The State, Village Communities, and Peasants: The “Third Realm” in Socialist China

Unlike past studies that have focused on the economic issues about rural collectives, this article reexamines the economic management of rural collectives by paying attention to both their economic and political attributes. Because of the land reform and the rebuilding of grassroots social structures under the leadership of the CCP, the intermediary organization connecting the state and the rural population underwent a transition from village/lineage communities (“the enlarged private”) to rural collectives (“the enlarged public”), hence the transformation of the “third realm” from the private to the public spheres at the grassroots level. The reform era since the 1980s, however, has witnessed the dual weakening of both the “enlarged private” and the “reduced public” in the third realm because of reforms in rural management and land systems. The “two-in-one” formation of state-society relations will be maintained in rural governance in the next two or three decades, which necessitates the reconstruction of the rural governance system through the rebuilding of the collective economy.

Community Elites and Collective Action: The State and the Starved during the Chinese Famine (1959–61)

Tens of millions of peasants died during the Great Famine in China from 1959 to 1961. Numerous Chinese peasants remained silent during the famine while others staged resistance. This article explores how peasant resistance was possible in a communist regime and how the government contained such resistance. It finds that resistance was considerably affected by the availability of protest leaders. Chinese peasants were organized into rural collectives controlled by the party-state through local cadres. Sympathetic rural cadres played crucial roles in facilitating peasant resistance. However, government control generally deprived rural communities of protest leaders. When collective resistance did occur, the government contained its influence through accommodation and repression. Effective control rendered the government insensitive to the famine suffered by the vast rural population of the country.

Local capitalism and neoliberalization in a Shenzhen former lineage village

This article examines the process of neoliberalization in the Shenzhen special economic zone in Guangdong Province, China. Building on the case study of a former peasant and almost single-lineage village that has become a part of the city of Shenzhen, I show how neoliberal principles aimed at advancing the transition to capitalism are combined with and countered by other ethical traditions. Owing to the long-standing conception of the lineage as an enterprise, the maintenance of the lineage structure in the transformation of the rural collectives has offered fertile ground for the emergence of a local capitalist coalition. Yet the current discourses on the necessity of obliterating the remains of the collective economy and introducing individual ownership run counter to the collectivist values of the lineage village community and the embeddedness of its economy in kinship and territorial ties. I further illustrate this discordance by the way in which the villagers managed to save their founding ancestor's grave site following government requests to clear the land by removing tombs. These policies form a complex blend of state interventions in the economy, neoliberal governance, and Confucian principles.

Spare-Time Education in Communist China

The first Chinese Five-Year Plan ended in 1957, and the second began the following year. The launching of the “great leap forward” in industrial and agricultural production and the transformation of the rural collectives into “People's Communes” in 1958 accelerated the pace of work of both workers and peasants.