This three-year research project is funded by the Danish Research Council for the Humanities and began in January 2008.

The purpose of this project is to provide a historically based analysis of the new types of social organization that have developed in rural China since the beginning of decollectivization in the 1980s. We will examine the interaction between three central actors in this field:1) The Chinese state at the county, township and village levels; 2) Intellectual reformers and NGOs engaged in rural community building projects; 3) Villagers who revive and transform old networks and institutions and create new forms of social organization.

The project will engage Nordic and Chinese researchers in a close dialogue on the new forms of organization emerging in rural China, thereby benefiting from the dynamic created by combining Chinese and Nordic approaches to rural development and social organization.

Introduction

Decollectivization left an organizational vacuum in rural China. This research network explores the new forms of social and political organization that have emerged in China’s rural areas since the beginning of the 1980s. Chinese and Nordic scholars will cooperate on developing a historically based understanding of how citizens in China’s rural areas have been organized and have organized themselves after de-collectivization, and how their relationship with the state has evolved during this process.

In the early 1980s, agriculture in China was in reality privatized after more than 30 years of collective organization. During the collective period villages were relatively isolated, self-supplying and homogenous. The dissolution of the collective structures created more social differentiation and markedly greater social and geographic mobility. This meant that also traditional forms of social organization such as families and lineages that had structured village life before the socialist transformation came under pressure. Many villagers – especially young people – sought employment far from their native villages, and this had a serious impact on families’ traditional areas of responsibility such as childcare, care for the elderly, and public order.

Due to the weakening of both socialist and pre-revolutionary structures, social organization dissolved in many places, and the provision of public goods and services deteriorated. Irrigation works, roads, schools and health clinics were neglected, and conflicts between the rural population and representatives of the local state intensified (Bernstein and Lü 2003). During the 1990s more and more Chinese academics and officials realized that the rural areas had been ignored during the period of rapid economic growth, and today terms like “social cohesion” and “community building” are frequently used in Chinese official discourse to describe the ambition of establishing a new social order in the villages that can match the economic and social challenges of the 21 ^st century.

However, the state is not the only actor in this field. Farmers’ associations, producers’ cooperatives and agribusinesses are transforming China’s economic and social landscape, and the nature of their relationship to the local state is not easily generalized or theorized. At the same time many villagers rely on informal networks that supplement as well as negotiate with and challenge the state. Hu Biliang (2007) has demonstrated how such informal networks have operated in the economic development of a number of different villages, and how their specific forms are related to their local historical contexts. Lily Tsai (2007) has argued that strong “traditional” community organizations such as lineage and temple organizations are more efficient than democratically elected village committees when it comes to securing the provision of public goods in rural areas. Informal networks also play an important role in the opposition to state control. The term rightful resistance (O’Brien and Li 1996) has proven fruitful for understanding rural citizens’ strategic use of both formal and informal institutions in their conflicts with the state.

Intellectual reformers and NGOs constitute a third force active in the field of rural organization. Some of them  draw explicitly on the experiences of the Rural Reconstruction Movement of the 1920s and 1930s in their attempts to set up projects that can at the same time satisfy the Chinese government’s demand for control and the villagers’ desire for greater autonomy. Others are more inspired by contemporary theories of civil society and international NGO practices.

The network aims at exploring the interaction between these three central actors: 1) The Chinese state struggling to retain control in the villages through new institutions and new types of governance; 2) Social scientists, intellectual reformers and NGOs attempting to establish partly autonomous grassroots organizations through community building projects; and 3) Villagers who create new forms of economic and social organization and revive old informal networks.

References :

Bernstein, Thomas P. and Xiaobo Lü (2003): Taxation Without Representation in Rural China , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press

Hu, Biliang (2007): Informal Institutions and Rural Development in China , London: Routledge.

O’Brien, Kevin J. and Lianjiang Li (2006): Rightful Resistance in Rural China , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Tsai, Lily L. (2007): “The Struggle for Village Public Goods Provision: Informal Institutions of Accountability in Rural China”, i Elizabeth J. Perry and Merle Goldman (eds.) Grassroots Political Reform in Contemporary China , Cambridge: Harvard University Press, pp. 117—148.