Rebuilding Of Lives The State, Society, And Peasant In The Northeast Of Liaoning, 1946-1976

According to its long-term academic origin as a so popular topic since modern China, now it has become a great challenge to discuss the relationship under the circumstance of the People's Republic of China (PRC) after the creatively using of the term, 'involution', by Philip C. C. Huang and Prasenjit Duara. After his excellent works on North China, Prasenjit Duara concluded that the PRC had resolved the problems of state power involution and state making. Criticism was immediate though, as American scholars E. Friedman, P.G Pickowicz, and M. Selden, drew a completely opposite conclusion based on their research in Wugong Commune. Furthermore, Helen F. Siu, the famous anthropologist and a representative of the researchers on South China, showed that the PRC not only could not resolve the problem of involution, but also created the new issue of a bi-directional involution of the state and the society.In the author's opinion, academic thoughts on the subject can be divided into two completely different cognition trends.The peasants were completely skilled citizens who voluntarily fell into step along the designed road and grew into important allies of the Revolution and ConstructionThe peasants were a silent class that was led and mobilized by the Revolution elites under the particular historical conditionIf we say the former position reflects a kind of burnout of theoretical innovation, the latter is filled with the intellectual's alertness and rethinking of the state-making. Even so, both trends neglected the complexity of rural society and the farmers themselves. The real farmers, who should have played the leading role, were never mentioned in the text.Therefore, the depth-interviewing method was adopted to analyze the sculpting and molding of the individual world and life concepts by the different stages of social changes on the basis of materail on the lives course from 1946-1976 of 39 farmers in the northwest of Liaoning, by which the analysis revealed the structure of the relationship between the state and the society within the individual spirit.In the first half of the 20^th century, there was an insurmountable distance between national politics entering the village and their conception of the world at large to those fanners who did not understand the difference between a modern nation and traditional empire. The development of land reform showed the reality that the national revolution should depend on the political practice of farmers in villages and be embedded in the construction and interaction of these villages. Though the village political practices and the national government's purposes for them were difficult to rectify, a new program of the new country had been established and practiced.After the foundation of the New China, there was a continual change in the form of village farmers from mutual aid teams to elementary cooperatives, and then to advanced cooperatives. In mutual aid cooperatives and elementary cooperatives, farmers could have the living mode of diversification and mutual supplement through which they could overcome extreme poverty and famine. In the political program of the new country, the more systematic and publicly-owned reorganization of the society was already on the agenda.Then the author focused on the shocks to the life course of individual farmers by various political movements after the Great Leap Movement in 1958, from which onward various social movements came one after another. The coming of new social movements meant the production of new social upflow rules, of which the Cultural Revolution was the acme kind of reflect mode of such social motion. The unpredictability of the social movements and the status mobile brought noticeable influences on the village fanner's life course. Most fanners felt that life was variable and difficult to control, and life demands immediate action. They also felt the experience of the loser. Therefore, a great psychological divide between the state and the common fanners was created.