Alternative to development: an ethnographic study on a social experiment in rural China

Abstract

In the recent two decades, China has begun to incorporate the rural area into the development engine. State-led development predominated during this reconfiguration of the countryside, and commercializing the village became the mainstream development. Meantime, various small-scale and bottom-up social practices emerged in the sidestream. These social practices are often initiated by NGOs or intellectuals in an effort to mobilize non-state and non-capital social powers to seek alternative pathways for the rural communities. How can we understand this kind of social experiments? What’s the distinction between these “sidesteam” practices and the mainstream model led by the state and capital? What kind of meanings and implications can these practices bring? This research takes an ethnographic study of a social experiment in a northern Chinese village to engage in the discussion. This study sheds light on a spatial renovation project in the village and tries to unpack the social, political, and economic processes embodied in this experiment. Through a comparison with the state-led development project, this study demonstrates how this small-scale but profoundly impacting endeavor constitutes the alternative to the mainstream development. In this project, the most crucial initiator, a local NGO, “revalued the devalued in development” and transformed marginalized groups, abandoned local cultures and waste materials into social forces that could make a change for the village. This study will elaborate why and how this local NGO diverted from the mainstream development and unpack how the social power carved out the social space for the alternative experiment. This study places this experiment in the context of critical development studies and introduces the concept of “alternative to development” to comprehend this grassroot experiment. “Alternative to development” builds on a “long horizon” social transformation vision and emphasizes counter-assumptions and episteme challenging to development. Through seeking heuristic views from the “epistemic contents” of this experiment, this study attempts to embrace “reconstruction of humanization” to challenge the underpinnings of development and to construct the theory of alternativeness. This effort can provide a deeper understanding of the dynamics of alternative practices and further invite a rethink of development and China’s rural revitalization.