STATE-PEASANT RELATIONS UNDER CHINA'S CONTEMPORARY REFORMS

This study examines the interaction between peasant and state during the rural reforms since Mao's death. It traces the mutual and antagonistic goals that drove the peasantry and the central leadership to invest the reforms, and analyzes how the consequent transformation of the countryside has altered state-peasant conflict. The study focuses on four areas of contention that dominated reform-era politics: (1) local struggles over the direction of the reforms; (2) central-local fights for control of the harvest; (3) antagonism between city and country; and (4) the emergence of a new regime in local politics based on growing stratification within the peasantry.;This study is based on fourteen months of research in Hubei Province (including work in libraries and interviews at communes) and archival research in Hong Kong.;The dissertation concludes that although peasants enjoy no legitimate role in Chinese politics, they influence political change through disorganized local resistance and creative adaptations to central demands. Central policy-makers must take this peasant response into account because the state's all-important modernization program depends on peasant cooperation for the supply of farm goods to urban industrial centers. However, this need to extract goods and capital from the countryside also injects a constant source of conflict into state-peasant relations. The reforms have altered the way this conflict is played out by producing a new commercial elite in the countryside, with which the state is cultivating a political alliance.