ABSTRACT
Shanxi Province is perhaps more usually thought of, both inside as well as outside China, in terms of an undeveloped poor peasant economy rather than as an urbanised, industrialised economy. In part the dominance of the poor peasant perspective on Shanxi in popular consciousness is a function of the province's role in the Sino–Japanese War when it was the location for the three strongest of the Chinese Communist Party's [CCP] front-line base areas — in Jin-Cha-Ji, Jin-Ji-Lu-Yu and Jin-Sui — and the later uses of that history after the establishment of the People's Republic of China [PRC]. Such impressions were undoubtedly assisted during the 1950s to 1970s by the province's support for radical rural policy initiatives, of which the most famous was undoubtedly the national campaign to ‘Learn from Dazhai’ — the former model production brigade in the Taihang Mountains on the province's eastern border. Though Shanxi undoubtedly does have more than its average share of poor peasants — some 12 per cent of the provincial population are considered to live in rural poverty — none the less Shanxi is, and has been since the 1920s, one of China's more industrialised and urbanised provinces. 1
