Lost Rural Futures: Agrarian Nationalism and Industrial Dissent in Modern China

A debate in the early 1940s between two social scientists, Yang Kaidao and Zhou Xianwen, reinvigorated a national conversation about China’s relationship with agriculture. Clearly China’s roots were agrarian, but was it destined to remain “a country founded on agriculture” with the rural village as the focal point of the state and the nucleus of society, or must the republic industrialize in order to survive? If the answer seems obvious to the present-day observer, it remained debatable on the eve of the communist revolution. This paper uses the Yang-Zhou debate as a window on past visions of an agrarian future that were impassioned yet full of irony: agricultural fundamentalists pointed to settled agriculture as a distinctive and transhistorical feature of the Chinese state, but their arguments and policy recommendations echoed similar movements in Japan, Italy, Latvia, and many other twentieth-century states. We contend that China’s twentieth-century agrarian fundamentalism should be acknowledged both as a pivotal yet underexplored cornerstone of Chinese nationalism and as a key link in a broader global agrarian-nationalist movement that largely dissipated after the Second World War.