Engineering the Chinese Village: Western Economics and Rural Development in Republican China

This paper explores the impact of Western economics on early twentieth-century Chinese thought on rural development by focusing on Richard Tawney’s and John Bernard Tayler’s work on the modernization of Chinese agriculture. Tawney’s and Tayler’s approaches differed dramatically. An established economist from the London School of Economics, Tawney was committed to a purely economic approach, which lead to a certain blindness to local social and cultural circumstances, while not being completely free from stereotypical perceptions of China. Tayler, on the other hand, was representative of Western “missionary economics” (most Western schools teaching Economics in China were Christian institutions). Tayler, professor of Economics at Yanjing University was influenced by his missionary background and saw in the Chinese rural village an opportunity to create a social and economic utopia, a living critique of Western modernity. Both approaches resonated with Chinese economists. An analysis of Tawney’s and Tayler’s work reveals that it is impossible to draw a line of demarcation between a “Western” and a “Chinese” approach to China’s rural development. Most Chinese economists had studied in the West and embraced Western economics. In addition, Tawney and Tayler collaborated closely with local economists. In a process of mutual influence, Tawney’s and Tayler’s views of rural reconstruction came to reflect ideological divisions that characterized the domestic economic debate. In this context the Chinese village in the early twentieth century became a site for global economic experimentation, going beyond a Western and Chinese dichotomy. Each supported by both Western and Chinese economists, highly modernist reform projects vied with projects that called for a Chinese version of rural modernity. In both cases, however, the peasant was denied any voice or agency and was reduced to the role of a malleable object to be molded into a model economic actor.