They strove for a middle way, independent of the Nationalist government but in competition with the radical revolutionary approach to the village espoused by Mao Zedong and the Chinese Communist Party.
Yen's Ting Hsien (Ding Xian) Experiment in Dingzhou, Hebei[1] and Liang's school at Zouping, Shandong,[2] were only the earliest and most prominent of hundreds of village projects, educational foundations, and government zones which aimed to change the Chinese countryside.
They made tangible but limited progress in modernizing the tax, infrastructural, economic, cultural, and educational equipment and mechanisms of rural regions until the cancellation of government coordination and subsidies in the mid-to-late 1930s due to rampant wars and the lack of resources.
[5][6] After the outbreak of the Second Sino-Japanese War, Rural Reconstruction activists formed the Rural Reconstruction Party, at first an important part of the China Democratic League but then rendered politically irrelevant in the emerging war between the Chinese Communists and the Chinese Nationalists.
[9] In the 1990s, several academics and social reformers in China started a New Rural Reconstruction Movement, with stations at Ding County and Zouping.