Other reforms

About Mo Yan's novel "Garlic Ballads"

Chinese reforms in the late 1970s are traditionally seen as an unqualified success story, transforming a poor agricultural country into a modern global leader. However, behind the façade of successive victories there were periods of confusion, social conflict and painful adaptation. Mo Yan's novel Garlic Ballads, written in the turning point of 1988, captured precisely this underbelly of change - through the example of a rural revolt caused by the failure of local reforms. Ivan Zuenko talks about how this novel reflected the other side of the “long eighties.”

All of us, since February 24, 2022, have found ourselves in the face of advancing barbarism, violence and lies. In this situation, it is extremely important to preserve at least the remnants of culture and support the values ​​of humanism - including for the sake of the future of Russia. Therefore, the editors of Gorky will continue to talk about books, reminding our readers that there is still a place for thought and fiction in the world.

Mo Yan. Garlic ballads. M.: Eksmo, 2026. Translation from Chinese by Kirill Batygin

We're used to seeing China's reforms, which began in the late 1970s and are officially still ongoing, being portrayed as an unqualified success story: a path from one victory to another. It would seem that it is impossible to argue with the positive outcome of these reforms. Over the course of several decades, China has transformed from a poor agricultural country, gripped by the turmoil of the Cultural Revolution, into a modern, developed state. This is all true, but it is also true that the reforms did not go smoothly, were not consistent and, of course, were not without side effects.

I called my preface to the translation of Mo Yan’s novel “The Thirteenth Step” “The Other Eighties,” trying to emphasize essentially the same idea: the “long 1980s” in China were a time not only of success and hope, but also of confusion, loss of support in life, when the old rules no longer worked, and the new ones frightened them with their incomprehensibility and opacity.

This article is called "Other Reforms" because the emphasis in the novel is on reforms. And not in the city, but in the countryside.

The novel “Garlic Ballads” was written in 1988, and in this very date a person familiar with the intricacies of recent Chinese history can guess a lot. This is an amazing year. Shortly before this, in October 1987, the XIII Congress of the ruling Communist Party was held in China, at which a bold decision was made: to ensure the successful implementation of economic reform through changes in the political sphere. The transformations are also bold: to separate the party from the state, to make it a purely political institution that does not interfere in governance.

The political reform turned out to have many opponents. The first planned measures on the ground were actually sabotaged. In an attempt to nevertheless “stir up” the stagnant party-administrative apparatus, the “reformers” initiated publicity in the press, unprecedented by Chinese standards. The intelligentsia and students supported this impulse. They began to speak out much more openly and critically. And already in the spring of 1989, all these sentiments led to protests, the center of which was Tiananmen Square in Beijing.

And in February 1988, the young 33-year-old Mo Yan, who suddenly became famous and popular after the film adaptation of the story “Red Kaoliang,” came from Beijing to his parents in his home county of Gaomi, Shandong Province, to celebrate the Lunar New Year.

Here, in the local newspaper Dazhong Ribao, he read about an incident that occurred in neighboring Cangshan County in May 1987, when local peasants staged a virtual revolt against officials who had stopped purchasing their products, citing overproduction and overcrowded warehouses.

The riots lasted one day, May 27, and boiled down to the fact that peasants, demanding a meeting with the district leadership, broke windows in the government building and damaged several cars. Some especially desperate ones managed to break into the building, where they destroyed offices, damaged furniture and documents that came to hand. By evening, order was restored and the instigators were arrested. Subsequently, it was not only them who suffered, but also the district leaders, who were removed from their positions for mistakes they made (however, Mo Yan himself, judging by the last lines of the novel, was not sure that their mistakes were properly addressed).

This story fit well with the efforts of the “reformers” to fight local conservatives, so it was given traction in the press. After reading about the incident in the newspaper, Mo Yan was so outraged (or, on the contrary, inspired by the prospects of rapid change, which must have seemed inevitable to him if there was political will to deal with problems in the countryside) that he put aside his current projects, including the already mentioned “The Thirteenth Step”, and is believed to have written “Garlic Ballads” in just 35 days. He kept the outline (including those ill-fated garlic arrows that the Tsangshan peasants grew), but designed everything else.

As Mo Yan himself admits in the author's afterword, he did not study any other materials about the riot other than newspaper articles, and did not travel to Cangshan to collect interviews. Obviously, he didn't need it. He already had a good idea of ​​life in the countryside, especially since he himself was born in the village, and until the age of 21, when he ended up in the ranks of the People's Liberation Army of China, he worked on the land. And the problems in rural areas in two neighboring counties could hardly be significantly different.

At that time, the reforms did not at all seem like a “success story.” If some considered them half-hearted, overly cautious and demanded expansion and deepening, then others treated them with approximately the same feelings with which Russian citizens, deceived by “privatization” and left without pensions, savings and work, perceived the activities of Yeltsin, Chubais and other “young reformers” in the early 1990s.

The essence of the conflict that occurred in Cangshan (Mo Yan placed it in a fictitious county with the telling name Tiantang, Heaven on Earth), if described in terms of political economy, is that as part of the policy of restructuring agriculture and its adaptation to a mixed economy with a significant market share, local authorities encouraged peasants to switch from grain production to cash crops - namely garlic, or more precisely, garlic shoots, which are used in Chinese cuisine. Overproduction of this product led to the depreciation of the product. And neither the peasants themselves nor the officials were ready for this.

The author lays out the outline of the plot in the last chapter close to the text of the original newspaper articles. It can be assumed that a similar situation could arise in other counties in relation to other commercial crops. For several years in the mid-1980s, such production was very profitable because the market was not yet oversaturated, so more and more peasants abandoned planting rice and gave up the land for garlic (fruits, peanuts, cotton, tobacco, etc. - substitute as necessary).

In the case of Cangshan, in the spring of 1987, most of the land in the county was devoted to garlic. Meanwhile, the county lacked not only intelligent specialists who could explain the risks of overproduction, but also warehouses for storing perishable products (five to six days from the date of collection), as well as ordinary roads and transport to transport the goods to the same Beijing or Tianjin, which were only 600 kilometers from the scene of action.

When the first harvest of 1987 was received and a huge surplus of goods was immediately discovered, officials who had previously promoted planting garlic instead of rice abandoned the peasants to their fate. In other words, the transition to commodity production was carried out according to the laws of a planned economy, and when a crisis situation arose, the authorities reacted according to the laws of the market.

Numerous cases of extortion from various authorities added fuel to the fire, where each official sought to profit from the peasants who, in their opinion, had become excessively rich.

Thus, the novel focuses not so much on the fact that it was the reforms that made possible a situation with overproduction of garlic, previously unimaginable under the planned system, but on the fact that the reforms created limitless opportunities for corruption (note that it was corruption that was the main irritant during the “Tiananmen crisis” of 1989 and it was precisely to fight it that students, citizens and even the officials themselves took to the streets and squares).

Mo Yan directly links the difficulties faced by the rural community to the collapse of traditional social structures. The heroes of the novel find themselves between the old patriarchal foundations (already noticeably fading, but still strong) and the pressure of the new corrupt political power (it is already in effect, but at the same time it is based not on traditional Confucian values, but simply on the “right of the strong”).

In a word, as in The Thirteenth Step, the emotional background of the book is the same feeling of confusion and loss of ground under one’s feet - only this time not in the city, but in the countryside. And this clearly captures the spirit of the times - the spirit of the late 1980s in China.

Ten years earlier, such a work could hardly have appeared. And not only because the village at that time continued to remain patriarchal, but also because it was in the village that the first obvious results of reforms were obtained. And until the mid-1980s, it was the most active and enterprising peasants, who took on “family contracts” and moved to a commodity economy, who earned much more than the city dwellers who were still in the grip of the planned system. For Chinese writers working at that time - including Mo Yan himself - it was the Chinese village, powerful, heroic, that was the personification of all of China, its greatness and enormous, albeit dormant, potential.

By the end of the 1980s, the situation had changed, and with his novel Mo Yan seemed to “deconstruct” this myth about the Chinese village, where “stick a stick in the ground and it will start to sprout,” just let the peasants work honestly on their land. The same myth, the spread of which he himself contributed a lot to in “Red Kaoliang”. Now Mo Yan says that the reforms have not brought the peasants the long-awaited prosperity. The village is depicted as still poor, suffering from extortions and arbitrariness of the higher authorities.

Probably, according to Mo Yang, all these problems could be corrected by starting an effective fight against corruption and dismissing negligent leaders. In a word, “there are still some shortcomings in places,” but talented and sharp criticism will help correct them. Otherwise, it is difficult to explain what he, still an active PLA soldier, was counting on when submitting such a critical work to the publishing house.

The novel was published in a magazine and as a separate book, but it was quickly banned and only published again two decades later. Mo Yan himself entered the master's program at Beijing Normal University in the fall of 1988, and since the early 1990s has gained worldwide fame as the author of "Wine Country" and other novels in the genre of "magical realism" and in 2012 won the Nobel Prize in Literature. By that time, he had long been no longer perceived as a dissident, having received universal recognition and honor.

The situation in the countryside, of course, has also changed. The crisis of confidence in reform and government in 1989 led to the famous events in Tiananmen Square. The political reform was curtailed, the administrative regime became stronger, and the issue of the party's self-removal from governance was removed from the agenda. Paradoxically, this contributed to the fact that the younger generation of party leaders in the 1990s carried out a number of long-overdue reforms: price reform, public sector restructuring, tax reform. By the beginning of the new century, this ensured China's economic breakthrough.

Working on the land ceased to be the main occupation of the villagers - they now earned more by leaving their homes and working as migrant workers in countless factory towns. And so many peasants were no longer needed on the land: new equipment, new fertilizers, new agricultural technologies made it possible to obtain a larger harvest with less labor. At the same time, the state launched a broad urbanization program - transforming villages into towns and urban areas, expanding urban living standards. In 2011, the urban population in China exceeded the rural one.

The era is gone.

However, literary works remain that describe this complex transformation. “Garlic Ballads” by Mo Yan is perhaps one of the most striking in this series.