New Rural Reconstruction Movement

New Rural Reconstruction (NRR, Chinese: 新乡村建设; pinyin: Xīn xiāngcūn jiànshè) is an intellectual current and social movement initiated by Wen Tiejun and other activists to address the crisis they saw in the Chinese countryside at the start of the 21st century. As of 2009, at its core there are several NGOs and academic institutions, dozens of rural cooperatives and associations, and hundreds of self-conscious participants (including academics, social workers, student volunteers, and grassroots activists). More broadly, the ideas and spirit of NRR have influenced a growing movement of rural experimentation, including many activists who do not use the term "NRR."

The initiators and theorists of NRR, sometimes known as the "New Rural Reconstruction school" (Chinese: 新乡村建设派; pinyin: Xīn xiāngcūn jiànshè pài), felt that the reforms begun by Deng Xiaoping and other CCP leaders in the late 1970s were no longer benefiting rural communities, especially in central and western China, and in some ways hurting them. While most of the NRR school rarely use the term "New Left" to describe themselves, they are generally considered to be an important part of that critical tradition. Like the Chinese New Left in general, the NRR school is critical of the dominant current of utopian marketization, in which the market is seen as a solution to all problems. Instead, NRR supports the creation of rural cooperatives and other forms of cooperative social organization.

NRR grew out of a loosely parallel set of academics, students, state development workers, and grassroots activists. In the early 1990s, a debate grew up over neo-liberal policies, such as those advocated by the World Bank. These critics charged that the success of free market and globalization policies in the short term threatened the long term viability of China's farm families and villages by eroding the remnants of the Mao-era communes, which had provided health, education, and welfare, leaving individual families to fend for themselves in these areas. In addition, urban expansion drove up land prices and local officials confiscated land in order to build factories and housing for the newly affluent. By the middle of the 1990s, in addition to demonstrations against traditional targets such as taxes, there were widespread protests against the corruption of local officials, pollution from the factories (many of which were owned by outside interests), and the gap between the newly rich and the still poor rural areas.

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