6 - The Emergence of the Peasantry

Summary

The peasant framework for perceiving rural China was, by the 1930s, fast becoming commonplace, shared across the political spectrum both within the country and overseas. This chapter explores parallels in the 1930s between Guomindang sociology texts and international representations of rural China, focusing on the work of Pearl S. Buck. The chapter does this for what it says about convergences between artistic and academic writing on the nature of rural life, and the global conversations behind the reduction of complex communities into peasantries. The chapter also touches on the development of sociology and anthropology in China in the 1930s and 1940s under Fei Xiaotong. As the chapter demonstrates, whether in the hands of Guomindang sociologists or American writers like Buck, disaster narratives favored generalization in their treatment of how such crises were experienced and responded to, serving as stark examples of social ills targeted for party interventions: village inertia and social predation.