The Rural Modern: Reconstructing the Self and State in Republican China

By Kate Merkel-Hess

Discussions of China’s early twentieth-century modernization efforts tend to focus almost exclusively on cities, and the changes, both cultural and industrial, seen there. As a result, the communist peasant revolution appears as a decisive historical break. Kate Merkel-Hess corrects that misconception by demonstrating how crucial the countryside was for reformers in China long before the success of the communist revolution.
 
In The Rural Modern, Merkel-Hess shows that Chinese reformers and intellectuals created an idea of modernity that was not simply about what was foreign and new, as in Shanghai and other cities, but instead captured the Chinese people’s desire for social and political change rooted in rural traditions and institutions. She traces efforts to remake village education, economics, and politics, analyzing how these efforts contributed to a new, inclusive vision of rural Chinese life. Merkel-Hess argues that as China sought to redefine itself, such rural reform efforts played a major role, and tensions that emerged between rural and urban ways deeply informed social relations, government policies, and subsequent efforts to create a modern nation during the communist period.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Release date: Aug 17, 2016
• ISBN: 9780226383309

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The Rural Modern

The Rural Modern

Reconstructing the Self and State in Republican China

KATE MERKEL-HESS

The University of Chicago Press

Chicago and London

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637

The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London

© 2016 by The University of Chicago

All rights reserved. Published 2016.

Printed in the United States of America

25 24 23 22 21 20 19 18 17 16    1 2 3 4 5

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-38327-9 (cloth)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-38330-9 (e-book)

DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226383309.001.0001

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Merkel-Hess, Kate, 1976– author.

Title: The rural modern : reconstructing the self and state in Republican China / Kate Merkel-Hess.

Description: Chicago ; London : The University of Chicago Press, 2016. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2016002820 | isbn 9780226383279 (cloth : alk. paper) | isbn 9780226383309 (e-book)

Subjects: LCSH: Rural development—China—History—20th century. | Education, Rural—China—History—20th century. | China—History—Republic, 1912–1949.

Classification: LCC HN740.Z9 C623 2016 DS774.5 | DDC 307.1/412—DC23 LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2016002820

This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

Contents

List of Illustrations

A Note on Romanization

Acknowledgments

Introduction

1   Writing for New Literates in the Chinese Countryside

2   To the Countryside

3   Organizing the Village

4   Village Contestations

5   A Movement Made and Lost

Conclusion

Archives

Notes

Glossary of Chinese Terms

Bibliography

Index

Illustrations

1. Illustration for a lesson on The Model Village in the 1928 edition of The Farmer’s Thousand-Character Reader

2. A refined depiction of the model village in the 1930 edition of The Farmer’s Thousand-Character Reader

3. Anti-Japan parade in Dingxian, in front of a wall bearing the Mass Education Movement slogan Eliminate illiteracy, make new people, 1931 or 1932

4. A courtyard classroom in Dingxian in 1931 or 1932

5. Illustration of a peasant reading The Farmer’s Thousand-Character Reader, 1930

6. A boy and his sister look in the window of a pharmacy in The Townspeople’s Thousand-Character Reader, 1929

7. Lao Wang knocked out by electricity in Beijing, from the newspaper Nongmin, August 1, 1926

8. The Yan Family in Dingxian in 1931 or 1932

9. Schematic outlining the structure of basic education in Guangxi, from the journal Shandong minzhong jiaoyu yuekan, February 25, 1936

10. Organizational chart of the YMCA’s rural project at Weitingshan, from Shi Zhongyi’s Jiu nongcun de xin qixiang, 1933

A Note on Romanization

In this book, I use the pinyin system to romanize Chinese terms, with one exception. In the case of individuals more commonly known under different titles, I have used that alternate romanization (Sun Yat-sen, Chiang Kai-shek, and so on). A number of the figures discussed in this book had both Chinese and English names. I have chosen to use the Chinese names throughout (Yan Yangchu rather than James Yen, for instance). For the ease of the reader, I have also, in a few cases, updated irregular or old romanizations in direct quotations to pinyin (Tianjin rather than Tienhsin), indicating the change as such. Finally, I have contextualized almost all Chinese terms, but two units of measure appear a few times and deserve further explanation. First, a mu is equivalent to about one-sixth of an acre. Second, sui is the Chinese calculation of age. A person is one sui at birth and adds one sui at each passing New Year.

Acknowledgments

I’ve been fortunate to have wonderful mentors who supported this project. Ken Pomeranz has been a sounding board from start to finish, reading numerous drafts and providing detailed suggestions and queries that greatly improved my work. His diligence and generosity are an inspiration. Jeff Wasserstrom gave feedback on the whole manuscript, and I’m thankful for his help over the years in expanding my lungs in writing for a broader audience and in thinking about the relationships between historical and contemporary China. Several others at the University of California, Irvine—where this project began—provided suggestions, help, and friendship, especially Bin Wong, as well as Vinayak Chaturvedi, Lynn Mally, Bob Moeller, and Anne Walthall.

Many others gave feedback along the way. My colleagues at Penn State have supported and advised me as I have edited and revised, especially David Atwill, Kate Baldanza, Lori Ginzberg, Amy Greenberg, Ronnie Hsia, Michael Kulikowski, and On-cho Ng. I was fortunate to be able to present this research in many different formats, where people asked questions and suggested fruitful leads, and these comments and queries often opened new avenues of inquiry and resulted in new sections of the book. I want to particularly thank Norm Apter, Janet Chen, Alex Day, Prasenjit Duara, Pierre Fuller, Charles Hayford, Henrietta Harrison, Gail Hershatter, Brooks Jessup, Tom Mullaney, Richard Jean So, Jonathan Spence, Wensheng Wang, and Margherita Zanasi. My undergraduate advisor at Yale, Annping Chin, provided some leads for this research but more generally encouraged me to always value the humanity of the people I was writing about. Also at Yale, John Gaddis, Valerie Hansen, Zhengguo Kang, and Charles Laughlin encouraged my early interest in China and history. It was always a pleasure to talk about rural reform with Wang Guo, and I’m grateful for his help and advice in Beijing. Thanks, too, to Ma Junya, who aided me in Nanjing; Julie Zhai, who gave me a tour of Zouping; Lien Ling-ling and Ming-te Pan, who provided guidance and introductions in Taipei; Li Xuechang, who advised me in Shanghai; and Luo Zhitian, who helped with introductions at Peking University. Two anonymous readers for the University of Chicago Press provided helpful and detailed comments that greatly improved the manuscript.

The staff of many archives and libraries provided their assistance in locating materials. My thanks goes to the staff at the Shanghai Municipal Library Republican Reading Room, the Shanghai Municipal Archives, the Second Historical Archives of China in Nanjing, the Institute of Modern History Archives and Library at Academia Sinica, Academia Historica in Taipei, the Zouping County Archives, the Dingzhou City Archives, the Jiangning County Archives, the Peking University Library, the Columbia University Rare Books and Manuscripts Library, the Columbia Center for Oral History Archives, and the Rockefeller Foundation records. I am also enormously grateful to the interlibrary loan desks at the University of California, Irvine and Penn State University Libraries, whose assistance precluded many additional research trips. Special thanks to Penn State librarians Jade Atwill and Eric Novotny, who helped track down materials and advocate for access to invaluable databases.

A number of institutions and organizations supported the research and writing of this book. Research in China and Taiwan was supported by a Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Grant, a University of California Pacific Rim Foundation Dissertation Grant, UCI’s Center for Asian Studies and School of Humanities, and a Kent Forster Memorial Fund Award from the Penn State Department of History. The Association for Asian Studies–China and Inner Asia Council provided a grant that allowed me to conduct additional research in the United States, and the Rockefeller Foundation provided a Rockefeller Grant-in-Aid to support my visit to Tarrytown. Writing for this project was supported by the University of California, Irvine’s International Center for Writing and Translation and a Mellon/ACLS Doctoral Dissertation Grant. A Mellon/ACLS Recent Doctoral Recipients Fellowship supported a postdoctoral year at the UCI Humanities Collective during which I began revising the manuscript.

This manuscript found a welcoming home at the University of Chicago Press. Priya Nelson has just the combination of friendliness and efficiency that one hopes for in an editor. Ellen Kladky fielded all manner of queries and provided unerring advice.

Portions of this manuscript have appeared in previous publications, and I am grateful to their publishers for allowing me to reuse them here. Portions of chapter 1 were previously published as Reading the Rural Modern: Literacy and Morality in Republican China, History Compass 7.1 (2009): 44–54, © 2008 The Author, © 2008 Blackwell Publishing Ltd. Portions of chapter 3 were published as Acting Out Reform: Theater and Village in the Republican Rural Reconstruction Movement, Twentieth-Century China 37.2 (May 2012): 161–80, © Twentieth-Century China 2012.

Many friends shared ideas, dinners, and research forays both at home and abroad, including Nicole Barnes, Maura Cunningham, Patrick Deegan, Kelly Hammond, Denise Ho, Karrie Koesel, Hyebin Lim, Jennifer Liu, and Xia Shi. Kathi and Todd Walton were my home-away-from-home in Shanghai. Emma Tsui and Nicole Gilbertson were always just a phone call away. Mary K. and John McDonald always wanted to hear what I was up to and celebrated every success. Mary and Steve Merkel-Hess gave me a love of books, languages, and other cultures and enthusiastically supported my forays to Asia. My thanks go to all of them.

Bryan and Jed McDonald are my most steadfast supporters. The joy of their presence in my life has infused the years during which this project was completed. There are not thanks enough for that.

Introduction

In 1929, a teenager writing under the name Hongxu published an article on rural citizenship and governance reform in a journal for rural new literates. Hongxu had only recently moved to Beiping (as Beijing was then called) from rural Ding County (Dingxian), where he had grown up and become involved in rural reform work. Before turning to the practicalities of rural self-government, Hongxu mused on why rural reform was necessary to begin with—settling, ultimately, on the personal failings of the Chinese people. Why we have been oppressed by the Great Powers [can be said in] one simple sentence. It is because Chinese people could not self-strengthen, he wrote. The Chinese people were illiterate and ignorant, he continued, and thus the nation was weak. We must admit that it is not imperialism bullying us; in reality we have welcomed it ourselves!¹ Stubborn, conservative peasants have not reformed their thinking, he complained, but if they could do so, they might unify and change China.²

Today, China’s modernization is associated with grand infrastructure projects, such as the massive dams, elevated highways, and high-speed railways that in recent years have been symbols of Chinese development. When early twentieth-century reformers dreamed of modernizing their country—a task they felt was critical to repelling encroaching imperial powers and preserving China—they sometimes planned big projects as well. The founding statesman of the Republic of China (1912–49), Sun Yat-sen, for one, dreamed of rail lines crisscrossing the nation.³ But just as often, modernizers attributed China’s weaknesses to its peoples’ weaknesses and proposed transforming the common people in order to build a new China. More than twenty years before Hongxu published his piece, intellectual Liang Qichao had written that China needed to make a new people (xinmin).⁴ Sun Yat-sen, in addition to proposing railroads and other infrastructure developments, had argued that a psychological reconstruction (xinli jianshe) of the people was critical and that revolution depended on transforming hearts-and-minds (geming xian gexin).⁵ Yet Hongxu’s writing did point to a new inflection by the late 1920s in the discussion of how the transformation and remaking of the individual might change the nation: a growing focus on rural rather than urban people.

In the 1920s, many factors came together to draw national attention to the Chinese countryside’s supposed ills. Reform-minded elites began to sense the limitations of the urban-based economic reforms that had dominated discussions since the late nineteenth century.⁶ Newly introduced social science methods encouraged intellectuals to study the people; the 1920s and 1930s were the high point for the social survey movement, which sought to collect and aggregate information about China’s new national subjects and particularly, as the 1920s wore on, those in rural areas.⁷ The fact that more than 85 percent of China’s population lived in rural areas became a mantra among reformers of all stripes, eager to justify their increased attention to the countryside. Moreover, by the early 1930s, the global depression had made deep inroads into the Chinese rural economy, creating conditions that some observers wrote were the worst the Chinese peasant had ever experienced.⁸ In 1919, Li Dazhao, a leading literary figure and later a cofounder of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), published an essay arguing that the state of China’s rural millions would determine the nation’s future and called for young Chinese to go to the countryside.⁹ In response to the calls of Li and others, what had been a trickle of reform-minded young people to the countryside in the early 1920s became a flood by the end of the decade.

The CCP famously used peasant power to achieve its rural revolution in 1949. Historians have identified the party’s successful mobilization of rural people, beginning in the 1920s and 1930s, as the critical factor in its success. Yet Communists like Li and the young Mao Zedong were not the only ones who were agitating on behalf of and mobilizing rural people at the time. Intellectuals across the political spectrum called for a remaking of rural China, a call that would intensify in the 1930s as the CCP established its rural base areas and the Nationalists and others scrambled to generate more moderate alternatives to rural revolution. As this book argues, the Communists were neither the first nor the only group of urban intellectuals to look to the villages as the foundation of a new nation. This book instead tells the story of the second most prominent group of rural reformers in China in the 1920s and 1930s—a loose coalition of reform-minded elites who sought to create a rural alternative to urban modernity that would mobilize rural people and strengthen the nation, eventually coalescing around the idea of rural reconstruction (xiangcun jianshe). At the time, their efforts seemed like the most compelling alternative to the CCP: less violent and more participatory. As it turned out, rural reconstruction would be the last non-Communist effort to remake rural China.

The rural reconstruction vision of a new China encompassed many of the elements that were simultaneously being articulated as components of China’s emerging urban modernity, from celebrating national holidays to tooth brushing to learning to read, but it resituated the location of modernity from the city to the countryside and celebrated the village community as the core of the nation.¹⁰ In their model villages, counties, districts, and schools, thousands of Chinese reformers who ventured into the countryside between the mid-1920s and late 1930s set up streetside literacy classes, founded reform teahouses that provided productive entertainment, established village health clinics, and put on public demonstrations of new agricultural techniques. Though they shared an interest in reconstructing a modern nation with the Chinese government (ruled between 1927 and 1937 by the Nationalist or Guomindang [GMD] Party from the capital of Nanjing), their reforms were not initially based around the top-down, centralized planning for economic development that constituted Nanjing’s modernizing reforms. And while they shared with the Communists a belief that the countryside had to be remade, they believed it should happen through persuasion and education rather than violent social and economic restructuring.

The reformers who affiliated themselves with the ideas of rural reconstruction were a diverse lot, but they shared a belief that the primary site of a new China was the rural self and rural community. The rural reconstruction agenda generated by these reformers focused on changing psyches more than intensive resource investment, embedding the self in public communities in order to better mobilize the population, and creating citizens whose intellectual commitment to modern habits of thought legitimated them as political participants, at least within the confines of their villages. Perhaps most importantly, they believed that localism was not antagonistic to nationalism. Indeed, they argued that a strong state depended on robust local communities. But there was a danger in reformers’ championing of local communities. While reformers envisioned self-sustaining villages that would not place an economic burden on the central government and that would strengthen the nation through their own development, the existence of such villages—their security and stability—depended on a stable central state that allowed and supported the existence of such localism. The government at the time—and the one that followed—had little patience for such localism.

This book not only explores how these reformers imagined a remade people and their communities and the process they proposed to transform rural people into modern people but also tracks the shifts in rural reconstruction models as government and international interest in the reforms grew. In the face of the devastating conditions of the 1930s, which included the global depression as well as the imminent Japanese invasion, some reconstructionists compromised their vision of communities directed by remade rural people and threw their lot in with advocates of a state-driven, top-down approach to rural change. This not only perverted their earlier optimistic vision of individual transformation and village cohesion but also revealed the underlying elitist tendencies of the rural reconstruction message and pointed toward the developmentalism of the post–World War II period.

Examining, as this book does, things like didactic new village operas, literacy drives, and other efforts by urban intellectuals to remake rural people seems to take us away from the main currents of twentieth century Chinese history, which has been more engaged with exploring the roots of rural revolution than the failed moderate reforms that sat alongside it, with the clash of armies than the persuasion of peasants, with a profound physical reshaping of landscape and lived environment than with the subtle remaking of interior life. Yet the ideas at the heart of rural reconstruction were intimately linked to the struggles over the future of China and its place in the world as a supposedly backward region. Rural reconstruction emerged in a critical global and national moment. World War I had just ended, and the Treaty of Versailles had laid bare the hollowness of the Wilsonian internationalism that had so inspired many colonial elites.¹¹ The international implications of the Russian Revolution were beginning to take hold—slowly—as it became a symbol of the undoing of old orders that the Great War had effected. Domestically, Chinese society was undergoing such rapid changes in everything from personal deportment to the introduction of technology that it created new gaps in society; rural Chinese people met urban ones, with their bowler hats or bobbed hair, and called them foreigners (yang) rather than recognizing them as compatriots of a shared culture.¹² Amid this change and uncertainty, the story of rural reconstruction illuminates the contestations over how to manage the new Chinese republic and the sovereignty of its people, exposing a rural-centered vision of modernity and governance—a rural modern—that by the mid-1930s many contemporaries felt was a compelling middle course between Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalists and Mao Zedong’s Communists.¹³ In this moment of ferment and possibility, a group of Chinese intellectuals created a new vision of China that handpicked portions of Western modernities but rejected what didn’t suit them and retained Chinese elements that did. Rural reconstruction ultimately failed to generate lasting political or social change, but that should not blind us to the potential and power it held as an alternative solution to China’s troubles at a time when it remained unclear whether the future would be based on a model of urban or rural development, of measured change or revolution.

While this book examines the first few decades of the rural reconstruction vision for the countryside in the 1920s and 1930s, its story has resonance in today’s China, where the rural population is declining but visions of an ideal countryside remain compelling. Since the 1990s, China’s focus on primarily urban industrialization has exacerbated urban-rural gaps in income, education, health, opportunity, and many other measures. In response, in the early twenty-first century, the Chinese government was increasingly vocal about the countryside’s lagging economic performance. From the elimination of agricultural taxes in 2006 to the promotion of the policy of Constructing a New Socialist Countryside (jianshe shehuizhuyi xin nongcun) later that same year, the government attempted to ameliorate the conditions of disadvantaged rural populations and limit the potential for rural unrest.¹⁴ In spite of these many campaigns, the reality in contemporary China is that there is no far-reaching plan to save the countryside.

The neglect of the countryside is not a new phenomenon. From its founding in 1949, the People’s Republic of China (PRC), for all its rhetorical commitments to remaking the countryside, focused its resources on urban modernization.¹⁵ Over the course of its first thirty years, the PRC’s policies resulted in overall increased rural productivity and public health standards as well as, at least until the 1990s, a very slow rate of urbanization given the rate of industrialization. But rural areas also saw incredible dislocation, death, and lagging economic growth during those decades. The CCP saw the countryside as a site of education and reformation and insisted, even while funneling funding into the cities, that agriculture could be the foundation of a modern China. Policies that kept rural populations in the villages and tied to the land were a crucial part of the political agenda in the PRC, particularly after about 1960, and have only begun to be revised in the last decade.¹⁶ Now China is actively moving rural populations into cities—razing villages and relocating rural people to suburban high-rises. China became a majority urban country in 2011, and the government plans to move another 250 million people to the cities by the early 2020s.¹⁷ This demographic shift is the end of a story that originated in the 1920s and 1930s, when intellectuals began what turned out to be an almost century-long challenge to the urban nature of modernization, positing, in its place, a modern countryside inhabited by empowered rural citizens.

The government’s early twenty-first-century efforts to address rural problems emerged partly in response to independent intellectuals’ and activists’ efforts to question the growing commodification of rural life and assert alternative forms of rural economic and social organization. Prime among these efforts is the New Rural Reconstruction Movement (xin xiangcun jianshe yundong) begun around the turn of the century—a loose collection of actions by communities and individuals that range from establishing rural cooperative communities to founding artist’s communes that seek to revitalize their host villages. New Rural Reconstruction consciously looks back to the Republican-era reforms that are the subject of this book—some of the projects are even sited in the same locations that hosted the reformers discussed in the chapters that follow.¹⁸ These contemporary reformers, observing the failure of both midcentury development models and late twentieth-century capitalism to bring sustainable prosperity to the villages or create resilient communities, have looked to the Republican models for inspiration as they raise questions about the dominant model of urban industrialization and the exclusion of peasants from public life, particularly from governance of their own affairs. Inspired by what some 1930s activists called whole society (zhengge de shehui) reforms, these new reconstructionists have picked up a thread of ideas from Republican reformers who sought to create model communities that they hoped could better weather the buffeting of violence, economic downturn, and political instability that characterized the 1930s. This book returns us to this optimistic vision of rural people and the possibilities of the countryside, exploring not only why rural reconstruction failed to create lasting change but also why its vision of a Chinese nation grounded in the countryside has continued to resonate with intellectuals.

The Boundaries of Rural Reconstruction

The rural reform world of the 1930s was riotous, with people working in many different venues and registers. Reformers—ranging from county magistrates to central government officials to university professors to foreign missionaries—embraced ideological bents from Confucian to socialist to Christian and established projects in a wide range of settings, from the rural suburbs of Suzhou (the urbane Yangzi Valley city famous for its gardens) to the steppes of Suiyuan (in present-day Inner Mongolia). While many of the projects began with mass education work, by the mid-1930s, projects existed that focused primarily on health outreach, agricultural experimentation, financial reform, and sometimes reform of the whole society. Many of these reformers called their work rural reconstruction. In 1936, the China scholar George E. Taylor wrote that the rural reconstruction effort was a welter of experiments which cover the whole country, encompassing a mass of facts, schemes, changes and developments.¹⁹

As I began my research and confronted this morass of reconstruction efforts, I focused initially on a group of reformers who identified between roughly 1933 and 1937, and sometimes thereafter as well, with something called the Rural Reconstruction Movement (xiangcun jianshe yundong). This loosely structured group was organized around a few key government committees, scholarly networks, and independent conferences. Its unofficial membership rolls, such as can be cobbled together from conference proceedings and government committees, encompassed the internationally recognized experimental county overseen by the liberal, US-influenced Chinese Mass Education Movement (Zhonghua pingmin jiaoyu cujin hui; MEM) in Dingxian, Hebei; government-run projects like the experimental county of Jiangning, just outside the national capital; and educational efforts like conservative-minded philosopher Liang Shuming’s Shandong Rural Reconstruction Institute (Shandong xiangcun jianshe yanjiuyuan). There were also dozens of smaller reform efforts, from missionary-run literacy programs to experimental districts run by university departments (where very little reform work seemed to take place) to county magistrates who had decided, in the tradition of activist local officials, to take a didactic approach to the betterment of their districts.

Yet the closer I looked, the less solid the Rural Reconstruction Movement seemed to be. A web of connections held the loose rural reconstruction assemblage together, from personnel who traveled between projects to conferences where they met to exchange ideas to the rich body of publications that ricocheted between projects, beginning from the founding of the earliest projects in the mid-1920s. But it was government interest and involvement in co-opting the rural reconstruction vision beginning in 1932 that raised the profile of the so-called movement around rural reconstruction. At that time, the central government granted some of the reform projects status as experimental districts with control over the rural populations who lived there, and reformers no longer needed to rely so heavily on the persuasive techniques they had developed in their first few years in the countryside. Both Nanjing and foreign funders encouraged reformers to focus on technical training and development of rural leadership. The result was a shift in reformers’ priorities, away from the program of individuated transformation of the 1920s and toward economic development, technical expertise, and a top-down management of reform efforts. The personnel and intellectual interpenetrations of government and independent reformers and the diversity of the projects that laid claim to the rural reconstruction title made it difficult to think of this as a coherent social movement.

Moreover, how could I account for the offshoots and precursors that were clearly in dialogue with the mid-1930s movement but that could not be found on the mid-1930s lists of participants and, despite their influence on later reformers, never referred to themselves with the label rural reconstruction? The most important of these was prominent reform educator Tao Xingzhi’s Xiaozhuang School, founded on a verdant hill on the outskirts of the nation’s capital in 1927 but shuttered by order of the GMD government (which feared it was harboring leftists) in 1930, well before the advent of any movement around rural reconstruction. Yet mentions of Xiaozhuang abound in rural reconstruction write-ups and descriptions of rural reconstruction’s origins, and we can track a handful of its personnel into later 1930s projects. Xiaozhuang’s closure points to a greater threat that goaded the GMD to seize on rural reconstruction: the growing power of the Communists. Some of those affiliated with rural reconstruction were sympathetic to the CCP belief in the need for systemic rural change, and a few joined the CCP in the 1930s (and many more of those described in this book would work on behalf of the PRC government after 1949), but more than any specific ideological or methodological connections between the CCP mobilization of the countryside and rural reconstruction efforts, the two rural efforts demonstrate the broad spectrum of initiatives to engage and mobilize the countryside in the 1930s. There were few direct connections between rural reconstruction and the CCP, so how, too, could I situate rural reconstruction in relation to the most important rural movement of the late Republic?

In answer, I kept returning to the loose connections that bound this welter of reformers together, as they struggled, despite their differences, with the shared constraints of an unstable countryside, the deepening of the global depression, the ham-handed policy making of the central government, and eventually, the Japanese invasion. Out of these constraints, a variety of individuals—not only the rosters of those that the government approached after 1932 but many more before and during that period—created plans for reform grounded in an affordable and achievable program of individualized education and transformation that would take place in model rural communities. Reformers proposed these communities as templates for national reform, framing them as responses to Sun Yat-sen’s call for a national reconstruction. These experimental projects had an influence on the ideas and approaches to rural reform out of proportion to their numbers, running institutes to train other reformers and creating public perceptions of what rural reconstruction and rural reform looked like through a vast body of publications. This rural reconstruction proposal for social change grappled with—sometimes challenging, sometimes embracing—Nanjing’s tendencies toward centralization and its imposition of bureaucratic hierarchies. Instead, reformers insisted on the importance of recognizing and honoring the boundaries and sovereignty of local communities against the encroaching state, of attempting to create a vision of modernity that did not depend on hollowing out the countryside but instead sustained it. This localist, rural vision of reconstruction was an alternate reading of Nanjing’s plans for national development, turning its urban, industrial, centralizing vision of state making on its head.

It was more challenging to track the relationships between the CCP and rural reconstruction. The CCP was well aware of—and in some cases an active participant in—1930s discussions of rural reconstruction, and the Communists shared reconstructionists’ concerns about rural society and the belief that rural people could be mobilized for the good of the nation. Mao even advocated using some of the textbooks produced by rural reconstructionists as the model for CCP literacy efforts.²⁰ Indeed, there was a great deal of resonance in the tactics of education and persuasion that rural reconstructionists and the Communists employed, including in some of the CCP’s earliest efforts like the early 1920s mass education and cultural reform efforts in Anyuan.²¹ Yet while some people who got their starts in rural reconstruction projects joined the CCP during the 1930s, evidence of intellectual exchange between the CCP and rural reconstruction is anecdotal and scattered. And though the two efforts shared many of their tactics for rural engagement, when Communist activists did observe or comment on rural reconstruction efforts, they were