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the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the editors of The Journal ofInterdisciplinary History
Radicalism and Education Reform in 20th-Century China: The Search for an IdealDevelopment Model by Suzanne PepperReview by: Lucian W. PyeThe Journal of Interdisciplinary History, Vol. 28, No. 2 (Autumn, 1997), pp. 337-339Published by: The MIT PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/206466 .
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REVIEWS | 337
cities, were designed by officials for purposes of resource extraction and political control.1
The final two substantive chapters stress Chinese cultural continuity by examining Taiwan (petty capitalist, not capitalist, though linked to global capitalism) and reformist post-Mao China, where the tributary mode is being recreated along with petty capitalism and a restrengthen- ing of household hierarchies in violation of the communist regime's early commitment to women's liberation aligned with land reform.
This is a deliberately interdisciplinary work, although its main thrust is anthropological. It is unquestionably the product of meticulous and wide-ranging reading and thinking. Gates is as harsh on Marxist scholars as on others, particularly those who consciously neglect the complex reality of material life. By contrast, she relies in large part on her many years of fieldwork in Taiwan and mainland China to supply her solidly grounded evidence.
The ultimate test of such an ambitious work of reconceptualizing a thousand years of history is how useful the theoretical model is. It certainly works well as a critical device and as a means of drawing attention to evidence or interconnections that might have been over- looked. But in the end, the approach is more confining than liberating, sliding off into reification of modes and functionalism-anathema to Marxists-as the "needs" of one mode or another determined behavior and shaped grand historical processes.
Thomas B. Gold University of California, Berkeley
Radicalism and Education Reform in 20th-Century China: The Search for an Ideal Development Model. By Suzanne Pepper (New York, Cambridge University Press, I996) 6Io pp. $59.95
With this encyclopedic study, Pepper has consolidated her position as the foremost authority on Chinese educational policies and practices. The stimulus to her two-decade study was the contrast between the favorable American educators' view of Chinese education during the Cultural Revolution in the early 1970s and the prevailing Chinese view of the entire period as a disaster, especially in education. At that time, American educators were searching for a developmental model that would protect what they saw as the poor and vulnerable third world from the presumed curses of neocolonialism. In the anarchy of the Red Guards' behavior they saw an example of children being spared the pains of "repressive" standards and hard work, and allowed to find and express their inner selves. The Chinese, however, confronted with a "lost generation" of young people with no education, skill, or knowledge,
I See, for example, G. William Skinner, "Urban Development in Imperial China," in idem, (ed.), The City in Late Imperial China (Stanford, I977), 3-31.
REVIEWS | 337
cities, were designed by officials for purposes of resource extraction and political control.1
The final two substantive chapters stress Chinese cultural continuity by examining Taiwan (petty capitalist, not capitalist, though linked to global capitalism) and reformist post-Mao China, where the tributary mode is being recreated along with petty capitalism and a restrengthen- ing of household hierarchies in violation of the communist regime's early commitment to women's liberation aligned with land reform.
This is a deliberately interdisciplinary work, although its main thrust is anthropological. It is unquestionably the product of meticulous and wide-ranging reading and thinking. Gates is as harsh on Marxist scholars as on others, particularly those who consciously neglect the complex reality of material life. By contrast, she relies in large part on her many years of fieldwork in Taiwan and mainland China to supply her solidly grounded evidence.
The ultimate test of such an ambitious work of reconceptualizing a thousand years of history is how useful the theoretical model is. It certainly works well as a critical device and as a means of drawing attention to evidence or interconnections that might have been over- looked. But in the end, the approach is more confining than liberating, sliding off into reification of modes and functionalism-anathema to Marxists-as the "needs" of one mode or another determined behavior and shaped grand historical processes.
Thomas B. Gold University of California, Berkeley
Radicalism and Education Reform in 20th-Century China: The Search for an Ideal Development Model. By Suzanne Pepper (New York, Cambridge University Press, I996) 6Io pp. $59.95
With this encyclopedic study, Pepper has consolidated her position as the foremost authority on Chinese educational policies and practices. The stimulus to her two-decade study was the contrast between the favorable American educators' view of Chinese education during the Cultural Revolution in the early 1970s and the prevailing Chinese view of the entire period as a disaster, especially in education. At that time, American educators were searching for a developmental model that would protect what they saw as the poor and vulnerable third world from the presumed curses of neocolonialism. In the anarchy of the Red Guards' behavior they saw an example of children being spared the pains of "repressive" standards and hard work, and allowed to find and express their inner selves. The Chinese, however, confronted with a "lost generation" of young people with no education, skill, or knowledge,
I See, for example, G. William Skinner, "Urban Development in Imperial China," in idem, (ed.), The City in Late Imperial China (Stanford, I977), 3-31.
This content downloaded from 169.229.32.137 on Thu, 8 May 2014 23:38:17 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
338 LUCIAN W. PYE
recognized the folly of the experience. What American educators were prepared to trumpet as a worthy developmental model would have sunk the third world into even deeper poverty and backwardness.
The fundamental problem that Pepper decided to study in twenti- eth-century China was how a poor country might best allocate its scarce resources-whether to support elite, modem education or advance mass literacy, that is, whether to focus on culturally advanced urban centers or on rural and backward communities. Such was the dilemma that challenged Chinese educators as they sought to break from Confucian traditions of classical education by tutors and to establish modern systems of schools and universities that could bring China into a world culture based on science and technology. Pepper traces in great detail the early twists and turns of policy that helped China to build up a respectable university system and a network of urban secondary schools, but did little for the rural masses-a pattern of development that led increasingly to a radical intelligentsia and unschooled, rural mass population. In the process, she has compiled data that were difficult to obtain but very useful about the educational scene during the I92os and I930s.
The bulk of her work, however, involves following the zigs and zags of policy from the early years of Mao Zedong's rule through the Cultural Revolution and to the period of Deng Xiaoping's reforms. Her sources for these years are not only official reports but extensive inter- views with refugees in Hong Kong who personally experienced the consequences of the policy thrusts.
Briefly put, in the early years of Communist rule, the educational system was bent into the Soviet model. The result was reasonably good higher technical training, but, after a decade, Mao was shocked to discover that the universities had fewer students from rural and poor families than they had in the I930s when missionary and other programs recruited the best and the brightest from even the lower classes. Hence, the dramatic attempt at a radical rural program, which eventually cul- minated in the disastrous decade of the Cultural Revolution.
The picture of contemporary education in China is far more grim than the publicity of Chinese economic achievements would suggest. First, the collapse of China's tax collecting system has left an appalling shortage of funds: In 1978, government revenues were 31.2 percent of GNP; by I995, they were only 10.7 percent. Second, schools in many rural areas literally have disappeared because those with enough skills to teach have chosen to pursue better-paying jobs. Third, professors and university students have also embraced the spirit of "To Get Rich is Glorious"; they have xiahai, that is, "plunged into the sea" to join the new market economy. The three traditional benefits that industry could not provide its employees but academia could-the joys of June, July, and August-no longer have much appeal.
Pepper ends on a note that China is back to the old elite-mass divide. The system once again pretends toward equality but encourages the opposite. It is a disheartening but absorbing story for which Pepper
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REVIEWS | 339
has gathered all the details. Unfortunately, because her writing style is muscle-bound and opaque, this impressive work is less likely to be read as a story than to be used as a reference source.
Lucian W. Pye Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Tokugawa Village Practice: Class, Status, Power, Law. By Herman Ooms (Berkeley, University of California Press, 1996) 425 pp. $45.00
Ooms has returned to an old subject in Japanese history with a fresh perspective through "insights gained from Pierre Bourdieu's writings" (2) and by focusing on the village unit from the seventeenth through nineteenth centuries for his data, rather than the political center. He comes to this study from intellectual history and is to be commended for broadening his field of research to include law, society, the economy, and politics. This new focus on class, status, and power in the village (without connection to incidents of unrest), combined with detailed case histories of a kind not found elsewhere in English, provides a valuable source for those studying Japan and those who want to make comparisons with other societies.
Ooms examines his diverse but interconnected subjects from a variety of perspectives, using numerous case studies primarily from an area in Nagano Prefecture. His cases include one woman's resistance against authority, changing village politics in the Tokugawa period (I600-I868), suits and endless wrangling within sample villages about status, evidence against the view that Tokugawa villages were "autono- mous, harmonious, egalitarian communities," and examples involving outcaste status.
He enhances our realization about the complexity of Tokugawa society and about how much we do not yet know about it. His way of illustrating the fuzziness of categories-such as samurai and com- moner-and the similarity in the discrimination against lower-status villagers and outcastes is astute; and his stress on how the Shogunate, a military government, imposed upon the general populace techniques of military organization is well placed (9I). All too often the military administration is seen as completely separate from the lives of ordinary villagers.
Nevertheless, this book is frustrating. Because Ooms has designed it as a "collection of essays that can be read independently and in almost any sequence" (io), the chapters do not relate clearly to one another. The final chapter is an essay on law rather than an overview of the other essays. The use of class and status is frequently confusing; Ooms concedes that the distinction is "hard to justify even analytically" (7I).
The book is strong on intellectual issues but weaker when it comes to dealing with causal-particularly economic-relationships in the real
REVIEWS | 339
has gathered all the details. Unfortunately, because her writing style is muscle-bound and opaque, this impressive work is less likely to be read as a story than to be used as a reference source.
Lucian W. Pye Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Tokugawa Village Practice: Class, Status, Power, Law. By Herman Ooms (Berkeley, University of California Press, 1996) 425 pp. $45.00
Ooms has returned to an old subject in Japanese history with a fresh perspective through "insights gained from Pierre Bourdieu's writings" (2) and by focusing on the village unit from the seventeenth through nineteenth centuries for his data, rather than the political center. He comes to this study from intellectual history and is to be commended for broadening his field of research to include law, society, the economy, and politics. This new focus on class, status, and power in the village (without connection to incidents of unrest), combined with detailed case histories of a kind not found elsewhere in English, provides a valuable source for those studying Japan and those who want to make comparisons with other societies.
Ooms examines his diverse but interconnected subjects from a variety of perspectives, using numerous case studies primarily from an area in Nagano Prefecture. His cases include one woman's resistance against authority, changing village politics in the Tokugawa period (I600-I868), suits and endless wrangling within sample villages about status, evidence against the view that Tokugawa villages were "autono- mous, harmonious, egalitarian communities," and examples involving outcaste status.
He enhances our realization about the complexity of Tokugawa society and about how much we do not yet know about it. His way of illustrating the fuzziness of categories-such as samurai and com- moner-and the similarity in the discrimination against lower-status villagers and outcastes is astute; and his stress on how the Shogunate, a military government, imposed upon the general populace techniques of military organization is well placed (9I). All too often the military administration is seen as completely separate from the lives of ordinary villagers.
Nevertheless, this book is frustrating. Because Ooms has designed it as a "collection of essays that can be read independently and in almost any sequence" (io), the chapters do not relate clearly to one another. The final chapter is an essay on law rather than an overview of the other essays. The use of class and status is frequently confusing; Ooms concedes that the distinction is "hard to justify even analytically" (7I).
The book is strong on intellectual issues but weaker when it comes to dealing with causal-particularly economic-relationships in the real
This content downloaded from 169.229.32.137 on Thu, 8 May 2014 23:38:17 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
