China's Far West: Four Decades of Change

It's too bad this book is out of print, and so expensive, because it's a most enlightening book for those interested in 20th Century China and the immense changes it has undergone. Presumably libraries are the main customers for this book. Yet while it's very intelligent, it's not a dry academic book, so has broad appeal beyond scholarly libraries. The fact that this book focuses on an often neglected region of China (Shaanxi, Gansu, Qinghai, Tibet, Xinjiang, Yunnan, etc.) makes it all the more important. It would be interesting to see the ratio of books published on the SE coast vs. the far West. A. Doak Barnett, a legendary China scholar, toured these areas in 1948 and again in 1988. He paints a rich picture by interviewing a wide range of people: government officials high and low, blue-collar workers, peasants, a former labor camp prisoner, etc. As well as, of course, adding his own observations of the changes. The consensus among all is that the positive economic transformation in these 4 decades is enormous, yet poverty remains widespread (it could hardly be any other way). Many told Barnett that the biggest positive changes in their lives, materially, came in the 1980s. This is doubtlessly true, because only in the reform period did the government give up its obsession with heavy industry and allow the production of consumer goods and petty retail market activity to flourish. But it's also likely, and one can infer this from Barnett's observations and interviews, that the capabilities for reform period growth were enhanced by productive capacity investments in the pre-reform era, which were underutilized. The biggest current problem in urban economic reform remains the "third front" industries. These are defense industries that were placed in the far west for strategic purposes during the cold war, but now are unneeded duplicates that lose money, yet at the same time provide employment for many. The main rural problem is how to diversify (diets are much more grain-heavy/homogeneous than in the central and eastern regions) and raise yields in a difficult geographic and economic environment. Yields went through a surge in the 1978-83 period, yet gains since have been slow. Those with an interest in China's minorities will especially want to read this book. For instance the lay reader might not know that as many Tibetans live outside of Tibet than live in it. Barnett discusses the history of and meets the Tibetans of Sichuan, Gansu, and Qinghai; as well as the many other minorities in the West. It would be great to update this book with a third visit.