College of Asia and the Pacific, The Australian National UniversityAustralian National University

The Man Awakened from Dreams: One Man's Life in a North China Village 1857-1942 byHenrietta HarrisonReview by: Peter J. SeyboltThe China Journal, No. 55 (Jan., 2006), pp. 183-185Published by: The University of Chicago Press on behalf of the College of Asia and the Pacific, TheAustralian National UniversityStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20066147 .

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REVIEWS, JANUARY 2006 183

traditionally relied on a large number of offspring to provide an economic

security blanket. Male offspring were thus valued over girls. All the girls interviewed by Fong, however, were raised to be winners and

their parents placed great expectations on their shoulders. Some of them were

extremely competitive and confident. In fact, they were usually the best and

brightest students at school with regard to their academic achievements,

outperforming their male peers, believing in themselves and having no regret about their gender. The one-child policy, introduced in the late 1970s, has

changed the previous pattern of parental investment. Urban daughters now enjoy

unprecedented parental support. Low fertility has enabled mothers to get paid work and thus gain the ability to demonstrate their filiality by providing their own parents with financial support. Because their mothers have proven that

daughters can provide their parents with support in old age, and because these

girls have no brothers for their parents to favor, daughters have more power than

ever before to defy disadvantageous gender norms.

Fong's book will be of great interest to scholars and graduate students of

contemporary China. It will be of particular interest to those who want to learn more about urban China's education system, which is fiercely competitive and

demanding. But one needs to be reminded that China's social structure is

characterized by a deep and increasing divide between the rural and the urban, so

much so that Fong's evidence and arguments can only apply to urban schools.

Even in urban schools specially set up for the children of migrant workers who

have gone to Chinese cities to live and work, the aspirations of children and their

parents are not about First World lifestyles. They are about survival.

Jing Jun

Tsinghua University

The Man Awakened from Dreams: One Man's Life in a North China Village 1857-1942, by Henrietta Harrison. Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2005.

xii + 207 pp. US$40.00 (hardcover), US$16.95 (paperback).

This is a wonderful book, which I recommend highly for use in a variety of

academic courses on Chinese history and culture as well as for general reading

pleasure. By concentrating on the life of a single individual, Henrietta Harrison

has significantly enhanced our understanding of Chinese history and culture in

general during a critical period of transition. Her book is a splendid example of

the value of studying particular individuals, areas and events to expand, refine

and enliven the relatively abstract generalizations of more broadly based studies.

The "man awakened from dreams" in the title is Liu Dapeng, an

impoverished scholar living in a small village in Shanxi Province in the late 19*

and early 20th centuries. We learn about him principally from his voluminous

writings?more than 400 handwritten volumes, including a diary, an

autobiography, a local gazetteer, travel observations, a plan for local flood

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184 THE CHINA JOURNAL, NO. 55

defenses, a collection of local superstitions, a family genealogy, family

regulations, essays on various topics and many volumes of poetry. Harrison has

judiciously used these materials, as well as interviews with Liu's descendents, local records and numerous other sources, to draw us into Liu's world.

Liu Dapeng was not a typical example of his time or place ("Real people are

never typical" p. 7); rather, he provides a striking example of idealized

Confucian rectitude and propriety. He thought of himself as an exemplar of

Confucian values and earned the respect of his neighbors for his honesty and

sense of justice. But his Confucian thought and behavior were not sufficient

qualifications for the appointment to government office to which he aspired; he

considered himself a failure for never having passed the national civil service

examinations, though he was one of a very select few who succeeded in county and provincial examinations, becoming a member of the lower gentry class. In

his determination to lead a Confucian life, adherence to traditional expectations of filial behavior was Liu's foremost concern. He continually chided himself for

caring insufficiently for his parents and ancestors, to the unrealistic (and

unwittingly egotistical) extent that he was convinced that natural disasters, such

as floods, drought, and personal tragedies like the death of a child were Heaven's

retribution for his personal moral failings. As a Confucian exemplar, Liu had enormous respect for tradition and great

distrust for the "modernization" efforts that characterized the late Qing Dynasty and early Republican period in which he lived. He felt increasingly isolated after

the revolution of 1911, writing in his journal: "Everyone is for the reforms, and I

alone hold to the old ways. Everyone is destroying the bonds of relationships, and I alone hold to principles" (p. 93). He felt that concepts of democracy and

progress then in vogue threatened the essential moral foundation of society,

though ineluctably he was forced to make concessions to the times and

participate, albeit peripherally, in the process of change he abhorred. He was

elected to the new National Assembly in 1915, much to his bewilderment ("I was

one of the representatives, but I don't know what a representative is" p. 100), but

soon became disillusioned and was certain that Heaven had sent numerous

portents indicating condemnation of the new Republic. Even as Confucianism, and Liu's prestige as a scholar, declined after the revolution, he maintained a

traditional sense of gentry obligation to serve as a local leader and representative of the community in such activities as mediating disputes and taking the lead in

protests against ever-increasing taxes levied to support the projects of the new

Republic and the military ambitions of the Shanxi warlord Yan Xishan. His lack

of success in the latter endeavor is symbolic of the end of the world he

understood.

In Harrison's account of Liu Dapeng's personal and family life, we also

learn a great deal about the details of daily life in northern China. The book is rich with descriptions of popular belief, children's games, schooling, medical

practices, food, birth and death rituals, the status and role of women, business

practices, farming and land ownership, the adjudication of water distribution,

mining, papermaking, commerce and much more. Inextricably related to these

local concerns and practices, and directly affecting them, were the processes of

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REVIEWS, JANUARY 2006 185

global change that Harrison succinctly describes and analyzes. During the course

of Liu Dapeng's life, Shanxi Province, once a prosperous center of banking and

international commerce, became increasingly impoverished due to events over

which local people had no control and of which they had little understanding. The Shanxi merchants who once dominated a thriving trade with Mongolia and

Russia were progressively ruined by national and international events?Western

imperialism and the gradual shift of trade from the northwest to the southeast, the

completion of the Trans-Siberian Railroad in 1905 bypassing traditional trade

routes, Mongolian independence in 1912, World War I and the Russian

Revolution, the great worldwide depression, and the recurrent military activities

of the Boxers, warlord armies, the Japanese, the Kuomintang and the

Communists. "Between 1900 and 1980, the villages of central Shanxi were

transformed from prosperous centers of commerce and industry into

impoverished and largely agricultural communities" (p. 7). Liu's family became

desperately poor, as did most of their neighbors. While the events of global significance mentioned in Harrison's account

provide necessary context for understanding what was happening in the remote

villages of Shanxi Province, it is equally true that her concrete description of

family and village life provides the reader with a nuanced and more profound

understanding of the significance of those larger events. The Man Awakened

from Dreams is a skillfully crafted book that deserves a wide readership.

Peter J. Seybolt

University of Vermont

Wild Grass: Three Stories of Change in Modern China by Ian Johnson. New

York: Pantheon Books, 2004 ix + 324 pp. US$24.00 (hardcover).

This book by a former Beijing Bureau Chief of the Wall Street Journal is an

engaging narrative that profiles three ordinary yet remarkable individuals whose

experience in confronting the injustices of China's political and legal system reflect the tensions simmering beneath the surface of China's economic miracle.

Johnson's intimate account reveals what he clearly believes to be the stirrings of

a quiet revolution at the grassroots that must eventually transform China into a

fairer society. The first of Johnson's three long chapters traces the story of former middle

school teacher, self-educated legal services officer and peasant champion, Ma

Wenlin. Inspired by the success of the Peijiawan case in which peasants

successfully sued the local government for exceeding its authority in taxation, Ma filed a similar lawsuit on behalf of aggrieved peasants in his home county of

Zizhou in Shaanxi Province.

Ma's story strikes at the heart of the crisis in China's countryside. Economic

and administrative reforms have placed increasing pressure on local levels of the

Party-state to generate their own revenues. In industrialized areas, local

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