Hostname: page-component-848d4c4894-r5zm4 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-06-28T09:52:54.420Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

The Country, the City, and Visions of Modernity in 1930s China

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 September 2010

CATHERINE LYNCH
CATHERINE LYNCH*
Affiliation:
Eastern Connecticut State University, Willimantic, Connecticut, United States
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

The 1930s saw new research and extended debates over the nature of the countryside in China and its socio-economic and historical role. Those on different sides of these debates, many drawing on historical materialism, tended to recreate modernist assumptions. These included assumptions that history was unilinear, and that what was Western was also modern, universal, urban, and objective, while what was not Western was traditional, local, rural, and subjective. The modern nation state, made up of modern citizens, was the outcome of, and the active subject in, a progressive history.

Yet other approaches, focusing on the role of the countryside in China's development, challenged not only aspects of modernity but the assumptions in which the debates were couched. The philosopher and social activist Liang Shuming (1893–1988) focused on the countryside as the creative field in China. He envisioned a new form of community that, instead of the state, would be the active locus for change. Liang's new, village communities would draw on but not reproduce cultural traditions across a ruptured history and form the basis of a non-capitalist industrialisation. Rather than appropriate the dominant image of modernity, Liang revisited its basic assumptions. In so doing, he generated fresh visions, opening up a different set of possibilities and recasting the relation of the country to the city, the nation and the future.

Type
Research Article
Information
Rural History , Volume 21 , Issue 2 , October 2010 , pp. 151 - 163
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2010

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Notes

I am grateful to Jeremy Burchardt for generously making incisive comments on an earlier draft.

1. Huang, Philip C. C., The Peasant Economy and Social Change in North China (Stanford, 1985)Google Scholar. Rawski, Thomas G., Economic Growth in Prewar China (Berkeley, 1989)Google Scholar.

2. Fanjian, Kong, ‘The 1930s Debate on the Nature of China's Rural Economy,’ Xingping, Kang, trans., in Social Sciences in China, 1 (1989), 28–43Google Scholar. Original in Zhongguo shehui kexue [Social sciences in China], 2 (1987). Zehou, Li, ‘Ji Zhongguo xiandai san ci xueshu lunzhan’ [On three academic debates in contemporary China], in Li Zehou, Zhongguo xiandai sixiang shi lun [Contemporary Chinese intellectual history], (Beijing, 1987), pp. 50–87Google Scholar.

3. Jun, Gao, ed., Zhongguo shehui xingzhi wenti lunzhan, ziliao xuanji [The debate on the question of the nature of Chinese society, selected materials], 2 vols. (Beijing, 1984)Google Scholar. Muqiao, Xue and Hefa, Feng, eds., ‘Zhongguo nongcun’ lunwen xuan [Selected essays from China's Villages], 2 vols. (Beijing, 1983)Google Scholar.

4. See Thøgersen, Stig, ‘Revisiting a Dramatic Triangle: The State, Villagers, and Social Activists in Chinese Rural Reconstruction Projects’, Journal of Current Chinese Affairs, 38: 4 (2009), 9–33 for an English language introduction to contemporary rural reformGoogle Scholar.

5. Faure, David and Liu, Tao Tao, eds., Town and Country in China: Identity and Perception (Houndmills and New York, 2002)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

6. Bret Wallach, in his suggestive book, Losing Asia: Modernization and the Culture of Development (Baltimore, 1996), argues that the absorption of what he calls the culture of development was in fact a rather slow process in colonial India.

7. Catherine Lynch, ‘Liang Shuming and the Populist Alternative in China’ (unpublished doctoral thesis, University of Wisconsin-Madison, 1989).

8. For an excellent overview of Chinese history in the first half of the twentieth century and of issues raised by recent scholarship, see Zarrow, Peter, China in War and Revolution, 1895–1949 (New York, 2005)Google Scholar.

9. Bergère, Marie-Claire, The Golden Age of the Chinese Bourgeoisie 1911–1937 (Cambridge, 1989)Google Scholar.

10. Casualty counts are notoriously difficult to pin down. John Dower reports that ‘estimates of the human toll in China range from several million to 15 million deaths’ and concludes that ‘it is reasonable to think in general terms of approximately 10 million Chinese war dead’. John Dower, War Without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War (New York, 1986), pp. 295, 296.

11. Zarrow, China, p. 322.

12. Myers, Ramon H., The Chinese Peasant Economy: Agricultural Development in Hopei and Shangtung, 1890–1949 (Cambridge, Mass., 1970), p. 13Google Scholar. Myers cites Fang Tien-t'ing, referring to ‘monographs’ and ‘periodicals’. It is possible that he was counting individual issues of periodicals.

13. Mote, Frederick W., ‘A Millennium of Chinese Urban History: Form, Time and Space Concepts in Soochow,’ Rice University Studies 59 (1973), 35–36Google Scholar. See also Skinner, G. William, ed., The City in Late Imperial China, (Stanford, 1977)Google Scholar.

14. Faure and Liu, eds., Town and Country in China.

15. ‘Introduction’, Faure and Liu, eds., Town and Country in China, p. 5.

16. Henrietta Harrison, ‘Village Identity in Rural North China: A Sense of Place in the Diary of Liu Dapeng’, Faure and Liu, eds., Town and Country in China, p. 85.

17. Tao Tao Liu, ‘Perceptions of City and Country in Modern Chinese Fiction in the Early Republican Era’, Faure and Liu, eds., Town and Country in China, pp. 203–232, deals with this issue through the fiction of modern intellectuals in the cities.

18. A good deal of recent scholarship has focused on modern cities and specifically on Shanghai. Two prominent examples are Lee, Leo Ou-fan, Shanghai Modern: The Flowering of a New Urban Culture in China, 1930–1945 (Cambridge, Mass., 1999)Google Scholar and Wakeman, Frederic Jr., Policing Shanghai, 1927–1937 (Berkeley, 1995)Google Scholar. Ye, Wen-hsin, ed., Becoming Chinese: Passages to Modernity and Beyond (Berkeley, 2000)Google Scholar deals more generally with Chinese modernity and the city.

19. Arif Dirlik discusses the variety of critical uses of the terminologies of modernity and how they can be applied to China in his article, ‘Modernism and Antimodernism in Mao Zedong's Marxism,’ in Dirlik, Arif, Healy, Paul, and Knight, Nick, eds., Critical Perspectives on Mao Zedong's Thought (Atlantic Highlands, New Jersey, 1997), pp. 59–83Google Scholar.

20. Shuming, Liang, Dong xi wenhua ji qi zhexue [Eastern and western cultures and their philosophies] (Shanghai, 1922)Google Scholar; reprint in Liang Shuming quanji [The complete works of Liang Shuming], (Jinan, 1989) vol. 1, pp. 321–547.

21. The debate on the nature of village economy and society appeared most importantly on the pages of Zhongguo nongcun [China's villages], published in Shanghai, and also in Nanjing's Zhongguo jingji [China's economy]. See also Xue Muqiao and Feng Hefa, eds., ‘Zhongguo nongcun’ lunwen xuan.

22. Shuming, Liang, Xiangcun jianshe lilun [A theory of rural reconstruction], (Zouping, 1937)Google Scholar; reprint in Liang Shuming quanji [The complete works of Liang Shuming], (Jinan, 1990) vol.2, pp. 143–572.

23. Li Zehou, ‘Ji Zhongguo xiandai san ci xueshu lunzhan’. See also Dirlik, Arif, Revolution and History: The Origins of Marxist Historiography in China, 1919–1937 (Berkeley, 1978)Google Scholar.

24. Barlow, Tani E., ‘Colonialism's Career in Postwar China Studies’, positions 1:1 (Spring 1993), 224–267CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

25. Liang used the phrase in English when rejecting it in Zhongguo wenhua yaoyi [The essence of Chinese culture], (Shanghai, 1949); reprint in Liang Shuming quanji [The complete works of Liang Shuming], (Jinan, 1990) vol. 3, p. 43. The discussion which follows draws largely from Shuming, Liang, Xiangcun jianshe lilun [A theory of rural reconstruction], (Zouping, 1937)Google Scholar; reprint in Liang Shuming quanji [The complete works of Liang Shuming], (Jinan, 1990) vol. 2, pp. 143–572, and Da xiangcun jianshe pipan [In answer to the criticism of rural reconstruction], (Chongqing, 1941); reprint in Liang Shuming quanji [The complete works of Liang Shuming], (Jinan, 1990) vol. 2, pp. 589–658.

26. Liang Shuming, Da xiangcun jianshe pipan; reprint in Liang Shuming quanji, (1990) vol. 2, pp. 609–10.

27. Liang Shuming, Xiangcun jianshe lilun, reprint in Liang Shuming quanji, (1990) vol. 2, p. 317.

28. Duara, Prasenjit, ‘Historicizing National Identity, or Who Imagines What and When’, in Eley, Geoff and Suny, Ronald Grigor, eds., Becoming National: A Reader (New York, 1996), pp. 151–177Google Scholar.

29. See Lynch, Catherine, ‘Liang Shuming, Education, and Change’ in Ziyouzhuyi yu renwen chuantong [Liberalism and the humanistic tradition], Hui-fen, Chiu [Josephine Chiu Duke], ed., (Taipei, 2005), pp. 375–95Google Scholar.

30. Shuming, Liang, ‘Xiangnong xuexiao de banfa ji qi yiyi’ [The methods and meaning of peasant schools] in Xiangcun jianshe [Rural reconstruction] 2:16 (1933)Google Scholar; reprint in Liang Shuming quanji [The complete works of Liang Shuming], (Jinan, 1992) vol. 5, pp. 347–56; and ‘Shehui benwei de jiaoyu xitong cao'an’ [Draft proposal for a society based education system] in Xiangcun jianshe [Rural reconstruction] 3:5 (1933); reprint in Liang Shuming quanji [The complete works of Liang Shuming], (Jinan, 1992) vol. 5, pp. 393–410. For an appraisal of the results of educational reforms under the Shandong Rural Reconstruction Institute, see Thøgersen, Stig, A County of Culture: Twentieth Century China Seen From the Village Schools of Zouping, Shandong (Ann Arbor, 2002)CrossRefGoogle Scholar and ‘Reconstructing Society: Liang Shuming and the Rural Reconstruction Movement in Shandong’, Brødsgaard, Kjeld Erik and Strand, David, eds., Reconstructing Twentieth-Century China: State Control, Civil Society, and National Identity (Oxford, 1998), pp. 139–62Google Scholar.

31. Arif Dirlik, in ‘Modernism and Antimodernism in Mao Zedong's Marxism,’ has highlighted the importance of subjectivity as a modern concern.