Politics of Peasants (eBook)

This book is an analysis and exploration of the relationship between peasants and policies within the process of reform in China. After examining the long term rural policies, either before or after the reform, it was found that all these polices have been expected to promote peasants' interests and claimed to take enhancing peasants' happiness as their goal. Nonetheless, the history and current reality of rural development have demonstrated that the same policy starting point had lead to very different policy designs. Even today, quite a few institutional arrangements with good intentions have ended up with opposite results and have even become bad policies that do harm to people. This book argues that the reason for such serious deviation, between political intentions and institutional arrangements, as well as between policy goals and its results is: as a political force, the peasantry itself has not effectively engaged with the political process of the country.  

Zhao Shukai, born in November 1959 in Laixi of Shangdong Province, is a law PhD, a researcher and an expert who enjoys special government allowance from the State Council. He worked in the Rural Policy Research Office of the Secretariat of the CPC Central Committee from August 1982 to July 1990 and has been working in the Development Research Center of the State Council since August 1990, during which he worked at local level for two years (the Party Committee of Zhuolu County and Zhang Jiakou Municipal Government) and studied abroad for three years (Australian National University, Duke University and Harvard University of America); he used to be China's Rural Development Project Consultant for UNDP, World Bank and UK Department for International Development). In November 2006, he served as the chief lecturer for the 36^th Collective Study of the CPC Central Committee Political Bureau. His main works include Township Governance and Government Institutionalization (The Commercial Press, 2010), Peasant Politics (The Commercial Press, 2011), New Destiny of Peasants (The Commercial Press, 2012), etc. 

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This book is an analysis and exploration of the relationship between peasants and policies within the process of reform in China. After examining the long term rural policies, either before or after the reform, it was found that all these polices have been expected to promote peasants' interests and claimed to take enhancing peasants' happiness as their goal. Nonetheless, the history and current reality of rural development have demonstrated that the same policy starting point had lead to very different policy designs. Even today, quite a few institutional arrangements with good intentions have ended up with opposite results and have even become bad policies that do harm to people. This book argues that the reason for such serious deviation, between political intentions and institutional arrangements, as well as between policy goals and its results is: as a political force, the peasantry itself has not effectively engaged with the political process of the country.