Rural Reconstruction Movement
   HOME

TheInfoList



OR:

The Rural Reconstruction Movement was started in
China China, officially the People's Republic of China (PRC), is a country in East Asia. It is the world's most populous country, with a population exceeding 1.4 billion, slightly ahead of India. China spans the equivalent of five time zones and ...
in the 1920s by Y.C. James Yen,
Liang Shuming Liang Shuming (, Wade-Giles ''Liang Shu-ming''; sometimes ''Liang Sou-ming'', October 18, 1893 – June 23, 1988), born Liang Huanding (), courtesy name Shouming (), was a Chinese philosopher, politician, and writer in the Rural Reconstruct ...
and others to revive the
Chinese village The Chinese Village in the Alexander Park of Tsarskoye Selo, Russia was Catherine the Great's attempt to follow the 18th-century fashion for the Chinoiserie. Probably inspired by a similar project in Drottningholm, Catherine ordered Antonio ...
. They strove for a middle way, independent of the Nationalist government but in competition with the radical revolutionary approach to the village espoused by
Mao Zedong Mao Zedong pronounced ; also romanised traditionally as Mao Tse-tung. (26 December 1893 – 9 September 1976), also known as Chairman Mao, was a Chinese communist revolutionary who was the founder of the People's Republic of China (PRC) ...
and the
Chinese Communist Party The Chinese Communist Party (CCP), officially the Communist Party of China (CPC), is the founding and One-party state, sole ruling party of the China, People's Republic of China (PRC). Under the leadership of Mao Zedong, the CCP emerged victoriou ...
.


History

Yen's Ting Hsien (Ding Xian) Experiment in Dingzhou, Hebei and Liang's school at
Zouping Zouping () is a county-level city of Shandong province. Geography The city is located on the northern edge of the mountainous central portion of the province. It is under the administration of the prefecture-level city of Binzhou, but is only w ...
, Shandong, were only the earliest and most prominent of hundreds of village projects, educational foundations, and government zones which aimed to change the Chinese countryside. After 1931, the Nanking government offered qualified support but placed restrictions on the expansion of its work. American Christian missionaries gave their enthusiastic support. The movement was prominent in building
Chinese resistance to Japan After the Japanese invasion of Manchuria, and until 1933, large volunteer armies waged war against Japanese and Manchukuo forces over much of Northeast China. Due to Chiang Kai-shek's policy of non-resistance, the Japanese were soon able to establ ...
during the latter's invasions by strengthening the village economy, culture, and political structure, including pioneering work in village health. Many social activists who participated in this movement were graduated as professors of the United States. They made tangible but limited progress in modernizing the tax, infrastructural, economic, cultural, and educational equipment and mechanisms of rural regions until the cancellation of government coordination and subsidies in the mid-to-late 1930s due to rampant wars and the lack of resources. The rural reconstructive activists advocated a “third way” between the communist violent land reform and the reformism of the Nationalist Government based on the respect of human rights and individual liberties for educational doctrine. After the outbreak of the
Second Sino-Japanese War The Second Sino-Japanese War (1937–1945) or War of Resistance (Chinese term) was a military conflict that was primarily waged between the Republic of China and the Empire of Japan. The war made up the Chinese theater of the wider Pacific Th ...
, Rural Reconstruction activists formed the Rural Reconstruction Party, at first an important part of the
China Democratic League The China Democratic League (CDL) is one of the eight legally recognized minor political parties in the People's Republic of China under the Chinese Communist Party's United Front. The CDL was originally founded in 1941 as an umbrella coalition ...
but then rendered politically irrelevant in the emerging war between the Chinese Communists and the
Chinese Nationalists The Kuomintang (KMT), also referred to as the Guomindang (GMD), the Nationalist Party of China (NPC) or the Chinese Nationalist Party (CNP), is a major political party in the Republic of China, initially on the Chinese mainland and in Taiw ...
. In 1948, however, James Yen persuaded the
US Congress The United States Congress is the legislature of the federal government of the United States. It is bicameral, composed of a lower body, the House of Representatives, and an upper body, the Senate. It meets in the U.S. Capitol in Washingto ...
to fund the
Sino-American Joint Commission on Rural Reconstruction Sino-American Joint Commission on Rural Reconstruction (JCRR; ) is a commission established in 1948 in mainland China. After the Chinese Civil War, the JCRR then moved to Taiwan, where its work has been widely credited with laying the agricultural b ...
. Before moving to Taiwan, the JCRR carried out the largest
land reform Land reform is a form of agrarian reform involving the changing of laws, regulations, or customs regarding land ownership. Land reform may consist of a government-initiated or government-backed property redistribution, generally of agricultural ...
project carried out in mainland China before 1949, as well as health and education projects. On Taiwan in the 1950s, the JCRR was key in laying the rural foundation for the quick
economic growth Economic growth can be defined as the increase or improvement in the inflation-adjusted market value of the goods and services produced by an economy in a financial year. Statisticians conventionally measure such growth as the percent rate of ...
of the 1960s and the 1970s. The rural reconstruction movement started by Dr. Yen continues to be active in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. The
International Institute of Rural Reconstruction International Institute of Rural Reconstruction, also known as IIRR is a non-profit organization that helps empower rural communities by making them self-sufficient. By offering programs across health, education, environment and livelihood, its ...
(IIRR) had headquarters in the Philippines and celebrated its 50th anniversary in 2010.International Institute of Rural Reconstruction
/ref> In the 1990s, several academics and social reformers in China started a
New Rural Reconstruction Movement New Rural Reconstruction (NRR, ) is an intellectual current and social movement initiated by Wen Tiejun and other activists to address the crisis they saw in the Chinese countryside at the start of the 21st century. As of 2009, at its core there a ...
, with stations at
Ding County Dingzhou, or Tingchow in Postal Map Romanization, and formerly called Ding County or Dingxian, is a county-level city in the prefecture-level city of Baoding, Hebei Province. As of 2009, Dingzhou had a population of 1.2 million. Dingzhou has 3 ...
and Zouping.


See also

*
New Life Movement The New Life Movement () was a government-led civic campaign in the 1930s Republic of China to promote cultural reform and Neo-Confucian social morality and to ultimately unite China under a centralised ideology following the emergence of ideologica ...
*
Y. C. James Yen Y. C. James Yen (, 1890/1893-1990), known to his many English speaking friends as "Jimmy," was a Chinese educator and organizer known for his work in mass literacy and rural reconstruction, first in China, then in many countries. After working wit ...
*
Nanjing Decade The Nanjing decade (also Nanking decade, , or the Golden decade, ) is an informal name for the decade from 1927 (or 1928) to 1937 in the Republic of China. It began when Nationalist Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek took Nanjing from Zhili clique ...


Notes


References

*
Guy Alitto Guy Salvatore Alitto () is an American academic in the History and East Asian Languages and Civilization Departments at the University of Chicago. He is known in China for revitalizing the scholarship on Chinese Confucian scholar Liang Shuming. He ...
, ''The Last Confucian: Liang Shu-Ming and the Chinese Dilemma of Modernity'' (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979). * * Charles Hayford, ''To the People: James Yen and Village China ''(New York: Columbia University Press, 1990). * Martha McKee Keehn, ed., ''Y.C. James Yen's Thought on Mass Education and Rural Reconstruction : China and Beyond: Selected Papers from an International Conference Held in Shijiazhuang, China, May 27-June 1, 1990'' (New York: International Institute of Rural Reconstruction, 1993). * {{cite book , last = Merkel-Hess , first = Kate, year = 2016 , title = The Rural Modern: Reconstructing the Self and State in Republican China , publisher = The University of Chicago Press, location = Chicago; London , isbn = 9780226383279 Agricultural organizations based in China Republic of China (1912–1949)