First Published in 1990. Written at a new juncture in the study of the Chinese revolution. A new generation of scholarship is emerging which promises to resolve old debates, bridge old dichotomies, and join formerly separate strands of analysis. Several of the essays in this volume are based on papers presented at a workshop on Chinese Communist base areas held at Harvard University's Fairbank Center for East Asian Research. These papers chronicle the varied approaches to China's revolution.
"This book, a condensed translation of the prize-winning Jacqueries et révolution dans la Chine du XXe siècle, focuses on “spontaneous” rural unrest, uninfluenced by revolutionary intellectuals. Yet it raises issues inspired by the perennial concerns of revolutionary leaders, such as peasant “class consciousness” and China’s modernization. The author shows that the predominant forms of protest were directed not against the landowning class but against agents of the state. Foremost among them, resistance to taxation had little to do with class struggle. By contrast, protest by poor agricultural laborers and heavily indebted households was extremely rare. Other forms of social protest were reactions less to social exploitation than to oppression by local powerholders. Peasant resistance to the late Qing “new policy” reforms did indeed impede China’s modernization. Decades later, peasant efforts to evade conscription, while motivated by abuses and inequities, weakened the anti-Japanese resistance. The concluding chapter stresses persistent features of rural protest. It suggests that twentieth-century Chinese peasants were less different from seventeenth- or eighteenth-century French peasants than might be imagined and points to continuities between pre- and post-1949 rural protest."
Bianco focuses on "spontaneous" rural unrest, uninfluenced by revolutionary intellectuals. The author shows that predominant forms of protest were directed not against the landowning class but against state agents, and suggests that 20th-century Chinese peasants were less different from 17th- or 18th-century French peasants than might be imagined.
Inhaltsverzeichnis: Prologue -- Factions -- Enter the Army -- Escalation -- Beijing Intervenes -- Forging Order -- Backlash -- The Final Struggle -- Troubled Decade.
Containing ten quality chapters on China's rural reforms and agricultural development, this first volume from the Series on Developing China: Translated Research from China emphasizes the importance of countryside, agriculture and the role of peasants in China's economy.While the Chinese revolution has traveled a path of “encircling the cities from the rural areas”, Chinese reforms were likewise started in promoting the household contract responsibility system in the rural areas — the majority of its population living in the countryside makes it the focus of the reforms. Such structural issues that readjustment of interests entailed as urban-rural divide and poor-rich gap are closely related to the rural reform. For this, a rural study centered on the three rural issues (agriculture, rural areas and peasants), or peasantography, is actually an academic “gold mine”, which contains the richest possibilities for Chinese social science to contribute to the world.The above mentioned chapters cover an extensive range of issues in rural reform and agricultural development in China, including property right, food trade structure, the Township and Village Enterprises, non-agricultural employment, the mobility of labor force, land distribution, taxation and saving behavior. The research approach ranges from a macro- to microeconomics level, while in terms of research methodology, property theory, game model and quantitative economics are used, in combination with historiography and empirical case studies.
A study of the Chinese Communist Party's revolutionary enterprise in northern Shaanxi during the 1934-45 period, this book argues that the "Yan'an Way," long celebrated by the Party as the foundation and model for its success, was a product of quite special circumstances that were not replicable in most other parts of China. In late 1943, Mao Zedong hailed the rural cooperative movement in northern Shaanxi as the northwest base area's "second revolution," the first being the land reform of 1934-36. Based on newly available Chinese sources, the book studies the different styles and consequences of the Party's efforts in two key subregions of northern Shaanxi, Yanshu (the home of the "Yan'an Way") and Suide. The critical difference between the two subregions was an abundance of land in Yanshu and a severe scarcity of land in densely populated Suide. In Yanshu, the Party was able to ride a wave of farmer enthusiasm for farm building and development, whereas in Suide the task was to cull farming populations, resulting in resentment of cadre heavy-handedness. To show the variation in reform outcomes in the two subregions, the author examines the result of the Party's major reconstruction initiatives: internal migration, tax reform and tax collection mobilizations, tenancy reform, and heightened agricultural goals. Predictably, because of the widely varying conditions in Yanshu and Suide, community building took radically different forms and had strikingly different consequences. Throughout, the book considers the evolution of peasant-Party relations in a period when the Party was consolidating its state-building and rural development strategies. It also studies the meaning of rural "democracy" in the Communist base area, the problem of "peasant consciousness" in relation to revolution and mobilization, the function of rural cooperatives, and the state-village nexus as it developed during a period of revolutionary upheaval.
