A new people: Rural modernity in Republican China

The renewed interest in the countryside among Chinese intellectuals in the 1920s and 1930s resulted in dozens of "Rural Reconstruction" projects. Reformers from diverse backgrounds addressed rural problems through reform and outreach, sharing ideas for a remade Chinese countryside in the growing popular press. As rural reformers moved to rural areas, they confronted the systemic problems that plagued rural China. Though the reforms were grounded in literacy education, reformers quickly realized that they could accomplish little in the face of physical insecurity, endemic poverty, and poor health. Careful study of rural conditions led reformers to conclude that while foreign reform ideas might have value, they needed to be "Sinified" to be useful in rural China.;In the mid-1930s, rural reconstruction advocates built national organizations like the Rural Work Discussion Society and established regional centers like the Provincial Institutes for Social and Political Reconstruction. Their efforts, particularly to develop a model for county self-government, resonated with a well developed strain in Chinese political thought that championed the role of local elites in directing local governance. Meanwhile, the Nanjing government grew concerned about local factionalism and rural revolution. In the emerging "national" Rural Reconstruction Movement, the Guomindang (GMD) government saw a potential model for rural change and the GMD's resulting "rural reconstruction" projects attempted to seize on the national excitement the movement had generated over localist rural reform.;While the movement as well as individual projects had weaknesses, the GMD's high-profile rural reconstruction efforts coupled with the Japanese invasion of North China spelled a precipitous end for the movement. This work traces the path of the most prominent "failed" effort at rural reform in early twentieth China, a moment when we know rural revolution was a possibility for China. There were multiple factors in the Rural Reconstruction Movement's failure to become a national program for rural change, but this work posits that one of the critical factors was the tension between the movement's support for nation-building and the local emphasis of individual reform projects.