Intro -- Eating Rice from Bamboo Roots The Social History of a Community of Handicraft Papermakers in Rural Sichuan, 1920-2000 -- Acknowledgments -- Contents -- Tables, Maps, and Illustrations -- Weights, Measurements, and Money -- Introduction -- 1. Locations of Skill -- 2. Community and Kinship in the Jiajiang Hills -- 3. Class and Commerce -- 4. Artisans into Peasants -- 5. Papermakers on the Socialist Road, 1949 to 1958 -- 6. The Great Leap Famine and Rural Deindustrialization -- 7. The Return to Household Production -- 8. Paper Trade and Village Industries in the Reform Era -- 9. The Jiadangqiao Stele -- Conclusion -- Appendixes -- A Character List for Selected Chinese Names and Terms -- B Glossary of Selected Papermaking Terms -- C Main Paper Types and Their Markets in the Twentieth Century -- Reference Matter -- Notes -- Works Cited -- Index -- Harvard East Asian Monographs.
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AbstractMassive, rapid capital accumulation is usually associated with capitalist development, but historically, socialist states were among the most aggressive accumulators. Accumulation in Maoist China was faster than even in Stalin's Soviet Union, despite the fact that China was a much poorer country with fewer natural resources. China's accumulation rate, defined as the ratio of gross capital formation to gross national income, reached twenty-five to thirty per cent in 1957–1962, peaking at forty-four per cent in 1958. This level proved to be unsustainable, but after a slowdown in the early 1960s, the rate rose back to thirty-six percent.1 As is well known, the cost of China's rapid industrialization was borne mostly by its rural population.2 My aim in this chapter is to show that it was disproportionally borne by rural women, who contributed to socialist accumulation in direct and indirect ways: directly, as collective farmers, growers of the grain, cotton, soy, tea, sugarcane, etc. that fueled industrialization; and indirectly, by biologically, socially, and materially reproducing the country's labor force and by submitting to a regime of extreme austerity that allowed the government to extract scarce resources and direct them to the cities and the export trade. My argument proceeds in three steps. I will begin with an overview of socialist primitive accumulation under Mao, its preconditions and mechanisms, and the ways it replicated earlier Soviet policies or diverged from them. Next, I will discuss the various ways in which rural women's work underpinned capital accumulation and laid the foundation for China's rapid industrialization in the years since Mao's death. Finally, I will look in some detail at rural women's work at home, to show how their self-exploitation, overwork, and underconsumption in the domestic realm created the conditions for accumulation. My focus is on cotton work – both cotton cultivation and domestic cloth production – but I will also look at other ways in which domestic work supported accumulation.
SummaryFor decades after the socialist revolution, people in rural China continued to wear homespun cloth, and millions of rural women continued to spend a large part of their waking hours producing cloth and clothing. This is puzzling because the state opposed manual cloth production as wasteful of labor and raw materials, and because state monopolies should have ensured that all cotton ended up in the hands of the state and that all rural people were supplied with rationed machine-made cloth. This article looks at the reasons for the long survival of handloom cloth. These include the ways in which manual cloth production was integrated with rural gender norms and with a gift economy that prescribed the exchange of cloth at major life cycle events, and the existence of interlocking scarcities (of grain, cash, cotton, and cloth) that forced rural people to sell their cloth rations and make their own cloth from whatever cotton they could scrape together.
Rural industrialization is often seen as a characteristic feature of Chinese socialism, under both Mao and his successors. It is less often recognized that rural industrialization did not start from scratch: the pre-1949 Chinese countryside was already industrialized to a considerable degree, though most rural industries were unmechanized "proto-industries" – small-scale, decentralized, and household-based. Modernizing governments, including both the Kuomintang and CCP regimes, tended to see such industries as obstacles on their march towards industrial modernity, understood as mass production in urban factories. This article focuses on one particular industry, handicraft papermaking in Jiajiang county, Sichuan. It argues that Maoist policies, with their emphasis on local grain self-sufficiency, discriminated against communities that depended on specialized production and exchange. To the extent that these communities had specialized in crafts in order to compensate for an inhospitable natural environment (as was the case in many upland areas), Maoist policies penalized the already disadvantaged – with sometimes disastrous consequences.
