The Chinese Communist Party has often been credited with recognizing the revolutionary potential of a mobilized peasantry. Yet in the 1920s and 1930s the Communists were not the only Chinese who believed that their nation’s future lay in its villages rather than in its cities. These other reformers, a loose coalition of “rural reconstruction” advocates, argued that the countryside could be made modern through the mobilization of rural people, but they rejected the Communist belief in violent revolution. Incredibly influential in the interwar years but now largely forgotten, rural reconstructio ... More

The Chinese Communist Party has often been credited with recognizing the revolutionary potential of a mobilized peasantry. Yet in the 1920s and 1930s the Communists were not the only Chinese who believed that their nation’s future lay in its villages rather than in its cities. These other reformers, a loose coalition of “rural reconstruction” advocates, argued that the countryside could be made modern through the mobilization of rural people, but they rejected the Communist belief in violent revolution. Incredibly influential in the interwar years but now largely forgotten, rural reconstruction reformers embraced the ideas of scientific progress and cosmopolitan culture but disputed the city’s monopoly on modernity. Incorporating ideas from a variety of similar efforts from Ireland to India, Chinese rural reformers ranged from Confucian to Christian in their ideological commitments and attempted to preserve the vitality and social coherence of rural communities by undertaking everything from literacy education to theater modernization to agricultural outreach. Despite their prominence and widespread efforts, rural reconstruction failed to generate national change. As this book traces, much of that failure was the result of reformers’ willingness to relinquish their early messages of peasant self-transformation and self-sufficiency in order to cooperate with the Nationalist government. Nevertheless, rural reconstruction created a lasting political vision of a remade countryside and an educated, mobilized rural population that not only helped lay the groundwork for the Communist Revolution of 1949 but continues to inspire advocates for rural people and communities in China today.