{"id":238,"date":"2007-02-25T01:03:31","date_gmt":"2007-02-25T06:03:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.froginawell.net\/china\/2007\/02\/when-is-a-farmer-not-a-farmer-when-he%e2%80%99s-chinese-then-he%e2%80%99s-a-peasant\/"},"modified":"2014-08-30T13:40:06","modified_gmt":"2014-08-30T13:40:06","slug":"when-is-a-farmer-not-a-farmer-when-hes-chinese-then-hes-a-peasant","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/froginawell.net\/frog\/2007\/02\/when-is-a-farmer-not-a-farmer-when-hes-chinese-then-hes-a-peasant\/","title":{"rendered":"When is a Farmer not a Farmer? When He\u2019s Chinese: Then He\u2019s A Peasant"},"content":{"rendered":"

After Mao Zedong died in 1976, they put his body on display in one of those see-through coffins which Lenin made popular. Shortly after, the NBC evening news commentator, David Brinkley, termed this \u201cpeasant under glass\u201d \u2013 a racist flippancy which would not have been accepted (or probably even thought of) for the dead leader of a Western state.<\/o><\/p>\n

Now the thing is that Mao wasn\u2019t even a peasant: He never made his living with a hoe (if anything he was a landlord); he earned the highest educational degree available in his home province at the time; he was successively a librarian, teacher, and school principal; and for most of his career he was a salaried government official. He saw himself in the tradition of rulers and state builders like Qin Shi Huangdi and George Washington. Mao is a peasant only if all<\/em> Chinese are peasants in essence, simply by virtue of being Chinese. (Curiously, for some of the same Orientalist reasons, Mao and his successor Deng Xiaoping were also held to be \u201cemperors.\u201d That is, all<\/em> rulers in <\/st1>Beijing<\/st1> were \u201cemperors\u201d by virtue of being Chinese.)<\/o><\/p>\n

So when I looked into it, I was surprised to find that the use of the word \u201cpeasant\u201d rather than \u201cfarmer\u201d was relatively new. I spent a pleasant afternoon in <\/st1>the library pulling books off the shelf and found that until the 1920s, Americans religiously used \u201cfarmer\u201d for China<\/st1>, \u201cpeasant\u201d for Europe, Russia<\/st1>, and even the Mediterranean<\/st1>. F.H. King\u2019s classic 1911 study is Farmers of Forty Centuries<\/strong>.<\/o><\/p>\n

After about 1930, the words switched positions. Pearl Buck\u2019s The Good Earth <\/strong>(1931), for instance, uses the word \u201cfarmer,\u201d never \u201cpeasant,\u201d but after that, Americans overwhelmingly prefered \u201cpeasant.\u201d When Oprah Winfrey chose The Good Earth<\/strong> for her book club in 2005, the New York Times bestseller list said it was about \u201cpeasant\u201d life.<\/o><\/p>\n

In recent years, \u201cpeasant\u201d has come under fire. A writer in China Daily<\/strong> wrote in 1985 that \u201cfrom now on, the word peasant no longer suits <\/st1>China<\/st1>‘s rural population.\u201d Randy Stross called \u201cpeasant\u201d a \u201cquaint taxonomic term that Americans usually used and that served to keep the Chinese apart \u2013 <\/span>and ranked vaguely below \u2013 <\/span>the ‘farmers’ at home.\u201d The British anthropologist Polly Hill attacked the term first because it confused all residents within a village, whether they farmed, peddled, wove, cooked, or lent money (or did each in succession), and second because it lumped together villagers in Africa, Latin America, and Asia who are actually in quite different situations. <\/o><\/p>\n

What did Americans down to Pearl Buck mean when they insisted France<\/st1> and Russia<\/st1> had peasants but the United States<\/st1> and <\/st1>China<\/st1> had farmers? The distinction was central to Jeffersonian democracy. Thomas Jefferson charged that \u201cthe mobs of great cities add just so much to the support of pure government as sores do to the strength of the human body\u201d and believed that the \u201ccultivators of the earth are the most valuable citizens.\u201d Old World<\/st1> despotism was based on landless peasants who did not have the independent means to stand up to the dukes, lords, barons, and kings. A \u201cpeasant\u201d worked under \u201cmedieval\u201d or \u201cfeudal\u201d conditions, while a propertied \u201cfarmer\u201d produced free or democratic rule.<\/o><\/p>\n

Now we can re-conceive our problem of why there were farmers in <\/st1>China<\/st1>. As best I can make out, the implicit logic runs something like this:<\/o><\/p>\n