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Huanyin Li provides a comprehensive and systematic study of rural life after the founding of PRC. Drawing on villagers' oral narratives and scarce village-level materials such as account books, records of meetings, village cadre notebooks and official documents from Qin village in Dongtai municipality, Jiangsu province, Li traces the history of the village, and rural China more generally, from 1948 to 2008. The book is refreshing in its theoretical perspective, compelling in its arguments and meticulous in the extensive details it presents of peasants' lives and production in rural China.
Besides the introduction and conclusion, the book has four parts, organized chronologically. The first three address village life under socialism, recounting in rich detail villagers' involvement in agricultural collectivization, participation in collective production and responses to waves of political campaigns and policy shifts. Part four deals with agricultural de-collectivization and rural development during the post-socialist period after 1979. The author examines the relationship between state and village, grassroots cadres and ordinary villagers, and the problem of economic incentives and farming efficiency under the collective system, as well as new developments during the reform era. Thus, the book illuminates the complexity and diversity of motivations of Chinese villagers within different institutional settings, and highlights the importance of villagers' actions in production and policy-making processes. According to...