Freeing China's Farmers: Rural Restructuring in the Reform Era
By David Zweig
ME Sharpe, 1997. 365 pp., $45
Review by Eva Cheng
The title of David Zweig's book, Freeing China's Farmers, is consistent with one of its main underlying assertions — the overhauling of the property and production systems in rural China over the last 20 years was an act to "free" Chinese farmers from the constraints preventing them from "getting rich".
Providing no basis for his argument, Zweig asserts that the new rich accumulated wealth through their own labour, by managing others' labour and, generally, because of their "entrepreneurship".
He claims that "lazy" and jealous villagers use slander and threats of social sanctions, and favour restrictions to ensure others can't get rich. To Zweig, the rural decollectivisation and related changes are an "opportunity for household prosperity".
Zweig suggests that labour-intensive production has always been China's "comparative advantage" in the world market (rather than a result of the retardation of its technological development due to colonialism and imperialism). He sees the flourishing of township and village factories (mostly low-end assembly sweatshops — sometimes polluting and deadly — producing for export) as evidence of the "internationalisation" of China's rural economy.
Apart from the difference between "lazy" villagers and "hardworking" entrepreneurs, a Chinese rural locality, in Zweig's world, is a community of shared interests prompted by common geography. Localities with export-oriented sweatshops, he writes, "opted for greater levels of global interdependence", often due to the decisive leadership of "entrepreneurial state officials" who "recognized the potential for community growth and personal wealth in global economic linkages and, therefore, mobilized the community to seek those benefits".
Zweig's exposition is fundamentally free of class, let alone class contradictions, but he makes plenty of references to cadres, leaders, elites, entrepreneurs and villagers.
In mentioning the class question on two rare occasions, he passed it by dismissively: people tried to prevent private household farming because of ideological predilections against capitalist restoration and increased "class polarization". "China lacks a capitalist class", he states with no argumentation anywhere to back this claim.
Freeing China's Farmers comprises 13 essays, most first published in the 1980s, even though the book itself was published in 1997. Two chapters that provide a more comprehensive coverage were first published in 1983 and 1987, which leaves a gap in developments over the last decade.
However, details of the resistance of local bureaucrats, as well as some richer provinces, against rural decollectivisation — in defence of their relatively socialised and mechanised farming — is interesting. While certainly driven by self-interest, this resistance seems at the same time to be defending a superior mode of production.
Other chapters feature issues related to rural restructuring — regional diversity, inter- and intravillage conflicts, villagers' resistance to rural reforms, historical and recent struggles over land and the emergence of an embryonic legal system. These are based mainly on the experiences of localities in and around Jiangsu province, including Nanjing (1985-89), which have the benefit of some detail but limited value for generalisation, certainly not for the 1990s.
Issues like urban-rural relations, the changing role of supply and marketing cooperatives and the explosive growth of township and village enterprises were also examined, capturing the developments up until 1986, 1989 and 1992 respectively.
The remaining chapters, written in the early 1990s, include some useful information and deal with the predominant export orientation of rural industries, shaped by the 1987 dismantling of the monopoly of foreign trade.
Zweig has made no attempt to study what most of these rural factories produce, completely ignoring their key role as labour-intensive low-technology assembly lines for broader production operations overseas (especially for smaller scale capitalists from Hong Kong, Taiwan and the rest of Asia). He sweepingly hails them as evidence of the industrialisation and "internationalisation" of rural China.
No mention is made of the fact that such industrialisation is superficial and highly dependent. The internationalisation hypothesis, not backed by any analysis, serves as little more than a label.
Other unfounded assertions include: "under the collective system, the free-rider principle was constantly at work"; "rural residents prospered under the household responsibility system" (totally ignoring the widening wealth gap and lingering mass poverty in rural China); "having joint ventures in their township is a status symbol for local cadres, a sign that they are progressive and that foreigners appreciate their management skills".
The meeting that Zweig refers to on pages 154-155 was not a Communist Party congress (there have been only 15 in the party's entire history of nearly 80 years); it was a central committee meeting, the crucial one that formally kicked off the rural "reform".