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Social and Political Change in Revolutionary China
This in-depth study examines the influence of the Chinese Communist Party’s effective organizing in Shanxi Province during the War of Resistance. Shanxi Province was on the frontlines of the 1937–1945 War of Resistance against Japan—the war that launched the Chinese Communist Party. During that time, the Taihang Base Area of Southwest Shanxi was one of the Party’s most important strongholds. David Goodman provides the first county-level analysis of social and political change in the Taihang Base Area during those crucial years. Goodman explores revolution as process, arguing that the Party was successful because of its management of revolutionary incrementalism. He examines the roles of various groups, highlighting the activities of urban intellectuals, teachers, and peasant small-holders as agents of change. Based on newly available sources, including recently republished materials from the Taihang Base Area, restricted documentation from the Taiyuan Archive, and interviews with veterans of the Taihang Base Area this meticulously researched work deepens our understanding of the social and political origins of the Chinese revolution.
Revolutionary Transformations
An international team of scholars explore China's transformative revolutionary decade, the 1950s, calling into question existing narratives.
Revolution
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Bitter and Sweet
Less than a half century ago, China experienced a cataclysmic famine, which was particularly devastating in the countryside. As a result, older people in rural areas have experienced in their lifetimes both extreme deprivation and relative abundance of food. Young people, on the other hand, have a different relationship to food. Many young rural Chinese are migrating to rapidly industrializing cities for work, leaving behind backbreaking labor but also a connection to food through agriculture. Bitter and Sweet examines the role of food in one rural Chinese community as it has shaped everyday lives over the course of several tumultuous decades. In her superb ethnographic accounts, Ellen Oxfeld compels us to reexamine some of the dominant frameworks that have permeated recent scholarship on contemporary China and that describe increasing dislocation and individualism and a lack of moral centeredness. By using food as a lens, she shows a more complex picture, where connectedness and sense of place continue to play an important role, even in the context of rapid change.
The Unknown Cultural Revolution
The Unknown Cultural Revolution challenges the established narrative of China’s Cultural Revolution, which assumes that this period of great social upheaval led to economic disaster, the persecution of intellectuals, and senseless violence. Dongping Han offers a powerful account of the dramatic improvements in the living conditions, infrastructure, and agricultural practices of China’s rural population that emerged in this period. Drawing on extensive local interviews and records in rural Jimo County, in Shandong Province, Han shows that the Cultural Revolution helped overthrow local hierarchies, establish participatory democracy and economic planning in the communes, and expand educatio...
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 s...
Peasants without the Party
Exploring one of the most dynamic and contested regions of the world, this series includes works on political, economic, cultural, and social changes in modern and contemporary Asia and the Pacific. The leading specialist on China's twentieth century peasant resistance reexamines, in bold and original ways, the question: Was the Chinese peasantry a revolutionary force? Where most scholarly attention has focused on Communist-led peasant movements, Bianco's story is one of peasant thought and action largely unmediated by modern political parties. This volume pays particular attention to the first half of the twentieth century when peasant-based conflict, ranging from tax and food protests to secret society conflicts, opium struggles, inter-communal conflicts, and tenant protests over rent, was central to nationwide revolutionary processes.
Education Directory
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Power and Protest in the Countryside
"Constitutes an important and timely addition to the literature on peasant rebellion; wisely, the editors have been eclectic in drawing from some of the leading historians, anthropologists, political scientists, and sociologists active in the field an analysis of the forms that rural violence has taken through the past three centuries."--Pacific Affairs
