Introduction

In socialist countries a powerful state system seems to confront a weak society, resulting in isolation and powerlessness for individual members of society. As a result, analyses of these systems are dominated by aspects such as elite groups, the bureaucracy and its behavior, central institutions, and macroeconomic processes. The conditions of everyday life, or informal protest movements by various sections of society, in the People’s Republic of China (PRC), particularly by the peasants, have been in general ignored in academic literature. This, of course, had been largely due to the shortage of information and the impossibility of fieldwork before the 1980s. Nevertheless, the habit of staring fixedly at the activities of the Politburo or other central institutions—the well-known “Kremlinology”—has blinded observers to protests and resistance activity, as well as to bottom-up processes of change. Joel Migdal has compared such uncritical concentration on the centers of power and the state with “looking at a mousetrap without at all understanding the mouse.” ¹ Such an “expressionist idea of politics” (Habermas), which stares at and waits for policies from above, fails to understand the self-organization of the political, which in a “sub-political way” can move all spheres of society. ² In political analyses of developing countries, rural inhabitants and peasants played a rather marginal role. They are considered to be weak, dispersed, unorganized, backward, and conservative. They are held to exert little influence on political decision-making processes and have therefore been regarded as a negligible factor. This applies equally to discussions of the processes of modernization and democratization, where, as in transition theory, for instance, only the elites or the urban classes are seen to have a role in the democratic processes, or where the peasants essentially are seen as a factor in the preservation of the authoritarian forces (the “culture of authority”).