On Peasant Revolution and National Resistance: Toward a Theory of Peasant Mobilization and Revolutionary War with Special Reference to Modern China

Abstract

A longstanding thesis on the Chinese revolution is that the peasants embraced the Communist movement because the brutalization by the invading Japanese Army aroused the village people, making it possible for the Communist Party to organize them and to appeal to their nationalist aspirations. A theoretical exploration of peasant mobilization and revolutionary war in the T'aihang Mountain-North China Plain revolutionary base suggests different reasons. The peasants there embraced the Communist movement mainly because the Communist Party 8th Route Army helped them regain their basic rights to subsistence in their struggles with landlords and local governments before the Japanese invasion. The armies of the Japanese and the Kuomintang exerted tremendous pressures on the peasant movements in the base area, and there was a negative correlation between the presence of these intruding forces and the emergence of a viable Communist political order. The revolutionary army won the War of Resistance and the War of Liberation largely by averting and ameliorating the burdens the peasants were encountering. In all of the revolutionary processes, the peasants placed greater value on the performance of the party in enhancing their livelihood than on the nationalist propaganda of the revolutionary movement.

Socioeconomic Relations in Pre-Communist China

“…Dr. Myers has long been known as an authority on those materials as well as an economist who has done important work relating to Taiwan.It is somewhat startling in view of his long association with data concerning landlord-tenant attitudes and activities to find him attributing modification of the view that landlord-tenant relations were oppressive to recent work by Ralph Thaxton (1975Thaxton ( , 1977. A major point for which Myers (1980: 243) gives credit to Thaxton &dquo;is the insight that Chinese tenants in the early twentieth century held certain rights and expected these rights to be upheld by the groups with which they were dealing.&dquo; As a matter of fact, the same point has been made before.…”