BOOK REVIEWS

Zhang Xin, Social Transformation in Modern China. The State and Local Elites in Henan 1900-1937

This new study is devoted to the relations between the state and the elites in a dozen of districts located in the north-east and the south-west of the province of Henan. The first group belongs to a “central” region (densely populated, with good communications and commercial farming) and the second to a “peripheral” region (mountainous, relatively inaccessible, poor and sparsely populated).

Having passed through the theoretical portals erected in the first chapter, and familiarised ourselves with the main geographical and socio-economic features of Henan province in the second chapter, we get to the heart of the matter, a comparative chronicle of these districts from the beginning of the century to the Sino-Japanese War. This chronicle draws on local archives, which are remarkable for their richness and precision, and is given form by classic concepts such as elite mobility, social activism and the construction of the state, brought together by the author in a single paradigm dubbed “social transformation”.

The development of the districts of the north-east and the south-west are compared point by point, whether this be mobility of elites (Chapters 3 and 4), or their activism (Chapters 5 and 6), or the penetration of the state into society (Chapters 7 to 9).

In the districts of the north-east, the traditional elites maintained a dominant position until after the revolution of 1911. It was during the 1920s that they began to experience competition from secret societies (Red Spears and Tianmenhui) whose protection was sought by the peasants, and from the graduates of the modern schools, who enrolled in the Kuomintang or the Communist Party, less out of ideological conviction than to satisfy their hunger for power at village level. In the south-west, the complete breakdown of the administrative structure and the social order, brought about by the 1911 revolution, left the way open to outlaws and the countryside became covered with defensive fortifications, one for each village, and each one a centre of power. It was from among the heads of the local militias holed up in these forts that the local leaders were recruited, whether peasants, schoolmasters or scholars, who would perpetrate any form of violence in order to establish their authority.

By extending their network of personal relations far beyond the boundaries of the village, the district, or the province, the elites of the north-east increased their influence. They transformed literary societies of a traditional kind into instruments of power, turning them into pressure groups, and using them to gain the confidence of their fellow countryman, Yuan Shikai. The patronage of this eminent person allowed them from the beginning of the Republic to interfere in the conduct of national policy, sometimes to the detriment of their local leadership. In the south of the province, the social activism of the heads of the militias took a very different form, with alliances between the districts and the setting up of an “independent government” with relatively developed administrative institutions.

Analysing the process of construction of the state in the northern districts, Zhang Xin shows the significant inroads made by bureaucracy, particularly under the Nationalist regime, but also the difficulties encountered in tax reform and in the mobilisation of resources. In the south-west the resistance of the “independent government” inflicted a double defeat, both fiscal and administrative, on the power of the state.

The great value of this densely packed study is its concrete nature. The episodes retrieved from the dust of the archives (such as the rise of the leaders of forts in the south-west of Henan) shed a revealing light on life in the Chinese countryside. The work is to be commended also for its comparative dimension, which is helped by the earlier studies of, among others, such authors as Mary Rankin, Joseph Esherick and Keith Schoppa. Thus Zhang Xin highlights in passing the analogies between the development of the elites of the north-east districts of Henan and those in Jiangsu or Zhejiang. The contrasts which emerge so strikingly between the north and the south of Henan, remind us, moreover, that not only on the scale of China, but even on the scale of a province, situations vary, and general conclusions are to be arrived at with prudence.

Zhang Xin is aware of this necessary prudence when he states on page 251 that “the Chinese transition to modernity is the work of multilinear processes”, but he does not always seem to observe it. The development of the districts of the south-west hardly supports the author’s theory of the existence of a Chinese form of modernity, different from the Western one, based neither on industrialisation nor on capitalism, but on the process of “social transformation”. To this reviewer, the development of these districts, as it is presented in the book, verges instead on the archaic, and political correctness has trouble finding historical justification there.