New Rural Reconstruction Movement - History

History

Around 2002, some Chinese advocates of rural cooperative experimentation began adopting the term "Rural Reconstruction" from China's 1920s-1930s Rural Reconstruction Movement. The term "NRR" was first publicly used in January 2003, when CSER (China Society of Economic Reform, the think-tank/ publishing house where Wen Tiejun was based at the time) sponsored a national workshop on NRR in Beijing, attended by dozens of grassroots activists as well as supporters from Hong Kong. In July 2003, grassroots activist Qiu Jiansheng founded the James Yen Institute for Rural Reconstruction near the site of James Yen's 1930s Rural Reconstruction center in Dingzhou, along with the support of the local government, CSER, and Lau Kin Chi's China Social Services and Development Research Centre. This became one of two national centers for NRR activities - mainly training student volunteers and grassroots activists on how to set up, run and support projects such as cooperatives - until it closed in 2007. In 2004 the other, still active national center - the Liang Shuming Center for Rural Reconstruction - was founded in Beijing by grassroots activist Liu Xiangbo, also with the support of Wen Tiejun. After Wen left CSER and founded the Rural Reconstruction Center at Renmin University in 2005, the latter replaced CSER as an important institutional and economic base for the Liang Shuming Center and other NRR organizations and activities, such as the Guoren Green Alliance (a marketing network for environmentally-friendly farming cooperatives) and the Little Donkey Farm (one of China's first experiments with community supported agriculture).

Other academic institutions, such as the Center for Rural Governance Studies at Huazhong University of Science and Technology, and other NGOs and networks, such as the Guizhou Association for Community Building and Rural Governance, identify with NRR, although some emphasize their differences from the current of NRR centered on Wen Tiejun and the Liang Shuming Center. Others, and an uncertain but certainly large number of grassroots experiments, have been influenced by NRR without using this term. To complicate matters, since the Chinese government began promoting the policy of “Constructing a New Socialist Countryside” (NSC, Chinese: 建设社会主义新农村; pinyin: jianshe shehuizhuyi xin nongcun) in 2006, many NRR advocates made a subtle switch to the state's term "NSC" instead of "NRR," presenting their views and experiments as "peasant-centered" or "village-community-centered" approaches to NSC. (While this new CCP policy is influenced in part by NRR, it should be primarily understood as an attempt to build the conditions for developing the rural consumer market.)