Scott’s “State Planning” Has Failed—Now What? An Interview with Wang Xiaoyi

A Note from Foodthink

On 19 July 2024, James C. Scott, Professor of Political Science at Yale University, died. In the days that followed, a wave of tribute articles set about re-examining his thought—on peasants and agriculture, everyday resistance, the state and society, and anarchism.

James Scott began his career studying peasant resistance, then broadened into far wider themes, eventually becoming a thinker of broad and enduring influence. In Foodthink’s view, the arc of his life’s work reveals a unique value of peasant and agrarian societies to modernity that transcends any single subject in itself.

So why did Scott attract such attention in China? What is the most important legacy he left for Chinese intellectual circles? And how should we use Scott’s lens to view Chinese society today?

With these questions in mind, Foodthink spoke with Wang Xiaoyi, a researcher at the Institute of Sociology, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, and the Chinese translator of two of Scott’s works: Seeing Like a State and The Art of Not Being Governed. In 2007, Wang Xiaoyi helped organise Scott’s first visit to China, the outcomes of which were published as Scott and Rural China: Research and Dialogue.

● James Scott at the urban–rural fringe in Beijing, perhaps the best setting to illustrate his theory of grassroots spontaneity.

A Foodthink Author

Wang Xiaoyi

Researcher at the Institute of Sociology, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, and Director of the Centre for Rural Environment and Society. His main field of research is rural sociology, with a particular focus on rural poverty, the rural environment and community development. Author or co-author of works including A Survey of Poverty in Twelve Villages in China, Grassland Communities Under Environmental Pressure and Climate Change and Social Adaptation: A Study of Pastoral Communities on Inner Mongolian Grasslands; Chinese translator of Rural Social Change, Seeing Like a State and The Art of Not Being Governed; and author of dozens of articles on the rural environment, poverty governance and related topics.

Foodthink: After Scott’s death, many scholars in China took the opportunity of mourning him to re-articulate his ideas, which shows just how great an influence he has had on Chinese intellectual life. Why has Scott attracted so much attention in China? Beyond academia, has he had a more tangible impact on the country’s practice and social development?

Wang Xiaoyi: I think Scott’s reception in China has gone through three stages. In the first stage, he was accepted primarily as one of the key authors in peasant studies. After the Second World War, and especially from the 1960s onwards, a group of Western scholars began paying close attention to peasants—studying their resistance, and their economic, social and cultural characteristics. They held that peasant society was distinct from other social strata, and that to understand guerrilla warfare in colonial settings, one had to understand peasants. Within that body of scholarship, Scott’s concepts of the “moral economy of the peasantry” and “weapons of the weak” undoubtedly became vital tools for making sense of peasant societies.

One central argument in The Moral Economy of the Peasant is that peasants revolt not because their immediate interests are threatened, but because they are subjected to injustice. In other words, peasants hold a standard of what counts as fair, and when that standard is violated, they rebel. Underpinning this sense of fairness is a moral economy of patronage and reciprocity, shaped by their conditions of subsistence. In Weapons of the Weak, Scott analyses the low-cost modes of everyday resistance adopted by peasants as the weak: passive destruction, foot-dragging, gossip and various forms of non-cooperation.

That Scott became known to Chinese scholars as a researcher on peasants may be attributable to two factors: first, Qin Hui’s oversight of the translation and compilation of the Peasant Studies Series in the 1980s, which helped promote the Chinese edition of The Moral Economy of the Peasant; and second, Philip Huang’s taxonomic review of the peasant-studies tradition in The Peasant Economy and Social Change in North China, in which he discussed Scott’s theory.

Moreover, the fact that Scott’s two major works on peasants found an audience in China may be directly related to the realities of the time. Rural reform in China called for a fresh understanding of peasant society—peasants were no longer regarded as a backward class in need of remoulding, but as a vital force driving China’s reforms. At the same time, rural social conflicts were attracting growing attention from scholars in the 1990s, and Scott’s vocabulary—the bottom, the weak, hidden transcripts—offered concepts with significant reference value for understanding those conflicts.

It is fair to say that Scott’s influence during this period was concentrated in academia, and in particular within the scholarly community devoted to peasant studies.

● Scott’s two studies of peasant resistance in Southeast Asia: The Moral Economy of the Peasant and Weapons of the Weak.

Foodthink: After these two books, the next Scott title published in China was Seeing Like a State. You translated it, and it became something of a bestseller in academic circles. From then on, Scott became something of a “celebrity” in China. Why do you think there was such a strong response?

Wang Xiaoyi: The Chinese edition of Seeing Like a State was published in 2004. As we know, the book resists easy categorisation into any single discipline, and its influence has crossed disciplinary boundaries into a wider intellectual readership. I translated it not out of academic calculation but because I felt a certain resonance when I read it. At the time, through my work, I had encountered a number of large-scale projects and policies on rural development and ecological protection, driven sometimes by international organisations, sometimes by the government. In the process of engaging with those projects and policies, I kept feeling that the implementation and the results diverged enormously from the original design—at times veering in entirely the opposite direction. So when a friend gave me this book, I was first drawn in by its subtitle: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed?

From what I have observed, after the Chinese translation came out, the book did not first make its impact among specialist academics, but among people engaged in social practice—development practitioners, grassroots organisations working on the front line in rural areas—and over time it also gained considerable influence among younger students, policymakers and scholars concerned with social reality.

I think two core ideas in the book had the most impact. The first is failure. To acknowledge that many meticulously designed projects have failed, and to view the human process of modernisation through the lens of failure—to observe how states, in particular, intervene in nature and society—is a genuinely new perspective. Many failures are not simply accidents or the result of a few people’s mistakes, but are rooted in systemic errors; indeed, the more elaborate the design, the more likely it may be to lead to failure.

The second is why failure occurs. The cause is that the state replaces existing complexity and diversity with simple, clear-cut social designs. Because such simplified designs produce many unforeseen consequences, the greater the state’s capacity to intervene in nature and society, the greater the risks it creates.

I think what the book brought people was less a sense of shock than of recognition. We have all seen many similar phenomena unfold, yet lacked a framework for thinking about them systematically. That is why so many readers, after finishing the book, could recount similar stories of their own—because the book set off a process of reflection.

Scott’s ability to generate influence across disciplines is directly tied to the broad Chinese readership of Seeing Like a State. After that, Scott’s image was no longer just that of an expert on peasants; he was seen as an intellectual who criticised the state and questioned modernisation itself. This marks the second stage of Scott’s reception in China.

● Chinese and English covers of Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed.

Foodthink: Do you think the theory of “participatory development” put forward in rural development projects at the time has any connection to Scott?

Wang Xiaoyi: Before and after the publication of Seeing Like a State, development theory had already entered China and adopted participation as a principal tool. Participatory development requires the involvement of local residents, and underlying that is the notion of “local knowledge”, which bears a resemblance to the concept of “mētis” Scott discusses in Seeing Like a State. But I do not think Seeing Like a State and participatory development are closely connected, at least I have not seen that case made. Their purposes and methods are quite different: Seeing Like a State helps us understand how projects fail and to recognise the role of the modern state in development, whereas participatory development is more often used as a tool, aimed at making development projects more successful. One is about understanding the failure of projects; the other is about engineering their success. They appear to share an inner connection, but in practice they may operate on entirely different logics.

Participatory development, once introduced to China, cannot be said to have been without effect. At the micro level it did address some problems in development, made project design more reasonable, gave peasants greater motivation to participate, and put some local knowledge to use. At the same time, however, “participatory” also became a tool to help outside experts collect information more quickly, complete project design and write polished evaluation reports. Looking back now, many participatory development projects ultimately failed as well, because in the development process, the inequalities in power, resources and knowledge cannot simply be resolved by participation.

Foodthink: If state-led projects are flawed and participatory approaches also run into difficulties in practice, what would the right path be? Does Scott have a view on this?

Wang Xiaoyi: As I read Scott, I increasingly sensed a kind of helplessness on his part. His analysis of how state-directed large-scale social engineering fails is logically rigorous and highly persuasive—yet when it comes to prescribing remedies, he too struggles to offer a more incisive answer, only urging us to keep trying and remain vigilant against failure.

In The Art of Not Being Governed, his analysis of pre-modern states offers rich descriptions of the autonomy of highland peoples and how they evade state control, and it is powerfully explanatory. But once his analysis enters the register of the modern state, it becomes vague, even resorting to a historical severance—insisting that his framework applies only to pre-modern polities.

Although Scott proposed “mētis” and emphasised locality, we find that these suggestions are neither clearly articulated nor particularly forceful. In fact, Elinor Ostrom, the champion of polycentric governance, often made similar statements, conceding that no panacea exists.

Of course, we might say that the diversity, endogeneity and spontaneity they champion may be important means of addressing such problems—but certainly not the whole picture. Especially as we watch globalisation waning and the role of the nation-state being reasserted, no one can deny that the nation-state remains a crucial factor in finding solutions. In this sense, Scott’s helplessness is not merely his own; it is a helplessness that all of us confront.

● A typical “state-directed scheme”: over the past few decades, the state has implemented environmental engineering projects targeting the degradation of the northern grasslands—grazing bans and seasonal rest periods, returning farmland to grassland, and the like—yet for various reasons, these projects have not delivered the anticipated results. Image: Shu Ni

Foodthink: If we judge by success or failure, then state-led engineering might have succeeded on many dimensions—take top-down targeted poverty alleviation, for instance. But what happens when we push further still? To find healthy, sustainable development, do we need to rely on “diversity”—to let ordinary people find their own way of making a living? The worry now is that certain policies and governance models may strangle that very diversity.

Wang Xiaoyi: Personally, I think the answer is not a matter of our judgement but of looking back at history. History moves in cycles, and those cycles often play out between state planning and societal spontaneity. We need to see not only the state’s successes and failures, but also the successes and failures of grassroots spontaneity. Very often, the two sides of a problem coexist. Spontaneity brings vitality to society, but we must also reckon with the problems it creates. When the problems generated by spontaneity accumulate over a period—when social order, social justice and social rights come under threat—the corrective force of the state becomes necessary. And when excessive state control drains society of its vitality, grassroots spontaneity may be emphasised anew.

If we look back at the history of rural governance since 1949, we can discern a “loosen–tighten–loosen–tighten” cycle. After 1949, peasants gained land and their enthusiasm for production rose, but a new stratification of wealth and power soon followed. The People’s Commune system then extended state power deep into the rural grassroots, placing peasants’ production and daily lives under tight control. Reform and opening up brought a gradual easing of state control over rural society, but many problems emerged, including widening inequality, corruption among cadres and organised criminal forces. In the new era, the state has tightened its grip on rural society once more; the bureaucratic form-filling, patchwork governance and much-criticised performative inspections and rankings that people now frequently complain about are all products of this trend. Yet we also see that from the establishment of error-tolerance mechanisms, through reducing the burden on grassroots levels, to calls for empowering grassroots governance, the dominant inclination of policymakers has been to grant the grassroots greater space and greater flexibility. I believe society always advances, however haltingly, through this winding process. Every policy adjustment carries its own underlying logic.

Second, we should also recognise the trial-and-error nature of policy-making. At least from my own experience, policy design invariably leaves room for adjustment. In the short term, one frequently sees policies struggling to fit reality, and indeed many encounter significant problems during implementation. But viewed over a longer arc, one regularly observes policies being refined and improved—and that process of refinement is itself one of trial and error.

Foodthink: So returning to Scott’s thought—what is the significance of critiquing state planning in China? Does grassroots wisdom and initiative matter?

Wang Xiaoyi: In my view, first, criticising Scott for not providing a solution is pointless, because not every scholar is expected to become a think tank. Look at the great thinkers in history—how many could offer ready-made answers? Second, simply accepting Scott’s views wholesale would also be a mistake. When we read Scott, we need a dialectical eye. In critiquing the state’s drive toward clarity and simplification, Scott himself, in a certain sense, falls into a kind of clarity and simplification of his own. As his close friend Edward Friedman once pointed out, the historical explanation of Southeast Asia’s highlands in The Art of Not Being Governed may be somewhat overly simplified. Yet the fact that Scott has had such wide-ranging influence in China—to the point of becoming, in a sense, an academic bestseller—matters for several reasons:

First, Scott’s interpretations always strike readers as fresh and illuminating, making them wonder, “How can we see this problem in such a way?” In Seeing Like a State, he divides crops into “proletarian” and “petty-bourgeois”: the former are storable grain crops, the latter delicate berry crops. In The Art of Not Being Governed, he divides them into “crops of the state” and “crops of evasion”: rice is the former, because it grows above ground, ripens simultaneously and is easily taxed by the state; cassava is the latter, buried deep underground, harvestable only after long intervals and thus difficult for the state to requisition. Likewise, his account of highland peoples’ flight from valley states, and of the state’s pursuit of fugitive populations, goes beyond mere historical description—it attempts a new reading of the state and of power. Every one of these insights feels deeply stimulating.

● Scott’s concept of “crops of the state” in The Art of Not Being Governed later developed into a systematic account of the historical origins of the state and agriculture in Against the Grain.

Second, his books keep readers vigilant about human reason, state planning and the process of modernisation, reminding them that neither human rationality nor state power is omnipotent. They may bring a surface veneer of prosperity and development, but also carry latent problems. When people and states adopt a cautious posture toward these forces, mistakes cannot be entirely avoided, but they may be smaller—and more readily corrected when they do occur. Third, I believe that Scott’s analysis gives us greater confidence in the adaptive capacity of grassroots society. We often see large-scale planning projects running into numerous problems, but after ten, twenty, or even more years, looking back reveals that society has developed new ways of being through adaptive change.

Take, for example, some ecological resettlement projects, which faced many issues at the outset—the resettled communities had no industry, and people could not adapt to the local environment. Yet after several years, we found that the demographic composition of the resettlement areas had shifted: those who could not cope had sold their new homes, while newcomers arrived with their own survival strategies. The resettlement plan did not fail, but neither did the settlement conform to the original blueprint; instead, the residents developed, through adaptive change, a way of life quite different from what was envisaged. If planning left some room for adaptive change, the difficulties of adjustment might be reduced—but even without that room, space for adaptation emerges spontaneously over time. So we should have full confidence in society’s capacity for spontaneous adaptation.

Finally, Scott’s method of class analysis is something we frequently overlook. In practice, we often ignore Scott’s emphasis on class. “Weapons of the Weak” is not the weapon of peasants as a whole, for among peasants there are the strong as well as the weak—”weapons of the weak” belong specifically to those at the bottom of society. Likewise, flight from the state is not the action of everyone; it is those at the very bottom, corralled by the state to provide material and manpower, who flee. Without class analysis, there is no bottom-up perspective, and many questions become muddled. For instance, when we speak of peasants or smallholders today, we deliberately or unconsciously ignore the fact that peasants are not a monolithic whole. In today’s rural society, peasants have divergent interests, and not all smallholders are weak. When we read Scott, or borrow his lens to observe society, we must remember never to neglect the analysis of class.

Foodthink: Scott visited China twice, in 2007 and in 2012. The first visit was organised with your participation. What was that like?

Wang Xiaoyi: I met him twice in Beijing. The first time, I was the one who invited him. During that trip, he took part in a seminar at the Institute of Sociology and gave two talks—at Minzu University of China and at Tsinghua University. The seminar at the Institute of Sociology was somewhat different from a standard lecture or symposium. It was organised jointly by Professor Qu Jingdong and me. We did not want him to present his own research, since his major works already had a wide readership in China, and his ideas had spawned a body of work with distinctly Chinese characteristics—take “resilient weapons” as a case in point. So we tried a new approach: we invited several scholars to borrow Scott’s concepts or logic to analyse contemporary Chinese social phenomena, and then asked Scott to offer his comments on those papers. The outcome was recorded in the book Scott and Rural China. It was, I think, a rather interesting experiment—whether it succeeded, readers can judge for themselves from the slim volume.

Scott’s two talks at Minzu University of China and Tsinghua University are also included in Scott and Rural China. At Minzu University of China, his lecture was “Why Civilisation Struggles to Climb the Mountain”—essentially the core argument of The Art of Not Being Governed, which he was then writing. The venue was “standing-room only”: the auditorium was packed, with listeners filling the aisles. As Scott himself put it, it felt like being a celebrity. At Tsinghua University, his talk focused primarily on Seeing Like a State.

In 2012, when Scott came to China for the second time, Professor Ye Jingzhong of China Agricultural University invited him to deliver a lecture at the Agrarian Studies Lecture Series. On that occasion I also took him to Pi Village on the edge of Beijing to visit the Migrant Workers’ Culture and Art Museum.

● *Scott and Rural China*, which also includes Wang Xiaoyi’s article “Pastoralists and the State Under Ecological Pressure.” In the essay collection *Grassland Communities Under Environmental Pressure*, Wang Xiaoyi draws on six specific grassland community case studies to engage in dialogue with Scott’s theories of “state control” and “weapons of the weak.” Scott’s lecture at Tsinghua University can also be read in Foodthink’s reprint.

Foodthink: From your interactions with Scott, what sort of person did you find him to be?

Wang Xiaoyi: I did not have a particularly deep association with him—face to face, it was only those two occasions. But I think he was a rather pure scholar. By “pure” I mean that his attention was entirely absorbed by the academic questions he was working on. His scholarship was not aimed at offering sound prescriptions for policymakers or society; in other words, he was not a think-tank kind of scholar. Nor was he a professional writer—part of his research funding for his work in Burma came from advance book royalties paid to him. Scott once said his addiction was writing books, and perhaps that truly captured his character. As an American intellectual, his political leanings sometimes slipped out unbidden, for instance his dissatisfaction with Trump. He even once joked with me, asking whether I knew anyone at Beijing Zoo who could lock Trump up and put him on display as an exhibit.

Foodthink: How did Scott view China?

Wang Xiaoyi: I did not discuss many China-related topics with him, but I think he was genuinely interested in the country. He once said that had China allowed him to do fieldwork in the 1970s, he would not have ended up researching in Indonesia—his field site would have been China. He had also once considered writing about the Great Leap Forward in Seeing Like a State, but in the end that line of research was never completed. Beyond that, he probably had some familiarity with China, given that his close friend Edward Friedman is an expert on rural China. Scott himself said that through Friedman he came to understand Chinese rural society. And no doubt quite a number of Chinese scholars and students interacted with him to varying degrees, so he must have had some sense of conditions on the ground, though how deep that understanding went, I could not say. My own impression was that he paid considerable attention to the impact he had in China. In particular, after Seeing Like a State came out and he felt the enthusiasm of Chinese academia, he invited me to do the Chinese translation of The Art of Not Being Governed even before the English edition was formally published. Had it not been for the long publishing cycle, the Chinese edition would very likely have been the first edition published in any language other than English—it was simply a case of good things taking time to come together. Throughout the process, he also kept close track of the Chinese edition’s progress.

Now Scott’s influence in China has entered a third period. He is no longer just an expert on peasant studies, nor merely a cross-disciplinary thinker—his books have become academic bestsellers. If I am not mistaken, his last several titles were translated into Chinese almost immediately after their English publication, and some of his earlier works have also been translated and published. Word has it that his final work (In Praise of Floods: The Stake of All Creatures in the River’s Freedom) is about flooding along the Irrawaddy River, and it is reportedly expected to be published in 2025. I imagine Chinese publishers are already preparing for it. We are also looking forward to seeing this book at last brought to completion.

● 2007: James Scott taking part in a seminar at the Institute of Sociology, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences.

● 2007: James Scott delivering his lecture “Why Civilisation Struggles to Climb the Mountain” at Minzu University of China, with the host Professor Wang Mingming beside him.

Unless otherwise indicated, all photographs are provided by the interviewee

Interview: Tian Le, Wang Hao

Editing: Wang Hao

Published by Foodthink