Within and Against Peasantness: Backwardness and Filiality in Rural China ANDREW B. KIPNIS Northern Kentucky University Economically the contradiction between town and country is an extremely antagonistic one both in capitalist society, where under the rule of the bourgeoisie the towns ruthlessly plunder the countryside, and in the Kuomingtang areas in China, where under the rule of foreign imperialism and the Chinese big compradore bourgeoisie the towns most rapaciously plunder the countryside. But in a socialist country and in our own revolutionary base areas, this antagonistic contraction has changed into one that is non-antagonistic; and when communist society is reached it will be abolished. [Mao Tse-tung (Mao Zedong) 1937:345] Enlightenment teleologies have left us with an ideology of time, seemingly global in scope, in which groups of people marginalized by projects of "mod- ernization" are seen as historically "backward." To cite just a few examples, Reed-Danahay and Anderson-Levitt (1991) discuss how French school teach- ers refer to the families of immigrant and rural students as "conservative" (that is, favoring historically previous teaching methods); James Ferguson de- scribes how "development" agencies categorize Lesotho socioeconomic struc- tures as "aboriginal, not yet incorporated into the modern world" (1990:71, emphasis in original), while James C. Scott (1985) notes how poor Malaysian peasants are often seen as "backward looking." Socialist states, deeply com- mitted to the teleology that places communism "ahead" of capitalism, are no less entangled in this ideology than capitalist ones. 1 In the People's Republic of China, like most Leninist states, the party considers itself the "vanguard" Research for this essay was made possible by financial support from the Committee on Scholarly Communication with the People's Republic of China, the University of North Carolina disserta- tion fellowships, and the Johns Hopkins Nanjing Center. Revisions were completed during an East—West Center Post-Doctoral Fellowship and release time provided by Northern Kentucky University. Judith Farquhar, Dorothy Holland, and two anonymous reviewers made numerous useful suggestions. I gratefully acknowledge the support of all of these people and institutions. Most of all thanks are owed to the Zouping County Office of Foreign Affairs, Fengjia Village (Governing) Committee, and all of the people who shared their opinions on rural life. Any remaining faults are my own. 1 Indeed, because of the role of ideology in legitimizing state power in socialist nations, they are perhaps even more entangled. See Verdery (1991) for discussion. 0010-4175/95/1692-0107 $7.50 + .10 © 1995 Society for Comparative Study of Society and History IIO