Rural industrialization is often seen as a characteristic feature of Chinese socialism, under both Mao and his successors. It is less often recognized that rural industrialization did not start from scratch: the pre-1949 Chinese countryside was already industrialized to a considerable degree, though most rural industries were unmechanized "proto-industries" -small-scale, decentralized, and household-based. Modernizing governments, including both the Kuomintang and CCP regimes, tended to see such industries as obstacles on their march towards industrial modernity, understood as mass production in urban factories. This article focuses on one particular industry, handicraft papermaking in Jiajiang county, Sichuan. It argues that Maoist policies, with their emphasis on local grain self-sufficiency, discriminated against communities that depended on specialized production and exchange. To the extent that these communities had specialized in crafts in order to compensate for an inhospitable natural environment (as was the case in many upland areas), Maoist policies penalized the already disadvantaged -with sometimes disastrous consequences.
SUMMARY: For decades after the socialist revolution, people in rural China continued to wear homespun cloth, and millions of rural women continued to spend a large part of their waking hours producing cloth and clothing. This is puzzling because the state opposed manual cloth production as wasteful of labor and raw materials, and because state monopolies should have ensured that all cotton ended up in the hands of the state and that all rural people were supplied with rationed machine-made cloth. This article looks at the reasons for the long survival of handloom cloth. These include the ways in which manual cloth production was integrated with rural gender norms and with a gift economy that prescribed the exchange of cloth at major life cycle events, and the existence of interlocking scarcities (of grain, cash, cotton, and cloth) that forced rural people to sell their cloth rations and make their own cloth from whatever cotton they could scrape together.The image of rural women hunched over spinning wheels and looms does not figure prominently in the historiography of socialist China. Chao Kang's study of the Chinese cotton industry assumes that manual textile production was phased out in the early 1950s, and other works in English and Chinese concur.1 Yet interviews and archival sources show that tubu (homespun cloth) remained the standard garb for many rural people until the very end of the collective period, and that for an entire generation, millions of rural women continued to spend large portions of their waking hours at the spinning wheel or the loom, usually after a full day of collective labor in the fields. This is perplexing for two reasons: firstly, official discourses in the PRC did not afford legitimacy to the labor of making cloth and clothing; to the 1.
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