From Heaven to Earth

Much has been written on China's peasant revolution, less has been written of the peasant experience of reform. Since 1979(?), when the first major reforms were introduced into China's villages, there have been many shifts and changes in the translation and practice of reform policies so that many of the initial assumptions and judgements made by observers, analysts and participants have been modified over the years. It is not so much that that implications of the reforms for lives, practices and policies have become clearer as that they have become increasingly paradoxical and various. In From Heaven to Earth Elisabeth Croll examines the images, policies and experiences of development and links the peasants' experience of revolution and reform with their conceptualisations of time and change. The author combines a study of the images or dreams of development as sets of rhetorical lens through which peasant populations perceive collective family and individual experiences with an analysis of rural development policies and reforms at the centre of which lies the peasant household. She also examines the new and recent desires which motivate peasant households in China; the new and strenuous demands which are generated by current reforms which allocate new responsibilities to the peasant family; and family strategies evolved by peasant households to maximise their resources within the context of reformed rural development. In looking at the peasant family, household and individual, and their relationship with the state From Heaven to Earth the book highlights power, knowledge and agency in the context of the translation of and implementation of national policy and its communication in the process of government and project management and within policies and practices.