CHEN VILLAGE: The Recent History of a Peasant Community in Mao' China

by Anita; Richard Madsen & Jonathan Unger Chan ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 1, 1984

From interviews with 26 Hong Kong refugees and a recent visit: the extraordinary story of Chen Village from collectivization and austerity, through struggle campaigns, economic stagnation, and political disillusion. . . to decollectivization and prosperity. The three authors are sociologists and China-specialists who have somehow managed a narrative with fictional shape and color. The story begins, in 1964, with the arrival at dank, run-down Chen Village (strategically, in the Hong Kong vicinity) of 50 Canton teenage enthusiasts. The village is divided into five production teams, each with property rights over a fifth of the village lands, and each with a leader elected chiefly for his agricultural-management abilities. (All this to repair the damage of the Great Leap Forward's gigantic communes.) Two able, aggressive, articulate (and illiterate) young men hold the top brigade (village) posts: party secretary Chen Qingfa and brigade management chief Chen Longyong. Qingfa is loyal to his kinsmen and a natural patronage politician; Longyong, by contrast, sets himself up as abstemious, self-righteous, pure. Their rivalry will be played out in the course of the ensuing struggle campaigns--with first one, then the other, in the ascendant--until, in 1979, Longyong's economic development plans are defeated by the flight of Chen Village's youth to Hong Kong. . . and Qingfa returns to power, in 1980, just in time to be directed ""to follow precisely the path that he had been accused of taking so long before."" The production-team lands are divided among households; the households are allowed to sell their produce directly to Hong Kong (a fascinating echo, here, of Jane Jacobs' Cities and the Wealth of Nations, p. 240); the village imports labor. ""Even the village health clinic was put up for bids."" (The only applicant, naturally: the local barefoot doctor.) The authors do not gloat. What they point out--and the relations of the protagonists illustrate--is that the struggle campaigns, meant to unite, encouraged the venting of grudges and fostered cynical mistrust. But what one also sees here is Maoism at its apogee: when the voice of Mao counselor Ao, one of the city youths, first rouses the village over the broadcast system; when, to debunk the outlawed household gods, the commune-level workteam has to produce bumper harvests. In the William Hinton/ Ronald Dore tradition: insightful and revealing.

Pub Date: April 1, 1984

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Univ. of California Press

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1984

Categories: NONFICTION