Revolution in the Highlands: China's Jinggangshan Base Area
This extensively researched and elegantly written study offers a fine-grained analysis of the origins of the Chinese Communist Revolution in the countryside. Building on decades of research in newly available sources and multiple trips to Jiangxi, Stephen Averill provides a definitive local perspective on the rise of a revolution that reshaped China and the world. A rich work of social history, it goes beyond recently popular organizational approaches to explore the ways in which the party and social networks interpenetrated and interacted in the early stages of revolutionary base-building.

The Jinggangshan highlands provided the base for Mao Zedong's first efforts at rural revolution. Chinese histories and most Western accounts have focused on the heroic exploits of Mao and his Communist Party comrades, battling the natural elements, hostile military forces, and skeptical authorities in the urban-based Communist Central Committee. This long-awaited work penetrates the hagiographic haze of Mao-centered analysis to provide a close narrative and rich social history of the Jinggangshan base. The author explores the historical patterns of local strongman rule, clientelist politics, lineage conflict, and ethnic struggle within which the party competed for power. Through this multifaceted lens, the revolutionary experience in Jinggangshan is equally dramatic but considerably more sobering than the conventional story.

Among Western studies of the Chinese revolution, this work stands out as the definitive account of the critical moment in the 1920s when the physical and ideological center of the Communist movement shifted from the cities to the countryside. This was a process of elite-mediated political osmosis and adaptive compromises with local traditions. The party was not simply an outside force manipulating social tensions for its own political ends. There was, instead, an intricate interweaving of local networks and social cleavages in the highlands with the political structures and policy divisions of t

1101830412
Revolution in the Highlands: China's Jinggangshan Base Area
This extensively researched and elegantly written study offers a fine-grained analysis of the origins of the Chinese Communist Revolution in the countryside. Building on decades of research in newly available sources and multiple trips to Jiangxi, Stephen Averill provides a definitive local perspective on the rise of a revolution that reshaped China and the world. A rich work of social history, it goes beyond recently popular organizational approaches to explore the ways in which the party and social networks interpenetrated and interacted in the early stages of revolutionary base-building.

The Jinggangshan highlands provided the base for Mao Zedong's first efforts at rural revolution. Chinese histories and most Western accounts have focused on the heroic exploits of Mao and his Communist Party comrades, battling the natural elements, hostile military forces, and skeptical authorities in the urban-based Communist Central Committee. This long-awaited work penetrates the hagiographic haze of Mao-centered analysis to provide a close narrative and rich social history of the Jinggangshan base. The author explores the historical patterns of local strongman rule, clientelist politics, lineage conflict, and ethnic struggle within which the party competed for power. Through this multifaceted lens, the revolutionary experience in Jinggangshan is equally dramatic but considerably more sobering than the conventional story.

Among Western studies of the Chinese revolution, this work stands out as the definitive account of the critical moment in the 1920s when the physical and ideological center of the Communist movement shifted from the cities to the countryside. This was a process of elite-mediated political osmosis and adaptive compromises with local traditions. The party was not simply an outside force manipulating social tensions for its own political ends. There was, instead, an intricate interweaving of local networks and social cleavages in the highlands with the political structures and policy divisions of t

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Revolution in the Highlands: China's Jinggangshan Base Area

Revolution in the Highlands: China's Jinggangshan Base Area

Revolution in the Highlands: China's Jinggangshan Base Area

Revolution in the Highlands: China's Jinggangshan Base Area

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Overview

This extensively researched and elegantly written study offers a fine-grained analysis of the origins of the Chinese Communist Revolution in the countryside. Building on decades of research in newly available sources and multiple trips to Jiangxi, Stephen Averill provides a definitive local perspective on the rise of a revolution that reshaped China and the world. A rich work of social history, it goes beyond recently popular organizational approaches to explore the ways in which the party and social networks interpenetrated and interacted in the early stages of revolutionary base-building.

The Jinggangshan highlands provided the base for Mao Zedong's first efforts at rural revolution. Chinese histories and most Western accounts have focused on the heroic exploits of Mao and his Communist Party comrades, battling the natural elements, hostile military forces, and skeptical authorities in the urban-based Communist Central Committee. This long-awaited work penetrates the hagiographic haze of Mao-centered analysis to provide a close narrative and rich social history of the Jinggangshan base. The author explores the historical patterns of local strongman rule, clientelist politics, lineage conflict, and ethnic struggle within which the party competed for power. Through this multifaceted lens, the revolutionary experience in Jinggangshan is equally dramatic but considerably more sobering than the conventional story.

Among Western studies of the Chinese revolution, this work stands out as the definitive account of the critical moment in the 1920s when the physical and ideological center of the Communist movement shifted from the cities to the countryside. This was a process of elite-mediated political osmosis and adaptive compromises with local traditions. The party was not simply an outside force manipulating social tensions for its own political ends. There was, instead, an intricate interweaving of local networks and social cleavages in the highlands with the political structures and policy divisions of t


Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780742528789
Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
Publication date: 11/06/2006
Series: State & Society in East Asia
Edition description: New Edition
Pages: 488
Product dimensions: 6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.25(d)

About the Author

Stephen C. Averill (1945-2004) was associate professor of history at Michigan State University.

Table of Contents

Part 1 Preface
Part 2 Introduction by Joseph W. Esherick and Elizabeth J. Perry
Part 3 Introduction
Part 4 Part I: Jinggangshan Before Mao
Chapter 5 Introduction
Chapter 6 Chapter 1: Jinggangshan Society and Economy
Chapter 7 Chapter 2: Bandits and Brotherhoods
Chapter 8 Chapter 3: Wang Zuo and Yuan Wencai
Chapter 9 Chapter 4: The Early Jinggangshan Revolutionary Movement
Part 10 Part II: The Jinggangshan Revolutionary Base Area
Chapter 11 Introduction
Chapter 12 Chapter 5: Establishing the Jinggangshan Base
Chapter 13 Chapter 6: All That Is Needed Is to Go in Circles: Contending for the Base
Chapter 14 Chapter 7: Socioeconomic Reform
Chapter 15 Chapter 8: The Midyear Crisis
Chapter 16 Chapter 9: Autumn and the Fall of the Base
Part 17 Part III: Jinggangshan after Mao
Chapter 18 Introduction
Chapter 19 Chapter 10: Jinggangshan After Mao
Chapter 20 Chapter 11: Crisis and Rupture
Part 21 Conclusion

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