Kate Merkel-Hess. The Rural Modern

The word “modern” has several connotations for China. Often “modern” means the creation of cities, notably Shanghai, that replicate Western infrastructure, architecture, and institutions. Sometimes “modern” means new Chinese art and literature based on Western models. Sometimes “modern” means imported Western political ideologies, such as democracy or Marxism. In The Rural Modern: Reconstructing the Self and State in Republican China, Kate Merkel-Hess looks at a quite different “modern,” the rural modern, embodied in projects in Republican China that aimed to transform the lives of 85 percent of China’s population, the peasants. These projects were designed to remake China from the bottom up through “creating resilient, sustainable rural communities” (114). Sadly, this “modern” fits Alexander Woodside’s elegiac “lost modern” (Lost Modernities: China, Vietnam, Korea, and the Hazards of World History [2006]): what might have been. The projects were doomed by war; they came to an end in the chaos and violence of Japanese invasion in 1937. They must still be seen as courageous and creative efforts that might have created a new world. In her penetrating analysis in this excellent monograph, Merkel-Hess has written a detailed description of the projects—and an homage to the men who spearheaded them.

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