南街村

Bucking the general trend of privatization in China, the model village of Nanjie has cultivated the image of a “small zone of communism,” a modern-day commune that practices extreme measures of egalitarianism. Such an image is promoted by some Party leaders at the center as well as local cadres, and bolstered by the spectacular display of the village’s wealth. With the aid of fieldwork data, our research examines the claims of “success,” “egalitarianism,” and the attribution of “success” to “egalitarianism.” We find that the village’s early rise to prosperity took place before the celebrated Maoist practices were introduced, and that its later rapid development was an artifact of politically awarded state loans. We then examine the “actually existing Maoism” by uncovering the capitalist labor relations between the local villagers and the hired laborers, and the political inequality among the village’s own legal residents. We conclude by examining the political processes that gave rise to this star village in the post-Mao era.

Abstract This article introduces the analytical framework of “factional model-making” to describe and explain the open political contention of Chinese Communist Party elites in the policy process. Party elites undertake factional model-making to express policy disagreements and to signal their power to the regime: by flouting the Party line publicly without punishment, they show that they can influence the Party line and therefore pressurize the regime into acknowledging their position in the opaque power structure. This article chronicles the history of factional model-making from the 1960s to 2012 and examines in detail the making of Henan's Nanjie Village into a re-collectivization model by the Party's left. The process began in the 1990s and ended soon after Xi Jinping came to power in 2012, which prompted Nanjie's patrons to recast the village as a Party model trumpeting Xi's line. The suppression of factional model-making under Xi is discussed in the conclusion.

… alternatives for the rural economy. The most prominent example of maintaining the goals and methods of the socialist era, Nanjiecun (South Street Village), a “Maoist” town in Henan …

… Nanjiecun village was a special case in China, but it represented some old ideals that still survived in people’s minds. Villagers in Nanjiecun … were numerous; the village provided free …

… and success of Nanjiecun village in southern Henan. Nanjiecun is famous/infamous for being the most ‘Maoist,’ or more accurately, neo-Maoist collective and space left in China, with a …

… not the first time that rural China saw a rising tide of the rural cooperative movement. Rural cooperatives first … Yi Nanjiecun wei li, dui reng baochi de jitizhi jinxing hezuozhi gaige [Nanjie …

… Nanjiecun: a village in Linying county, Henan province, … Rural industrial enterprises there continued to offer villagers … situation is more like China’s Nanjiecun than Nanjiecun itself.** …

… and local patterns of socio-economic development, partly to highlight … collective economy and outside, a market economy.”Objectives on the “inside” are to develop a collective economy …

… collectively owned and managed.After the people's commune system collapsed in the early 1980s, rural China is still collectively … elimination of the market economy in the Maoist period …

… village, increasing the income of village enterprises and other all-round and multi-dimensional approaches can alleviate the difficulties faced by the elderly care model in Nanjie Village. …