A Century of Change in a Chinese Village

A century of change in a Chinese village: The crisis of the countryside, authored by Lin Juren and Xie Yuxi, and translated by Linda Grove, provides a comprehensive and nuanced account of the systematic social, cultural, economic and political changes in a Northern Chinese village called Lengshuigou, located on the fringe of Jinan city, the provincial capital of Shandong. It provides a rich and valuable source of empirical materials and grounded knowledge for scholars interrogating rural China from the disciplinary angles of sociology, anthropology, political science, human geography, regional studies, planning, etc. * Eurasian Geography and Economics *

The present book was published in Chinese in 2013 by a team of sociologists from Shandong University and the Shandong Academy of Social Sciences who benefited from close proximity to and deep familiarity with the village. This translation was ably edited by Linda Grove, who writes a useful, perceptive preface. Because of this long history of research, the book presents a comprehensive overview of a century of rural social change. . . . Although the general story told here will be familiar, the specific characteristics of Lengshuigou will provide food for thought about how contingencies of history and specificities of place give particular shape to general processes of change.

* Pacific Affairs *
There is a certain poignancy in the fact that just as this fine book is published, the village that it describes will disappear. In 2018, one of the best-studied villages in China will be razed to make way for a high-speed rail station—a perfect synecdoche for New China erasing the old. Japanese investigators in the 1940s, Japanese and Korean scholars in the 1980s, and teams of Chinese and Japanese academics since the 1990s have carried out exhaustive studies of Lengshuigou, a large village in the North China province of Shandong. All of this work is ably summarized in this rich volume by Lin Juren, Xie Yuzi, and Linda Grove, which charts the changes in politics and society, culture and customs, networks and human relations over four very different eras: ‘traditional’ society, the socialist era of collective agriculture and Maoist class struggle, the early reform years in the 1980s and 1990s, and the twenty-first-century era of accelerating social change. Lengshuigou may disappear, but this memorable record of a vital human community will endure. -- Joseph Esherick, University of California, San Diego
This study of Lengshuigou since the 1930s is essential reading for anyone with an interest in rural China or even social change more generally. It is exceptional not simply for its wealth of detail but for its systematic approach to come to grips with the processes of social change and development from anthropological, political, social, and economic perspectives. One explanation of this success lies in the repeated visits to Lengshuigou by foreign and Chinese researchers and the publication of their results, which provides this volume and its 2010 research with an invaluable resource base. A richly textured account of rural China in transformation, the book details the interactions among wider politics and economics and rural society— both in the past and more recent years— as Lengshuigou inevitably moves from being a rural community to an urban transport hub. -- David S. G. Goodman, Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool University, Suzhou