| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 109.2

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 109.2 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Asia

Yunxiang Yan. Private Life under Socialism: Love, Intimacy, and Family Change in a Chinese Village, 1949–1999. Stanford: Stanford University Press. 2003. Pp. xvi, 289. Cloth $55.00, paper $19.95.
This is a thought-provoking book about rural family life in the People's Republic of China (PRC). Based on his years of observation in Xiajia village in the northeastern province of Heilongjiang, Yunxiang Yan asserts that the state's intrusion into village society and family life during the first three decades of its existence, combined with its withdrawal at the end of collectivization, left "a moral and ideological vacuum" (p. 234) that has led to the development of "ultra-utilitarian individualism" (p. 233) and the "freak of the uncivil individual" (p. 226). Yan claims that young villagers "ruthlessly extract money from their parents for the 'modernization' of their own private lives" (p. 234). Meanwhile "public life has declined, social order deteriorated, and the village community disintegrated" (p. 234).	1
These are potentially significant conclusions, but Yan is not always convincing. Part of the problem is a lack of transparency about his methods and a limited reflection about his place in this community. Yan lived in this village from 1971 to 1978 and returned seven times from 1989 to 1999. He acknowledges the advantages of his connection with the village—without it he could not have gathered much of the information he did—but admits of no disadvantage. In the preface he claims that "I simply followed and documented the life course of more than two dozen individuals" (p. xii). There are several problems here: little about ethnography is ever "simple"; we do not know who these two dozen people were; in places, Yan seems to be following more than two dozen people; and if he grew close to some people, might he have alienated others?	. . .

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