The Peasant Family and Rural Development in the Yangzi Delta, 1350-1988 by Philip C C Huang

The Peasant Family and Rural Development in the Yangzi Delta, 1350-1988 by Philip C C Huang

How can we account for the durability of subsistence farming in China despite six centuries of vigorous commercialization from 1350 to 1950 and three decades of collectivization between 1950 to 1980? Why did the Chinese rural economy not undergo the transformation predicted by the classical models of Adam Smith and Karl Marx? In attempting to answer this question, scholars have generally treated commercialization and collectivization as distinct from population increase, the other great rural change of the past six centuries. This book breaks new ground in arguing that in the Yangzi delta, China's most advanced agricultural region, population increase was what drove commercialization and collectivization, even as it was made possible by them. The processes at work, which the author terms involutionary commercialization and involutionary growth, entailed ever-increasing labor input per unit of land, resulting in expanded total output but diminishing marginal returns per workday. In the Ming-Qing period, involution usually meant a switch to more labor-intensive cash crops and low-return household sidelines. In post-revolutionary China, it typically meant greatly intensified crop production. Stagnant or declining returns per workday were absorbed first by the family production unit and then by the collective. The true significance of the 1980's reforms, the author argues, lies in the diversion of labour from farming to rural industries and profitable sidelines and the first increases for centuries in productivity and income per workday. With these changes have come a measure of rural prosperity and the genuine possibility of transformative rural development. By reconstructing Ming-Qing agricultural history and drawing on twentieth-century ethnographic data and his own field investigations, the author brings his large themes down to the level of individual peasant households. Like his acclaimed The Peasant Economy and Social Change in North China (1985), this study is noteworthy for both its empirical richness and its theoretical sweep, but it goes well beyond the earlier work in its inter-regional comparisons and its use of the pre- and post-1949 periods to illuminate each other.

'Huang's book is extraordinarily rich, and I believe it to be the best sustained study of rural north China yet written'Jonathan Spence, The New York Review of Books

Philip C. C. Huang taught at UCLA from 1966 to 2004, advancing to Professor, Above-Scale in 1991, and has taught at the Renmin University of China, in the Law School and the School of Agricultural Economics and Rural Development, since 2005. He was the founding director of UCLA's Center for Chinese Studies from 1986 of 1995, the (founding) editor of Modern China: An International Journal of History and Social Science from 1975 to the present, and the (founding) editor of 中国乡村研究 (Rural China: An International Journal of History and Social Science) from 2003 to the present. His major publications are his trilogy on rural China: The Peasant Economy and Social Change in North China, 1985 (awarded the Fairbank prize of the American Historical Association); The Peasant Family and Rural Development in the Yangzi Delta, 1350-1988, 1990 (awarded the Levenson prize of the Association for Asian Studies); and 超越左右：从实践历史探寻探寻中国农村发展出路 (Beyond the Left-Right Divide: Searching for a Path of Rural Development in China from the History of Practice), in Chinese only, 2014. And his trilogy on Chinese civil justice: Civil Justice in China: Representation and Practice in the Qing, 1996; Code, Custom, and Legal Practice in China: The Qing and the Republic Compared, 2001; Chinese Civil Justice, Past and Present, 2010. All the books in English have been published in multiple printings and editions in Chinese.

Kathryn Bernhardt is professor emerita of history at the University of California, Los Angeles. She is the author of Rents, Taxes, and Peasant Resistance: The Lower Yangzi Region, 1840-1950 (Stanford University Press, 1992; awarded the 1992 John K. Fairbank prize of the American Historical Association) and Women and Property in China, 960-1949 (Stanford University Press, 1999) and co-editor (with Philip C. C. Huang) of Civil Law in Qing and Republican China (Stanford University Press, 1994).

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9780804717885
ISBN 10	0804717885
Title	The Peasant Family and Rural Development in the Yangzi Delta, 1350-1988
Author	Philip C C Huang
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Paperback
Publisher	Stanford University Press
Year published	1990-06-01
Number of pages	440
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.