Return of the peasant: History, politics, and the peasantry in postsocialist China

This dissertation examines contemporary debates on China's emerging rural crisis and its relationship to intellectual politics in the reform era (1979 to the present), putting these debates into historical perspective. The post-Mao reforms in China, which began in the countryside, helped lay the foundations for the much-touted Chinese economic take-off, and by the mid-1980s were largely seen as a major success. Twenty years later, however, rural China and the peasant are often discussed in public and intellectual discourse as the greatest predicaments facing the continuation of reforms and the economic growth. How did the figure of the peasant, so central to our understanding of Chinese history, shift from a figure of success to one of crisis? We cannot make sense of this shift simply by paying attention to the economics of rural development or the internal politics of the Chinese Communist Party, but need to investigate the vicissitudes of reform-era intellectual politics and contemporary reflections on recent Chinese history. This dissertation is an intellectual history of the present, tracing contemporary debates on rural China and modernity and their historical resonances, debates that have had an important effect on state policy. The work of Cao Jinqing, Gan Yang, He Huili, He Xuefeng, Lin Yifu, Lu Xinyu, Lu Xueyi, Qin Hui, Wang Hui, Wen Tiejun, and others is discussed. It also investigates current rural activism, especially the new rural reconstruction movement, which attempts to strengthen rural society by rebuilding cooperative relations. The dissertation pays particular attention to the relationship between historical understanding and politics as a key site of contention. It argues that an investigation of how people narrate recent Chinese history is a key to understanding the emergence of the peasant as a figure of crisis. The peasant is the site of the return of politics because of the material difficulty of integrating the peasant and agriculture into a society increasingly dominated by the market logic of global capitalism.