The Rockefeller Foundation, the Rural Work Discussion Society, and the Remaking of Rural China

In the late 1920s, intellectuals, officials, and activists throughout China were writing and talking about “rural reform” and what it meant for the Chinese nation and economy. While most of the prominent reform leaders were Chinese, many had been educated in the United States and U.S. funders were primary funders of several national-level rural reform organizations. This paper argues that out of this collaboration between Chinese reformers and U.S. funders like the Rockefeller Foundation emerged a distinct notion of what a modern countryside and its economy, government, and society should look like. In the early 1930s, the New York–based Rockefeller Foundation began funding the Mass Education Movement in Dingxian, Hebei, a rural reform project headed by charismatic leader James Yen and one of the best-known reform projects in China and internationally. The MEM goals of literacy, citizenship education, agricultural outreach, and social organization suited the social reform agenda the Rockefeller Foundation was promoting and funding at the time from Appalachia to East Asia; the Foundation granted several hundred thousand dollars to the MEM over the next decade, a small but not insubstantial section of the million-odd dollars the Foundation invested in China annually. Despite the national fascination with rural reform in China, both Chinese reformers and Rockefeller Foundation officials worried that the reform movement lacked necessary trained personnel and technical expertise. At the urging of Rockefeller officials in China, reform leaders like Yen and Liang Shuming spearheaded efforts to bring together leaders from rural reform projects around China to discuss ideas, policy, and funding. With the formation of these organizations in the mid-1930s, a national “Rural Reconstruction Movement” emerged that promoted an agenda for rural modernization that integrated the foreign and modern with traditional ways of engaging the countryside.