Yesterday at his sociology blog Understanding Society, Daniel Little considered a fraught question: what paths to modernization were open for China in the 1930s, before the People's Republic? He identified, in addition to the pathway of OTL involving the establishment of a one-party Communist state devoted to radical top-down reform, another route, a more voluntarist and bottom-up route of "rural reconstruction."
(Assume, for the purposes of this question, that Chinese history remains OTL until after the Second World War, with the Kuomintang winning the Chinese Civil War.)
What avenues of purposeful social change were available to China's leaders in the early part of the twentieth century? This broad question was addressed in strikingly relevant terms in 1937 in a special issue of Pacific Affairs. This is a remarkable volume for anyone interested in China's twentieth-century history, including contributions by Leonard Hsü, Edgar Snow, and R. H. Tawney. It is striking to read these reflections from the mid-1930s, from the perspective of the realities of China in the early twenty-first century.
The model of modernization that prevailed by mid-century in China was that of communist revolution, emphasizing class conflict, state ownership and management of the economy, and a substantial dose of ideological orthodoxy. This trajectory began in the 1920s in China, and led through a very tumultuous several decades before the final triumph of communism in China in 1949.
[. . .]
Communism was one important strand of reform that China witnessed in the 1930s. But there were other efforts at modernization that offered a different view of what China needed in order to move forward. Many of these non-Communist directions fell within a broad coalition of individuals and groups under the label of "rural reconstruction," which focused on social reforms, educational reforms, and governance reforms in the countryside.
[. . .]
The hard question to be considered now, eighty years later, is whether rural reconstruction and social reform could have brought about wide and deep processes of social change in China without the traumas associated with decades of revolutionary war. On the one hand, the logic of centralized one-party rebuilding of a large society like China is inherently risky. It poses the hazard of bad ideas prevailing at a certain time and being implemented on a vast and destructive scale. The Great Leap Forward and subsequent massive famine is one such example, and so is the Cultural Revolution. So centralized blueprints for longterm change carried out by an authoritarian regime seem inherently hazardous for a people. But at the same time, the problems that China faced in the 1930s, both in rural life and in urban life, were genuinely massive; and it isn't entirely clear that a piecemeal, decentralized process of reform could have reached the scope necessary to bring about sustained social and economic progress in China.
Daniel Little's question remains relevant. Absent a Communist takeover, what would reformism look like in China? How would China (presumably the Republic of China under the Kuomintang) have dealt with its many issues?The model of modernization that prevailed by mid-century in China was that of communist revolution, emphasizing class conflict, state ownership and management of the economy, and a substantial dose of ideological orthodoxy. This trajectory began in the 1920s in China, and led through a very tumultuous several decades before the final triumph of communism in China in 1949.
[. . .]
Communism was one important strand of reform that China witnessed in the 1930s. But there were other efforts at modernization that offered a different view of what China needed in order to move forward. Many of these non-Communist directions fell within a broad coalition of individuals and groups under the label of "rural reconstruction," which focused on social reforms, educational reforms, and governance reforms in the countryside.
[. . .]
The hard question to be considered now, eighty years later, is whether rural reconstruction and social reform could have brought about wide and deep processes of social change in China without the traumas associated with decades of revolutionary war. On the one hand, the logic of centralized one-party rebuilding of a large society like China is inherently risky. It poses the hazard of bad ideas prevailing at a certain time and being implemented on a vast and destructive scale. The Great Leap Forward and subsequent massive famine is one such example, and so is the Cultural Revolution. So centralized blueprints for longterm change carried out by an authoritarian regime seem inherently hazardous for a people. But at the same time, the problems that China faced in the 1930s, both in rural life and in urban life, were genuinely massive; and it isn't entirely clear that a piecemeal, decentralized process of reform could have reached the scope necessary to bring about sustained social and economic progress in China.
(Assume, for the purposes of this question, that Chinese history remains OTL until after the Second World War, with the Kuomintang winning the Chinese Civil War.)