ABSTRACT
The crisis of peasant welfare in the late 1990s and new state policies leading to the 2006 abolition of the agricultural tax in China altered the state-rural society relationship, sparking a new debate on rural governance and peasant organization among intellectuals that advocated for the peasantry. As many have noted, the abolition of the agricultural tax brings to an end thousands of years of the Chinese state taxing agriculture for revenue. But perhaps a more telling periodization can be constructed out of the last one hundred years of statemaking, state involution, state extraction from the rural sphere and the politics of peasant advocacy.1 In the last decade of the Qing Dynasty (1644-1911), rural governance underwent a significant transformation, beginning a century-long experiment in modernizing rural governance that produced decidedly mixed results for China’s peasants, though the successful industrialization of China. These experiments in state-rural society relations combined an attempt to modernize rural economic, political and social life with a new extractive power – a combination of modernization and central-state extraction that the Chinese state only brought to an end in 2006. The contemporary political debate over the social, economic and political organization of the peasantry that coincided with the
The author would like to thank Gail Hershatter, the editors of this collection and the anonymous reviewers for comments and suggestions on this paper. Guolin Yi was helpful in obtaining sources. 1By ‘politics of peasant advocacy’ I am referring to the attempt by intellectuals to influence the official politics of rural reform of the state and party as well as attempts by intellectuals to directly organize peasants. Benedict Kerkvliet (2009) argues that there are broadly three forms of peasant politics: official, advocacy and everyday politics.
