Single Sparks

China's Rural Revolutions

Kathleen Hartford, Steven M. Goldstein

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9781315493916
• Topic: Law
• Subtopic: Public Law
• Index: Law

First Published in 1990. Written at a new juncture in the study of the Chinese revolution. A new generation of scholarship is emerging which promises to resolve old debates, bridge old dichotomies, and join formerly separate strands of analysis. Several of the essays in this volume are based on papers presented at a workshop on Chinese Communist base areas held at Harvard University's Fairbank Center for East Asian Research. These papers chronicle the varied approaches to China's revolution.

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Introduction: Perspectives on the Chinese Communist Revolution

KATHLEEN HARTFORD and STEVEN M. GOLDSTEIN

We are at a new juncture in the study of the Chinese revolution. A new generation of scholarship is emerging which promises to resolve old debates, bridge old dichotomies, and join formerly separate strands of analysis. We are accumulating a rich body of empirical data making possible a fruitful exchange between those studying the Chinese revolution and those attempting comparative generalizations. We are gaining a clearer sense of the interrelations of domestic and international factors, of the Communist movement and its opponents, of spontaneous peasant impulses and revolutionary organization and leadership. These strands are being joined by intensive studies of the Chinese Communist revolution in local contexts, of which the essays in this book are a highly instructive sample. Although these local studies deal with milieus far more limited in geographical and, at times, chronological scope than much of the earlier work on the revolution, such limitations have allowed more comprehensive examination of relevant actors and causal factors than has heretofore been possible. The result is a seemingly paradoxical development. The exceptions to previous generalizations on China, the catalogue of "local idiosyncrasies," are pointing to a pattern that promises a new set of tentative general hypotheses on the revolution. In this pattern one finds a greater consonance between the Chinese revolutionary process and the generalizations of comparativists than was evident in earlier, more general works on the revolution.

Clearly these are large claims to make for a body of work that is still maturing. In support and elucidation of them, we provide in this introduction an overview of the intellectual background to the work presented here, as represented by studies on the Chinese revolution and by those on comparative revolutions.

The Study of the Chinese Revolution: Early Images, 1932–1949

Not until the CCP's forced removal to China's rural hinterlands did it emerge as a significant object of study by Westerners. Before 1927, most observers regarded the Guomindang (GMD) under Chiang Kaishek as the (pejorative) extreme in Chinese radicalism. But once the GMD achieved control of the national political apparatus, Westerners reporting on China's military, political, and social upheaval turned their attention to the growing Communist movement. They tended to find the sources of its dynamism in three factors: popular (especially peasant) support for the CCP, partisan warfare, and organization.

In 1944, the Shanxi warlord Yan Xishan accounted for CCP strength in an apparent tautology: "The reason why the Communists today have such powerful forces is that so many people are following them."¹ The Western reporter who recorded this comment accepted popular support as central to an explanation of the CCP's strength, a view that figured in almost all discussions of the Communist movement in the pre-1949 period. For most authors, one question was paramount: Why do the peasants so enthusiastically support the CCP?

The reasons for this preoccupation lie, in part, in the prior experience of analysts assessing the Communist areas: most knew Guomindang China well. Whatever their political leanings,² these Western observers were overwhelmed by the country's massive social dislocations and disgusted by the GMD's continuing inability to respond to these problems. Popular dissatisfaction in the Nationalist areas highlighted the perceived enthusiastic peasant support in the base areas.³ Even by the mid-1930s most accounts (primarily of the Jiangxi Soviet) located the sources of Communist success in the party's ability to address rural economic hardship.⁴ This approach figures in perhaps the earliest systematic discussion of the Communist movement, written in 1932 by O. Edmund Clubb, then a young American vice-consul. Clubb saw the Guomindang's 1927 break with the CCP as an important watershed. The GMD had lost its "roots in the great body of the people" and had turned to a policy of "grasping militarism." It was simply unresponsive to China's worsening socioeconomic problems. By contrast, the Communist program—land redistribution, fiscal reform, and labor legislation—had created "considerable popular support."⁵

A second factor focusing observers' attention on peasant support was the type of warfare conducted by the Communists. "Partisan warfare," later to be known as "people's war," was to many observers a new and exciting phenomenon. And those who wrote in the 1930s and 1940s agreed that the key to success in such warfare lay in popular support.⁶

Popular enthusiasm was needed if the CCP's armies were to get the recruits, supplies, and intelligence they needed to fight. But enthusiasm was of little use unless there was an organization in place to channel and deploy it.⁷ Almost all visitors to the Communist areas commented upon the pervasiveness of organization. Organization was the vehicle for the education, discipline, and further indoctrination that helped elicit support. But organization did more than this: it transformed propaganda into popular policies. Relief from military threat or economic insecurity was impossible without the intercession of partyled or sponsored organizations. Peng Dehuai made this point to Edgar Snow in 1936 when he asserted that only by "constant political and organizational work" could the CCP "fulfill the promise of its propaganda." Foreign residents of the GMD areas had seen how government venality and brutality sapped popular support. In the CCP areas, they concluded that the reverse was true: organization was essential to building support.⁸

Few authors during these years would have denied that strong and constant organization was needed to avoid a return to peasant passivity and indifference. And even fewer would have quibbled with the United States War Department, which asserted that the CCP was "the most effectively organized group in China."⁹ All these writings recognized that the Communists had created organizations that had generated the commitment of the masses, channeled it into apparently popular policy directions, and so created policies and institutions that a growing proportion of the population considered worth fighting for.

Some analysts saw power in Communist organizations flowing primarily from the top down. Traditionally passive peasants had to be organized, and the resultant bodies were intended to implement the will of the party leadership.¹⁰ Others spoke of "democracy" in the base areas, suggesting that they saw more mass spontaneity and popular control in these organizations.¹¹ Some traced the sources of peasant support to the CCP's socioeconomic policies, while others, during the Anti-Japanese War era, tended to stress the mobilizing effects of the war. The major differences of emphasis are illustrated by three works: Edgar Snow's Red Star over China, George Taylor's The Struggle for North China, and Theodore White and Annalee Jacoby's Thunder Out of China.

For Taylor, writing in 1941, the emphasis is clearly on the importance of the Japanese invasion and Communist resistance organizations: "[Japanese] brutality was, of course, an excellent argument for the guerrillas, but only on condition that they were there to state it, that they had been in a district long enough to organize and infuse a new morale and political outlook into the peasantry."¹² In Taylor's view, socioeconomic reforms were a secondary but complementary factor stimulating peasant involvement. He sees the war not merely as a catalyst but as a crucial intervening variable which generated a peasant consciousness unprecedented in Chinese history. He suggests, however, that peasants might lapse into apathy again once the war had passed and, further, that classes brought together to fight the Japanese might divide again along economic lines. Maintaining the momentum, Taylor believed, took considerable political acumen. The Communist movement was not a passive beneficiary of GMD decay and Japanese invasion. Rather, the basis of Communist success lay in organizations able to channel mass dissatisfaction and implement ameliorative policies.

Snow's contrasting view of the Communist movement was decisively conditioned by his visit to the border areas before the Japanese invasion. The CCP leaders with whom he spoke were naturally tentative about the new policy of promoting anti-Japanese nationalism. Indeed, Snow's conversations with the Communist leaders suggest their belief that a conservative, parochial peasantry could only be incorporated in the movement for national liberation if their immediate economic needs were first addressed. The CCP leaders remained skeptical of the efficacy of anti-Japanese resistance policies as a mobilizational device. Zhou Enlai, for example, spoke of food and land as "the primary demands of the revolutionary peasantry."¹³

For Snow the Communist movement was part of an inexorable process fueled, for the most part, by China's serious, long-standing economic ills. The war was a catalyst, not a precondition of revolution. It would speed the growth in awareness of the Chinese people. The CCP, of course, would benefit from popular mobilization brought about by the war; Snow certainly recognized the importance of nationalist appeals in building Communist support. But in contrast to Taylor, he argued that a socioeconomic reform program had to draw the peasants into Communist organization before the issue of anti-Japanese nationalism could become salient.¹⁴

White and Jacoby viewed the Communist revolution from the very different vantage point of the immediate postwar era. Theirs is the perspective not only of economic misery and brutal Japanese occupation but also of a degenerating, and to them thoroughly corrupt and reprehensible, Guomindang. For them, the simple act of bringing an alienated people into the governing process created support crucial to party success. The reason for this success, they wrote,

could be reduced to a single paragraph: If you take a peasant who has been swindled, beaten, and kicked about for all his waking days and whose father has transmitted to him an emotion of bitterness reaching back for generations-if you take such a peasant, treat him like a man, ask his opinion, let him vote for local government, let him organize his own police and gendarmes, decide on his own taxes, and vote himself a reduction in rent and interest-if you do all that, the peasant becomes a man who has something to fight for, and he will fight to preserve it against any enemy, Japanese or Chinese.¹⁵

Thus we see their strong emphasis on Communist political institutions as an integral part of the movement's appeal. The role of international forces is unclear in their analysis. They saw the Japanese invasion as an important event, as was the postwar rivalry between the Soviet Union and the United States and the growth of Asian nationalism. Still, the Chinese revolution remained essentially a domestic phenomenon.¹⁶

If one pauses at the 1949 juncture for a retrospective look at evaluations of the Communist movement, several qualities of the literature stand out. One is struck first by the diversity of those writing on the Communist movement. In contrast to later years, academics played a secondary role. Although George Taylor and Laurence Rossinger, for example, made important contributions, they were overshadowed by newspaper reporters and free-lance writers who introduced the Communist movement to the public outside China. This was quite natural. Most academics were historians, and the Communist movement was current events, to be described by participant observers on the spot

Second, a clear evolution in sources of evidence took place. The movement was, until the mid-1930s, largely inaccessible to foreigners. During the period of the Jiangxi Soviet, commentators such as Clubb and Harold Isaacs had to rely on scarce written sources or hearsay. Snow changed all that. After 1936, and until the final Civil War, studies of the Communist movement relied heavily on firsthand observations which circulated among a small community of CCP-watchers in China. This factor not only provided a means by which the reporting of diplomatic personnel like John S. Service and John Payton Davies influenced public writings but also contributed somewhat to the uniformity of themes in writing about the CCP during these years. Indeed, some would argue that the dependence on such shared impressions and conversations with Communist leaders, to the neglect of examination of party publications, presented a somewhat misleading image of the CCP.¹⁷

Finally, the reliance on on-the-spot observation meant that conditions within China—primarily Guomindang corruption and lack of purpose—were the major determinants shaping Westerners' views of the CCP, Distaste for the GMD conditioned a tendency to see the Communists as an indigenous revolutionary movement responsive to the grave social problems being ignored by the GMD. As the only major force pressing for change in a steadily deteriorating China, the CCP was assumed to have deep indigenous roots. The Soviet tie was thus viewed as quite secondary when compared to the CCP's links to the Chinese revolution.¹⁸

Such was the mainstream view of the nature of the Chinese Communist movement, characterized by a common set of preoccupations but distinguished nonetheless by considerable internal pluralism. It by no means went unchallenged. Many within the American government, and outside of it, felt that the strength, popular following, democratic nature, and military effectiveness of the CCP had been overstated. The Communists, this school asserted, made only a slight contribution to the war while maintaining their hold over the population by means of propaganda backed up by organized coercion. They viewed the Guomindang as making the major contribution to the war against Japan. Charges of undemocratic practices and corruption were largely dismissed with reference to the exigencies of war. How, Walter Judd asked, could freedoms be extended to people during wartime?¹⁹

In the eyes of many who subscribed to this view, the prevailing drift of analysis was part of a deliberate plan to misrepresent the Chinese situation by discrediting the Guomindang. This argument presaged what was to be known during the cold war era as the "conspiracy theory."²⁰ But as Ross Koen has argued, until 1947 those defending the Guomindang from its critics made little headway. Paradoxically, they began to win out only as the tide of civil war turned against the increasingly corrupt and inept Nationalists. Perceptions of the Chinese Communist movement were coming under the pressures of the growing cold war mentality and the "who lost China" debate that it spawned.²¹

“The Organizational Weapon,” 1949–1962

During the 1950s many who wrote on the Communist revolution ignored earlier insights regarding the relationship between Chinese Communism and China's ongoing revolution.²² Many also discarded the analytical categories—party/mass relations, people's war, organizational ties with the populace, etc.—that had dominated earlier discussions. Treatments of the emergence of Chinese Communism were thus intellectually detached not only from China's earlier history but also from the scholarship of less than a decade earlier. They were now written against a preoccupation with three immediate issues: the prevailing scholarly view of Communist revolutions, the cold war, and the nature of the Communist system.

Scholarly studies of Communist revolution passed through two stages during the period from 1949 to 1962. In the first, which lasted until the mid-1950s, conceptualizations of Communist revolution were largely post facto extrapolations from the takeovers in Eastern Europe. In the second stage, starting with the mid-1950s, Communist revolution became associated with the emergence of the third world and the movement of Marxism eastward. Communism became a "disease of the transition" to economic takeoff, a "problem of development."²³ Despite this shift, the intellectual categories used to study Communist revolution remained remarkably consistent throughout the thirteen-year period.

The most striking consistency was the propensity for the study of Communist revolution to become the study of Soviet foreign policy. It was assumed that national Communist parties were best understood as instruments of Soviet foreign policy. Some writers spoke of Soviet "fifth columns" in various states, and Sigmund Neumann used the concept of "international civil war" where "a central revolutionary authority … can direct its orders by remote control. "²⁴

Commentators throughout these years recognized, however, that the quality and strategy of national Communist organizations were also crucial to the revolutionary success. Most important was the creation and prop...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• About the Contributors
• 1 Introduction: Perspectives on the Chinese Communist Revolution
• 2 Law and Order: The Role of Guomindang Security Forces in the Suppression of the Communist Bases during the Soviet Period
• 3 Communist Guerrilla Bases in Southeast China After the Start of the Long March
• 4 Repression and Communist Success: The Case of Jin-Cha-Ji, 1938–1943
• 5 Nationalist Guerrillas in the Sino-Japanese War: The “Die-Hards” of Shandong Province
• 6 Mobilizing for War: Rural Revolution in Manchuria as an Instrument for War
• Notes
• Index