When is a Farmer not a Farmer?

When he's Chinese -- then he's a peasant, writes Charles Hayford

By Charles W. Hayford
AsiaMedia Contributing Writer

Tuesday, April 10, 2007

After Mao Zedong died in 1976, they put his body on display in one of those see-through coffins which Lenin made popular. Shortly after, the NBC evening news commentator, David Brinkley, termed this "peasant under glass" -- a racist flippancy which would not have been accepted (or probably even thought of) for the dead leader of a Western state.

Now, the thing is that Mao wasn't a peasant: He never made his living with a hoe (if anything he was a landlord); he earned the highest educational degree available in his home province at the time; he was successively a librarian, teacher, and school principal; and for most of his career he was a salaried government official. He saw himself in the tradition of rulers and state builders like Qin Shi Huangdi and George Washington. Mao is a peasant only if all Chinese are peasants in essence, simply by virtue of being Chinese.

(Curiously, for some of the same Orientalist reasons, Mao and his successor Deng Xiaoping were also held to be "emperors." That is, all rulers in Beijing were "emperors" by virtue of being Chinese.)

So when I looked into it, I was surprised to find that the use of the word "peasant" rather than "farmer" was relatively new. I spent a pleasant afternoon in the library pulling books off the shelf and found that until the 1920s, Americans religiously used "farmer" for China, "peasant" for Europe, Russia and even the Mediterranean. F.H. King's classic 1911 study is Farmers of Forty Centuries.

After about 1930, the words switched positions. Pearl Buck's The Good Earth (1931), for instance, uses the word "farmer," never "peasant," but after that, Americans overwhelmingly preferred "peasant." When Oprah Winfrey chose The Good Earth for her book club in 2005, The New York Times bestseller list said it was about "peasant" life. I find that newspaper articles often mix “peasant” and “farmer” in the same story with no apparent reason.

In recent years, "peasant" has come under fire. A writer in China Daily wrote in 1985 that "from now on, the word peasant no longer suits China's rural population." The historian Randall Stross called "peasant" a "quaint taxonomic term that Americans usually used and that served to keep the Chinese apart -- and ranked vaguely below -- the 'farmers' at home." The British anthropologist Polly Hill attacked the term first because it mixed together all residents within a village, whether they farmed, peddled, wove, cooked, or lent money (or did each in succession), and second because it lumped together villagers in Africa, Latin America, and Asia who are actually in quite different situations.

What did Americans down to Pearl Buck mean when they insisted France and Russia had peasants but the United States and China had farmers? The distinction was central to Jeffersonian democracy. Thomas Jefferson charged that "the mobs of great cities add just so much to the support of pure government as sores do to the strength of the human body" and believed that the "cultivators of the earth are the most valuable citizens." Americans followed Jefferson in holding that Old World despotism was based on landless peasants who did not have the independent means to stand up to the dukes, lords, barons and kings. A "peasant" worked under "feudal" conditions, while a propertied "farmer" produced free or democratic rule.

Now we can re-conceive our problem of why there were farmers in China. As best I can make out, the implicit logic runs something like this: European history was normal; the stages were Ancient, Medieval/ feudal and Modern. China was outside this normal history, in fact was eternal and unchanging, and therefore had no feudalism. Peasants are a feudal phenomenon: Ergo, China had farmers, not peasants.

Then why the change from "farmer" to "peasant"?

Young Chinese of the New Culture Movement (1916-1923) had been taught by their elders that Chinese culture was glorious but came to see China as poor, backward and shameful; they searched for a new political force powerful enough to destroy traditional culture and to repel imperialism. They found this force in Marxist Revolution, which reframed China’s weakness and poverty as "feudalism," a word which made China's weakness a curable structural malady.

Historians now resist the claim that China was feudal. Feudal Europe and Japan had decentralized political systems in which the economy was dominated by local military force to the detriment of the market. But from at least the sixteenth century the Chinese rural economy had been basically commercialized, with markets in land and labor. Politics were civilian, centralized and national -- anything but feudal.

True, by the mid-1920s, the village economy had been shaken by political disarray, deflation, inflation, drought, flood, famine, warlords, taxes, pestilence, opium and sociologists. But the solution proposed depended on the terms in which they were construed as problems.

That the problem was political disorganization, not feudalism, was true, but not the point. "Feudalism," in this New Culture argument, was not a technical description but a metaphor, and a devastatingly effective one at that. After all, Marxists and American liberals both saw progress as history’s universal pattern. Feudalism in Europe was ended by the French Revolution, so to say that China was "feudal" was to assert that the Chinese people now could look forward to Revolution, that Revolution would lead to Liberation from feudalism and imperialism, that the formation of a nation was liberating, and that a vanguard should lead it (Marxists and liberals simply disagreed as to who the vanguard should be).

Therefore, the man with the hoe became a peasant.

Must we give up the word "peasant"? Heavens no.  But too often we mistake "peasant" for a primary category of nature rather than a convenient term which must be used warily. After 1949, too many in China and in the West saw the countryside as filled with feudal minded peasants, making it easy to rationalize state control. Observing that the "peasant" was invented, not discovered, helps to keep us honest.

This piece draws upon Charles Hayford's essay "The Storm over the Peasant: Orientalism, Rhetoric and Representation in Modern China," in Contesting the Master Narrative: Essays in Social History (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1998), which has references and further examples. An earlier version was posted at Frog in a Well.

The views expressed above are those of the author and are not necessarily those of AsiaMedia or the UCLA Asia Institute.

Date Posted: 4/10/2007