Rural Violence in Socialist China

Abstract

Have state policies under socialism radically and irrevocably transformed the Chinese countryside? Or do traditional attitudes and behaviour persist, fuelled by rural social structures that remain tenaciously vigorous despite new socialist imperatives? These questions have shaped much of the inquiry and debate on contemporary China over the past few decades. More recently, however, another promising line of argument has gained some currency. This approach does not pose the relationship between state control and traditional social structure as a “zero-sum conflict” in which the ascendancy of one is necessarily a loss for the other. Rather, it sees state and society as interacting in a more complex manner; a manner which is not always conflictual, and sometimes even quite complementary. By this view, certain policies of the Chinese state have contributed (albeit often unwittingly) to the survival and strengthening of traditional patterns of activity.