Land Wars: The Story of China’s Agrarian Revolution (2019)

233 Pages·05.646 MB·English

by  Brian DeMare

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DeMare, Brian. Land Wars : The Story of China's Agrarian Revolution, Stanford University Press, 2019.
ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/wustl/detail.action?docID=5779773.
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LAND WARS
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DeMare, Brian. Land Wars : The Story of China's Agrarian Revolution, Stanford University Press, 2019. ProQuest Ebook
Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/wustl/detail.action?docID=5779773.
Created from wustl on 2020-02-04 14:56:02.
Brian DeMare
L A N D WA R S
The Story of China’s Agrarian Revolution
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Stanford University Press
Stanford, California
DeMare, Brian. Land Wars : The Story of China's Agrarian Revolution, Stanford University Press, 2019. ProQuest Ebook
Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/wustl/detail.action?docID=5779773.
Created from wustl on 2020-02-04 14:56:02.
Stanford University Press
Stanford, California
© 2019 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means,
electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or in any information
storage or retrieval system without the prior written permission of Stanford University Press.
.de Printed in the United States of America on acid-free, archival-quality paper
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er sth Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
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ir llA Names: DeMare, Brian James, author.
.sserP TDietslec:r iLpatinodn :w Satrasn :f othrde ,s Ctoarlyif oorf nCiah i:n Sat'asn afgorradr iUann irveevrosiltuyt iPorne s/s B, 2ri0a1n9 D. |e MIncalrued.es bibliographical
ytisrevin Idenrteiffieerersn:c LesC aCnNd i2n0d1e8x0.52952 (print) | LCCN 2019003609 (ebook) | ISBN 9781503609525
U | ISBN 9781503608498 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781503609518 (pbk. : alk. paper)
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rofn Subjects: LCSH: Land reform—China—History—20th century. | Social conflict—China—
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tS History—20th century. | Collectivization of agriculture—China—History—20th
.91 century. | Communism and agriculture—China—History—20th century. | Propaganda,
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© Communist—China—History—20th century. | Mao, Zedong, 1893–1976—Political and
thg social views. | China—Rural conditions—20th century. | China—History—Civil War,
iryp 1945–1949.
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Classification: LCC HD1333.C6 (ebook) | LCC HD1333.C6 D45 2019 (print) | DDC
338.10951/09045—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018052952
Cover design: John Barnett | 4 Eyes
DeMare, Brian. Land Wars : The Story of China's Agrarian Revolution, Stanford University Press, 2019. ProQuest Ebook
Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/wustl/detail.action?docID=5779773.
Created from wustl on 2020-02-04 14:56:02.
For Nina. For Miles.
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DeMare, Brian. Land Wars : The Story of China's Agrarian Revolution, Stanford University Press, 2019. ProQuest Ebook
Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/wustl/detail.action?docID=5779773.
Created from wustl on 2020-02-04 14:56:02.
CONTENTS
Preface ix
Introduction: The Story of Mao’s Revolution 1
1. Arriving: Work Teams 27
2. Organizing: The Search for Bitterness 48
3. Dividing: Creating Peasants and Landlords 72
4. Struggling: Inside the Furnace of Revolution 100
5. Turning: The Promise of Fanshen 130
Conclusion: Agrarian Revolution in Retrospect 159
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.sse Index 211
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DeMare, Brian. Land Wars : The Story of China's Agrarian Revolution, Stanford University Press, 2019. ProQuest Ebook
Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/wustl/detail.action?docID=5779773.
Created from wustl on 2020-02-04 14:56:12.
PREFACE
Throughout decades of tumultuous revolutionary fervor, China remained
a deeply rural nation, home to hundreds of millions of villagers dispersed
within a staggeringly diverse countryside. Between 1945 and 1952, these
villagers underwent agrarian revolution: Mao Zedong’s attempt to bring his
vision of rural China, at once egalitarian and confrontational, to life. Mao
and his comrades in the Communist Party, declaring the countryside to be
under feudal control, dispatched work teams to the countryside to totally
transform village China. First came campaigns targeting feared strongmen,
the cruelest of China’s rural exploiters, and those who had collaborated
with Japanese invaders. Only then came land reform (tudi gaige), a confron-
tational program of land redistribution that promised economic prosperity
and socialist liberation.
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.sse of urban intellectuals, helped give every villager a new Maoist class label,
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d that resulted in countless deaths. According to Mao’s grand tale of rural
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.91 awakened villagers to their power as the great peasant masses who would
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iryp the course of modern Chinese history cannot be overstated. Early years of
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campaigning helped bring the Chinese Communist Party to power. After the
founding of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) in 1949, massive rounds
DeMare, Brian. Land Wars : The Story of China's Agrarian Revolution, Stanford University Press, 2019. ProQuest Ebook
Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/wustl/detail.action?docID=5779773.
Created from wustl on 2020-02-04 14:56:21.
x Preface
of land reform cemented the party’s rule over its vast but young state. And
even today, the party’s claim to have liberated China’s peasant masses re-
mains a bedrock of its political legitimacy.
Due to its scope and complexity, Mao Zedong’s agrarian revolution has
proved an uneasy topic for historical inquiry. Over the course of over a
half-dozen years, the Communist Party launched systematic and thorough
campaigns in the hopes of completely transforming the Chinese country-
side. Mao’s attempt to remake village China was not a single event in one
place and time, but a long series of interrelated campaigns with differing
terrains, land laws, and political contexts. During these years, moreover,
the Communists went from revolutionary upstarts to rulers of the world’s
most populous nation. Transcribing the history of these campaigns has been
further complicated by the powerful stories that the Communists told about
their revolution. These stories, fully fleshed out in novels claiming to realis-
tically represent the entire process of local transformation, have done much
to confuse the lines between the literal and the literary. Even nonfiction
accounts of land reform owe much to Mao’s narrative of rural revolution.
This study investigates the entire process of agrarian revolution in order
to explore the discrepancies and disjunctions within the campaigns. It also
recognizes the power of the Maoist narrative of exploited peasants who
found liberation through class struggle. During the years of land reform,
this story was inescapable. Chinese citizens need not read the lengthy novels
penned by party authors on rural revolution or attend the operatic perfor-
.d
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se attend huge exhibits that meticulously showed the transition from the feu-
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gir llA dal past to the liberated future. I wrote this book because of my belief that
.sse historians must engage Mao’s narrative of revolution in order to understand
rP what truly occurred in rural China as the Communists came to power. The
ytisre party indoctrinated a vast army of would-be revolutionaries with this story
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fn become reality. In writing this book, I drew heavily on the sources histori-
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decades, I have found the lines between fact and fiction blurred and perme-
able. This book is my attempt to make sense of how the stories told about
the revolution became the revolution itself.
DeMare, Brian. Land Wars : The Story of China's Agrarian Revolution, Stanford University Press, 2019. ProQuest Ebook
Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/wustl/detail.action?docID=5779773.
Created from wustl on 2020-02-04 14:56:21.
Preface xi
The Introduction to this book traces the development of Mao’s revolu-
tionary narrative within the context of the party’s long engagement with
village China. Subsequent chapters begin with narrative treatments of land
reform as an entry point into the various steps of rural revolution. In chap-
ter 1, work teams arrive in newly liberated villages to announce the onset of
revolutionary change. In chapter 2, team members search out poor peasant
activists and train them to speak out against their wealthy neighbors. Dur-
ing later chapters, class statuses are determined and counterrevolutionary
plots discovered. In this book, just as in Mao’s story of agrarian revolu-
tion, everything builds up to class struggle, the ferocious ritual that allowed
peasants to obtain their true liberation by publicly attacking landlords and
other class enemies. But while this book uses the land reform plotline and
draws on stories of revolution, it simultaneously deconstructs and questions
Mao’s narrative to show how it was manufactured, deployed, and received
in a diverse countryside, all too often with unexpected, even deadly, results.
Investigation into the relationship between revolution and narrative re-
veals that stories have shaped not only our understanding of the past, but
the contours of history itself. Despite the diversity of China’s vast and popu-
lous countryside, the party demanded that work teams overseeing agrar-
ian revolution follow its established plotline, which assumed the need for
fierce class struggle against evil landlords. The stories the party told about
land reform and other mass campaigns in the countryside made agrarian
revolution understandable and desirable. But this tale was never intended
.d
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se for China. Even today, the dissonance between Mao’s grand story and the
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g realities of these years of campaigning reverberate across the countryside.
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ytisre This project originated many years ago when I was a graduate student at
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fn Since then I have accumulated a tremendous debt to many scholars.
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.9 Foremost among them are the colleagues who found the time to provide
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2 © invaluable feedback on various chapters of this book: Jeremy Brown,
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giryp Christian Hess, Jeffery Javed, Matthew Johnson, Fabio Lanza, Fangchun
oC Li, and Aminda Smith. Of course, the remaining mistakes are mine alone.
I also thank Andrew Endrey and Felix Wemheuer for helping me access
new historical materials. I commend their generosity and commitment to
academic exchange. Many others helped me think through the challenges
DeMare, Brian. Land Wars : The Story of China's Agrarian Revolution, Stanford University Press, 2019. ProQuest Ebook
Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/wustl/detail.action?docID=5779773.
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xii Preface
of writing this book, including Deng Hongqin, Edward Friedman, Carma
Hinton, Huaiyin Li, Ma Weiqiang, Zhao Ma, Ralph Thaxton, and Yiching
Wu.
A deep thanks to everyone at Stanford University Press, starting with
Marcela Maxfield. Her strong editorial voice and belief in this project were
essential in getting this book into print. Tim Roberts skillfully managed the
production of the book. And a special thanks to Bev Miller, who painstak-
ingly oversaw the copyediting of the manuscript. The Stanford University
Press design team astounded me with their work for the book. I also owe
a tremendous debt to the two anonymous reviewers whose perceptive cri-
tiques made me rethink many aspects of this book.
Researching China from New Orleans, the city that care forgot, presents
a unique challenge. Working at Tulane University, however, has been a bless-
ing. A Young Mellon Professorship, awarded by the School of Liberal Arts,
provided critical research funding. My colleagues in the history department
have given me camaraderie and a true academic home. As this book came
to completion, my fellow historians Emily Clark, Kris Lane, Jana Lipman,
Liz McMahon, Linda Pollock, and Randy Sparks shared much needed ad-
vice on writing and publishing. I also thank the department administrators,
whose hard work allowed me to finish this book: Donna Denneen, Susan
McCann, and Ericka Sanchez. And I cannot forget my students, some of
whom have put up with my rants about narratives and grassroots China for
years. Three talented students volunteered to comment on this book: John
.d
evre Berner, Colin Boyd, and Drew Pearson. My research assistant, Xiaoyu Yu,
se helped me navigate through a collection of particularly challenging hand-
r sth
g written documents. Off campus, these friends helped make New Orleans
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.sse home: Amy Arthur, Ryan Farishian, James Gentry, Nowell Raff, and John
rP and Sarah Wachter.
ytisre My parents, Maggie and Paul, chose to raise their ʻohana in Hawaii. I
vin
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fn and Tracey. I often thought about those blissful days as I worked on this
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.9 project. As readers will discover, the story of China’s rural revolution is
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2 © not always a happy one. I suspect that I never would have finished this
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g book without Nina and Miles DeMare. Thanks to them, my life has been
iryp
oC filled with aloha, which has sustained me during the most depressing mo-
ments of archival discovery. Nina, from our days living in a hutong not far
from Tiananmen, always believed that I would finish graduate school, find
a job, and get tenure. She never once suspected that this book might not see
DeMare, Brian. Land Wars : The Story of China's Agrarian Revolution, Stanford University Press, 2019. ProQuest Ebook
Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/wustl/detail.action?docID=5779773.
Created from wustl on 2020-02-04 14:56:21.