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"Peasant uprisings China History 20th century."
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Revolutions as Organizational Change
By comparing peasant revolutions in Hunan and Jiangxi between 1926 and 1934, Revolutions as Organizational Change offers a new organizational perspective on peasant revolutions. Utilizing newly available historical materials in the People’s Republic of China in the reform era, it challenges the established view that the great Chinese revolution of the twentieth century was a revolution “made\" by the Chinese Communist Party (the CCP). The book begins with a puzzle presented by the two peasant revolutions. While outside mobilization by the CCP was largely absent in Hunan, peasant revolutionary behaviors were spontaneous and radical. In Jiangxi, however, despite intense mobilization by the CCP, peasants remained passive and conservative. This study seeks to resolve the puzzle by examining the roles of communal cooperative institutions in the making of peasant revolutions. Historically, peasant communities in many parts of the world were regulated by powerful cooperative institutions to confront environmental challenges. This book argues that different communal organizational principles affect peasants’ perceptions of the legitimacy of their communal orders. Agrarian rebellions can be caused by peasants’ attempts to restructure unjust and illegitimate communal organizational orders, while legitimate communal organizational orders can powerfully constrain the mobilization by outside revolutionary agents such as the CCP.
eBook
When Food Became Scarce
When Food Became Scarce is about the Great Leap Famine of 1958-61. Yixin Chen adopts a grassroots level analysis to explore an existential question concerning hundreds of millions of Chinese peasants: why did some peasants perish while others from the same villages facing the same collective problems of food scarcity survive?
Viewing the famine as a persistent ordeal, Chen identifies environment and lineage as two pivotal factors that influenced the rural populace's destiny. When food quotas under the Maoist communal dining system plummeted below subsistence or came to a halt, most individual villagers in the mountainous regions of southern China turned to their environment for alternative sustenance, ensuring their survival. More remarkably, across the nation, more peasants united in self-preservation strategies, concealing grains to elude excessive state requisitions, orchestrating food and crop riots, and collectively combating desperation. Given that the majority of Chinese villages were historically established on the foundation of consanguine relationships, creating an obligation among villagers to support one another due to shared ancestry, lineage emerged as a microlevel social mechanism that activated diverse forms of collective resistance. In villages where peasants effectively upheld their lineage organizations and adopted self-protective measures, their survival rates exceeded those of villages where the enforcement of Maoist Great Leap initiatives disrupted the lineage structure, leaving the communities more vulnerable. When Food Became Scare reorients the famine narrative, unpacking its intricacies from the perspective of the survival side.
eBook
Chinese discourses on the peasant, 1900-1949
Xiaorong Han explores how Chinese intellectuals envisioned the peasantry and its role in changing society during the first half of the twentieth century. Politically motivated intellectuals, both Communist and non-Communist, believed that rural peasants and their villages would be at the heart of change during this long period of national crisis. Nevertheless, intellectuals saw themselves as the true shapers of change who would transform and use the peasantry. Han uses intellectuals’ writings to provide a comprehensive look at their views of the peasantry. He shows how intellectuals with varying politics created images of the peasant—a supposed contemporary image and an ideal image of the peasant transformed for political ends, how intellectuals theorized on the nature of Chinese rural life, and how intellectuals conceived their own relationships with peasants.
eBook
Chinese Discourses on the Peasant, 1900-1949
Xiaorong Han explores how Chinese intellectuals envisioned the peasantry and its role in changing society during the first half of the twentieth century. Politically motivated intellectuals, both Communist and non-Communist, believed that rural peasants and their villages would be at the heart of change during this long period of national crisis. Nevertheless, intellectuals saw themselves as the true shapers of change who would transform and use the peasantry. Han uses intellectuals' writings to provide a comprehensive look at their views of the peasantry. He shows how intellectuals with varying politics created images of the peasant—a supposed contemporary image and an ideal image of the peasant transformed for political ends, how intellectuals theorized on the nature of Chinese rural life, and how intellectuals conceived their own relationships with peasants.
eBook
Peasants without the Party: Grass-Roots Movements in Twentieth-Century China
Publishers details for: Peasants Without the Party: Grass-roots Movements in Twentieth-century China, by Lucien Bianco, Armonk: M. E. Sharpe, 2001. xxvii + 309 pp. US$64.95 (hardcover), US$26.95 (paperback).
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