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Abstract

Originally set up in 1998 in China, the Puhan Rural Community was the first peasant-initiated, cross-village organization established after the collapse of the top-down people's communes and the implementation of the household responsibility system. Puhan learned a lesson about the exploitation of usurious microfinance and decided that it was capable of establishing a system of mutual aid credit by itself, changing the cultural emphasis on money. Its story of struggling with rural financial organizations opens up a debate on the trap of marketization and monetization, the root causes of loans and debts, the negotiating power of collectives, the production mode of ecological agriculture, and the redefinition of the commonwealth.

Over the last twenty years, China has gained recognition for its efforts to reduce pollution and remediate the effects of industrialization within its borders. To mitigate the adverse effects of this reality, communities are returning to grassroots projects that present an alternative to unchecked globalization.

Confronting the triple trap of the COVID-19 pandemic, economic downturn, and ecological crisis, the Chinese leadership has reiterated that "China puts the people's interests first—nothing is more precious than people's lives." This kind of people-centered governance philosophy is ostensibly meant to protect the lives and health of the people, while defending people's property under the basic system of collective ownership.

Intro -- Foreword -- Preface -- Contents -- List of Figures -- List of Tables -- 1 Introduction -- 1 Key Concepts -- Capital and Government -- Urbanization and Cycle of Crises -- Political Modernization and Debt Crisis -- Theory of Cost Transfer -- Crisis Soft-Landing and Empowering the Three Agrarian Sectors -- 2 Development Trap and China's Experience -- 3 China's Economic Crises and the Conditions of "Soft-Landing" -- 2 1949-1952: 'Land Reform Dividend'-Old Crisis Plus New Crisis -- 1 Overview -- 2 An Interpretation of the Crisis in the Three Years of National Economic Restoration -- 3 Resolving the Modern Financial Crisis of the Old Republic -- From Silver Crisis to Paper Currency Crisis -- Currency War and Hyperinflation in the Republic of China -- The Birth of Renminbi: The Continuation or End of the Crisis? -- Stabilizing the RMB: 'Material Supplies Standard' Resolved the Crisis of Paper Currency -- The Great Currency Defence Battle -- The State-Conferred Credibility on RMB by Supplies-Based Value System in Three Domains -- 'Supplies Standard' Currency System in Practice in Liberated Regions -- RMB Put on a Firm Footing by the Organization of Rural Regions After Land Reform -- Redistribution of Property Relationship and Organization of Peasants Reduced the Cost of Levying Staple Grain -- Irrigation Infrastructure Construction Through State-Mobilized Labour to Secure Food Production -- Preliminary Completion of State Regime Building -- 4 New Crisis: Government Regulation Under a Weak Market and Political Movement -- Background: Sluggish Urban and Rural Economies After Curbing Hyperinflation -- Efforts in Promoting Urban-Rural Market Exchange and Their Limits -- The Achievement of Promoting Urban-Rural Market Exchange and Its Limit -- Primitive Accumulation of Capital and the Policy Paradox of Price Scissors.

Zhoujiazhuang and the Puhan Rural Community offer contrasting experiences of how communities in different parts of China have responded to, negotiated, and undergone extensive changes during the last forty years since the reform policy was implemented in the country in 1979.

In light of ecological disasters in China and social alienation among the Chinese people, this article argues that ecology must take precedence over economy, agriculture over industry and finance, and life over money and profit. The article focuses on the New Rural Reconstruction Movement and the Loving Home Village campaigns and identifies several grassroots initiatives in search for pathways to social and ecological transition. It presents in detail the trajectories of Little Donkey Farm, Liang Shuming Rural Reconstruction Center, Yun Jianli, and Yang Zhengxi, which are examples of how to mobilize both urban and rural communities to participate in social and ecolo- gical transformation.

This article examines how China deals with the global crises. China's policies to counter the crises rely on maintaining investment-led growth, which, however, has incurred an overexpansion of credits and serious debts similar to those of the West entering the era of financial capitalism. The current challenge is whether China can deploy the strategy of rural vitalization to turn to ecological civilization.

During the 1960s, China was effectively excluded from the two major camps: the Soviet camp and the U.S. camp. For about a decade, China was obliged to seek development within its own borders and thereby achieved some extent of delinking: a refusal to succumb to U.S.-eurocentric globalization and an embrace of a people's agenda of development. While foreign relations were later normalized and China once again brought in foreign capital, since being explicitly targeted as the primary rival of the United States, however, the situation may again warrant moves toward delinking and searching for alternatives, with ups and downs along the way.

The tyranny of global monopoly-finance capital can be seen in part as monetary geopolitics backed by military power. It directly appropriates, through investment schemes, production gains from the physical and resource economies of developing countries. At the same time, it engages in financial speculation by means of buying long and selling short in capital markets. The end result is the plundering of social wealth. China is not immune to this tyranny. This article analyses how China negotiates with the effects of global financial crises through adopting the policy of strategic transformation towards ecological civilisation and rural revitalisation. In addition, the grassroots initiative of rural reconstruction movement has played an important role in the ongoing transformative process.