Forcefully accelerating land consolidation in the hinterlands would simultaneously release more “surplus” labor from the agricultural sector, thus continuing to fuel China’s rapid economic growth of the past two to three decades, which has heavily relied upon labor-intensive manufacturing . The “New Countryside” campaign has now survived beyond the conclusion of the Eleventh Five-Year Plan. Most of its goals were renewed in 2011 in the Twelfth Five-Year Plan, which specifically demanded the “acceleration of the construction of a Socialist New Countryside” . The goal of the present paper is to explore the empirical practice of New Countryside reforms as they are implemented on the ground, and, in so doing, to test the applicability of certain theoretical models relating the state to local society. In particular, I hope to contribute to the critique of the standard understanding of the functioning of China’s centralized authoritarian state. The paper is organized in five sections. The first section presents a review of the theoretical literature on the state and the local in the modernizing process. The second section discusses the research methodology and the sources used in this paper. In the third section, the empirical case study of the village of Jinhu in Anhui Province is described.Finally,macetas con drenaje a brief conclusion offers refilections on the relationship of the state to the local as applied to my empirical case study.One of the best known and most influential studies of the state is James Scott’s Seeing Like a State.

Scott was trained in political science and his earlier works were primarily on agrarian and peasant societies in Southeast Asia, focusing on the moral economy and everyday forms of resistance, the “weapons of the weak,” based on ethnographic studies in villages of Indonesia. His later book, however, was a comparative study of how state-planned utopian schemes failed and brought death to millions in such diverse examples as the compulsory ujamaa villages in Tanzania, collectivization in the Soviet Union, Le Corbusier’s urban planning in Brasilia, and the Great Leap Forward in China. His answer to why so many well-intentioned centrally planned projects failed was that “high modernist” ideology and the hubris of state planners gave no consideration to local conditions and practical knowledge—or “metis”. The state in the eyes of Scott is a monolithic entity that behaves universally with a single agenda that would simplify society into a uniform whole amenable to single-minded centralized modernization. Scott’s earlier interest in peasant resistance reappears in his latest book, The Art of Not Being Governed , a historical study of populations that have evaded the reach of states by moving into the upland Southeast Asian region of “Zomia.” China appears on occasion as an actor in this book as well, but always as the archetypical large, centralized state driving oppressed peasants into the “shatter zone” of the Southeast Asian uplands. It is no surprise, then, that China experts frequently turn to Scott’s account of the monolithic state, more so than to his earlier accounts of everyday resistance. Even before Scott’s work on the state, Kenneth Lieberthal proposed the somewhat more nuanced theory of “fragmented authoritarianism,” which remains influential on current understandings of the Chinese political structure after the post-1978 economic reforms.

According to Lieberthal, there are six core bureaucratic organs with nationwide networks that exercise executive power.Decision-making requires a consensus among these six parallel bureaucracies. Lieberthal’s model, thus, portrays the Chinese political system as fragmented and disjointed. On the basis of a study of large-scale dam projects in Southwest China, Andrew Mertha has more recently developed Lieberthal’s model—“fragmented authoritarianism 2.0”— by adding to the mix of politically influential entities the media, non-governmental organizations, and individual activists. But despite a recognition of the fragmented nature of the Chinese political structure, by focusing on the authoritarianism of the political regime, China specialists have tended to place an overwhelming emphasis on the state and, more specifically, the central government as the prime mover of Chinese society. Even “fragmented authoritarianism 2.0” has left out of consideration the roles of by far the most numerous actors on the ground, namely local officials, small-time entrepreneurs, and, most importantly, the peasantry. It is scholars focusing more specifically on Chinese society, rather than on political structures alone, who have articulated the complexity and internal dynamism of the state, placing great emphasis on the participation of the local in various projects of China’s modernization. Jean Oi coined the term “local state corporatism,” underscoring the critical role played by various local groups in advancing China’s rapid economic growth after its adoption of the market economy. Michael Burawoy also emphasized the important role of the local in the success story of China’s transition from socialism to capitalism in comparison with other former socialist countries, like Russia. Other recent contributions emphasizing the importance of the local include David Wank’s ethnographic study on personal ties between business entrepreneurs and local officials in the Special Economic Zone of Xiamen; Susan Whiting’s book on China’s rural industrial sector; You-tien Hsing’s research on the strategies of urbanization among regional government officials and developers in China’s great urban transformation; and Gunter Schubert and Anna L.

Ahlers’s focus on county officials as a “strategic group” in the implementation of New Countryside projects. All point to the crucial importance of the local in China’s rapid economic, social, political, and cultural transformation. Finally, Sebastian Heilmann reminds us that the seeming “longevity” of the Chinese Communist Party’s authoritarian regime is realized and maintained not through coercive force but through the filexible use of local governments in the application of national policy. For the most part, however, all of these studies ultimately adopt a state-centered perspective even when they go beyond Scott and Leiberthal in including local officials and entrepreneurs. But, instead of seeing like a state, there is clearly a need to see through the eyes and follow the activities of non-state actors—the heroes rather than the boogieman of James Scott’s writings. In fact,macetas 7 litros a number of scholars have encouraged us to view political and social developments from the bottom up. In general, since Manuel Castells’ influential study on urban social movements in America and Europe, there has been a tendency when describing the “grassroots” to focus on confrontations. In the Chinese case, among the more influential recent scholarship, Ching Kwan Lee examines urban labor protests in the industrial rustbelt and in China’s export-oriented sunbelt. You-tien Hsing stresses territorial battles in her studies of the great urban transformation in China’s urban centers and urban-rural fringes. Similarly, a majority of studies on the Chinese peasantry tend to stress confrontation. Thus, the work of Kevin O’Brien and Li Lianjiang emphasizes the peasants “rightful resistance” in rural China. Although one might be able to characterize the peasants’ local reaction to rural modernity projects as “resistance,” I believe the realities are much more nuanced, even murky. There is a need, in my view, to explore the complex negotiations between multiple participating actors. Another non-state actor playing an indirect role in rural development who has been largely neglected is the urban consumer of rural products. Most scholarship deals with macroeconomics and the urban demand for goods, such as milk and fruits . More recently, China’s rural regions have acquired new meaning for middle-class urban consumers, both as increasingly popular tourist destinations and, as we shall see, as a source of safer, cleaner food. It is tempting to apply Raymond Williams’ perspective in The Country and the City—where he emphasizes the divide and the connection between the rural and the urban, and the persistent theme of rural nostalgia on the part of urbanites— to the case of rural China. However, Williams was looking at a society more than a hundred years after the Industrial Revolution in England. In the case of a Chinese society still in the process of transformation from an agrarian to an industrial society, from rural to urban, and from socialist to capitalist, it is perhaps too early for that kind of nostalgia to appear. There are other ways of explaining the attraction of rural society to city dwellers in emerging economies. James Ferguson’s Expectations of Modernity demonstrates the political significance of rural nationalist authenticity in the process of Zambia’s nation building during the post-colonial regime. Also of interest is Timothy Oakes’ suggestion of the countryside as a tourist “playground” for contemporary Chinese urbanites. The present paper seeks to integrate both state and non-state local actors into a comprehensive framework. In this way, I hope to complicate and thus better understand the mechanisms of transformation in today’s rural China.

To achieve this goal, I will pose three theoretical questions. First, how are the modernity projects instituted by the central state re-envisioned and executed by local actors? In other words, how do the modernity projects as conceived at the central and local levels converge and/or diverge? Second, how do non-state actors actually shape the process and consequences of rural modernization? Finally, what is the contingent historical context of rurality and modernity in China today?Over the past three years as part of my broader investigation of the drastic changes affecting villages in contemporary China, I have visited nine villages in six provinces across eastern, central, and western China . In March and July 2011, I lived with peasants and conducted preliminary interviews with both peasants and county-level bureaucrats involved in land transfer projects in two counties in Southern Anhui, an inland province in central China. In June 2012, I returned to southern Anhui and stayed for one month in Nanshan County, and later spent another week in a village in Northern Anhui to continue observing land transfer and consolidation.I interviewed 16 local government administrators, including two county-level, seven township-level, and seven village-level officials. Finally, in summer 2013, I spent two full months—between June and August— visiting four village sites, in rural Beijing, Shanxi, Fujian, and Jiangsu Provinces, where I participated in “New Rural Reconstruction” training courses initiated and organized by intellectuals at Renmin University of China in Beijing. Each village was found to present a different model of the “New Countryside” project, refilecting its diverse geographic, economic, social, and cultural conditions. Despite such differences between the nine villages, I have observed in each case a similarly zealous drive towards rural urbanization and land consolidation. In this paper, however, I am only focusing on one particular site—Jinhu Village in Southern Anhui, Nanshan County. Anhui Province relies primarily on agriculture as its economic mainstay; it is also one of the largest suppliers of migrant labor for coastal industrial centers. The New Countryside project in Jinhu New Village is particularly interesting and ambitious in terms of its size and scope, as well as its inclusion in its development scheme of an agricultural theme park. Although I focus primarily on the Jinhu site and Nanshan County, I will also allude to the other sites I visited for comparative purposes.In Nanshan, besides government officials, I also interviewed six private agribusiness entrepreneurs, and lived as a participant observer with now “landless peasants” who had been coercively moved out of their homes and off their agricultural land. In this paper, I focus precisely on the radical practice of the “New Countryside” project, involving the dislocation of large segments of the rural population from their farmhouses into recently constructed “new villages/resettlement districts” . In order to experience peasant life after displacement, I lived four days and three nights with a “landless peasant” household in the new Jinhu resettlement village. My host was a young woman I refer to here as “Mrs. Tang,” whom I met in a majiang parlor in the village. Whereas the bulk of my research involved qualitative fieldwork, I supplemented this material with online data. While at the Jinhu site, I paid particular attention to the built environment in order to explore the spatiality of the new village and its implications. I supplemented my own hand-drawn maps and photographs with Landsat, Nokia, and TerraServer satellite images. The different sources of satellite images involved photographs taken at different times, providing a convenient means to map both the present site after redevelopment and the locations of the traditional villages. Finally, I have taken advantage of the internet by searching forums and other discussions concerning the Jinhu New Village and the Jinhu Rural World Theme Park site. I have found four different representations of Jinhu on such online discussions.