Mobilizing for Development

The Modernization of Rural East Asia

Kristen E. Looney

• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781501748851
• Topic: Volkswirtschaftslehre
• Subtopic: Entwicklungsökonomie

Mobilizing for Development tackles the question of how countries achieve rural development and offers a new way of thinking about East Asia's political economy that challenges the developmental state paradigm. Through a comparison of Taiwan (1950s–1970s), South Korea (1950s–1970s), and China (1980s–2000s), Kristen E. Looney shows that different types of development outcomes—improvements in agricultural production, rural living standards, and the village environment—were realized to different degrees, at different times, and in different ways. She argues that rural modernization campaigns, defined as policies demanding high levels of mobilization to effect dramatic change, played a central role in the region and that divergent development outcomes can be attributed to the interplay between campaigns and institutions. The analysis departs from common portrayals of the developmental state as wholly technocratic and demonstrates that rural development was not just a byproduct of industrialization.

Looney's research is based on several years of fieldwork in Asia and makes a unique contribution by systematically comparing China's development experience with other countries. Relevant to political science, economic history, rural sociology, and Asian Studies, the book enriches our understanding of state-led development and agrarian change.

1

THE ROLE OF RURAL INSTITUTIONS AND STATE CAMPAIGNS IN DEVELOPMENT

Most accounts of rural development in East Asia privilege the role of land reform and the emergence of developmental states. While this narrative is not incorrect, it is woefully incomplete. A thorough examination of rural sector change in the region reveals the transformative effects of rural modernization campaigns, which I define as policies demanding high levels of bureaucratic and popular mobilization to overhaul traditional ways of life in the countryside. East Asian governments’ use of campaigns runs counter to standard portrayals of the developmental state as wholly technocratic and demonstrates that rural development was not the inevitable result of industrialization. Rather, it was an intentional policy goal accomplished with techniques that aligned more with Maoism or Leninism than with market principles or careful economic management.

This chapter begins by assessing common explanations for East Asian rural development in the post–World War II period. First, I consider the argument that Japan and its former colonies, Taiwan and Korea, had favorable initial conditions. Although the rural sector in each country was badly damaged by war, it quickly recovered because of prewar technological, infrastructural, and institutional development. Second, communist movements at home and abroad, as well as the United States’ strong presence in the region, provided an impetus for land reforms that contributed to agricultural production, social equality, and political stability. Third, all these factors—Japan, the US, and the spread of communism—led to the emergence of developmental states. Even though these states prioritized industrial development, the countryside also benefited from institutions that promoted rural development, including a technocratic bureaucracy and encompassing farmers’ organizations.

Next, I turn to the case of China and discuss some of the reasons for rural policy failures in the Mao era (1949–1976) and successes in the reform era (1978–present). Like these other countries, China completed a land reform program in the early 1950s and implemented several policies that improved rural living standards. However, land reform was quickly followed by collectivization, and many development achievements were wiped out by such factors as excessive extraction, poor institutions, and ideological extremism. Under reform, China moved away from socialist agriculture. Decollectivization, characterized by some as a “second land reform,” led to unprecedented poverty reduction.1 Agriculture and rural industry also benefited from the rise of a technocratic ruling elite. In this and other ways, China started to resemble a developmental state, and much of its economic success has been attributed to a kind of convergence with its East Asian neighbors. I suggest that while all these arguments (initial conditions, land reform, developmental states) have partial explanatory power, they do not fully account for variation across countries, over time, or along different dimensions of rural development (agricultural production, living standards, the village environment). They also fall short of explaining how these countries dealt with the problem of agricultural adjustment as the industrialization process deepened.

I then present the book’s main arguments about the effects of institutions and campaigns on rural development. Rural modernization campaigns are different from the typical response to agricultural adjustment—namely, import restrictions, subsidies, and other measures designed to raise farm incomes—and they furthermore have played a central role in East Asian rural development. This is an empirical claim, not a normative one. Campaigns only work under a narrow set of conditions that cannot be easily replicated, and within East Asia, they produced a mixed range of outcomes. I hypothesize that rural modernization campaigns are more likely to succeed when the goal is development rather than extraction, when the central government can control local officials, and when rural citizens can meaningfully participate in the policy process. After elaborating these points, I relate them to the main cases of Taiwan (most successful), South Korea (less successful), and China (least successful) by comparing their local governments and rural organizations, key institutions that affected campaign outcomes. I also develop two additional hypotheses about farmers’ organizations and the qualities that make them more or less effective advocates for small farmers, both in terms of providing essential services and shaping rural policy. I contend that they exhibit varying degrees of linkage and autonomy in relation to the state and villagers, and that these features, in turn, explain long-term differences in government responsiveness and agricultural production, an area where campaigns have enjoyed limited success.

The last part of the chapter revisits the case of Japan and concludes with a few points about why existing theories of state-led development need to be reexamined. Japan provides the earliest example of a campaign approach to development in the region. From the 1900s through the 1960s, there were in fact several campaigns launched by the state in order to protect and develop the countryside—the Local Improvement Movement, the Rural Revitalization Campaign, the New Village Campaign, and the New Life Campaign. Not all these campaigns were successful, but they illustrate the book’s basic premise about the strategic use of campaigns in East Asia. They also provide preliminary support for the arguments about how campaigns and institutions interact to affect development outcomes. In that sense, the Japanese case serves the purpose of a “plausibility probe,” defined by Harry Eckstein as a “stage of inquiry preliminary to testing,” which aims to establish the potential validity of candidate theories.2 Overall, the ideas developed in this chapter present a challenge to studies that portray state intervention in rural society as inherently predatory. They also suggest a need to reconsider some fundamental assumptions about how developmental states operate and the foundations of their success.

Existing Theory and Its Limitations

The Japan Factor

After World War II, agricultural production in East Asia quickly returned to, and then surpassed, prewar peak levels, as early as 1950 in Japan, 1951 in Taiwan, and 1954 in South Korea (following the Korean War). Even during the “economic miracle” period of 1955–1970 in Japan, when industrialization pushed gross national product growth into double digits, agriculture’s performance remained strong, averaging 3 percent per year.3 In Taiwan, agriculture experienced a fifteen-year stretch of accelerated growth, averaging 4.6 percent per year from 1952 to 1967. In the 1970s, it slowed down but maintained an impressive average growth rate of 3.2 percent.4 South Korea exhibited a similar pattern, with agricultural production growing 3.5 percent per year from 1954 to 1973, and then decelerating slightly in the 1970s.5

Comparing East Asia with the rest of the world reveals just how exceptional this performance was. According to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, the global average annual growth rate for agriculture during the 1952–1971 period was 2.7 percent, lower than all the averages just reported.6 Looking only at crop yields (not total sector production), East Asia and the Pacific registered 2.7 percent annual growth for the 1961–1975 period, compared to 1 percent for Latin America and the Caribbean, 0.8 percent for the Middle East and North Africa, 1.7 percent for South Asia, and 1.3 percent for sub-Saharan Africa.7

To explain the success of Japan, Taiwan, and Korea, scholars have highlighted the favorable initial conditions these countries inherited. During Japan’s Tokugawa era (1603–1868), significant progress was made in agriculture, such that by the time of the Meiji era (1868–1912), Japanese farmers had already adopted advanced techniques in irrigation, double cropping, fertilizer application, land reclamation, and seed improvement.8 The Meiji government established numerous rural extension and cooperative institutions, but these were actually secondary to Japan’s “cultivating landlords” in terms of promoting rural development.9 Unlike many rural societies where absentee land ownership is common, Japanese landlords were small-scale operators based in their villages. According to Penelope Francks, they integrated rural areas into the larger economy by acting as “a conduit, bringing new agricultural techniques, commercial opportunities and ideas and education into nineteenth-century Japanese villages.”10 This grassroots technological development resulted in five decades of sustained agricultural growth (1870s–1910s) and spurred Japan’s industrial take-off through the generation of government revenue and exports.11

In colonial Taiwan (1895–1945) and Korea (1910–1945), Japanese authorities developed modern systems of transport, finance, education, and administration. Taiwan, for example, had almost no roads, railways, or financial institutions before Japan arrived, and the proportion of primary-age children enrolled in school was less than 10 percent. By the 1940s, Japan had connected the northern and southern ports of Keelung and Kaohsiung by railway, built over twelve thousand kilometers of roads, opened more than four hundred banks and credit cooperatives, and increased primary school enrollment to over 70 percent.12 In both Taiwan and Korea, cadastral surveys were used to clarify property rights, formalize landlord-tenant relations, and facilitate land taxation. These state-building efforts would have important long-term consequences for development. Writing about Korea, Atul Kohli observes that Japan’s successful penetration of the agrarian periphery “stands out as a fairly unique display of state efficacy in the comparative history of colonialism.” This legacy, he argues, helps to explain why later state-led industrialization efforts in South Korea and, by extension, Taiwan were so successful compared with India, Brazil, and Nigeria, where colonialism did not result in the creation of strong state institutions.13

On the question of how colonialism affected rural development specifically, previous research shows that its effects were mixed. Conditions were difficult for Taiwanese and Korean farmers because Japanese authorities exploited agriculture, but they also left behind modern technologies, infrastructure, and institutions. Under the policy of “Industrial Japan, Agricultural Taiwan,” the colonial government engineered a shift from subsistence to export agriculture, transforming Taiwan into a major supplier of rice, sugar, and other products for Japan’s domestic market.14 In fact, Taiwan underwent a green revolution in the 1920s–1930s, four decades before the rest of Asia, owing to the adoption of chemical fertilizers, high-yield varieties of rice, and new cultivation practices. Irrigated farmland increased from 32 to 64 percent of total cultivated land, and an extensive network of farmers’ organizations was built, employing about forty thousand people, with one extension worker for every thirty-two households. Through this system, the state distributed newly developed fertilizers and a variety known as ponlai rice, which led to 45 percent higher yields and a 5 percent growth rate for agriculture in the 1920s.15

Although not on the same scale as Taiwan, the colonial government in Korea built similar institutions and introduced advanced farming practices as part of its “Rice Production Increase Plan,” leading to 3 percent growth in rice output for most of the 1920s–1930s.16 Unfortunately for Korean farmers, consumption declined even as production increased, since one-third of the rice crop was exported.17 The threat of starvation drove many Koreans to migrate to Japan and Manchuria.18 Taiwanese farmers were slightly better off because the food-processing sector created local employment opportunities, allowing households to earn wages and engage in part-time farming.19 And while farmers in both places were subject to exploitation, farmers in Taiwan probably suffered less because of the island’s lower population density (which affected tenure security) and its different assigned role in the Japanese empire: Taiwan was designated as a base for agriculture and Korea as a base for industry.20 In contrast with Taiwan, Japanese-built industries in Korea were concentrated in urban areas, and the agricultural sector was largely neglected until after the Japanese Rice Riots of 1918, a series of demonstrations against escalating rice prices that prompted the government to increase supplies coming from the peninsula.21

These different prewar levels of agricultural development and patterns of industrialization created divergent postwar economic trajectories, with Taiwan prioritizing agriculture and Korea prioritizing industry. Nevertheless, advancements made during the Japanese colonial period, both in the metropole and the periphery, were part of the reason for these countries’ quick recovery and subsequent growth. The postwar governments of Taiwan and Korea were able to draw from existing institutional resources and rehabilitate, rather than build from scratch, the farmers’ organizations and extension systems first set up by the Japanese.22 Similarly, Japan’s postwar government established its national farmers’ association, Nokyo (also known as the Japan Agricultural Cooperatives Group, or JA), on the foundation of preexisting cooperatives. As during the colonial era, all these organizations would prove essential for rural policy implementation.

Still, initial conditions cannot explain much about other aspects of rural development besides the region’s strong record of agricultural production. Nor can they explain why farmers’ organizations were more than just instruments of resource extraction for the industrializing state. Later in the chapter, I theorize about when farmers’ organizations are more likely to provide effective extension services and advocate successfully for the interests of small farmers.

The Land Reform Agenda

The United States, as an occupying power in postwar Japan and South Korea, and as a major supporter of the Kuomintang (KMT) regime in Taiwan, had considerable influence over the region’s rural development. In 1951, President Harry Truman established the Inter-Agency Committee on Land Reform Problems to ensure that land reform was broadly incorporated into US foreign policy.23 In the context of the Cold War, the goals of land reform were intertwined with national defense—tenant societies would be transformed into freeholder societies in order to stop the spread of communism.

Wolf Ladejinsky, known as the architect of Japanese land reform, was one of the first people in the United States to write extensively about land as a political resource.24 He believed the Russian and Chinese communists had correctly recognized a political opportunity in addressing the grievances of tenants and landless farmers, and he called on the US government to “fight Communist ideology with an effective version of the American farm tradition.”25 Ladejinsky repeatedly emphasized how small family farms would promote democracy, or at least give farmers a stake in Asia’s noncommunist regimes. Indeed, several prominent scholars have noted a strong link between land ownership and political stability. Samuel Huntington writes, “no social group is more conservative than a land-holding peasantry and none is more revolutionary than a peasantry which owns too little land or pays too high a rental.”26 Similarly, Jeffery Paige found that of all agrarian systems, smallholder economies were the most stable.27

US-backed land reforms in Asia amounted to the largest noncommunist land reforms on record. They were also some of the most successfully executed and nonviolent examples of land redistribution ever attempted. The US military government in Japan carried out land reform between 1946 and 1950 with the help of local land commissions, which were elected bodies composed of landlords, owner-cultivators, and tenants. More than 2 million hectares (4.9 million acres) of farmland changed hands, a cap of 3 hectares (7.4 acres) was placed on the scale of ownership, with a higher allowance for Hokkaido, and the proportion of farm households classified as full owner-cultivators increased from 37 to 62 percent. Tenancy was not completely eliminated, but written contracts were introduced t...