The politics of China's peasant revolution

Abstract

Efforts to explain the success of the Chinese Communist revolution have preoccupied more than a few American historians and political scientists in recent years. Most of these scholars, following the trail blazed by George Taylor's The Struggle for North China, have focused attention on the War of Resistance period (1937–1945) in search of the factors responsible for the phenomenal growth in Communist power. Chalmers Johnson, with his famous thesis of “peasant nationalism,” emphasizes the importance of the Japanese invasion for rural mobilization in China. Mark Selden, by contrast, identifies the Communist Party's positive wartime policies—the “Yenan Way”—as the key to revolutionary victory. Carl Dorris, while agreeing with much of Selden's explanation, locates the source of these successful wartime policies not in the capital of Yenan, but in the guerrilla bases of North China, especially Jin-Cha-Ji.

Notes

George E. Taylor, The Struggle for North China (New York: Institute of Pacific Relations, 1940).

In 1937 the Communists ruled an area of only a few thousand square miles with a population of a million people and an army estimated at 80,000 soldiers. At the conclusion of the War of Resistance, they controlled a quarter of the nation with some 100 million people and an army of almost one million.

Chalmers A. Johnson, Peasant Nationalism and Communist Power (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1962).

Mark Selden, The Yenan Way in Revolutionary China (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1971).

Carl E. Dorris, “Peasant Mobilization in North China and the Origins of Yenan Communism,” China Quarterly, No. 68, December 1976.