MODEL REBELS: The Rise and Fall of China's Richest Village
By BRUCE GILLEY
Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001. 219 pages, $45 (hardcover), $15.95 (paperback)

W. K. Cheng

Model Rebels chronicles the saga of Daqiu, once a wretchedly poor hamlet near the city of Tianjin, that by 1980 had become celebrated as "China's First Village" in both total economic output and per capita income. Much of the narrative centers on Daqiu's charismatic party secretary Yu Zuomin, a peasant cadre who in 1977 vowed to bring the village out of poverty within three years. Yu succeeded in doing just that by setting up a number of village-level industrial enterprises. Since it was one of the first villages to take advantage of the new possibilities in the early years of Deng Xiaoping's economic reforms, Daqiu was several steps ahead of the rest of the country. The rewards were handsome.
Consider the following. In 1978, when the village built its first factory, a small cold-rolled steel strip mill, Daqiu was an obscure place known for its alkaline soil and mud huts. By 1982, it had built a steel pipe factory, a printing plant, and an electrical equipment factory. The growth was so spectacular that the village enterprises were reorganized into a conglomerate the next year. By 1990, the village's factories and other businesses (now under four holding companies) employed six thousand workers and had total revenues that accounted for eighteen percent of the entire industrial output of Hebei Province's Jinghai County, in which Daqiu is located. Daqiu's material wealth was conspicuously visible. Not only were there new houses and new schools, Daqiu also built itself a free cable television system and a hundred-shop commercial strip appropriately named "Hong Kong Street."

But the real story that Bruce Gilley, a contributing editor to the Far Eastern Economic Review, tells in this book is not so much Daqiu's meteoric rise in wealth as the role it played in challenging some of the most fundamental precepts of Communist control. It was probably inevitable that Daqiu's success could not have been gained without brushing up against the obdurate structure of the Communist state. Deng Xiaoping's loosening of the Party's grip on China's economic production in 1978 led to the creation of a social-economic space that soon outgrew the institutional and organizational capability of the Party to control. Still, village enterprises like Daqiu's had to fight an uphill battle for survival and growth. Not only did they have to employ creative means in order to secure resources for the production and distribution of their products, often by circumventing the regular channels, but also they had to ward off the bitter jealousy that their success inevitably invited. For example, leftists in Beijing accused Daqiu of undermining the prospects for socialist economic development by setting up factories that competed against state-owned enterprises, while county bureaucrats attacked it for developing a material prosperity that, in their eyes, far exceeded its lot.
Since the success of economic reforms in Daqiu was contingent on the extent to which the village could shake off the straitjacket imposed on it by the conservative opposition, its economic ambition unavoidably embroiled it in matters of political import. This was nowhere more evident than in the rise and fall of Yu Zuomin, the architect-patriarch of Daqiu's economic miracle. Emboldened by Daqiu's spectacular success, Yu became increasingly vocal in championing the cause of rural economic independence as well as social and economic justice for China's peasant population. What eventually led to Yu's undoing was his political discourse; he came to view the Party as not only patently inconsequential in rural economics, but also as increasingly irrelevant in village politics. In the end, the fear of withering political control led the Party to crack down on the recalcitrant Daqiu. A murder case in 1992 gave the Party the long-sought opportunity to purge Daqiu of its leaders, most of whom received long jail sentences on charges of instigating disorder by interfering with the county investigation team sent to look into the crime. Yu himself languished in prison until his death, in 1999.
Gilley is to be commended for his study of Daqiu, and for using it to expose some of the most profound contradictions that exist in Chinese society in the era of economic reforms. The story is captivating, and Gilley's skillful narration makes reading this book a lively, enjoyable experience. What may be debatable is his identifying Daqiu, and Yu Zuomin, in particular, as representing some sort of incipient democracy. While it is true that Yu spoke in the interest of rural China and that the Daqiu experiment seems to augur the coming of age of a new moneyed class vis-¨¤-vis the Communist state, Daqiu was no democratic wonderland. For all its economic feats, Daqiu was a thoroughly paternalistic conglomerate run by an unrepentant autocrat. Furthermore, that Daqiu has continued to prosper even after the Party resumed control of the village in 1992 seems to suggest that economic growth can indeed be achieved within the framework prescribed by the Communist state, and to that extent, it undercuts Gilley's contention that rural reforms inevitably imply democratic possibilities. It appears that much more than economic well-being will have to happen before China finds a new social force capable of moving the country toward democratization.

W. K. Cheng teaches East Asian history at Mills College in Oakland, California.