This episode of the Matrix Podcast features Matrix Postdoctoral Fellow Julia Sizek interviewing Ross Doll and Coleman Mahler, two scholars from different disciplines whose work focuses on the modernization of China.
Ross Doll is Ciriacy-Wantrup Postdoctoral Fellow in the UC Berkeley Department of Geography. He researches agrarian change in Asia drawing on political ecology, cultural geography, and resilience ecology. Based on long-term ethnography, his current research considers the origins and influence of contemporary state-led agricultural modernization in the Yangzi Delta region of China, focusing on food security, landscape, and rural politics. Dr. Doll teaches courses on the geographies of natural resources, global and Asian development, and global poverty. He holds a PhD in Geography and a MA in China Studies from the University of Washington.
Coleman R. Mahler is a PhD Candidate in Modern Chinese History at the University of California, Berkeley. His dissertation is a history of information and truth in postwar China and Taiwan, exploring how governments across the Taiwan Strait gathered and analyzed agricultural data, and how these mass data gathering projects produced new understandings and practices of truth-making. He has published in journals including The PRC History Review and the Journal of Cold War Studies (forthcoming).
Podcast Transcript
Woman’s Voice: The Matrix Podcast is a production of Social Science Matrix, an interdisciplinary research center at the University of California, Berkeley.
Julia Sizek: Hello, and welcome to the Matrix Podcast. We’re recording here in the Ethnic Studies Changemaker Studio. We’re here with Ross Doll and Coleman Mahler, both of whom study agricultural modernization in China.
Ross is an S.V. Ciriacy-Wantrup Postdoctoral Fellow at UC, Berkeley. His research is in the fields of political economy of development, cultural geography, and the political ecology of agrarian change, with current work focusing on the uneven geographies of state-led agricultural modernization and rural development in China. Ross received his PhD in geography from the University of Washington, and was a visiting scholar at Clark University.
Coleman is a social and intellectual historian of Chinese elites and the state. His dissertation, “Information and the State in Rural China and Taiwan, 1937 through 1984,” is a comparative history of nation building on post-war China and Taiwan, focusing on the construction of information infrastructure in rural areas. Coleman was a Fulbright-Hays DDRA Fellow in Taiwan in 2021 through 2022.
So let’s get started and just get an understanding of agricultural modernization in China, which is both, you know, really important, but also maybe not that familiar to a lot of our listeners. This obviously centers the role of rural China, rather than the urban metropolises that we might think about. What’s the role of rural places and agricultural modernization in China?
Ross Doll: Sure. So to speak very broadly and generally, China’s countryside has traditionally been home to the majority of its population. Most rural people were subsistence farmers. This village subsistence system was fairly stable. It provided food for the country and for the rural people, and in fairly low-waste ways. It also provided the basis for most of what we understand to be Chinese culture.
Agricultural modernization is one of a few policies that is dramatically changing all of this within the last 30 years. Since the early 1990s, the population has changed from being over 70% rural to being around 35% rural these days. So we’ve seen major drops in the number of villages, and also increases in agricultural mechanization in recent years.
Now, change isn’t necessarily a bad thing, of course, but there’s the issue of the speed and the kind of change that we’re seeing unfolding. So this rapid move to industrialization and urbanization has implications across a broad range of factors, including the environment, food security, household economic security, as well as cultural and even psychological health.
The Chinese state has insisted all this is a natural part of development and will broadly benefit the country, but there are questions as to whether or not there are alternatives. Also, my research, as well as that of others, raises the question as just how natural all of this really is.
Coleman Mahler: Yeah, I think that’s a great answer. And I’ll talk a little bit about the 1950s, and the early Maoist period in general and the importance of rural China to the political economy of that period. So in the 1950s, rural China was incredibly important to the CCP, the Chinese Communist Party, for a number of reasons. First of all, most of the economic production at that time came from rural China, and agricultural yields in the form of grain were used to pay for China’s nascent industrialization.
Grain was shipped from the countryside to cities, where it fed a burgeoning class of industrial workers, and it was also shipped overseas, sold to mostly the Soviet Union and other countries. And that was a source of industrial products that China could use in building heavy— primarily heavy industry.
So for that reason, building a really stable and productive agrarian economy was crucial to Chinese nation-building in the 1950s. And the idea of rural China was also incredibly important for CCP ideology.
So the countryside surrounding cities was a really central Mao’s way of thinking about socialism, and what became seen as his intervention in Marxism of thinking that a rural revolution was possible in the first place. So for that reason, the idea of rural China and the idea of a peasantry that was ideologically and materially tied to the CCP became kind of a touchstone of both the CCP’s ideology, as well as its political economy. And so when you go and start seeing tensions in that alliance, the kind of mythologized alliance, it produced various kinds of crises in the CCP, self-confidence, its image of itself, and in some ways, contributed to opening and reform starting in the 1980s.
Sizek: Yeah. So this is really interesting because you’re pointing out both the economic importance of agricultural production for China as it undergoes these economic transformations in the ’70s, ’80s, and beyond, as well as the importance of the idea of the peasant. So, Ross, in your work, one of the things that you found is that there are ideas about the peasantry and the role that they play in state-building, as well as just these symbols of what it is to be Chinese. Can you speak to what that looks like?
Doll: Sure. So the peasantry has had a long and complex history within the PRC, within the People’s Republic of China era. And this to my understanding, begins with its basis in Marxist-Leninism. And within this ideology, we have a sort of contradictory notion of what the peasant is. On the one hand, the peasant is a figure of class struggle, and it’s sort of a heroic figure, and something to be sort of looked up to.
On the other hand, there’s the sense that this is something that might be holding the country back. It’s not actually sort of a collective force. It doesn’t have class consciousness in a sufficient way, this kind of thing. So I think this has been a core contradiction that’s been within the Chinese state all along.
And we see this playing out in contradictory ways during the Mao era, and I think that this speaks to Coleman’s work. We see this kind of playing out within a sort of schizophrenic perspective on rural development and on rural policy and rural governance.
And then there’s a change within the post-Mao era, within the 1980s, where the state starts to take a much less contradictory sort of approach, and starts to err more on the side of a kind of rationalistic, linear, teleological notion of development, which then discards this notion of the peasant as a figure of class struggle and as part of a broader discarding of class struggle as ideology. So that’s one way, I think, of seeing how the peasant has sort of interplayed within Chinese history up until this point.
Mahler: Yeah, and I would add that one of the major watershed moments in the CCP’s ideology, as well as its understanding of the national body and the future, as Ross was just describing, comes in the late 1970s. Because before that, as Ross said, generally Marxists didn’t have a huge amount of faith in the ability of the peasantry to organize and to be a part of class struggle.
And the Chinese Communist Party always had what some historians have called a voluntaristic spirit, meaning a great faith in the ability of individuals based on their subjective will to change their material conditions. And this was incredibly important in China, because the material conditions were very poor initially.
And Mao was very focused and believed that the peasantry could become what we might now say is indoctrinated, but in his view was, believers in their own destiny, and that they could contribute their labor productively.
Sizek: So one of the points that you’re raising, Coleman, is precisely how, under the state’s ideology, there’s this belief that peasants can change their own material conditions, and at the same time, the material conditions of how they’re doing agriculture are really starting to change. So what are the programs that the state is leading to change what agriculture actually looks like on the ground? What are they doing to transform the condition of peasants?
Mahler: So there’s a few specific policies in the 1950s that the CCP implemented in the countryside. The first one is very well known and is land reform. And that was essentially a redistribution of land from landlords and what were called rich peasants, the land rich, to the land poor, which was people who had very small amounts of land, or had no land at all, and were hired labor. And so that was an incredibly important moment.
Ultimately, it didn’t necessarily change the face of agricultural production in China because the per-acre amount of land holdings per individual were still very low. But what it did do was introduce a whole amount of class labels, and a system of almost a caste system that became very important for how the state dealt with people in terms of distributing resources, and how it— dealing with its administration. So that was important for a number of reasons.
The next stage in the early 1950s, around 1953, was cooperatization. And this was meant to change the face of agricultural production in China by rationalizing the use of land, help taking the land rich and people who had a lot of labor in their households and bringing them together, sharing various kinds of farming implements. And so it was meant to transform agriculture by pooling resources, and also providing an easier means for the state to channel investment and agricultural inputs to the farmers. But this also similarly had a kind of alternative aspect to it, which is that it made it much easier for the state to extract grain from the countryside.
So all of these kinds of means of improving agricultural productivity in the Maoist era also had this aspect where it was helping the state assert more control over the countryside.
Sizek: And how do people experience this assertion of state control? Do they go along with it? What are their subjective experiences of this?
Mahler: Well, initially, farmers were fairly welcoming to receiving land and other kinds of economic benefits through land reform, because that had been a long-cherished goal of many. And the CCP played on these kind of dreams of land ownership. And there is substantial support in the literature for the CCP having a broad amount of support, at least in North China and its base areas during the wartime in the 1940s.
But what the historical record shows is that this kind of support started to wane by the time you get to the mid-1950s, and farmers realized that the distribution of land was going to be accompanied by the states taking that land back for the purpose of cooperatization, and that this was going to be part of the state requiring grain sales from the locales, and basically increasing the amount of extraction.
And so as that became clear, farmers start to become— started to become more and more wary, and this led to a variety of behaviors, what one historian has called “counteraction,” what we might think of as weapons of the weak, and included things like stealing grain from the state or the local governments, reporting falsely about how much grain was in the local communes at any one time, and other means of hoodwinking the government to prevent state extraction.
Sizek: So given there obviously was both sort of working with the state, and then also resisting the state during this time, Ross, you also find this to be the case in terms of contemporary farmers and how they are reacting to state-led policies. Can you tell us a little bit about how there might be some historical echoes with the past with what you’re seeing today?
Doll: So in my field site, which is notable for being one of the first places in China to receive funding from the state for agricultural modernization, the state’s plan, which begins around middle of the 2000s, is to try to encourage large-scale and mechanized farming while still maintaining the basic structure of the Chinese agricultural land system, which is collective.
So in this scheme, the idea is to try to encourage farmers to lease their land to large-scale farmers on typically five-year contracts in exchange for rent. And so the state introduces this policy in the context of also reducing funding for rural government — so creating a kind of vacuum in their funding, and thus a great incentive, in some respect, for rural governments to try to expand this policy as much as possible.
And so what happens is the rural governments find these new large-scale farmers, but then the process is trying to create— to find a sort of balance point between the rent that they’re going to offer these large-scale farmers and what they can afford to give to the villagers. And so inevitably, there are a lot of people who are not really on board with this, a lot of villagers are not on board with this new system, and they resist.
And so the rural government turns to a number of different kinds of strategies to try to persuade or coerce villagers into giving up their land. So these strategies include — they sort of begin with ideological reeducation, which is often getting people together in a group, or visiting their homes, and trying to talk sense into them to try to persuade them that this is really the best possible route for them to take for their households, which is to give up farming and exchange it for rent of some kind.
And when a lot of people still resisted this idea, then the rural government turned to more heavy-handed tactics — so things like threats, the threat of taking away social security benefits for villagers, and then even more heavy-handed tactics, things like demolishing whole villages or eliminating irrigation ponds, or leaving land in a state of— under the auspices of mechanized — or industrializing it, but leaving land in a sort of unfarmable state such that farmers have no choice but to give their land over to the village.
One of the interesting things about this, though, is that I find that a lot of farmers in my field site, they gave over their land on these five-year contracts, but still had a desire to resume farming at the end of that five-year term. But then at the end of that five-year term, many decided to give up on the idea of farming, even though they could have retaken their land.
And so this— what I argue in some of my work is that one of the reasons why this happens is that the landscape itself, by being industrialized and modernized, and through this process — keeping farmers away from it through the process of formalizing it legally, as well as demolishing it and setting up barriers in various forms — that farmers became, in some respect, sort of naturalized to what the landscape represented.
And the landscape started to reinforce the ideology that the state was — upon which the state had proposed agricultural modernization to begin with. So the landscape had a kind of symbolic power, and this was a reason why it is that this was a more permanent kind of shift rather than, say, a five-year temporary shift in land leasing and in land use.
Sizek: So in many ways, what seemed like a temporary leasing structure, a five-year leasing structure, becomes a permanent leasing structure for these people, because the landscape seems to have changed very dramatically while they were there. What were some of the reactions of the people who you talked to about this? How did they frame their relationship to the land, and how it maybe had changed over the period of time that you interviewed them?
Doll: Sure. So at the beginning of the fieldwork cycle, which started in 2014 for me, this was at the point when a lot of people had just signed over their land on these five-year contracts. And I need to be clear that many people embraced this opportunity. They didn’t want a farm, and they were excited for the chance to turn their land over to a large-scale farmer in exchange for rent.
But I still found that the majority of farmers that I spoke to, and also the informal leaders of the villages, what they reflected to me was that the majority of villagers were hesitant to do this. But through the processes I was just describing — of ideological reeducation, coercion, pressure, this kind of thing — people did sign over their land. So they were resistant to it.
And there are various reasons, I think, why this was. But through the course of– and I think that there are a variety of reasons why this did happen. For example, over the five-years process of, you lease your land, you turn it over, and you become acclimated to a different way of life, you start doing different things. You take different jobs. Maybe you move away from the land.
Also, the idea of retaking the land, it might not seem as convenient. You might be able to have your land given back to you on a — to retake your land after that five-year lease. But maybe to farm again would be inconvenient. Or maybe by that point, a lot of these farmers are older. They’re feeling that maybe they’re starting to age out of that work.
But I also feel as though, and my fieldwork backs this up, that what I was seeing is that the villagers were using the land as a sort of reference point to speak to their relationship to it. And so while at the beginning of this process, villagers were referring to the land to say, look at the land, we know it, we can farm just as well as these large-scale farmers, based on our experience farming the land, what all of it has taught us, our knowledge of it.
And then coming back, when I returned to the land in 2017 and 2018, people then — the same people were referring to the land, but to speak to the ways that it was signifying the inevitability or the naturalness of a different kind of ideology, this sort of modernist ideology and rationalism, and sort of a linear way of development. And so the land had taken on a different kind of symbolic fixture and meaning for people over the course of that time.
So I think it speaks to the ways that our built environments, or the environments around us, have this kind of symbolic power and can reinforce these kinds of power dynamics, and can speak to different kinds of notions of value and identity and belonging, based on the way that it’s constructed.
Sizek: And this sort of symbolic power of the land also gets us back to this question that we started with a little bit, this question of the role of the CCP ideology in shaping how people think about agricultural modernization. So one of the interesting things, I think, Coleman, about your work is that you’re not only looking at the CCP, but you’re also looking at the Chinese Nationalist Party, known as the KMT. How are their approaches different to agricultural modernization, and what does it have to do with their ideology?
Mahler: Yeah. So the CCP generally imported the Soviet model to a large extent, at least early on, meaning the Soviets had a model in which they pushed collectivization of agriculture in order to both increase productivity, and also to take grain from the agricultural sector and bring it into industry. And the CCP generally relied on this, and that was a central part of Marxist-Leninist thinking in that period, though it did change later on in the late 1970s, which is something I can come back to.
On Taiwan, the Nationalist Party was in some ways very content to leave Taiwan as what we might call a “small peasant” economy, meaning they had no real forceful effort at collectivization, and they relied on an American model that focused on introducing agricultural inputs through what’s called “agricultural extension,” meaning things like fertilizer, mechanical plows, and things like this, or tractors. And to give these— to sell these directly to farmers, and to not really focus on increasing the scale of the plots, and so not to reap economies of scale.
And they did have some similar aspects. They had farmers’ associations, which were technically voluntary to join, but were supervised by the state. But it was much more of an American model based on American agricultural extension practices going back to the early 20th century. And this made sense in a lot of ways because the primary agricultural policymakers, or at least many of them, had been trained in America. And there was a substantial presence of American aid on Taiwan in the 1950s and ’60s as a part of the Cold War environment.
Sizek: So to track back to how these are different, obviously, in the CCP case, you have people who are being influenced to give up their land. It seems like in Taiwan this isn’t the case. How have historians sort of dealt with these differences and why they think these differences exist between the KMT and the CCP, and maybe beyond? I mean, obviously it seems like Americans are in Taiwan. What are some other reasons why there are these big differences in their agricultural policies?
Mahler: Yeah, it’s interesting. In both cases, agriculture was in many ways a handmaiden to industry, and that was also the case in Taiwan, which in some ways mimicked Japan, although in a lesser way of starting to become a very prominent exporter of light industrial products in the 1960s, sending various kinds of textiles and other kinds of things to America, as well as agricultural products.
And so that was, in some ways, a similar case to the CCP, which also used agricultural to fund industry, although they focused on heavy industry and defense to a much larger extent. And in general, there’s been a much more positive reaction in academic history to the Taiwan experience. So there’s a book that is entitled, I believe, The Taiwan Miracle [State and Society in the Taiwan Miracle]. And so this was seen as this product of entrepreneurship and what’s called— what was called “Free China” at that time.
And so Taiwan was held up as a model of a state that didn’t try to dominate in the same way as the CCP did, and in that way, succeeded. And that has been placed under significant revisionist scholarship since. People have started to think about Taiwan as a developmental state, meaning a kind of post-war phenomenon, including Japan to some extent, where the state plays a very dominant role in directing economic investment.
And so people are starting to think about Taiwan as, in some ways, being more similar to the Mainland China than we had previously thought. And in some ways, that’s also where I pick up with my research. But we’re still trying to figure out exactly in what ways are they similar and what ways were they different. And there’s a whole host of potential reasons why that was the case.
So of course, there’s ideology. The KMT, the Nationalist Party, was in many ways less concerned with managing the economy than the CCP was, and they had a whole range of technocrats that they assigned responsibilities to. Whereas the CCP was, in some ways, much jealous— much more jealous of its authority and less willing to delegate authority to experts, and had a much more complicated relationship with them.
There’s also the resources that Taiwan inherited from the Japanese who had colonized Taiwan in 1895 and ruled it until 1945, and had done a huge amount of work in improving Taiwanese agriculture and introducing things like irrigation and creating various kinds of infrastructure, such as land records. So the historical and inheritances were also very different between the two countries. And in some ways, the CCP started off much farther behind Taiwan. And so that’s definitely something that should be taken into account.
Sizek: And in that, you raise this really interesting question about the relationship between of individual farmers and the state, and the role of these experts who are either advising the state or who are advising individual farmers. So what is the structure of the communication between the state and the individual farmer in both of these cases, and what does that look like for sort of individual Chinese farmers?
Mahler: So on Mainland China, it changes a lot in the 1950s because you have the process of collectivization. By the end of collectivization, when you get commune starting in 1958, which is these large administrative units that also manage agriculture, basically all the farmers interactions are structured by the administration of the commune, which had a few different levels. So farmers would be part of local teams, what were called teams.
And then there was would go up to the next level, which was called brigades, and then you would finally keep going up to the commune management. And so at each level, there were various kinds of cadres, which is a general term, meaning someone in an administrative position that may or may not have had an affiliation to the party, but very often did.
And the farmer’s relationship with the land would be mediated through this administrative structure because they would not have owned their own property. Rather, they would have been assigned various kinds of tasks by the commune, and then received a share of the proceeds. So their entire relationship with the land, kind of going back to what Ross was talking about, was mediated through the state or these local aspects of it.
And that had a number of effects in terms of if the communes didn’t have good management for whatever reason, if the policies that weren’t really suitable for local conditions were put in place, they didn’t have necessarily a huge amount of ability to resist these, except on a micro level. And so you get all kinds of collusion between farmers who are trying to make sure that they don’t suffer too much under what they would consider to be an irrational or incorrect policies.
And so there’s a huge lag in terms of the local knowledge at the team level versus when you keep going higher into the commune and for commune administrative hierarchy, and then once you go beyond communes to get to the provincial level. So at each one of those levels, there’s a very different understanding of what’s happening. And it’s often incredibly opaque.
And this becomes a huge problem for the Communist state as it’s seeking to gather things like agricultural statistics. And on Taiwan, it’s a very different situation. To a large extent, the farmers associations mediate the relationship between the state and farmers, but these are much less invasive organizations, and they are more places that farmers go to purchase various kinds of agricultural inputs and they don’t have to do any of these things.
They might not be able to get the kinds of inputs they want without having to go through a state intermediary, which will only sell them certain kinds of things. So, for instance, the American advisors on Taiwan attempted to only sell fertilizer in certain ratios that they thought were scientifically proven to increase yields, and they tried to discourage farmers from using other kinds of fertilizer that they might have preferred.
But they didn’t use administrative coercion to enforce that. Rather, they used the mechanism of controlling the sale of these kinds of products. And this was not easy, but the way that the Taiwanese government could do this was because there was a monopoly on the sale of fertilizer in this period. So they also had a very invasive state presence compared to what we think of in the United States and some other countries. But it wasn’t as administratively kind of centralized as CCP agriculture was.
Sizek: Yeah. So I think this race is sort of an interesting methodological question too, because you’re really trying to go between these very different scales, the local level of the people who are just trying to farm some stuff so that they can eat, all the way up to the elite level. So how do both of you sort of approach this scalar problem in your research, and understanding these local experiences and also trying to locate them in these administrative records that you might be examining?
Doll: Well, I guess I see that– I see all these forces sort of coming to ground in every particular place. So I think that understanding the ways that policy and administration work together with historical ideology. You can see these things sort of translated within the ways that local governments, rural governments respond to different kinds of pressures, and also to different kinds of opportunities.
But then you can also see all of those things within the ways that villagers respond to and their own attitudes. So I think that for me, I can– I think it’s interesting to see how all of these are sort of conjunctural in some respect. You can see them manifested in responses and in behaviors.
But I think that it’s important to remember that this is a sort of dialogue between– this isn’t simply a matter of– and it’s a common kind of thought to have that within, especially Mainland China, that the state is all powerful and different sorts of proclamations are made and people just sort of kind of move in line to them.
But there is absolutely a kind of dialogue, not only between the local government and the rural government– or the national government, but also between the people and the various levels of government. There’s different kinds of push and pull and that kind of thing. And so to see these within, again, these kinds of longer, broader historical processes and dialogues across space and time, I think is a really important way of understanding Chinese history and contemporary situations.
Mahler: Yeah. And I mean, what you just raised is one of the central issues that I’m dealing with in my research. The way that I deal with it currently is by focusing primarily on the state’s perspective, and then trying to understand how it pursues knowledge production and information gathering. And to a large extent, these governments, if you read their various kinds of internal or external records, actually have a healthy discussion of these problems facing them.
And as a historian, it becomes possible to take a look at what they see as their problems, and then to provide a larger historical context into why that was happening with what we know now. And then also to really go and look at how the state required local actors in order to carry out these various projects that they wanted to implement.
And so it really becomes a very kind of following the leads type process in which you see, OK, what is the government complaining about in this instance? What are they what are they saying is their problem? And then looking at the chain of actions going down to the local level and the very specific politics in the different administrative levels. And trying to figure out how is what’s happening outside of the central government influencing how the central government perceives itself, what it’s doing in the various problems that it confronts.
And you see at some point that sometimes these governments do have a decent grasp of that something is happening that’s not good, but they’re having difficulty perceiving exactly why it’s happening. And so what I try to do is provide a larger context for that kind of discussion of the state with itself and with its very constituent parts.
Sizek: So what are some of the common challenges that they faced or they thought that they had, and what does that do to change how we think about the Chinese state?
Mahler: Yeah. So a really crucial problem that both governments faced is something that the historian Philip Kuhn talks about, which is called middlemen. And it’s kind of a general term, but what he’s talking about is how during the Qing dynasty, which lasted from around 1644 to 1911, and was the final Chinese imperial dynasty.
The state had a large amount of difficulty in understanding what was happening at the local level because it had a very minimal governance and was forced to rely on local power brokers who, for various reasons, obfuscated what was happening at the local level and to a large extent created various kinds of rackets to extract tax surcharges from the locals.
And so this became a real issue for all the Chinese states that existed after this, figuring out how to break through the local level and the local power brokers. And Phillip Kuhn argues that Land Reform for the CCP was a way of getting rid of these local elites who might have resisted its rule. And by having these hard-nosed class-based campaigns against rich peasants, landlords, they got rid of that group.
The problem was that a new group of middle men emerged for various reasons, from the lower peasant classes, the new kinds of leaders that emerged were not necessarily receptive to the CCP policies. And the issue is that the CCP was ultimately forced to rely on these groups for collecting taxes, collecting agricultural statistics because they were the ones that were closest to the ground and had knowledge of local society.
And so a big question in my dissertation is about how did Taiwan somewhat more successfully break the power of middle men at the local level. And currently, my thinking is that Taiwan had these historical inheritance from the Japanese, including land maps, much more precise land maps that had acreage of the land, had the exact physical location, and serial numbers that linked the owners to the specific plots. And was able to do more things like intensive sampling to gain a better understanding of crop yields.
And also through these fertilizer programs, the fertilizer monopoly, it had these means of forcing farmers to go along without creating the kinds of bizarre administrative incentives that sometimes plagued Mainland China. So the ways in which they dealt with– these two states dealt with local elites and whether or not they were able to successfully either co-opt or bypass them became a really important aspect of whether or not these nation-building projects were successful.
Doll: Well, it reminds me of my master’s thesis, which I wrote about. It was a comparison between mainland China and Taiwan and Land Reform approaches to formalization and rural development in general. And it reminds me of the ways that the KMT government in Taiwan made specific efforts to try to almost break the will of the former landlords and make sure that they sort of stayed down.
And one of the things that came up in my work that I thought was interesting is that there were these– I can’t remember what they were called, there were of informal courts and their intention was to help resolve specifically issues around land, but that the judges on these courts almost every time ruled in favor of the villagers and they never ruled in favor of the landlords. So this, I think, reminds me of– what you said just reminds me that there was a concerted effort to try to make sure those elites were– and especially the former elites stayed at a weakened position.
Mahler: Yeah. So in Taiwan, I think another important aspect was the presence of the American foreign aid bodies that controlled a lot of the investment in agriculture. And because they controlled all that investment, and were able to fiscally monitor what was going on at the local level, they were able to use the monitoring of this investment as a way of enforcing their will onto the farmers. So that was also an important aspect of it.
Whereas in China, because the investment was done through a complex patronage politics, it was much harder to track and to use fiscal leverage as a means of getting certain kinds of desired outcomes at the local level. Yeah, I don’t a huge amount about the relationship with landlords.
I mean, I in terms of Land Reform that, yes, they were extremely prejudiced against them, and kind of viewed them as a group that was going to use all kinds of tactics to hoodwink the state. But I’m not sure– I don’t personally know how that impacted the long-term agricultural modernization program on Taiwan.
Sizek: Yeah. I think it’s really interesting because one of these– it raises this question where it seems like in Taiwan because they have the American presence that’s really influencing the way that aid is being governed, fertilizer is being governed, all of these sorts of agricultural inputs. And then rather than have this middleman problem, they solve it through an economic solution.
But instead, in China, the problem seems to be that the middlemen are still trying to obfuscate everything. They’re trying to hold on to their local elite status. And this for me, it makes me wonder about the way that these middlemen have changed over time, and particularly what they look like now when agricultural modernization is so different in China. What have you seen sort of middlemen today, and what do they try to do or are they completely subsumed by the state ideology now?
Doll: Yeah, it’s an interesting question. It’s interesting to think about who are the current elites right now in China, in the Mainland because those elites that we were referring to historically, they more or less they were removed in various ways or ceased to have power once Mao came into power once the CCP took over.
But these days, with agricultural modernization, what we see, at least in my field site, and I think in many field sites, is an effort on the part of the rural governments to try to coalesce their power by cooperating with especially sort of elites from the urban areas around them, the county seat, this kind of thing, to take over those positions. And so they’re working with them to try to make sure that they become the new large-scale farmers.
And in my field site, this was, for the most part, kind of a disaster. It worked for a few years. But in the end, these the scales of farms that drew the elites to large-scale farming were simply too big. They couldn’t profit off of– or they couldn’t manage farms of this scale, especially given a lack of experience, but a variety of other factors.
And this was also in the context of a sort of post-2007, 2008 time when there everywhere around the world people were looking to invest in commodities. And this was not lost on, again, these even sort of smaller scale kinds of elites. So what we have now, from my perspective, is we have a real sort of bifurcation.
We have this sort of elite of the elite that still hold on to some parts of land, like in my field site, and I in many others. And these folks are more or less propped up by the rural government. They’re given kickbacks. They’re allowed to prosper and encouraged to prosper because their farms can act as sort of representations symbols of rural government power. They’re demonstration sites in some sense.
So when these folks are– when they’re evaluated, when higher ups come to see what they’ve done, they can show them these and say, hey, look how great– what a great job I’ve done and how good I am at my job. But really, these farms, these large-scale farms by the elite of the elites are mostly sort of– they’re fake to some extent. They don’t really produce very much. They waste a ton of land.
And then what we’ve seen in the shift is that a lot of the farm, the land that used to be farmed by the large-scale farmers, the former elites, has since been those folks have abandoned those processes and the land has been taken over by the sort of children of the people who were, I would say, dispossessed in some sense in those sort of first stages that I was describing.
So these are folks who’ve come back that have hit 50. They’ve sort of aged out of the– informally aged out of work and labor in urban areas and the low-wage work. So they’ve come back to their homes in an effort to raise their families and have a quieter life because they don’t have many other options. And they’ve taken over smaller scales of large-scale farming.
But now we get into the problem of they too are struggling because their scales are so small that they don’t really get the attention of the local government. They’re too small, there are too many of them, they don’t really matter very much. And so they struggle to solve even basic problems that they need the government, the local government to help them solve, like putting a new roads, basic extension services, this kind of thing.
So we’re sort of stuck in this middle ground. We have, on the one hand, fake large-scale farmers, and on the other hand, really struggling smaller scale/large scale farmers. I don’t really know what’s going to happen, but I think it does expose some really interesting problems within the basis of Chinese governance and ideology.
Mahler: Yeah. I just want to clarify one thing about what I said earlier about the role of local elites, which is that they kind of had a dual nature in which they both– sometimes they would act on their own self-interest. For instance, if they were a local leader, they might inflate statistics to try to look good to the state, and maybe get promotion or get more resources sent down their way. So they had that state-facing aspect.
But sometimes they also– if they felt aggrieved by the state or felt to be more part of local society, they would try to protect the other farmers in their area and under report to the state. So they did have this dual aspect. And it changed over time based on what the incentives of the political economy were. And that changed over the 1950s and ’60s.
Sizek: Thanks so much for coming on the podcast to talk about agricultural modernization and China.
Doll: Thank you very much for having us.
Mahler: Thank you very much.
Woman’s Voice: Thank you for listening. To learn more about Social Science Matrix, please visit matrix.berkeley.edu.
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