Re: rural reconstruction

[Brian Turner <myrd62@yahoo.com>]

--- Yiching Wu <yw16@uchicago.edu> wrote:

> Matt,
> 
> Joel made an excellent point. It in fact puzzles me
> too why antecedents have 
> been sought almost exclusively in the much smaller
> and briefer projects in 
> the 20s and 30s, while experiences and lessons of
> much grander scale are 
> ignored. Indeed a far more meaningful point of
> reference is the 1950s.
> 
> But the "communist project", of course, went in
> different phases and in 
> different forms. There were very significant
> differences between the 
> pre-1955 cooperative movement and the post-1955 "big
> push" (coincided with 
> the First Five-Year Plan) which led to the
> near-universal "communization" in 
> a few years only. I think Mark Selden's critique of
> the post-1955 
> developmental model and his more positive appraisal
> of the pre-1955 model 
> would be interesting to look at in this respect (see
> his Political Economy 
> of Chinese Development, 1993). Friedman, Pickowitz
> and Selden's jointly 
> authored book Chinese Village, Socialist State
> (1991) provide useful 
> historical and ethnographic materials, and should be
> quite relevant too for 
> thinking about the contemporary xiangjian issues.
> 
> 
> Yiching

Has anyone read the new book _Revolution, Resistance,
and Reform in Village China_, the sequel to _Chinese
Village, Socialist State_?  In comments about the book
prior to publication, Selden said that they planned to
discuss how the roots of the reforms can be traced to
1970, and the green revolution as well.  Apparently
there were more periods of relative market relaxation
and local experimentation than usually portrayed,
which probably explains why agricultural output growth
was pretty good in the 1970s.  My point is that the
1970s may be closer to the 1950s than people imagine. 
Though there's so much regional variation.  


		
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