Download or read book Peasants and Revolution in Rural China written by Chang Liu and published by Psychology Press. This book was released on 2007 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores rural political change in China from 1850 to 1949 to help us understand China’s transformation from a weak, decaying agrarian empire to a unified, strong nation-state during this period. Based on local gazetteers, contemporary field studies, government archives, personal memoirs and other primary sources, it systematically compares two key macro-regions of rural China – the North China plain and the Yangzi delta – to demonstrate the ways in which the forces of political change, shaped by different local conditions, operated to transform the country. It shows that on the North China plain, the village community composed mainly of owner-cultivators was the focal point for political mobilization, whilst in the Yangzi delta absentee landlordism was exploited by the state for local control and tax extraction. However, these both set the stage, in different ways, for the communist mobilization in the first half of the twentieth century. Peasants and Revolution in Rural Chinais an important addition to the literature on the history of the Chinese Revolution, and will be of interest to anyone seeking to understand the course of Chinese social and political development.
Download or read book China s Peasants written by Sulamith Heins Potter and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1990-03-29 with total page 382 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The revolutionary experiences of Cantonese peasant villagers are documented in the first comprehensive analysis of rural Chinese society by foreign anthropologists since the Revolution of 1949.
Download or read book Will the Boat Sink the Water written by Chen Guidi and published by PublicAffairs. This book was released on 2007-04-24 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Chinese economic miracle is happening despite, not because of, China's 900 million peasants. They are missing from the portraits of booming Shanghai, or Beijing. Many of China's underclass live under a feudalistic system unchanged since the fifteenth century. They are truly the voiceless in modern China. They are also, perhaps, the reason that China will not be able to make the great social and economic leap forward, because if it is to leap it must carry the 900 million with it. Chinese journalists Wu Chuntao and Chen Guidi returned to Wu's home province of Anhui, one of China's poorest, to undertake a three-year survey of what had happened to the peasants there, asking the question: Have the peasants been betrayed by the revolution undertaken in their name by Mao and his successors? The result is a brilliant narrative of life among the 900 million, and a vivid portrait of the petty dictators that run China's villages and counties and the consequences of their bullying despotism on the people they administer. Told principally through four dramatic narratives of particular Anhui people, Will the Boat Sink the Water? gives voice to the unheard masses and looks beneath the gloss of the new China to find the truth of daily life for its vast population of rural poor.
Download or read book Peasants and Revolution in Rural China written by Chang Liu and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2007-05-14 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores rural political change in China from 1850 to 1949 to help us understand China’s transformation from a weak, decaying agrarian empire to a unified, strong nation-state during this period. Based on local gazetteers, contemporary field studies, government archives, personal memoirs and other primary sources, it systematically compares two key macro-regions of rural China – the North China plain and the Yangzi delta – to demonstrate the ways in which the forces of political change, shaped by different local conditions, operated to transform the country. It shows that on the North China plain, the village community composed mainly of owner-cultivators was the focal point for political mobilization, whilst in the Yangzi delta absentee landlordism was exploited by the state for local control and tax extraction. However, these both set the stage, in different ways, for the communist mobilization in the first half of the twentieth century. Peasants and Revolution in Rural China is an important addition to the literature on the history of the Chinese Revolution, and will be of interest to anyone seeking to understand the course of Chinese social and political development.
Download or read book Salt of the Earth written by Ralph Thaxton and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 1997-01-01 with total page 454 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: On October 1, 1949, a rural-based insurgency demolished the Nationalist government of Chiang-kai Shek and brought the Chinese Communists to national power. How did the Chinese Communists gain their mandate to rule the countryside? In this pathbreaking study, Ralph A. Thaxton, Jr., provides a fresh and strikingly original interpretation of the political and economic origins of the October revolution. Salt of the Earth is based on direct interviews with the village people whose individual and collective protest activities helped shape the nature and course of the Chinese revolution in the deep countryside. Focusing on the Party's relationship with locally esteemed non-Communist leaders, the author shows that the Party's role is best understood in terms of its intimate connections with local collective activism and with existing modes of local protest, both of which were the product of rural people acting on their own grievances, interests, and goals. The author's collection and use of oral histories--from the last remaining eyewitnesses--and written corroborative materials is a remarkable achievement; his new interpretation of why China's rural people supported and joined the Communists in their quest for state power is dramatically different from what has come before. This book will stimulate debates on the genesis of popular mobilization and the growth of insurgency for decades to come. On October 1, 1949, a rural-based insurgency demolished the Nationalist government of Chiang-kai Shek and brought the Chinese Communists to national power. How did the Chinese Communists gain their mandate to rule the countryside? In this pathbreaking study, Ralph A. Thaxton, Jr., provides a fresh and strikingly original interpretation of the political and economic origins of the October revolution. Salt of the Earth is based on direct interviews with the village people whose individual and collective protest activities helped shape the nature and course of the Chinese revolution in the deep countryside. Focusing on the Party's relationship with locally esteemed non-Communist leaders, the author shows that the Party's role is best understood in terms of its intimate connections with local collective activism and with existing modes of local protest, both of which were the product of rural people acting on their own grievances, interests, and goals. The author's collection and use of oral histories--from the last remaining eyewitnesses--and written corroborative materials is a remarkable achievement; his new interpretation of why China's rural people supported and joined the Communists in their quest for state power is dramatically different from what has come before. This book will stimulate debates on the genesis of popular mobilization and the growth of insurgency for decades to come.
Download or read book Women the Family and Peasant Revolution in China written by Kay Ann Johnson and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2009-02-15 with total page 292 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Kay Ann Johnson provides much-needed information about women and gender equality under Communist leadership. She contends that, although the Chinese Communist Party has always ostensibly favored women's rights and family reform, it has rarely pushed for such reforms. In reality, its policies often have reinforced the traditional role of women to further the Party's predominant economic and military aims. Johnson's primary focus is on reforms of marriage and family because traditional marriage, family, and kinship practices have had the greatest influence in defining and shaping women's place in Chinese society. Conversant with current theory in political science, anthropology, and Marxist and feminist analysis, Johnson writes with clarity and discernment free of dogma. Her discussions of family reform ultimately provide insights into the Chinese government's concern with decreasing the national birth rate, which has become a top priority. Johnson's predictions of a coming crisis in population control are borne out by the recent increase in female infanticide and the government abortion campaign.
Download or read book Peasant Nationalism and Communist Power written by Chalmers A. Johnson and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 1962 with total page 276 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This author researches the Chinese Communists' wartime expansion, according to the documentation recorded by Japanese intelligence, then compares that expansion with that of the Yugoslav Communists.
Download or read book The Rural Modern written by Kate Merkel-Hess and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2016-08-17 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Discussions of China’s early twentieth-century modernization efforts tend to focus almost exclusively on cities, and the changes, both cultural and industrial, seen there. As a result, the communist peasant revolution appears as a decisive historical break. Kate Merkel-Hess corrects that misconception by demonstrating how crucial the countryside was for reformers in China long before the success of the communist revolution. In The Rural Modern, Merkel-Hess shows that Chinese reformers and intellectuals created an idea of modernity that was not simply about what was foreign and new, as in Shanghai and other cities, but instead captured the Chinese people’s desire for social and political change rooted in rural traditions and institutions. She traces efforts to remake village education, economics, and politics, analyzing how these efforts contributed to a new, inclusive vision of rural Chinese life. Merkel-Hess argues that as China sought to redefine itself, such rural reform efforts played a major role, and tensions that emerged between rural and urban ways deeply informed social relations, government policies, and subsequent efforts to create a modern nation during the communist period.
Download or read book Chinese Modernity and the Peasant Path written by Kathy Le Mons Walker and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 1999 with total page 366 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This ambitious work traces a social history of semicolonialism in late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century China. It takes as its central concern the intertwining of two antagonistic forces: elite constructions of modernity shaped globally, and an alternate line of peasant resistance and development. Nantong county and the northern portion of the commercially advanced Yangzi Delta form its focal points. Lying in the hinterland of and connected in myriad ways with the treaty port of Shanghai, which in the late nineteenth century became the center of imperialist activity in China, the northern delta is an ideal locale for examining how the acquisition, transmission, and contestation of power may have changed during the extended moment of semicolonial encounter. The authors specific project is to unravel the multiple strands of the semicolonial process and thereby the dominant and alternative histories it embodied. In emphasizing semicolonialism as a structural context shaping events, the book opens up a pivotal but silent area in the history of modern China. In confronting the development of capitalism as a historical phenomenon and suggesting that its consequences for land and labor on a global scale need greater theoretical and historical scrutiny, the book forces a new understanding of Chinas modernity. The book is in two parts. The first delineates key long-term dynamics in the political, economic, and social history of the area from the late Ming dynasty to the Opium Wars. The second part begins with an examination of the rise of modernist urban power in the context of accelerating growth in the textile and cotton trades, focusing on such topics as economic restructuring under Shanghais impetus, new forms of economic and political organization, and contention as well as cooperation within the urban elite. Turning to the countryside, the book then examines the regearing of the rural economy to the needs of urban capital, local and global; outlines the emergence of modern landlordism and other rural capitalisms; analyzes class formation in the peasantry associated with changes in labor organization, tenurial arrangements, and the gendered division of labor; and traces the coalescence of a distinctive political discourse through which peasants contested certain development schemes and advanced alternative conceptions of community and nation.
Download or read book Village China Under Socialism and Reform written by Huaiyin Li and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 2009-03-12 with total page 421 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Village China Under Socialism and Reform offers a comprehensive account of rural life after the communist revolution, detailing villager involvement in political campaigns since the 1950s, agricultural production under the collective system, family farming and non-agricultural economy in the reform, and everyday life in the family and community. Li's rich examination draws on original documents from local agricultural collectives, newly accessible government archives, and his own fieldwork in Qin village of Jiangsu province to highlight the continuities in rural transformation. Firmly disagreeing with those who claim that recent developments in rural China represent a radical break with pre-reform sociopolitical practices and patterns of production, Li instead draws a clear history connecting the current situation to ecological, social, and institutional changes that have persisted from the collective era.
Download or read book The Peasant Economy and Social Change in North China written by Philip Huang and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 1985-06-01 with total page 400 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The author presents a convincing new interpretation of the origins and nature of the agrarian crisis that gripped the North China Plain in the two centuries before the Revolution. His extensive research included eighteenth-century homicide case records, a nineteenth-century country government archive, large quantities of 1930's Japanese ethnographic materials, and his own field studies in 1980. Through a comparison of the histories of small family farms and larger scale managerial farms, the author documents and illustrates the long-term trends of agricultural commercialization, social stratification, and mounting population pressure in the peasant economy. He shows how those changes, in the absence of dynamic economic growth, combined over the course of several centuries to produce a majority, not simply of land-short peasants or of exploited tenants and agricultural laborers, but of poor peasants who required both family farming and agricultural wage income to survive. This interlocking of family farming with wage labor furnished a large supply of cheap labor, which in turn acted as a powerful brake of capital accumulation in the economy. The formation of such a poor peasantry ultimately altered both the nature of village communities and their relations with the elites and the state, creating tensions that led in the end to revolution.
Download or read book The Unknown Cultural Revolution written by Dongping Han and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 2008-12-01 with total page 207 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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 education and public services, especially for the elderly. Han lucidly illustrates how these changes fostered dramatic economic development in rural China. The Unknown Revolution documents a neglected side of China’s Cultural Revolution, demonstrating the potential of mass education and empowerment for radical political and economic transformation. It is a bold and provocative work, which demands the attention not only of students of contemporary Chinese history but of all who are concerned with poverty and inequality in the world today.
Download or read book Land Wars written by Brian J. DeMare and published by . This book was released on 2019 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Land Wars: The Story of China's Agrarian Revolution explores how Mao's narrative of rural revolution became a reality, at great human cost.
Download or read book From Commune to Capitalism written by Zhun Xu and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 2018-06-22 with total page 154 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Socialism and capitalism in the Chinese countryside -- Chinese agrarian change in world-historical context -- Agricultural productivity and decollectivization -- The political economy of decollectivization -- The achievement, contradictions, and demise of rural collectives
Download or read book Red China s Green Revolution written by Joshua Eisenman and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2018-04-24 with total page 427 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: China’s dismantling of the Mao-era rural commune system and return to individual household farming under Deng Xiaoping has been seen as a successful turn away from a misguided social experiment and a rejection of the disastrous policies that produced widespread famine. In this revisionist study, Joshua Eisenman marshals previously inaccessible data to overturn this narrative, showing that the commune modernized agriculture, increased productivity, and spurred an agricultural green revolution that laid the foundation for China’s future rapid growth. Red China’s Green Revolution tells the story of the commune’s origins, evolution, and downfall, demonstrating its role in China’s economic ascendance. After 1970, the commune emerged as a hybrid institution, including both collective and private elements, with a high degree of local control over economic decision but almost no say over political ones. It had an integrated agricultural research and extension system that promoted agricultural modernization and collectively owned local enterprises and small factories that spread rural industrialization. The commune transmitted Mao’s collectivist ideology and enforced collective isolation so it could overwork and underpay its households. Eisenman argues that the commune was eliminated not because it was unproductive, but because it was politically undesirable: it was the post-Mao leadership led by Deng Xiaoping—not rural residents—who chose to abandon the commune in order to consolidate their control over China. Based on detailed and systematic national, provincial, and county-level data, as well as interviews with agricultural experts and former commune members, Red China’s Green Revolution is a comprehensive historical and social scientific analysis that fundamentally challenges our understanding of recent Chinese economic history.
Download or read book Contending for the Chinese Modern written by Xiaoping Wang and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2019-05-15 with total page 616 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Contending for the "Chinese Modern", Xiaoping Wang studies the writing of fiction in 1940s China. Through a practice of political hermeneutics of fictional texts and social subtexts, it explores how social modernity and literary modernity intertwined with and interacted upon each other in the development of modern Chinese literature. It not only makes critical reappraisement of some renowned modern Chinese writers, but also sheds fresh lights on a series of theoretical problems pertaining to the issue of plural modernities, in which the problematic of subjectivity, class consciousness and identity politics are the key words as well as the concrete procedures that it employs to undertake the ideological analysis. The manuscript signifies a new paradigm in studies of modern Chinese literature.
Download or read book Peasants without the Party written by Lucien Bianco and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2015-03-04 with total page 340 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
