China Along the Yellow River: Reflections on Rural Society

This text had a major impact in its original Chinese version. Reviewed in the Far East Economic Review as 'one of the richest portraits of the Chinese countryside published in the reform era', the book charts a long journey through the hinterland region of the Yellow River undertaken by the author between 1994 and 1996. It examines in exhaustive detail the lives and work of peasants, Party and local government officials, providing a wealth of data on the nature of life in post-reform rural China. The author argues that global integration is but the latest 'great leap forward' in a succession of periodic reforms going back over a hundred years, that in every case it is China's farmers who bear the brunt of the changes, that in the past they have always rebelled, and, he predicts, they will do so again.