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China Community Structure
Most rural Chinese live in one of some 900,000 villages, which
have an average population of from 1,000 to 2,000 people. Villages
have never been self-contained, self-sufficient units, and the
social world of Chinese peasants has extended beyond their home
villages. Almost all new wives come into a village from other
settlements, and daughters marry out. All villagers have close
kinship ties with families in other villages, and marriage gobetweens shuttle from village to village.
Before 1950 clusters of villages centered on small market towns
that linked them to the wider economy and society. Most peasants
were only a few hours' walk or less from a market town, which
provided not only opportunities to buy and sell but also
opportunities for entertainment, information, social life, and a
host of specialized services. The villages around a market formed
a social unit that, although less immediately visible than the
villages, was equally significant.
From the early 1950s on, China's revolutionary government made
great efforts to put the state and its ideology into direct contact
with the villages and to sweep aside the intermediaries and brokers
who had traditionally interpreted central policies and national
values for villagers. The state and the party were generally
successful, establishing unprecedented degrees of political and
ideological integration of villages into the state and of villagelevel awareness of state policies and political goals.
The unintended consequence of the economic and political
policies of the 1950s and 1960s was to increase the closed,
corporate quality of China's villages and to narrow the social
horizons of villagers. Land reform and the reorganization of
villages as subunits of people's communes meant that villages
became collective landholding units and had clear boundaries
between their lands and those of adjacent villages. Central
direction of labor on collective fields made the former practices
of swapping labor between villages impossible. The household
registration and rationing systems confined villagers to their home
settlements and made it impossible for them to seek their fortune
elsewhere. Cooperation with fellow villagers and good relations
with village leaders became even more important than they had been
in the past. The suppression of rural markets, which accompanied
the drive for self-sufficiency in grain production and other
economic activities, had severe social as well as economic
consequences. Most peasants had neither reason nor opportunity for
regular trips to town, and their opportunities for exchange and
cooperation with residents of other villages were diminished.
Villages became work units, with all that that implied.
Decollectivization in the early 1980s resulted in the revival
of rural marketing, and a limited relaxation of controls on
outmigration opened villages and diminished the social boundaries
around them. The social world of peasants expanded, and the larger
marketing community took on more significance as that of the
village proper was diminished. Village membership, once the single
most important determinant of an individual's circumstances, became
only one of a number of significant factors, which also included
occupation, personal connections, and managerial talent.
Data as of July 1987
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