This final chapter elaborates an organizational theory of agrarian revolutions. It also draws broader conclusions about the study of agrarian revolutions in general and the Chinese revolution in particular.
Drawing from the different revolutionary patterns in Hunan and Jiangxi, this study suggests an alternative theory of agrarian revolution that focuses on the organizational frameworks of peasant communities. It argues that agrarian revolutions can be caused by peasants’ attempts to restructure unfair and illegitimate community organizational orders. Essentially, these attempts are organizational rebellions to build new and just communal organizational principles. Therefore, I interpret some agrarian revolutions as organizational phenomena.
However, community-level rebellion needs larger favorable political circumstances to be translated into agrarian revolution. This condition can be created either by state breakdown and wars or by outside revolutionary organizations. The larger favorable political context is important for agrarian revolutions for two reasons. First, an agrarian revolution is characterized by its size and supralocal impact. A community-sized rebellion is not an agrarian revolution. Only simultaneous organizational rebellion by many communities can generate supralocal impact. Only large events can create a political space big enough for many communities to rebel in.
Second, a larger favorable political situation creates the opportunity for peasants to rebel at the community level. This is a structural insight emphasized by Skocpol, who argues that causal analyses of conditions for revolutions “certainly have to examine configuration of conditions.”1 Different configurations of conditions create different possibilities for revolutions. As Skocpol points out, state administrative-military breakdown from above is critical for peasant revolutions:
Such revolutions have emerged more invariably out of occasionally favorable political situations, shaped in large part by the interstate dynamics of the modern world-capitalist era. For these dynamics have, at crucial conjunctures, weakened indigenous or colonial state controls over the peasantry. Moreover, they have often allowed, even impelled, revolutionary political movements to forge new relationships with the mass of the peasantry. Only in favorable circumstances such as these has the insurrectionary potential of peasants—whether traditionalist or commercializing, landed or landless—actually been able to propel revolutionary transformations.2
As put by Ralph Thaxton in his study of peasant revolution in the Taihang Mountain region of North China, without military-political protection by outside revolutionary organizations, “rebellious peasants will be dragged from their hovels, tortured before their loved ones, and dumped in shallow graves.”3 Therefore, Kathleen Hartford and Steven M. Goldstein argue that studies on the Chinese revolution must seriously incorporate insights from comparative studies on revolutions, including the structural perspective proposed by Skocpol. Specifically, they suggest that a key condition for successful peasant revolution in the Chinese context was the military balance of power between the Communist and counterrevolutionary forces, which critically defined the opportunities and costs for peasant insurrections.4
The Hunan experience convincingly demonstrated the importance of a larger favorable political situation in the making of peasant revolutions. Although peasants suffered under political and economic repressions by the rural upper class and had motives to change their communal organizational orders, landlords and the gentry-controlled militia system effectively denied peasants opportunities to rebel. The Northern Expedition, initiated by the Nationalist-Communist coalition in 1926, created a context of state administrative-military breakdown in Hunan. Peasants quickly seized the larger favorable political conditions and translated them into opportunities for community-level rebellions. The result was simultaneous community-level rebellions in most parts of the province. Because of its supralocal nature, this province-wide peasant movement became a genuine agrarian revolution.
A larger favorable political situation facilitates peasant revolutions in other ways as well. Peasants themselves rarely look beyond the local consequences of political actions. Only an outside revolutionary organization can use its supracommunity organizational networks to fuse and connect many local-level rebellions into a regional- or even national-scale revolutionary movement. The county-level and provincial-level peasant associations in Hunan were created by outside revolutionary organizations to provide networks that linked local- and community-level peasant movements into a larger political force.
So the organizational perspective of agrarian revolutions, as proposed by this study, involves a two-level process. At the community level peasants must perceive their community organizational order as illegitimate so that they have incentives to wage an organizational rebellion to restructure the relational system in their communities. However, a larger favorable political situation is important to realize this organizational rebellion at the community level and translate it into an agrarian revolution with supralocal impact. Communal rebellions emerge with difficulty since illegitimate community organizational orders are typically maintained through coercive means by the agrarian ruling class, which is supported by the repressive machine of the state. A larger favorable political situation can lower the cost of community-level rebellion and create the possibility of many simultaneous rebellions in a wider geographical context.
Without any one of the above processes, an agrarian revolution is unlikely to emerge. In the Hunan case, the illegitimate community paramilitary organizations of tuan-lian could effectively maintain their dominance in rural communities for a long time simply through coercive force. Widespread community-level rebellions only occurred when a nationalistic war created favorable circumstances. This war established a vast political space for peasants to overthrow their old community organizational frameworks. Also, the outside revolutionary agents organizationally linked community-level peasant rebellions into a province-wide revolutionary movement with clear national goals of anti-imperialism and antiwarlordism.
In the Jiangxi case, however, even though the Communist Red Army enjoyed political and military hegemony in the region and created a larger favorable situation for revolutionary insurrections, a legitimate community organizational context seriously impeded the CCP’s mobilization. As the previous chapter discusses, in many places Jiangxi peasants even openly opposed the revolution in the countryside. As Yuan I puts it,
The southern indigenous peasants provided less muscle for the CCP than their northern counterparts: in fact, in many ways they resisted class agitation and class consciousness. The agrarian policy of the Rural Soviet in the 1930s created bitter resentment among southern Chinese peasants toward the CCP, which undercut and rendered Mao’s peasant mobilization strategy impossible.5
This theory therefore incorporates both the opportunity and willingness factors in human actions. Both must be present to realize an agrarian revolution. Opportunity stands for the possibilities that are available within any environment, while willingness stands for the preferences of individuals or groups and their choices of action from a range of alternatives. Opportunity and willingness require the combination of both structure or environment and choice or decision-making process. This theory thus argues against a deterministic model of social scientific explanations. In the Chinese context, the ubiquitous “organizational weapon” perspective assumes that mobilizations by the CCP would have achieved identical results in different contexts. The experience of Jiangxi decisively disproves it. Although the CCP military-political hegemony in the region created ample opportunities for peasants to reshape their communal orders, their lack of willingness resulted in an uncooperative relationship with the party. In Hunan, by contrast, the combination of both willingness and opportunity factors created an impressive agrarian revolution that exceeded the imagination and goals of outside revolutionary organizations.
However, it must be noted that this organizational perspective is not presented as a theory that is capable of explaining all cases of agrarian revolutions. A central conclusion of recent comparative studies of revolutions is that there are not only many forms of revolution but also multiple causes. As Jeff Goodwin writes, this perspective assumes
not only that many phenomena that we wish to explain, including revolutions or types of revolutions, have multiple, complex determinants, but also that these phenomena may have very different complexes of determinants. This approach does not assume, in other words, that all revolutions or types of revolutions will have precisely the same cause: there may be multiple paths, so to speak, to the same destination.6
In this context, the organizational approach presented by this study applies only to peasant communities with strong and powerful internal cooperative institutions. As discussed in Chapter 3, Magagna identifies three types of peasant communities: redistributive, regulative, and residual.7 In the last type of communities, communal cooperative institutions either do not exist at all or “play [only] a marginal and episodic role.” Obviously, the utility of the organizational theory is limited to the study of the first two types of peasant communities.
This study has demonstrated that the formal organizational context of peasant communities shapes peasants’ political behaviors. This variable, however, has not been analyzed systematically by existing theories of agrarian revolutions. These theories can be classified into two categories by the mechanisms employed in explaining peasant revolutions. One is the cultural-norm approach represented by the moral economy theory. Precapitalist rural communities were governed by a set of traditional norms and values. When this normative system was destroyed by the market economic relationship, peasants resorted to rebellion to express their anger. The other is the rational-intentional approach, best represented by rational choice theory. Peasant revolutions emerge because peasants benefit materially from them. This approach also includes the Marxist class exploitation thesis and structural theory that emphasizes economic relationships. According to the underlying logic of this approach, it is the economic exploitation by the rural upper classes that propels peasants to improve their economic position through revolutionary change. As Daniel Little observes, the Marxist class conflict explanations of peasant rebellion “postulate the strongest kind of collective rationality.”8
These two broad approaches are located at either end of the individual-societal continuum. The rational-intentional approach focuses on individual interest calculations and interprets political actions in terms of conscious individual intentions. The cultural-norm approach focuses on societal norms and values. According to this view, political action, as mediated by societal norms and values, thus “involves a normative component that cannot be reduced to narrow self-interest.”9 The problem with these two approaches is that they fail to appreciate the organizational context of human society that constitutes its broader social structures. In various social contexts, individuals are linked with each other by different kinds of formal organizations. They are coordinated by formal cooperative institutions designed to control complex human relations and expand the domains of human activity.
This study focuses on this organizational dimension of human society, which forms part of its broader social structures. Besides being influenced by social norms and individual interests, peasants are also shaped by the social structures in which they are situated and that connect them with each other. Social structures mediate both individuals’ perceptions of justice and their interests. Thus, the same individual situated in different communal organizational contexts not only differently perceives fairness and justice in his or her relationship with others, but also receives different material benefits. By focusing on the mediating role of formal communal cooperative institutions, this study represents a turn from both the cultural-norm and the rational-intentional approaches in the study of agrarian revolutions.
This organizational approach also challenges the Marxist economic determinism thesis, which holds that economic relationships determine political actions, as they are based on the position of each class in the relations of production. This is a rationalist interpretation of political action because it presumes that each class can rationally assess its economic interests in certain relations of production and fully comprehend the goals and consequences of its political action. This thesis closely links the objective material factors and patterns of political behavior: the economic system creates objective interests for classes, and class members come to recognize their material interests and act to defend or promote these interests. Thus, this approach presumes that the relations of production define class relations, that the exploited segments of rural society have an implicit capacity to perceive the exploitative nature of the current relations of production, and that they are disposed to alter that system.
The problem with this approach is that it assumes a direct relationship between the economic position of a group and its political motivation. Political actions, however, are mediated by many other factors including culture, religion, ideology, and social structures. This study argues that in addition to economic relationships, social structures in general and formal relational structures in particular also define people’s perception of interests and thus the perceived need for political action.
This study shows that although class exploitation existed in both Hunan and Jiangxi, their peasants interpreted interclass relationships in markedly different ways. This was because peasants were organized through community organizations where interclass relationships were mediated and expressed by different organizational mechanisms. The relational structures of communities interacted with and complemented the economic relationship and thus defined a perception of interclass relationship that was different from the one defined solely by relations of production. Thus, although economic exploitation in Jiangxi was as severe as that in Hunan, Jiangxi rural communities experienced subdued interclass conflict because of their lineage-based community organizational frameworks. Conversely, the paramilitary-based communal organizational context of Hunan created an antagonistic relationship between the landed class and peasants. The difference in revolutionary patterns in Jiangxi and Hunan was the result of the alternate formal relational structures of their rural communities. Economic factors, in terms of relations of production and exploitation, did not determine the different political actions of Jiangxi and Hunan peasants.
How does this organizational approach stack up against classic theories of agrarian revolutions? Below, I examine the differences between the organizational approach of this study and other established approaches.
The organizational approach focuses on the organizational context of agrarian communities that emerge during communal environmental adaptation. Some agrarian revolutions, then, are organizational rebellions by peasants to restructure unfair and illegitimate communal organizational frameworks. In this regard, the theory shares important commonalities with the moral economy approach in its joint emphasis on the roles of anger and sense of injustice in the shaping of peasants’ rebellions. As Scott argues, “Any theory of revolution must make a place for the anger, revenge, and hatred that are so obviously a part of the experience.”10
However, the organizational theory offered by this study has a different causal mechanism from the one used by moral economy theory. The latter argues that the destruction of the old subsistence ethic by the capitalistic market relationship caused peasant rebellions. The moral economy approach thus focuses on precapitalist communal norms and value systems that shaped peasants’ senses of fairness and justice. In contrast, the organizational perspective focuses on the role of formal communal cooperative institutions and how this organizational context offers peasants incentives or disincentives for rebellion. Unjust and illegitimate communal organizational orders motivate peasants to seek organizational changes through rebellion and revolution.
The moral economy approach also treats a peasant community as a whole and analyzes rural rebellion as a collective action by the entire community against the outside world. The organizational approach does not view peasant communities as a harmonious whole. Rather, it treats some peasant rebellions as an internal process to reshape community organizational frameworks. It recognizes that peasant communities may be internally divided through unequal relationships between those who control communal cooperative institutions and those who do not. An organizational rebellion arises when the majority of the community members seek to overthrow organizational dominance by an exploitative minority.
The organizational approach also overcomes the narrow utilitarian concerns of rational choice theory. The theory argues that peasants rebel only when outside revolutionary organizations can offer them concrete material benefits. Rational choice theory particularly downplays the role of discontent and a sense of injustice as a cause of agrarian revolution. Only rational calculation of material gains from the revolutionary process propels peasants to participate in the process. However, as Timothy P. Wickham-Crowley argues in his study of peasant insurgency in Latin America, “the sense of moral outrage” is central to peasants’ decisions to join revolutionary organizations.11
According to the organizational approach of this study, peasants must perceive the current organizational context as unfair and unjust before they consider reshaping it. Apart from this normative and moral judgment, material incentives alone cannot propel peasants to restructure their communities. This explains why in Jiangxi peasants remained politically passive when the Communist Party offered many concrete and excludable material incentives to induce them into the revolutionary process. It also explains why Hunan peasants staged impressive political and socioeconomic transformations in the absence of material incentives offered by outside revolutionary organizations. Thus, peasants’ sense of injustice and their normative judgment, rather than a narrow focus on material gains, caused them to rebel.
The organizational approach also has improved explanatory power over the structural approach that focuses on power relations within peasant communities. As represented by Skocpol and Wolf, this approach argues that the distribution of power in rural communities shapes peasant rebellions. According to Wolf, it is the middle peasants rather than the poor peasants who are most rebellion-prone because they have more tactical powers. Skocpol argues that peasant rebellion can emerge only in peasant communities that have some economic and political autonomy and only when there are opportunities for peasants to rebel, such as when state repressive capabilities collapse as a result of regime crisis and war. According to its critics, the power resource approach at best explains the preconditions for the success or failure of peasant rebellions, not the reasons why peasants rebel. In general, it lacks a causal mechanism linking peasants’ motives to actions.
The organizational theory of this study incorporates both causal mechanisms and preconditions of peasant rebellions. Peasants rebel because they perceive their organizational contexts as unfair and illegitimate. Thus, the theory can better answer the question of “why rebel?” However, rebellion is more likely when a larger favorable political situation exists. The experience of Hunan proved the importance of favorable structural conditions that are correctly emphasized by Skocpol. Thus, this organizational approach agrees with the structural perspective in their common recognition of the importance of the opportunity factor in explaining why only some agrarian revolutions are successful.
This organizational perspective also improves the deficiencies of the structural approach that focuses on the economic relationships of agrarian communities. As represented by Arthur Stinchcombe and Jeffrey Paige, this approach argues that agrarian revolutions only emerge in specific types of economic systems, particularly the tenancy system, in which the structure of conflicts between the landed upper class and tenants is zero-sum.
Although the theory provides a clear causal mechanism to explain the revolutionary motives of tenants, it is economic reductionism. This study demonstrates that in addition to economic relationships that structure political motives, communal organizational relationships also matter. They mediate class relations and define peasants’ perceptions of interests. Thus, economic structure is not the only factor that shapes peasants’ motives, preferences, and collective actions.
Therefore, tenancy systems alone cannot explain the different revolutionary patterns of Hunan and Jiangxi, as both had a tenancy-dominated economic system. The percentage of tenants and owner-tenants in their peasant populations and their rent rates were almost identical. This study, by focusing on the organizational variable, reveals that illegitimate communal organizational orders in Hunan led to agrarian revolutions while legitimate ones in Jiangxi frustrated and impeded intense mobilizations by the CCP.
During the 1990s a generation of scholarship emerged to study more recent revolutions, such as the Iranian revolution, the Nicaraguan revolution, and revolutionary movements in the Philippines and Latin America.12 One notable feature of these recent studies on revolutions is their common emphasis on nonmaterial factors in the making of revolutions. Both John Foran and Jeff Goodwin point out that materialistic and instrumentalist views of social action fail to grasp the sometimes crucial affectual or emotional aspects of revolutionary movements. As they both quoted Teodor Shanin, “Social scientists often miss a centre-piece of any revolutionary struggle—the fervor and anger that drives revolutionaries and makes them into what they are. . . . At the very centre of revolutions lies an emotional upheaval or moral indignation, revulsion and fury with the powers-that-be, such that one cannot demure or remain silent, whatever the cost.”13
This view brings out the role of legitimacy in the cause of revolutions. The sense of wrongs and injustice propels many to attempt to overthrow the current order, whatever the cost. This legitimacy factor challenges the view that only materialist calculations determine the choices of social actions.
Wickham-Crowley’s work best represents this trend in recent scholarship on revolutions.14 His research attempts to explain the varying outcomes of revolutionary movements in Latin America. The study of peasant revolutionary behaviors occupies an important part of his analysis. Although his explanations of varying outcomes among Latin American revolutionary movements are complex and nuanced, he emphasizes the role of legitimacy.
He points out that declining legitimacy of the present political and socioeconomic orders is crucial in determining peasants’ decisions to support revolutionary movements. The decline of legitimacy can be the result of either failure of governors (landlords/government) to fulfill the social contract or peasants’ sense of being damaged by landlord or government activities. According to him, it is important to “introduce some notion of ‘damage’ if we are to comprehend and distinguish fully those situations in which peasants rise up against their enemies, and those rather different situations where cultivators are content just to continue till the soil.”15
Therefore, in analyzing peasant decisions to support revolutionary movements, Wickham-Crowley emphasizes that we must understand “the sense of moral outrage involved in the decision,” which rational choice theory “is utterly incapable of grasping.”16 For example, he found that widespread terror against peasants, which was designed to raise the cost of supporting revolutionary movements, usually made them more angry and generated more recruits for revolutions.
This focus by recent scholarship on the role of legitimacy in explaining varying outcomes in peasant revolutionary behaviors is completely consistent with the main thrust of this study, which sees agrarian revolutions as peasant attempts to rebel against illegitimate communal organizational orders. Perceptions of legitimacy or illegitimacy of their communal organizational orders explain contrasting peasant revolutionary behaviors in Hunan and Jiangxi. It is an illegitimate communal organizational order that motivated peasants in Hunan to seek organizational change at the community level. Indeed, after Hunan peasants overthrew the old communal order, they quickly established a new one that centered on peasant associations to regulate the internal affairs of the community. As historical accounts show, while peasant associations pursued economic activities, such as rent reduction and land reform, they also performed many other responsibilities, such as banning gambling and elevating women’s rights. This peasant association–centered new communal order commanded wide support and legitimacy among peasants precisely because it was based on voluntary cooperation among members of equal resources and power.
This book also has implications for the study of the great Chinese revolution. The Chinese revolution is the classic example of what Samuel Huntington calls the “Eastern type” of revolution, which starts in rural areas.17 Many scholars attributed the success of the CCP in rural areas to its mobilization ability and extensive organizational structures.18 As Robert Marks complains, studies of the origins of the Chinese revolution focus almost entirely on Communist organization and mobilization tactics: “nearly all interpretations place its origins anywhere but in the rural society,” because studies of the Chinese revolution place “explaining Chinese Communist success at the forefront.”19 The older generation of studies on the CCP revolution applied this perspective to different periods and localities. For example, in his study of the Jiangxi revolution, Ilpyong J. Kim argues that the success of the Communist revolution stemmed from its emphasis on mobilizing “passive and irresponsive” masses for revolutionary ends. Peasant participation in organization, according to Kim, roused them from political apathy, exposed them to party propaganda, and gave them the sense of shaping their own social and political environments.20
Mark Selden’s study of the Shaan-Gan-Ning base area in North China from 1937 to 1945 also focused on the CCP’s mobilization of peasants. According to him, the CCP “successfully united broad strata behind a mobilization program of national resistance and socioeconomic and political reform.”21 Indeed, his study crystallized the so-called Yanan Way, through which the CCP practiced a “mass-line” strategy to mobilize the peasantry and integrate it into the revolutionary process. Chen Yung-fa adopted a similar but more nuanced approach to study the CCP’s sophisticated and locally adaptive mobilization strategies in East and Central China during the 1937–45 period.22
Essentially, the CCP-centered studies see the Chinese revolution as an outcome “made” by the purposive actions of revolutionaries. As Tsou Tang summarizes the idea in a relatively recent interpretation of the Chinese revolution: “The Chinese case shows that the process of innovation, systematization, and strategic interaction in the choices made by the political actors are direct and readily observable micromechanisms leading to macrohistorical changes, particularly the transformation of one political system into another one.”23 In particular, Tang argues that the CCP’s success lay in its innovations in strategies and policies. As he points out, “These innovations account for the CCP’s ability to survive and achieve final victory.”24 According to Tang, these CCP innovations in strategies and polices included a focus on peasant-based revolution, using the country to surround the cities, the practice of the mass line to mobilize the people, the united front approach to neutralize potential enemies and widen societal support, and an emphasis on political and cultural transformations of human behaviors.25
As pointed out by Ralph Thaxton, this voluntarist perspective pays scant attention to the peasant society and history in the pre-1949 revolutionary process. Instead, “the relationship between the Chinese Communist Party and the peasantry was approached, defined, and analyzed in terms of the party’s motivations and capabilities to penetrate, mobilize, and capture peasant society for its own political objectives.”26 The deficiency of this approach is rather clear. This study shows that the CCP’s rural organizational capacity and mobilization techniques may not be as essential as portrayed. In Hunan, the CCP was not responsible for the outbreak of a great agrarian revolution. As evidence indicates, the CCP’s presence at the local levels was minimal at best. When a favorable macrosituation opened up political space, peasants rose up to overthrow the existing rural orders. In other cases like Jiangxi, the CCP simply failed to induce peasants into the revolutionary process even though it practiced intense mobilization. In fact, pre-existing rural social structures effectively tempered and even impeded the CCP’s mobilization.
As noted by recent comparative studies on revolution, theories that emphasize outside revolutionary organizations fail to pay sufficient attention to the question of “why are some ‘populations’ more responsive to attempts at mobilization, while other populations within the same society are less responsive to such attempts?”27 Instead, such theories hold that outside organizations practicing the same mobilization tactics everywhere achieve the same effect. These theories therefore overlook the importance of the pre-existing social-economic structures of peasant societies to both the causes of agrarian revolutions and the revolutionary mobilization from outside organizations.
Many scholars studying the Chinese revolution specifically focus on the exchange relationship used by the CCP to mobilize peasants in the revolutionary process. They argue that peasants supported revolutions because of the practical rural policies of the Communist Party. The party used such measures as land reforms and reduction of taxes and levies to build an exchange relationship with peasants. As Hartford and Goldstein point out, this perspective emphasizes “exchanges between peasants and the CCP that gained involvement in and support for party program.” Specifically, the exchanges rested upon “meeting immediate peasant needs as a prerequisite for the continuation of such involvement.”28
This focus on practical rural policies of the CCP reflects the logic of Popkin’s rational choice theory. However, the revolutionary experiences of Hunan and Jiangxi seriously challenge the roles of exchange relationships. On the one hand, in Jiangxi, the CCP indeed built a range of exchange relationships with the peasants. The party offered many concrete and exclusive benefits to those who participated in the revolutionary process. The result was not that positive. On the other hand, outside revolutionary organizations could offer little to the peasants of Hunan. Indeed, the CCP was largely absent in the local revolutionary process in Hunan. However, the absence of an exchange relationship with the CCP did not dampen the widespread enthusiasm of Hunan peasants who waged a great agrarian revolution.
As Wickham-Crowley argues in his research on Latin American peasant rebellions, “The success of revolutionaries in mobilizing the peasantry depends primarily on the preexisting nature of peasant culture and social structure, and only secondarily on the actions of the revolutionaries themselves.”29 Likewise, the CCP mobilization theory of the Chinese revolution should be put in a more balanced perspective. Although the party’s rural strategy worked in some places, such as North China where it successfully built key rural base areas that laid the foundation for its military victories during the 1946–49 period, in other places pre-existing communal social structures, both formal and informal ones, effectively tempered party mobilization efforts.
Elizabeth Perry’s research on peasant rebellions in the Huaibei region of North China began a new trend in the study of the peasant rebellions that pays due attention to pre-existing social structures and their constraints on the CCP mobilization. Indeed, she begins her book with the question of why “only some peasants rebel.”30 To answer this question, Perry studies the impact of ecological pressures on peasant communities that adopted either a predatory or protective strategy of collective violence for survival purposes. Moreover, she emphasizes the importance of kinship, patron-client ties, and other communal allegiances in shaping communal social structures and survival strategies. According to her, “Kinship and community had developed into effective vehicles for meeting the challenges for survival in a hostile environment.”31 Therefore, although the roots of agrarian struggle can be attributed to socioeconomic inequality, “the class content of that inequality could be obscured by other cross-cutting allegiances.”32 As she points out, because of the intervening effects of communal social structures, “groups of peasants should indeed be expected to differ in their propensity for rebellion, depending upon their position in the social structure.”33
Perry’s research found that pre-existing social structures in Huaibei once thwarted the activities of the CCP. As she observes, “When Communist cadres moved in to alter the societal arrangement, primitive rebels proved resistant to the changed conditions.”34 Resistance by the local communities tempered the results of CCP mobilization, which sought to use rent reduction and other economic reforms to turn peasants into supporters. According to Perry, communities based on extensive pre-existing social structures “exerted powerful influence on the style and success of Communist efforts to mobilize the local populace.35
Marks also emphasizes pre-existing social structures in his study of the peasant revolution in Haifeng, Guangdong Province, during the 1920s. Marks specifically tries to correct the bias of CCP-centered studies of the Chinese revolution that “place its origins anywhere but in the rural society.”36 According to Marks, “To focus on revolutionary ideas (Marxism or the thoughts of Mao), or on the practice of the Communist Party, implicitly lends those elements primary place in explaining social movements and revolutions, ignoring the role of common people in the making of their own history.”37 Marks suggests that studies of the Chinese revolution must abandon such a voluntarist approach, emphasizing the intent of revolutionary elites, and shift focus to rural social structures that “patterned peasant life” and defined interests between groups such as class and kin.
Marks’s study focuses on the changes in local social structure that were caused by large historical forces such as imperialism. According to him, before China’s integration into the capitalist world market, interclass relationships in Haifeng were mediated by a “fair” tenancy system under which land ownership did not confer owners the right to remove peasants from the land. It conferred only the right to a certain portion of the produce of the land as rent. As a result of this land system, the dominating pattern of conflicts in Haifeng was intralineage rivalries that “cut across class lines.”38 However, the arrival of imperialistic capitalism began to change the local social structure and shift the dynamics of conflicts. Landlords’ intensified efforts to alter the terms of tenancy to their advantage gave rise to class-based conflicts. As Marks puts it, “As the rural social structure changed, so too did the forms of collective action.”39
Marks suggests that the agrarian revolution in Haifeng during the 1920s was mainly caused by peasant reaction to the new pattern of social conflicts in the area, which was an outcome of recent changes in land tenure relations. The local CCP organization merely facilitated and articulated the revolution. As he puts it, “Explanations of revolutionary movements in terms of elite politics ignore the underlying historical currents—how particular class structures give rise to social classes and groups and how these groups articulate their interests and act in pursuit of them.”40
Averill also uses a similar approach to study the CCP revolutionary activities in the Jinggangshan base area in the 1920s. According to Averill, local social structures profoundly constrained the CCP’s strategies and goals. Instead of class-based social cleavages, this region was mainly defined by “mutually-reinforcing socioeconomic and ethnic fracture lines that separated two often antagonistic communities: a lowland society predominantly descended from earlier Han Chinese settlers of the region and a highland society dominated by descendants of later-arriving Hakka-speaking migrants.”41
This particular local social structure, centered on conflicting ethnic groups, “provided the context within which the party had to compete for power and ensured that the revolutionary movement which grew up in the mountains on the Jiangxi-Hunan border would bear the imprint of the environment in which it was created.”42 Specifically, the party itself was “pulled and tugged by participants in these disputes.”43 As a result, ethnic conflicts vastly complicated the CCP’s ability to build a united revolutionary movement based on a broad spectrum of the local society. Instead, the CCP had to rely on ad hoc and shifting alliances with existing ethnic groups, rebel forces, and even bandits.
Because of constraints imposed by pre-existing social structures, as represented by enduring patterns of socioeconomic tension between the relatively deprived mountain dwellers and the more prosperous lowland neighbors who habitually took advantage of them, Averill concludes that “these situational and structural circumstances did affect the revolutionary struggle.”44
Averill thus challenges the CCP-centered perspectives on the Chinese revolution by noting that “the Jinggangshan experience epitomizes the inherent ambiguities and contradictions rather than the strategic genius involved in the CCP base-building strategy, and in which the clear-cut Manichean struggle between the good and evil characteristic of party historiography generally is replaced by a fuzzier and more complex narrative framework.”45
The above studies of the Chinese revolution by Perry, Marks, and Averill all pay due attention to pre-existing social structures of the peasant society. They reveal that these structures could play a variety of roles in the making of agrarian revolutions. In some cases, as Marks’s study reveals in the Haifeng context, pre-existing social structures, which reflected shifts in economic systems and class relations, facilitated agrarian revolution and allowed the CCP to take advantage of peasant radicalism. In Huaibei and Jinggangshan, pre-existing social structures instead mediated class relations and seriously constrained the CCP’s efforts to mobilize peasants for revolutionary causes.
In this regard, these studies all correct the “organizational weapon” perspective of earlier studies on the CCP revolution and resonate with the thrust of this comparative study of Hunan and Jiangxi. They all share the same approach by treating seriously the roles of pre-existing social structures of the peasant communities and how they encouraged or discouraged the revolutionary tendencies of peasants. For this reason, they are able to answer the question of why only some peasants rebelled.
The progress made by these studies of the Chinese revolution is consistent with the focus of a new generation of comparative studies of peasant revolutions in other parts of the world. A common conclusion of these recent studies is that success or failure of revolutionaries in mobilizing peasants is shaped by pre-existing social structures of peasant societies. Moreover, peasant perceptions of legitimacy or illegitimacy of existing socioeconomic and political orders play a crucial role in determining their revolutionary tendencies. Rational calculation of material gains alone cannot motivate peasants to support a revolutionary movement and even become part of it. A sense of indignation and anger directed against the current socioeconomic and political orders is critical in explaining peasants’ motives to rebel.
1. Theda Skocpol, Social Revolutions in the Modern World (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994), p. 315.
2. Theda Skocpol, “What Makes Peasants Revolutionary?” Comparative Politics, Vol. 14, No. 3 (1982), p. 373.
3. Ralph Thaxton, China Turned Upside Down: Revolutionary Legitimacy in the Peasant World (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1983), p. 232.
4. Kathleen Hartford and Steven M. Goldstein, “Introduction: Perspectives on the Chinese Communist Revolution,” in Kathleen Hartford and Steven M. Goldstein, eds., Single Sparks: China’s Rural Revolution (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1989a), pp. 30–33.
5. Yuan I, “Reinventing Mao’s Peasant Revolution Theory: Agrarian Structure and Peasant Power in Pre-1949 South China,” Issues & Studies, Vol. 33, No. 7 (1997), p. 6.
6. See Jeff Goodwin, “Toward a New Sociology of Revolutions,” Theory & Society, Vol. 23, No. 6 (1994), pp. 731–66.
7. Victor Magagna, Communities of Grain: Rural Rebellion in Comparative Perspective (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991), pp. 252–53.
8. See Daniel Little, Understanding Peasant China (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1989), p. 178.
9. Ibid., p. 181.
10. James Scott, “Peasant Revolution: A Dismal Science,” Comparative Politics, Vol. 9, No. 2 (1977), p. 240.
11. Timothy P. Wickham-Crowley, Exploring Revolution: Essays on Latin American Insurgency and Revolutionary Theory (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1991), p. 19.
12. Representative works of this new generation of studies on revolutions include John Foran, Fragile Resistance: Social Transformation in Iran from 1500 to the Revolution (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1993); Eric Selbin, Modern Latin American Revolutions (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1993); Jeff Goodwin, No Other Way Out: State and Revolutionary Movements, 1945–1991 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001); and Timothy P. Wickham-Crowley, Guerrillas and Revolution in Latin America: A Comparative Study of Insurgents and Regimes Since 1956 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992).
13. The quote is from Teodor Shanin, Peasants and Peasant Societies: Selected Readings (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1987), p. 30.
14. Wickham-Crowley, 1992.
15. Wickham-Crowley, 1991, p. 178.
16. Ibid., p. 19.
17. Samuel Huntington, Political Order in Changing Societies (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1968).
18. Representative studies include Ilpyong J. Kim, “Mass Mobilization Policies and Techniques Developed in the Period of the Chinese Soviet Republic,” in A. Doak Barnett, ed., Chinese Communist Politics in Action (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1968); Ilpyong J. Kim, The Politics of Chinese Communism: Kiangsi under the Soviets (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973); Mark Selden, Yenan Way in Revolutionary China (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1971); Mark Selden, China in Revolution: The Yenan Way Revisited (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1995); and Chen Yung-fa, Making Revolution: The Communist Movement in Eastern and Central China, 1937–1945 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1986). For more discussion on the CCP mobilization perspective, see Kathleen Hartford and Steven M. Goldstein, 1989a.
19. See Robert Marks, Rural Revolution in South China: Peasants and the Making of History in Haifeng County, 1570–1930 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1984), p. xi.
20. Kim, 1973, pp. 131–33.
21. Selden, 1995, p. xi.
22. Chen Yung-fa, 1986.
23. Tsou Tang, “Interpreting the Revolution in China: Macrohistory and Micromechanisms,” Modern China, Vol. 26, No. 2 (2000), p. 214.
24. Ibid., p. 212.
25. Ibid., pp. 212–21.
26. Thaxton, 1983, p. iiv.
27. Wickham-Crowley, 1991, p. 8.
28. Hartford and Goldstein, 1989a, p. 17. For other studies that use this exchange perspective to explain the CCP success, see Steven Levine, Anvil of Victory: The Communist Revolution in Manchuria, 1945–1948 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987).
29. See Wickham-Crowley, 1991, p. 15.
30. Elizabeth Perry, Rebels and Revolutionaries in North China: 1845–1945 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1980), p. 1.
31. Ibid., p. 252.
32. Ibid.
33. Ibid., p. 251.
34. Ibid., p. 257.
35. Ibid., p. 213.
36. Robert Marks, 1984, p. xi.
37. Ibid., p. xv.
38. Ibid., p. 283.
39. Ibid., p. 284.
40. Ibid., p. 285.
41. Stephen C. Averill, Revolution in the Highlands: China’s Jinggangshan Base Area (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2006), p. 4.
42. Ibid., p. 3.
43. Ibid., p. 396.
44. Ibid., p. 399.
45. Ibid., p. 8.