Model Rebels: The Rise and Fall of China's Richest Village

by Bruce Gilley

A portentous tale of rural rebellion unfolds in Bruce Gilley's moving chronicle of a village on the northern China plains during the post-1978 economic reform era. Gilley examines how Daqiu Village, led by Yu Zuomin, a charismatic Communist Party secretary and president of the local industrial conglomerate, became the richest village in China and a model for the rural reforms of the 1980s and early 1990s. A growing campaign of political resistance led to increasing tensions between the villagers and the Chinese state, and eventually, in an event that made headlines around the world, an armed confrontation between the village and higher authorities backed by paramilitary police brought Yu Zuomin and his village crashing down.

236 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2001

About the author

Bruce Gilley is Professor of Political Science at the Mark O. Hatfield School of Government at Portland State University. His research centers on comparative and international politics and public policy. His work covers issues as diverse as democracy, climate change, political legitimacy, and international conflict. He is a specialist on the politics of China and Asia. He is the author of four university-press books, including The Nature of Asian Politics (2015), The Right to Rule: How States Win and Lose Legitimacy (2009) and China’s Democratic Future (2004) in addition to several co-edited volumes. His scholarly articles have appeared in journals including Comparative Political Studies and the European Journal of Political Research and his policy articles in journals including Foreign Affairs and the Washington Quarterly. A member of the editorial boards of the Journal of Democracy and the Journal of Contemporary China, Gilley has received grants from the Smith-Richardson Foundation and the Taiwan Foundation for Democracy. He was a Commonwealth Scholar at Oxford University from 1989 to 1991 and a Woodrow Wilson Scholar at Princeton University from 2004 to 2006. From 1992 to 2002, he was a journalist in Hong Kong where he wrote for the Eastern Express newspaper and then the Far Eastern Economic Review magazine.His biggest scoop was exposing an illicit technology transfer by a Stanford professor to China's military.

Dr. Gilley is the Principal of Policy Foresight Associates LLC, a Portland-based firm providing research and strategy advice on public policies and programs for clients in the United States and abroad. He is chapter president of the Oregon Association of Scholars, the state chapter of the National Association of Scholars and member of the Heterodox Academy. He is founding signatory of the Oregon Academic Faculty Pledge on Freedom.

Reviews

[Kevin · Rating 4 out of 5]

Model Rebels was my introduction to a mode of literature that has overtaken my reading: the "village study." I’m now on my third study and must effuse: these works are highly intimate sociographic, socioeconomic, sociopolitical, ethnographic (ad. infinitum) *thrillers.*

Are you interested in accounts of agrarian socialist policy reform and its effects at the ground level? Would you care to follow along a poor peasant village’s meteoric rise to incredible wealth, and further along, its eventual downfall? You’ll see all of this through the eyes of individual villagers, with great pains taken to record interviews.

Model Rebels “examines how Daqiu Village, led by Yu Zuomin, a charismatic Communist Party secretary and president of the local industrial conglomerate, became the richest village in China and a model for the rural reforms of the 1980s and early 1990s.” This village, Daqiu, was known throughout its region for being so poor that its villagers could not afford even a brick -- reflected in this regional joke:

Question: What's the best way to kill someone in Daqiu without getting caught?
Answer: Bash in his head with a brick. No Judge will ever believe that a person from Daqiu has enough money to own a brick. You are sure to be set free.

But 10 years into China’s post-Mao economic reform, Daqiu was producing 3 percent of China's steel. The villagers owned imported cars, had their own private television cable system, and the village treasury held hundreds of millions of dollars.All because of spirited and stubborn village leader Yu Zuomin. It was the “Yu Zuomin phenonemon” [Yu Zuomin xianxiang], and people throughout the country were visiting Daqiu to learn how to emulate its success. Reading this incredible success story is rendered even more dramatic because as you read, you know, the whole time, that this all culminates in armed confrontation between the villagers and Chinese paramilitary police.

In short, Gilley doesn't just tell a story of economic growth, but also narrates many of the developments that occurred in the village alongside. The local village leader, Yu Zuomin, a visionary, who leads Daqiu through this economic miracle becomes a dictator and tries to take on the Chinese government. There is everything in this story from greed, corruption, and bribery to murders and cover-ups.

I’ve rated this 4 instead of 5 stars because Gilley is too heavy handed with his lack of... socioeconomic relativism -- he makes it quite, quite, *quite* apparent upon which side of the political spectrum he falls, and it reeks of a starkly "Western" perspective.