The cemetery is fenced with iron bars, thus compartmentalizing the space much like other parts of the Jinhu site. Inside the cemetery, tombs are densely arranged based on a grid plan, quite similar to the arrangement of houses in the New Village. Instead of being in the form of tumuli—as were all tombs in traditional China and as are tombs commonly encountered in rural China today—tombs in the Jinhu cemetery are flat with standing steles, similar to those found in Western cemeteries. By use of this format of cemetery, the village dead were now confined to a neat,organized Western version of modernization, much like, as described above, the living villagers residing in Jinhu New Village. This Western-style format also served to make more efficient use of land, an important element in the logic of rural development of particular concern to central government planners.In sum, what do we make of the built environment at Jinhu New Village and Jinhu Rural World theme park? It is quite clear that New Countryside planners were not interested in a nostalgic presentation of the elements of old rural society. They were after something revolutionary and new, producing a built environment that highlighted scientific agricultural technologies, hygienic agriculture, and a compartmentalized space labeled for outsiders. Perhaps the most curious element of this vision of the rural modern evident at Jinhu involves the mimicry of American suburbia. Neither the lawns nor the stucco architecture have any precedence in traditional China. In peasant society,macetas 30 litros where grass is deemed a weed, lawns are particularly out of place.
There is little doubt, then, that this aesthetic represents a deliberate attempt to modernize by imitating the American model. American suburbia today, however, is the culmination of an almost two hundred year history, partly the outcome of developments in transportation technologies since the1820s, including the railroad, streetcars, and automobiles . In the U.S., suburbanization was partly accompanied by the decline of cities that accompanied a nation-wide deindustrialization. China has experienced none of these conditions. Unlike U.S. suburbia, Jinhu New Village has not developed organically over time; it involves an imagined modernity based on an imported model from the West now being imposed on rural Chinese society. As Lisa Rofel points out, modernity in China does not neatly replicate the hypothetical transnational European model, but entails “successive imaginaries of modernity” as an alternative to the Eurocentric “anthropology of modernity” as typically conceived. Karl Polanyi’s analysis of the process of “disembeddedness” described in The Great Transformation is relevant here . In traditional rural society, villagers are “embedded” into a social economy where economic transactions are combined with social interactions. In Jinhu Rural World, agrarian society is entirely commodified following the rules of the market economy for the sale of its urban consumers. The Jinhu New Village residents are disembedded from their traditional social economy when they lost their farmland and were moved out of their traditional villages. Though technically classified by the government as “peasants who have lost their land” , villagers are more accurately described as precarious wage laborers, now dependent on capitalists. What is happening in today’s China resembles the story Polanyi told about the early stages of the Industrial Revolution and the rise of capitalism in eighteenth-century Europe.
It is compelling to observe a stark contrast between China’s highly developed industry in urban areas and its “precapitalist” condition in the hinterland and the countryside. Though the Chinese economy has emerged as the second largest in the global arena, the significance of the Jinhu case suggests that China’s “great transformation” has merely started. Rural modernization and the “disembeddedness” of rural society underscore the drastically enhanced tension between two coexisting worlds—a “modern” New Countryside and an older traditional rural society, the world created by businessmen and government planners and the world of the longtime residents of Jinhu. One might construe this tension as leading to the triumph of modern scientific techniques, of machines, and of computer-based management over a dying traditional world. The new rural world, as refilected in the theme park, is devoid of the “backward” peasantry. The New Village is largely empty of young able-bodied men and women, who have gone elsewhere to find work. And those peasants who insist on staying behind in their village have neither land to farm nor much chance to find employment. They are left to eke out an existence, often by trying to maintain their old ways in an alien environment, for example by trying surreptitiously to grow a few crops on the New Village landscaping. Another way of viewing this tension, however, is to see it as a continuation of a longstanding Chinese economic phenomenon. In her book China’s Motor, Hill Gates has argued that, going back to imperial times, China’s economy was driven by two motors: a top-down state-driven “tributary” economy, and a grass roots small petty bourgeois-driven economy satisfying the needs of the people. In so far as it is the product of central planning, many New Countryside projects including Jinhu Rural World theme park, can be thought of as examples of the former “motor.”
However, following Gates’ rationale, the place of informal businesses, though often less visible, deserves closer analysis as a two-track economy that incorporates both bottom-up survival strategies and a top-down state generated social system. In Jinhu New Village, the majiang parlor, computer repair shop, clothing factory, restaurants, and general stores are all informal businesses of this sort, unregistered with the state, and hence subject neither to state regulations nor to state taxation. Although the Chinese regime often portrays itself as the mastermind behind post- 1978 development, in many urbanizing centers, including Jinhu New Village, the most vigorous sector of the local economy frequently seems to involve the informal economy, consisting of businesses operating out of private homes. Indeed, in Jinhu, the officially designated commercial spaces along the T-shaped axis remain largely unoccupied.China is commonly portrayed as a classic example of top-down authoritarian rule, albeit an authoritarian rule that is “fragmented” in nature. James Scott portrayed Maoist China as the epitome of the authoritarian regime when discussing the disastrous potential consequences of top-down decision making during the Great Leap Forward of the 1950s. Other more recent events are frequently presented as evidence of China’s authoritarianism, including the repression of the Tiananmen Square student protests of 1989 and of the Falun Gong sect. On the surface,macetas 5 litros the “New Countryside” campaign appears to involve top-down centralized decision-making. Not only was the campaign first announced as part of a five year plan, but the government also maintains complete control of the major sources of funding. However, although top-down authoritarian decision-making is evident in many state-led projects in contemporary China, the New Countryside affords the possibility of complicating our understanding of how central government campaigns are put into practice at the local level by revealing the complex relations between multiple participating actors, namely the central government, local state officials, business entrepreneurs, peasants, and an emerging middle class of urban consumers of the products of the countryside. The first actor to consider is the central government. The central government’s justification for rural development is focused on the macro-level. More specifically, its concerns can be reduced to three tangible issues: sannong, “national food security” , and ecological sustainability. As previously explained, sannong refers to the accumulated problems arising from uneven economic development between east coast regions and hinterland regions, between urban and rural societies, and between industrial and agricultural sectors. These problems have increasingly attracted the Chinese government’s attention, partly due to a growing concern for maintaining social stability. The New Countryside campaign was initially designed to be a national level policy for resolving the sannong problem, partly through “agricultural modernization” and a process of “national agricultural comprehensive development” . Yet, the central government has also increasingly worried about maintaining an adequate food supply as China’s agricultural sector is displaced by its industrial sector. The government has recently proclaimed a “red line of 120 million hectares of cultivated land” , needed to guarantee adequate food production.
It is largely for reasons of “national food security” that the government has asked local authorities to “save and consolidate” fragmented farmland. The call to save arable land has, thus, become a source of legitimacy for many rural projects, including the Jinhu case. A third issue concerns “ecological” matters. The government has become aware that rapid economic growth has come at the expense of ecological degradation. Realizing the risk of long-term unsustainability, the government has recently recognized the importance of improvements to the environment. It is worth noting that these current concerns of the Chinese central government derive from a globalized discourse. As David Harvey points out, in the past decade, food insecurity, energy, and environmental crises have become a new subject of development discourse all over the world. Whereas the central government is preoccupied primarily with macro-level issues, it falls on local actors—especially county, township, and village level officials—to implement these policies across China’s vast rural society. The logic of rural development as viewed by local state officials can be reduced to two main goals. The first is to implement central policies to the satisfaction of the central government. By turning their efforts into a success story—usually as measured by local economic growth—local officials can guarantee their career advancement in the bureaucracy. Equally important, however, is the second goal of making money on the side by profiting personally from local economic growth. While implementing central policies, partly by consolidating land, such officials are able to converge their own interests and concerns with those of the central government. In fact, land development for residential housing is the single most lucrative business and the engine of economic growth in today’s China, including the hinterlands . At the same time, dedicating land to the production of food, especially grain staples like rice and wheat, is far less profitable, partly due to government fixing of grain prices. Thus, while expropriating and consolidating peasant land is done in the name of the central government’s agenda of protecting national food security, the reality is more complex. The houses of peasants are torn down after all in order to make them the designated consumers of newly built rural residential housings. Moreover, after consolidation, the land may be used for purposes other than grain production, in this case, for a theme park nominally dedicated to the theme of agricultural production. The third group of actors involved in New Countryside rural development are the business entrepreneurs. As is universally true of all capitalists, the entrepreneurs’ primary objective is to make a profit. In order to do this, they need to attract consumers, while simultaneously adhering to local and central government regulations and ensuring that local peasants do not resist violently. In some sense, then, the local capitalists serve as the glue that joins together the various agendas of the other actors in the local arena. In China, real estate developers—including those involved in Jinhu Rural World—adhere to a logic of land development that involves placing some unused land in reserve for future expansion. In urban centers, land is held in reserve because it is always more profitable to sell additional housing projects after a site has attracted the attention of consumers during an initial phase of development.13 In the countryside, the rationale for holding land in reserve is somewhat different. Given the difficulty of having the peasants removed and resettled in New Villages, a process described in some detail below, a major priority is to keep them from returning to their farmlands while awaiting the financial capacity to develop the land in its entirety. For example, in Jinhu Rural World, as of summer 2012, only 16 out of 41 attractions had been opened to the public. Rather than renting out the land to farmers to cultivate until it was ready for development, the former farmland has been left fallow for the past few years and fenced off to keep local residents from accessing it. The fourth group of actors are, of course, the peasants themselves. In contrast to the profit motive driving rural development by entrepreneurs, the peasants generally adhere to a “subsistence ethic” that demands that all village resources be fully exploited for the production of food.