Interview with Qin Hu, Professor of History, Qinghua
Liu Guowang, Zhongguo Gaige 22 November 2000
--Translated by David Kelly (daikaili@yahoo.com.au)
I first met Professor Qin Hui at an international academic conference in May 1999. His speech, while emotional, was based on reason and evidence, very ‘disciplined.’ Everyone present was astonished. We later found in fact that his articles often appeared in influential media. The range of topics they touched on was broad, the style trenchant, the views profound and saturated with an intellectual’s abundant social conscience, and a contemporary citizen’s sense of responsibility. We learned then that Professor Qin is one of the foremost representatives of agrarian studies in China today, and holds a position in the History Department of Qinghua University.
The most obvious feature of Professor Qin’s work in agrarian studies is his mastery of what he calls “is” and “isms.”[1] In the view of some traditional scholars, this may not be ‘agrarian studies’ properly speaking, but in his view, this is precisely the kind of awareness of national conditions that a Chinese scholar needs to be equipped with. Regarding "issues and isms’', he says that the Chinese revolution was started by the peasants. Yet years later the same peasants, seen as “small and private”[2] accepted the terms of agricultural collectivisation quite submissively. In the late 1970’s, the peasants of Xiaogang Village, Fengyang County, Anhui, set off the shockwaves of rural reform with their “18 bloody handprints”, and today the town and village enterprises (TVEs) which “occupy half the country” are once again [successful] out of all reckoning. Phenomena like the tide of rural workers and the switch to the TVE system are too much to keep up with. So are the Chinese peasants conservative or backward?
Clearly, to solve the specious “problem” set out above we need an “ism” deeply rooted in Chinese social strata and modern agrarian studies. Using much concrete research into the traditional and modern Chinese countryside, and the results of modern agrarian research into Chinese villages and their society, Professor Qin has worked out a new delineation. The distinction between the traditional “peasant” and the modern “farmer” lies in the fact that the former “is subject to control by external powers”. In peasant society, products and labour are never directly exchanged by the producers, but rather are supplied offer to centres where they are redistributed, “Peasant” in this sense ceases to be an occupational or regional concept and is instead socially defined. Peasants are may not be people who work on the land, and workers on the land may not be peasants. In other words, rather than peasant society being one which engages in agriculture for a living, it is a non-citizen society, non-status, and a society based on public institutions (gonggongti). Hence either criticising the peasants’ “backwardness” or praising their “purity” from the point of view of an urbanite are equally ridiculous. Faced with a citizen society, in either case the peasant needs to be converted to a “complete individual.” Thus, the “peasant question” is essentially the question of China’s conversion from a peasant society to a citizen society, in which case “simply” working on the “three nongs”[3] or “letting peasants speak for themselves” is clearly helpless.
The peasant question is not the peasants’ own problem: its origins lie in the city. Looking at the peasant question, which is ubiquitous both in town and country, from this starting point, we suddenly see the light. Professor Qin asks, which of the obvious problems today of peasant incomes, tax burdens, migrant rural labour, agricultural land, etc, really originates in the countryside? Which of them do not involve the issue of peasants’ rights as citizens? Take the issue of reducing exactions on the peasantry: currently rural tax reform is an important policy and this is of course a good thing. Yet it should also be noted that as well as eliminating a number of unreasonable exactions, in fact there is a combination of existing regular taxes and miscellaneous taxes, so that clarifying the farmers’ burden is merely a measure to treat the symptoms. Such approaches have been repeatedly taken in China’s history, but because complementary measures to treat the root of the illness have never accompanied them, in the end they turn out to be a prelude to another round of increased exactions.
Qin Hui says, he in no way opposing the tax reforms, I is only saying that such reforms alone are not enough, they must be combined with complementary reforms of the government organs, protection of peasants’ rights, and so on. Take also the case of rural labourers: in fundamental terms this is a question of the peasants’ rights as citizens to work and to move from place to place. But, under a variety of pretexts, some localities callously adopt measures to limit the rural workers’ legitimate rights. While increasing the costs of coming into the cities, this further exacerbates the so-called “peasant question”, and only serves to give still further cause to increase the curbs on rural workers.
Professor Qin’s ability to create such a new form of agrarian studies is bound up with his unique personal history and intellectual trajectory. Born to an intellectual family in Guangxi in 1953 after ‘graduating’ from junior high school at the age of 15 he embarked on over 9 years as a youth sent down to a rural production team, to what he calls the “university of the paddy fields”. This period vastly influenced his subsequent career as a scholar. In those years with no tertiary entrance examination to stimulate scholars with the promise of recruitment to academic careers, and no drive to make a name, the only motivation for study was the desire for knowledge and truth for their own sake. Whatever interested him he pursued without regard for disciplinary boundaries. Meanwhile, his interests were generated by what appeared to him as issues. Moving from interest to issue to research became his mode of scholarship.
In 1978 with an astonishing ‘three level leap’ he qualified for direct admission as a graduate student in the Lanzhou University History Department. Working under China’s renowned agrarian historian Professor Zhao Lisheng he embarked on the difficult road of agrarian history research. In the subsequent 20 years or so, following his interests and tacking problems he has ventured into economics, politics, ideas, culture; matters ancient and modern, Chinese and foreign—wherever there is an issue he is to be found hunting for clues to it.
As his scholarship is of the ‘love of knowledge’ type, Professor Qin has never been one to follow trends, and indeed has a tendency to buck them. When cultural fever was on everyone’s lips as ‘ism’ characterising the late 1980s, he did nothing to add fuel to it, but instead pursued his ‘issues’; but when intellectual trends changed direction in the 1990s, with a return to textual research, Qin Hui brought up ‘isms’. In his own words, his attitude to life and scholarship and value criteria derive from the responsibilities of a modern citizen in a China which is in the process of transition.
[1] [Trans.] This is a conscious and ironical reference to polemics in the early 1920s between the liberal Hu Shi (1891-1962) and the Communists including Li Dazhao (1883-1927).
[2] [Trans.] 一小二私 yixiao ersi: the opposite of Mao’s call for communist institutions to be ‘big and public’ (yida ergong 一大二公).
[3] Nongye, nongmin, nongcun: “agriculture, the peasantry, the rural village community:” a view of some social scientists (notably Wen Tiejun), that economic models of agriculture must be integrated with knowledge of rural sociology and politics.
