Zhang Letian’s book Say Goodbye to Utopia: Research into the Institution of the People’s Communes has been a strong influence in sociological thinking inside China. Using documentary sources of unrivalled depth and completeness, Zhang takes an unusual and revealing look at the system of the people’s communes, exposing their strengths and weaknesses but seeing overall their legacy as positive and transformational. Zhang’s analysis understands the people’s communes as governed by an interaction between top-down imposed changes, or ‘shocks’ as he calls them, and patterns of traditional behaviour. While Zhang’s insights, rooted in rural China, are not necessarily generalizable to the whole of Chinese society, his work has resonances that makes it required reading for anyone interested in 20th-century Chinese society. Two questions will interest many of those studying Chinese sociology: what connections does the work have for global society, and how do concepts in Chinese sociology relate to those in international sociology? This review essay considers these questions both for Zhang’s book and other studies of the people’s communes.
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