rural reconstruction

["Sunzi Hu" <husunzi@hotmail.com>]

A while back this list briefly discussed the "rural reconstruction" 
(乡村建设 or simply "xiangjian") work promoted by 
insititutions such as the James Yen school in Hebei, and by figures such as 
Wen Tiejun. That thread touched briefly on how the most prominent 
participants in this self-described "movement" tend to understand their 
work, in particular the role of cooperatives (usually buying and selling 
coops, sometimes cooperative enterprises) in relation to regional, national 
and global political economies. Alex, for instance, pointed out that the 
general assumption tends to be that xiangjian projects such as pilot coops 
should help some of China's more marginalized villagers establish a more 
competitive position in the market, and that some critics have argued that 
coops mainly improve peasants' position relative to other peasants (rather 
than to "middle men"), so that the projects' ultimate benefits for China's 
overall rural population would be negligible.

I would like to reopen this discussion, and I would also like to ask if 
anyone can recommend any English or Chinese materials on "xiangjian" in 
general. I'm only now getting around to wading through (with my bad Chinese) 
the Chinese literature available on the web, and a few materials I picked up 
this summer. I haven't seen anything at all written in English on the topic 
- does anyone know of anything? As for the Chinese, can anyone recommend any 
good introductions to the following topics:

1) the various meanings of key notions such as "xiangjian" and "alternative 
devopment" (linglei fazhan) (they seem to mean very different things to 
different people and in different contexts)

2) what are some of the various long-term visions associated with Chinese 
xiangjian work, and how do they address criticisms like the one mentioned 
above, and bigger political economic questions in general?

3) how do various xiangjian advocates (Wen Tiejun representing one, but not 
the only trend) relate the "New Rural Reconstruction Movement" to its early 
20th century predecessor and its various advocates (James Yen, Liang 
Shuming, Tao Xingzhi - themselves representing somewhat differing trends), 
and to other "alternative development" models (most notably the Indian KSSP 
model)?

For instance, at the founding of the People's University Center for Rural 
Reconstruction this summer, several of the foreign guests tried to relate 
Chinese peasants' situation to that of people in Kerala, Chiapas, and 
elsewhere, but Wen concluded the conference by basically disowning this 
relation and insisting that, because Chinese peasants' situation is so 
different (that most Chinese peasants have secure access to enough land to 
take care of basic subsistence, etc.), it was still unclear to him exactly 
what the Chinese xiangjian movement could glean from alternative development 
movements in other countries. At the time I suspected that he was just 
saying that for political reasons - otherwise why would he have invited 
these guests in the first place? - but later several lower-profile activists 
said in personal conversation that this was really Wen's position (some 
agreed and some disagreed with his assessment).

Thanks for your help!

Matthew Allen Hale
Anthropology Department
University of Washington
Seattle, WA 98195