Eating Rice from Bamboo Roots: The Social History of a Community of Handicraft Papermakers in Rural Sichuan, 1920–2000 (Harvard East Asian Monographs)

'This book charts the vicissitudes of a rural community of papermakers in Sichuan. The process of transforming bamboo into paper involves production-related and social skills, as well as the everyday skills that allowed these papermakers to survive in an era of tumultuous change. The Chinese revolution—understood as a series of interconnected political, social, and technological transformations—was, Jacob Eyferth argues, as much about the redistribution of skill, knowledge, and technical control as it was about the redistribution of land and political power. The larger context for this study is the “rural–urban divide”: the institutional, social, and economic cleavages that separate rural people from urbanites. This book traces the changes in the distribution of knowledge that led to a massive transfer of technical control from villages to cities, from primary producers to managerial elites, and from women to men. It asks how a vision of rural people as unskilled has affected their place in the body politic and contributed to their disenfranchisement. By viewing skill as a contested resource, subject to distribution struggles, it addresses the issue of how revolution, state-making, and marketization have changed rural China.' Frontmatter Tables, Maps, and Illustrations (page xiii) Weights, Measurements, and Money (page xv) Introduction (page 1) 1 Locations of Skill (page 23) 2 Community and Kinship in the Jiajiang Hills (page 45) 3 Class and Commerce (page 68) 4 Artisans into Peasants (page 92) 5 Papermakers on the Socialist Road, 1949 to 1958 (page 116) 6 The Great Leap Famine and Rural Deindustrialization (page 140) 7 The Return to Household Production (page 158) 8 Paper Trade and Village Industries in the Reform Era (page 180) 9 The Jiadangqiao Stele (page 203) Conclusion (page 219) Appendixes A Character List for Selected Chinese Names and Terms (page 235) B Glossary of Selected Papermaking Terms (page 243) C Main Paper Types and Their Markers in the Twentieth Century (page 249) Reference Matter Notes (page 255) Works Cited (page 283) Index (page 315) Based on a study of rural papermakers in Sichuan, China, between 1920 and 2000, this book traces the changes in the distribution of knowledge that led to a massive transfer of technical control from villages to cities; from primary producers to managerial elites and from men to women Eyferth charts the vicissitudes of a rural community of papermakers in Sichuan, tracing the changes in the distribution of knowledge that led to a massive transfer of technical control from villages to cities, from primary producers to managerial elites, and from women to men.