Book Reviews

likely medium-term outcome has been edging from consensus to near unanimity (p. xiv, fn. 4). The impact of elections on village politics has been much studied in recent years although no conclusions have been reached. Consistent with the mainstream view that Chinas village elections have become increasingly close to the international standard, most scholars see positive consequences, including a positive correlation between elections and governance, better relations between cadres and villagers, between villages and townships, and more transparency and accountability for village government. Kevin OBrien, one of the best known scholars in the field, who argued until recently for the empowerment effect of direct elections, diverges from the mainstream. In the central piece for part one, Assessing village elections, he and Rongbin Han point out a dichotomy between elections and governance: on one hand, great improvement has been made in these elections; on the other hand, the quality of governance remains stubbornly low. They propose to shift the focus of the study from elections to the institutional context of village committees to seek explanations of poor governance. Although they do not directly challenge OBrien and Hans assessment, the other five scholars in the forum show disagreement in various ways. Qingshan Tan is less optimistic about the status of the elections, calling for more work to standardize them, while Gunter Schubert suggests shifting the focus of study from village to legitimacy of the local state that includes township and county. Melanie Manion, John James Kennedy and Bjrn Alpermann, who see more positive correlations between improved village elections and of governance, point out various positive effects and consequences in village, local and even national politics. This indicates a lively debate and suggests continued diversity of views in the field. The field has been dominated by political scientists using quantitative studies based on surveys. That domination will continue because quantitative studies are necessary to provide us with broad pictures of village elections in a locality or region, if not nationwide. However, OBrien, Manion and Schubert also call for more and better case studies like the one by Zongze Hu in this volume. OBrien invites sociologists to illustrate the effects of voting on various social groups and historians to study the antecedents of todays elections (p. xii). He believes that time has come for more comparison, both domestically and internationally (p. xiii). The merits of the book include in-depth study on a wide range of topics, timely assessment of the current status of village elections, and assessment of the state of the field, including methods, approaches and future directions. It is recommended for graduate students and scholars interested in close examination of Chinas village and local politics. YUSHENG YAO

729

iChina: The Rise of the Individual in Modern Chinese Society Edited by M E T T E H A L S K O V H A N S E N a n d R U N E S VA R V E R U D

Copenhagen: NIAS Press, 2010 xx + 275 pp. 18.99 ISBN 978-87-7694-053-9 doi:10.1017/S0305741011000828

The question is a source of heated debate at a critical moment in Chinas long march toward modernization whether Chinese society is indeed following a path parallel

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The China Quarterly, 207, September 2011, pp. 719755

to the development of a kind of second modernity Beck and Beck-Gernsheim find unfolding in Europe and the West as Svarverud synthesizes in this volume on Chinas individualization process (p. 194). With their examination of four different types of modernity, Ulrich Beck and Elisabeth Beck-Gernsheims foreword to this volume contextualizes the intellectual concern raised by this question within a consideration of three analytical dimensions: economic production and reproduction (capitalism); the nature of political authority; and socio-cultural integration (individualization, cosmopolitanization, and religion). Yan Yunxiang, author of the introductory chapter, further examines how, by the end of the 1990s, the longing for personal well-being and affective ties dominated the rise of the individual in rural China, while, at the same time, the states hostility toward self-organization and an autonomous society directly triggered a tendency to emphasize personal rights at the expense of obligations to and rights of others. In other words, Yan explores how and why the contested individualization process in China ended up by creating uncivil individuals (p. 2). In the context of the individualization thesis proposed by European social theorists, the group of Nordic and Chinese scholars who contributed to this volume participate here in an ongoing dialogue, confronting Chinese studies with Western theories on the rise of Chinese individual in both private and public domains. The core of the debate concerns the relationship between the Chinese individual and the social collectives, i.e. the family and the state. As Yan astutely points out, the emergence of the individual in China occurred in the absence of a parallel democratic value of individualism, one that would treat the individual fundamentally as a right holder in a Western-style welfare state system. Instead, since the time of late Qing imperial dynasty, advocates of individual freedom have always articulated their argument in reference to, and in consideration of, the nation state. This point is further elaborated in the chapters authored by Svarverud and Muhlhahn. In his examination of individual self-discipline and collective freedom, Svarverud refers back to Liang Qichao and other intellectual elites from the beginning of the 20th century who sought modernity in a battleground of new terms and new ideas on society (p. 198). The development of the differentiation of the minor self from the greater self illustrates that, even when the concept of the absolute freedom and autonomy of the individual arose in the new culture movement, political concerns for the self-discipline of the individual still fixed the individual to his role in the nationbuilding process. In Muhlhahns examination of the individual under Imperial, Republican and Socialist legal regimes, he further confirms that no system developed a concept of individual rights or entitlements that shielded the individual from excesses of state power (p. 243). It was actually the opening-up policy instituted in 1978 that marked a turning point for law and criminal justice in China; at that point, the Chinese government started to recognize the right of the accused and appointed defence lawyers to criminal defendants in legal proceedings. The rest of the volume can be read in two parts, each having a different focus on the experiences of urban and rural Chinese during the process of individualization. Li Minghuans chapter addresses the experiences of Chinese returnees from overseas and their collective protest when the state agricultural industry collapsed and forced them to search for individual work options. Rolandsens case study of young volunteers in Quanzhou demonstrates how NGOs created an effective collective niche for urban youth when economic and social changes increasingly forced them to rely on family and kinship networks in order to carve out a predictable future (p. 157). In contrast to these reluctant attitudes toward becoming individual citizens in a de-collectivized urban China, rural Chinese are more willing to embrace the

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individual freedom created by economic reform. Hansen and Pangs chapter demonstrates how rural youth defied stereotypes of the passive rural migrant worker who roams between coastal cities and works in various low-paid jobs without long-term contracts to protect their rights. The search for freedom for personal choice in matters of love and work mixed with imaginations of the modern industrial world, stimulated aspirations in these workers and kept them floating. Thorgerson and Nis case study of the rural elderly also shows that rural parents are becoming much more accepting of a broader variety of intergenerational relationships and living arrangements. Delman and Yins chapter on Sun Dawu, a self-made rural private entrepreneur, offers an account of how he dared to challenge his local government and question national policy from his peasant perspective. Such a sharp contrast between rural and urban attitudes toward individualization is further reinforced by an analysis of the individual in contemporary Chinese literature. The lonesome atmosphere repeatedly evoked by urban authors like Chen Ran seems extremely pale next to the forceful image of Wolf Totem in depictions of nomadic Inner Mongolia. Wedell-Wedellsborgs chapter on literary analysis captures this contrast and encourages readers to contemplate its origin. In Yan Yunxiangs own words, the prolonged ruralurban dual structure in Chinese socialism, which made rural residents second-class citizens and deprived them of most of the social welfare entitlements enjoyed by urban residents, effectively made Chinese villagers into a proletariat who, to borrow from Marx, have nothing to lose but their chains (p. 33). DANNING WANG

Chinas Homeless Generation: Voices from the Veterans of the Chinese Civil War, 1940s1990s
JOSHUA FAN London and New York: Routledge, 2010 xvi + 182 pp. $125.00 ISBN: 978-0-415-58261-2 doi:10.1017/S030574101100083X

In this interesting book, Joshua Fan tells the story of the roughly two million people, mostly low-ranking male veterans of the Chinese Civil War, who fled to Taiwan by land, sea and air in the late 1940s as the demise of the Kuomintang (KMT) government became apparent. As one of the largest waves of migration, not just in Chinese history, but also in world history (p. 19), this is a tale worth telling. His central point, that the overwhelming majority of these individuals remained homeless in the material sense in the 1950s and psychologically for four decades after the war aims to challenge scholarship and the commonly accepted oversimplification (p. 2) in Taiwan that mainlanders (waishengren) enjoyed privileged status in politics and society. With the exception of air force personnel, high-ranking army brass and politicians, Fan contends that most ordinary soldiers suffered widespread discrimination, trauma, marriage woes and heartbreak owing to low rank, poverty, language barriers, lack of education, connections and other family resources, and their association with a despised regime. In this respect, Chinas Homeless Generation is an important contribution to the literature on veterans in China and elsewhere in the world. This literature is cognizant of variations among veterans based mostly on prewar socioeconomic variables, while also noting their shared difficulties readjusting to civilian life after war.