of industrial and agricultural products between town and countryside, the Party and government called upon the supply and marketing cooperatives to act as relatively independent commodity operators and to conduct self-operated business – that is, to handle, in a comparatively flexible manner, third-category goods and the surplus farm and sideline products remaining after farmers had fulfilled the state’s planned procurement quotas. This market-oriented experiment, led by collectively owned cooperative economic organizations, represented an attempt by socialist commerce to participate in the free market during the planned-economy era. The development, modes of operation, social impact, and inherent difficulties of the cooperatives’ self-operated business not only reveal the complex configuration of “small freedoms under the big plan” 大计划下小自由 but also deepen our understanding of the structural contradictions of the planned commercial system.
摘要 民国初年，由于国家权威缺失与派系林立，“汉奸”经常作为具有道德标签的日常谩骂之词，而非凝聚全民族对外敌的认同。九一八事变以后，随着中日民族矛盾进一步激化，“汉奸”一词的使用更为频繁，且其含义及运用又出现新的变化，尤其是进入全面抗战阶段，国统区和中共根据地都在各自的领域对汉奸进行定义，以强化社会动员和民族团结。沦陷区的伪政府则利用“汉奸”话语，标榜自身“正统”。随着各种伪政权和伪组织纷纷成立，国共两党都出台了一系列惩治汉奸的法律条文，以相对宽泛的方式惩治汉奸，但对“汉奸”一词的诠释，始终存在法律认定与民间观念的差异，无论是政府官员还是普通民众，在严惩汉奸的舆论呼声中，其言行举措总是逾越法律边界，以致乱象丛生。“汉奸”一词在法律和社会话语的共同作用下，成为抗战时期一个具有深刻内涵和重要象征意义的词汇。
摘要 近代以来，在中国社会变迁的背景下，淮北地区的妇女逐渐挣脱传统家庭的束缚，开始向公共领域拓展，并呈现出一种特别典型和持久的复合性。一方面，在多方的阻力和限制下，妇女中的绝大部分仍未能自觉，依旧深陷在传统家庭的牢笼之中；另一方面，妇女中的先觉者奋力冲破旧有礼教和制度藩篱，通过争取教育权、婚姻自主权、经济独立权和政治参与权等，在社会实践中摆脱人身依附关系，走出家庭、融入社会，逐渐实现了个体独立。这种相互对立又同时并存的特征，折射出这一时期女性社会化的目标未能完全实现。
Abstract In the early years after the founding of the People’s Republic of China, the state encouraged the opening of market trade in order to promote the exchange of goods between urban and rural areas. With the implementation of the unified procurement and unified marketing policy, as well as the socialist transformation of capitalist industry and commerce, the government faced a dilemma in the sphere of grain administration. On the one hand, to curb hoarding by private merchants, the state gradually replaced free rural markets with state-led markets, strictly delimiting the categories of commodities and the spaces in which transactions could occur. On the other hand, inadequately planned supply gave rise to a flourishing black market. This informal economy was not a new phenomenon; rather, it was an inevitable concomitant of official market control. This dilemma manifested itself in multiple aspects of grain circulation. The state regulated the market through a dual-track pricing system and a quality grading system, while simultaneously transforming grain-related industries; yet the disjunction between official posted prices and market prices intensified informal transactions. In the transformation of grain shops, processing trades, and the cooked-food sector, however, a certain space was retained in light of practical circumstances. Comprehensive governance of grain sales – across the entire chain from markets and prices to industries – reveals the inherent tension between “control” and “liberalization” under the planned economy.
Abstract This article demonstrates how the specificity of statutes in the Qing Code combined with the bureaucratic process of case investigation, reporting, and review by superior courts to determine what could, and what could not, be accepted as valid “judicial truth” in serious cases such as homicide. Through a detailed examination of two homicide cases, both drawn from the mid-Qianlong era, the article shows how the complexity of actual circumstances could be forced into pre-existing legal categories and statutes. In both cases, the ideological intent of codified statute was thus cut short by the bureaucratic implementation of such law.
Abstract Agriculture has been the cornerstone of China’s economy since imperial times. Oxen, therefore, were primarily classified as working companions rather than food, granting them a unique role and status in China’s ecological and moral systems. This article examines how conceptual and technological changes influenced people’s centuries-old symbiotic relationship with oxen and blurred the ethical boundaries between what is considered edible and inedible in modern China. By analyzing the manipulation of the “oxen protection” discourse during the Republican period in relation to the power dynamics between competing interest groups, this article traces the trajectory of Republican government policies – from contrasting “oxen” with “non-oxen” and “protected cattle” with “non-protected cattle” to ultimately adopting the term “beef cattle” in 1933. At the discursive level, the Republican governments reiterated their responsibility to protect oxen so as to safeguard the country’s agricultural development and the livelihoods of peasants. However, the intention behind these policies was to justify and capitalize on the beef economy, revealing how the government had become increasingly alienated from the interests of the peasants.
Abstract This paper presents Qing legal cases in which magistrates scrutinized bodies for evidence about gender performance. These cases challenged the marital frame of reference, straining the legibility of the gendered body and the coherence of the normative categories that informed judicial reasoning. Several cases center on “stone maidens” who were rejected by husbands for vaginal impenetrability; one concerns a Buddhist nun who was raped, and whose treatment shows how jurists conceptualized the category of woman to include individuals outside the family; another concerns a husband rejected by his wife because of the inadequate size and performance of his penis; and the last concerns the evidence needed to exculpate a husband who had killed his wife and a neighbor when he caught them in adultery. Magistrates needed to find out whether the persons under scrutiny were physically capable of normative gender roles, or had violated the rules governing such roles; their judgments aimed to repair kinship networks and reinforce patriarchal hierarchies. These boundary-crossing “hard cases” help us understand the complex interweaving of bodily sex and social gender in the Qing: they provide insight into how magistrates (as well as midwives and others who gave evidence) would interpret the body in terms of what society demanded of it.
This article examines how PRC judges ruled on inheritance disputes during the Mao period (1949–1976). In fact, China not only rejected a draft succession law in 1956, it also did not promulgate any law governing succession until 1985. In part, this has contributed to the conventional characterization of China in the Mao period as a “lawless society” dominated by radical Maoist and Marxist ideologies. By using newly available archival documents and internal publications of local courts and legal cadres, this article reveals that PRC judges rejected the codification of law because the legal principles stipulated in the 1956 draft succession law could not be applied to the complex social reality of rural China at the time. Therefore, court rulings became products of the long-standing efforts of judges to reconcile the principles of justice inherent in the 1956 draft succession law and complex social realities in order to deliver judgments that all litigants could accept as fair. This article highlights how such efforts finally led to a codified law of succession in 1985. Hence, the Succession Law of 1985 was not a departure from the previous “lawless” Mao era, but the completion of PRC judges’ long process of amending the “incomplete” 1956 draft.
Abstract Using project-based practice in Zhao Village in western Guizhou as a case study, this article examines bureaucratic tension in China’s rural governance and explores pathways for its mitigation. While bureaucracy provides a standardized and formalized framework for governance, its propensity toward the expansion of instrumental rationality persistently erodes the legitimacy of rural governance grounded in shared values. Drawing on a thick description of the implementation process in Zhao Village, the study finds that, to ease such bureaucratic tension, village cadres – while complying with bureaucratic logics to fulfill assigned tasks – must also engage in creative governance practices that continually build public endorsement of concrete governing actions. In doing so, they dynamically reconstruct and consolidate the value consensus necessary for governance. This governance praxis, centered on the cumulative production of effectiveness, not only avoids governance failure induced by over-bureaucratization, but also provides crucial momentum for strengthening rural social cohesion and achieving effective governance and comprehensive revitalization.
Involution has been the key concept in my studies of Chinese history over the “longue durée.” It spotlights the reality of relatively high population pressure on farmland, with ever-decreasing farm size per capita throughout later imperial Chinese history, especially in the Ming-Qing era. Distinguished from gradually changing evolution and radical revolution, involution is characterized by mainly stationary technologies and methods of farming under ever-increasing population-to-land ratios.
The English and Chinese languages evince fundamental differences in modes of thought and expression. One leans strongly toward either/or, the other both/and. This can be seen in the differences between the two over a long period of time, and even in the Chinese understandings and usages of the terms “Communism” and “Communist Party.” Looking to the future, we can expect even stronger and more apparent evidence of the fundamental tendencies of the Chinese language and mode of thought.
The penetration of the Nationalist Government’s conscription system into the countryside during the War of Resistance against Japan provides a crucial lens through which to examine state – society relations in wartime China. Counties and townships constituted the starting points of recruitment, while villages were its fundamental units. Except for frontier regions and minority areas where recruitment was hampered by special circumstances, ordinary counties in Nationalist-controlled territory – such as Linli in Hunan Province – displayed a hybrid pattern in which state power infiltrated the localities even as village society exercised considerable autonomy. The discretionary space and flexibility embedded in recruitment both constrained the downward reach of state authority and reflected the Nationalist Government’s pragmatic recognition of local realities and policy adaptation, thereby achieving a measure of balance among the interests involved. In its mobilization strategy, the regime combined patriotic Resistance against Japan rhetoric with rural ethical norms and initially attained some success. Yet because guarantees for soldiers’ relatives were not honored, conscripts – acting out of survival rationality – turned to legitimate resistance through draft-evasion lawsuits and other practices, laying bare deep-seated tensions between the mobilization apparatus and rural society. The Linli experience thus highlights not only the limits of the Nationalist Government’s capacity to embed itself in rural China, but also the way in which popular survival ethics continuously eroded state mobilization as it filtered downward, revealing the complex dilemmas of wartime state-building and rural social integration.
The resolution of labor disputes and the localized operation of labor law constitute key vantage points from which to examine labor governance in China. Taking a sociological perspective, this article investigates the grassroots handling of “double wage” disputes and explores their theoretical implications. It reconstructs in detail the procedures and principles through which local society resolves such cases. The study finds that labor law, situated within the framework of central–local relations, acquires pronounced local characteristics in practice: the industrial and social foundations of specific regions shape how the law functions at both the arbitration and court levels. Divergent degrees of administrative involvement lead labor-arbitration commissions and people’s courts to issue different outcomes in cases of the same type, revealing a clear divide between arbitration and adjudication. The research further shows that regional legal consciousness and pragmatic flexibility in judicial practice partially undermine the “paternalism” of state law. Viewed through the lenses of center–local dynamics and the arbitration–adjudication split, China’s labor governance emerges as a complex and evolving formation, offering important insights for future scholarship and practical reform of labor-dispute resolution.
Different from modern physics, traditional Chinese “humanics” focused on the human world, not the physical world. Its main emphasis was on “people” and not on “things,” and on co-existence and not on pushes and pulls. The former led finally to the development and use of nuclear weapons, including the imperialism and colonialism that preceded it. The latter, however, always focused on human co-existence and interaction, not on physics. To be sure, some observers have equated modern communism with historical Western imperialism, and have projected onto modern and contemporary China imperialism’s pursuit of hegemony and invasion, leading therefore to the U.S.-led policy of “containment and isolation” of the People’s Republic of China. We need to see and understand that, in reality, the “all under heaven” view of present-day China is still anchored instead on traditional Confucian humanics, not modern Western imperialism or its physics.
Looking back at the advanced age of 84 on my own lifelong research, I can see that deep-seated emotions are certain to influence a researcher’s choice of problem, viewpoint, and depth of engagement. Only if we confront such realities can we hope to both derive creative energy from them and rise above them. Emotions can become hindrances to understanding and analysis, but can also lend them greater motive force and multi-dimensionality than “pure reason.” The key is to recognize the source and necessary presence of such, so as not to be driven unwittingly by them, but rather to derive greater depth of scholarly understanding from them. Needless to say, the point here has to do with the deep-seated motive forces of scholarship of the author, not simply a matter of techniques of emotive expression or mode of writing.
Involution, or diminishing output per unit input, necessarily occurred sooner or later under the mounting population-to-land pressures of China from the Ming and Qing periods on. It could be countered for a time by enhanced inputs, as, for example, through the use of more or higher-quality fertilizer, or by pre-modern technological advances, such as the earlier switch from dry rice farming to wet rice farming, but would then resume under continued population pressure. Involution was a phenomenon rarely encountered in the pre-modern West, but was a major long-term historical tendency in pre-modern China. With long-term involution came ever greater difficulty for transitions to other ways of production. The opposite of “involution” was “revolution,” wrought by technological change, such as the early switch from dry to wet farming of rice in China, or the coming of modern inputs such as chemical fertilizer. In addition to “revolution,” “involution” can also be juxtaposed against modernizing “development.” Pre-modern Chinese agriculture was far more labor intensive per unit land than pre-modern Western agriculture. Its transition into modernization (e.g., chemical inputs) was accordingly also far more difficult than the West’s. While the history of Western agriculture can be comprehended mainly through the two categories of “pre-modern” and “modern,” Chinese agriculture requires, in addition to those two, the intermediate third category of “involution” for comprehension.
In the first half of the 20th century, the global egg market expanded continuously, gradually making eggs an important commodity in China’s modern foreign trade. Between 1912 and 1937, egg production in China’s major egg trade regions increased moderately in line with the growth of the number of chickens, but there was no significant improvement in the egg output per chicken. The expansion of the egg market did not lead to the emergence of specialized poultry farmers, and chicken farming remained a common secondary activity within the rural household economy. Chinese peasants typically supplied eggs through the practice of free-range poultry farming. In the 1920s, both the government and society recognized the importance of developing the poultry industry and attempted to promote specialized poultry farms. However, these efforts yielded limited results, and this top-down approach did not lead to a breakthrough in the development of the poultry industry. The further development of poultry farming was constrained by a variety of factors, including traditional societal practices, lack of knowledge and technology, insufficient funding, and poor organizational structures. In brief, the development of the egg trade advanced the commercialization of eggs, yet smallholder peasants, relying on traditional methods of poultry farming, provided the initial supply of egg products. As a result, the poultry industry in modern China, in conjunction with the rural economy, failed to achieve further development.
This paper examines the collective actions and business strategies of peasants in the Wuchang region (of Heilongjiang) as the rice industry transitioned from large-scale production to brand development. The study finds that the formation of specialty industries is not merely the product of state-led, top-down interventions nor the result of local endogenous forces operating without state support; rather, it is a process of intertwined development. Even during the era of “politics dominating economics,” peasants exerted influence by controlling production volumes, thereby indirectly pressuring the state to adjust policies. As the market emerged, peasants also looked to the state to address new structural issues. The logic of peasant action is closely related to the space available for such action, and peasant agency is not merely a form of “resistance from the weak,” but rather a strategic form of interaction. In certain contexts, the spontaneous actions of individual peasants can also play a catalytic role. The developmental history of “Wuchang rice” is, in fact, a history of the evolving relationship between peasant agency and social structures. The key to fostering positive interaction among the relevant stakeholders lies in achieving a balance between these two forces.
Since the 1990s, the guiding principle of "maintaining land allocations regardless of changes in population" (sic) has gradually slowed the allocation of contract land in rural China and resulted in a new generation of rural residents without land contract and management rights. This article places the evolution of this policy in the context of the global expansion of neoliberal property rights theory, systematically reviewing the theoretical debates and practical issues arising from the rigid allocation of land contract and management rights. After reviewing the current situation, this article argues that there is an immediate need for reform of the land contract system based on the principle of "allocating land in accordance with changes in population" (sic). To address concerns about protecting investments in agricultural land, this study recommends combining insights from local experiences in the practice of the land system with the Harberger Tax mechanism, proposing a new model for the allocation of land contract and management rights. This innovative model builds upon the new practices of rural land allocation since the introduction of the "separation of the three rights" (sic) approach in China's collective land tenure system. It aims to promote the fair allocation of land and protect investments in the same, thereby achieving an organic unity of equity and efficiency. This study shows that an in-depth analysis of the institutional practices involving the land tenure system in local rural areas can help us reassess the theories underlying national policies and provide insights for further improvements in the land system in rural China.
Rural China has long been a rather sensitive subject within China. For that reason, our Chinese journal Zhongguo xiangcun yanjiu on rural China, published inside China, has faced some serious difficulties. By contrast, the bilingual international version of our journal Rural China: An International Journal of History and Social Science , published by E. J. Brill in the Netherlands, has long been very stable. In recent years, the Chinese countryside has in fact seen substantial new accomplishments and development. Today, the subject of “rural China” actually needs fundamental rethinking to incorporate the new developments that have occurred. It also requires that we pay attention to the multiple forces and influences that have come from outside the ruralities —— we must no longer “simply study rural China qua rural China.”
