Abstract
This book by Jia Gao and Yuanyuan Su sets out to explore ‘social mobilization’ in the context of contemporary Chinese rural urbanization. Given the current administration’s focus on rural revitalization (乡村振兴) since 2017, this is a very timely topic. The main focus of the book, however, is the preceding policy of ‘building a new socialist countryside’, a major initiative of the Hu–Wen administration between 2006 and 2011. The book is based on primarily Chinese secondary literature, government publications, several interviews in Shandong Province and Beijing Municipality, as well as the doctoral thesis of Yuanyuan Su. It is organized in eight chapters.
The first chapter reviews the historical process of rural urbanization in China and introduces the social mobilization framework. According to the authors, social mobilization ‘is used here to specifically refer to the large-scale advocacy of a series of actions proposed by high level decision-making institutions, and supported by other stakeholders, to achieve a long-term strategic goal of national, subnational or regional socioeconomic development’ (p. 21). Still, the specifics of the concept and its boundaries remain vague, which raises the question of how the concept could be applied in a sound way.
The second chapter discusses post-Mao administrative decentralization, fiscal reforms, and the rural development strategy of the central government. In particular the dependence on ‘land finance’, that is, the expropriation and commodification of collective land following the tax reform of 1994, is highlighted. The authors offer the interesting interpretation that the reforms that helped to enable land finance ‘further improved China’s central-local relation’ (p. 44). One will also learn that corruption in land finance is minor (p. 48).
The third chapter outlines the strategies employed during the implementation of the policy of building a new socialist countryside in Shandong from a provincial perspective. The fourth chapter focuses on the emerging role of private enterprises in post-Mao China and the role they played in the implementation of the policy. A welcome detail is the brief report on a private construction company trying to convince villagers to participate in the village reconstruction drive.
The next two chapters cover the implementation of the programme for building a new socialist countryside at the prefectural and the county/township level. Both start with a general overview of the administration at these levels of the Chinese political system before turning to Shandong Province. The seventh chapter aims to explore the responses of villagers to the programme. There is some interesting empirical data in these three chapters. However, most implementation strategies (or forms of social mobilization, in the words of the authors) have been discussed before. The analysis of land finance is surprisingly uncritical and key features of the project-based financing system are glossed over. The last chapter summarizes the findings of this policy implementation study and doubles down on one of the main arguments of the book: ‘Contrary to the widely held view that China is in the hands of the ruling CCP, this new perspective argues [that] the government system in China has gradually been reduced to one of many stakeholders engaged in major political-economic games’ (p. 187).
Unfortunately, several important limitations of this book have to be mentioned. The theoretic framework remains ill-defined and the reader is constantly wondering what social mobilization actually entails. Methodological issues are another source of distraction. Frequently we learn about the arguments of ‘some scholars’ and ‘others’ that disagree, but there are neither names nor references for these debates. There is also almost no background information on the interviews conducted, which often appear limited to gossip about local cadres. Finally, the authors repeatedly engage in a strange variant of reverse Orientalism and appear to argue that non-Chinese scholars are unable to understand governance in China because they lack the virtue of being Chinese. For example: ‘China’s middle bureaucracy is a difficult part of Chinese society to observe and analyse, especially for outsiders . . . Therefore this section will give more attention to analyses by Chinese academic and policy analysts than by outsiders’ (p. 113) and ‘any study of China according to non-indigenous ideas and non-traditional politics could destructively limit our knowledge of the world’s most populous country’ (p. 193). Unfortunately, this thinking leads them to ignore the findings of an extensive body of research on policy implementation, the programme of building a new socialist countryside, central–local relations as well as state–society relations.
For an expert reader interested in the specifics of the policy on building a new socialist countryside in Shandong Province, this book may offer a new perspective on the planning and implementation process there. Yet, since the authors do not take into account considerable sections of the existing literature and because of the other issues mentioned earlier, this may not be a good option for graduate or undergraduate teaching.