Class relations and the origins of rural revolution in a South China County

Abstract

To understand revolutions, we need to understand social structures. That is Theda Skocpol's message in States and Social Revolutions. However obvious that may seem, analyses of the Chinese revolution more often than not ignore structural questions and focus instead on the politics of revolution. This is true not only of adherents of “organizational weapon” theories, but also of more sympathetic treatments of the Chinese revolution. To focus on revolutionary ideas (Marxism or the thoughts of Mao), or on the practice of the Communist Party, gives those elements a causal weight greater than they deserve. Skocpol eschews such “voluntarist” explanations of revolution and denies that ideology or the conscious actions of revolutionaries in themselves have any causal relationship whatsoever to revolutionary outcomes.

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Robert B. Marks

This article is based on my forthcoming book, Peasant Rebellion and Rural Revolution in South China: Peasants and the Making of History in Haifeng County, 1570–1930 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press). A slightly different version of this article will appear in Kathleen Hartford and Steven Goldstein, eds., Single Sparks: China's Rural Revolutions, forthcoming. I would like to thank Kathy Hartford, Bryant Avery, Ben Kerkvliet, and Joe Moore for commenting on various drafts of this article.