Le Village de Lianmin/Base de données électronique (1949 - 1999) – Chine rurale
Lianmin, a Chinese Village : History, Economics and Social Transformations (1949-1999)
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Keeping traces and accounts from the past to better understand the present: Lianmin village experience (Zhejiang province)
Chinese rural areas have undergone a series of ruptures since the Chinese Communist Party came into power in 1949. Land reform first redistributed land and other goods to rural households. A collectivization process then quickly began in 1953 leading to the creation of People’s Communes in 1958. Two decades later, a partial decollectivisation process was accomplished throughout the country: the system of collective property continued to prevail while households were given the right of private usage of collective lands. Without such a complex process, the economic reforms initiated at the beginning of the 1980 would not have succeeded. As a matter of fact, the present economic evolution in China, and its political and social consequences, stem less from the development of industrial and commercial activities than from the agricultural land transfers carried out during the last decades as well as from the transactions, fees and taxes surrounding them. However, the process experimented by Chinese farmers during the past decades remains widely unknown: oral history material have not been systematically collected with those who witnessed collectivization although this is an urgent task; written documents circulating in the villages have not been gathered and are today often destroyed; official archives kept at the level of the county remain out of reach. This is why the present project, aiming at collecting already existing date about a single village community, Lianmin village but also at completing such material and preserving it by building a comprehensive electronic database, was developed.
The CECMC (UMR 8173, Chine, Corée, Japon) has thus elaborated a joint project with the Department of Sociology and Anthropology of Fudan University (Shanghai) consisting in creating an unprecedented database, in China as well as abroad. Such database would gather various types of material concerning a single village community, Lianmin village. The first task carried out consisted in making the inventory of the data already collected by Professor Zhang Letian, native from this village. Such data related mainly to the economic and political experience of Lianmin during land reform as well as during the collectivization process (population censuses, redistribution of land, means of production and other goods among the households; accounting receipts -a few thousand -; political meetings’ minutes.) These data have been complemented with the collection of documents found in local archives bureaus mentioning Lianmin village but also with oral history material, private archives put forwards by Lianmin inhabitants and pictures as well as videos. An international and interdisciplinary team of Chinese and French scholars have been formed to treat, digitize, scan, carry out the transcription of the needed data and organize it in a database to be opened to a public of specialists and non-specialists. Such database will be ready in December 2012.
Among the main contributions of this project:
1) The creation of a digital database, the first of this kind in China, enabling readers and researchers to capture the recent historical experience of a Chinese village in its economic, social and political dimensions,
2) A successful international collaboration between Chinese and French academic institutions that is leading to the present discussion of new joint projects,
3) The teaching and supervision provided to PhD students having contributed to the project. The teaching provided runs from social sciences methodology to the process of carrying out an international collaboration, and includes familiarity with interdisciplinary approaches (geography and computer science, economy and history, i.e., …).
4) The creation in April 2012 of the Center for documentation on local life in Chinese villages at Fudan University (Shanghai) which, as one of the outcomes of our joint program, continues the work of collecting local archives with an important financial support from Fudan University as well as from Shanghai municipality.
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The scientific production at this stage is:
- The database created, after numerous tests performed within the group of scholars and technicians involved in the project, will be open to the public on December 2012.
- Such database will be progressively enriched by the scientific publications originating from its data. Two books (one individual and one collective), written in Chinese, will already be published in the database on electronic support. Five more (four in Chinese and one in English) will be published during the two next years.
The project presented here by the Department of Sociology of Fudan university (Shanghai) and the Center for Studies on Modern and Contemporary China of the School for Advanced Studies in Social Sciences (Paris), with the support of the Beida University (Départment of Sociology and Anthropology) is concerned with the preservation and enrichment process of qualitative and quantitative data about a village community located in Zhejiang province (Lianmin village) rather than with purely academic research. It includes three stages: the first one is to complement the extensive data already collected about Lianmin village, the second one is to carry out the necessary stages to articulate it into a sound and comprehensive database; the third one is to make this preliminary database available to a group of fifteen international scholars that will use it to develop various research projects, having thus an opportunity to react to the quality, presentation, coherence of the database. At the end of the international conference presenting both the scientific papers of these scholars and their suggestions or criticisms regarding the content and form of the data gathered, the database about Lianming village will be revised, improved and finally made widely available to the scientific community on electronical support. From our perspective, the building of such an electronic database and its preliminary use by reputed scholars coming from different backgrounds to test its form and content while using it to pursue effective research projects are part and parcel of the same objective : to constitute a reliable, coherent and efficient database that might be enlarged in the future with new data. Through the present project, our common ambition is thus to make the informations gathered in Lianming village database available as a kind of "electronic fieldwork" to the present and future community of social scientists anchored in a variety of disciplines and interested in the history of China countryside during the 20th century. From the time being, the data already collected on Lianming village constitute the most exhaustive information, whether from a qualitative or quantitative point of view, ever gathered on a single village community in China. We fear that it would be a great loss if such data was to remain inaccessible to the wider scientific community in China as well as abroad, or be dispersed and disappear. One of the main purposes of the present project is to proceed with the digitalization process of the numerous documents already gathered (estimated duration of such a task : two years). This main task will be associated to another core activity : to complete the data already collected in order to build a more comprehensive database. Such work will be performed along two dimensions : When the data already available will be digitalized and the complementary data collected, fifteen reknown scholars coming from Taiwan, Mainland China, Europe and the United States will be invited to choose a research project and to carry it out by using the existing Lianmin village database. Under their guidance, the members of the research executive team in charge during the two first years of the project of the collection process of new material regarding Lianmin village will look for the complementary oral or written information required for each of the fifteen studies and missing in the database. Such information will be later incorporated into the database in the hope to thus build a more comprehensive and useful database. One year after launching these fifteen research projects related to Lianmin village, an international conference will be held to discuss the scholars' scientific findings but also to hear their appreciations regarding the database in process. We will ask them to write a brief report with their comments regarding the Lianmin village/Zhang Letian database and their suggestions to improve it. The electronic database will finally be processed and made available to the wider scientific community.
Project coordination
The author of this summary is the project coordinator, who is responsible for the content of this summary. The ANR declines any responsibility as for its contents.
Partner
Help of the ANR 0 euros
Beginning and duration of the scientific project:
- 0 Months
