Recent years have seen a sharp upsurge of rural protests in China, primarily directed against lower-ranking cadres. Some observers think this tide of protests threatens the stability of the Communist government, while others see them as a safety valve. In the 1990s, protests targeted the collection of illegal fees, but since the turn of the century, a majority of protests have revolved around usufruct rights to land and the environment. Regardless of the exact issues involved, historians cannot claim that rural collective actions only existed in the pre-Communist period; moreover, the Communist Revolution cannot be reduced to a theory of worsening economic exploitation and the emancipation of an impoverished and oppressed peasantry.

Lucien Bianco started to study modern Chinese history out of a deep sympathy with the peasantry just as Mao Zedong was launching the Cultural Revolution against supposed “capitalist roaders within the Party.” After firsthand contact with Maoist China, however, Bianco realized that the Communist Revolution he had imagined was incompatible with the reality he found. Yet unlike his mentor Jean Chesneaux he has stayed in China studies, building a body of work on rural unrest based on painstaking examination of difficult-to-find Chinese sources and benefiting from a unique Sino-French comparative perspective. Bianco collected many of his articles in Peasants without the Party: Grass-roots Movement in Twentieth-century China (2001). Now he has revised and shortened the French summation of his life's study into an English-language book that is an exhaustive, integrated, persuasive, and succinct analysis of rural unrest over the first half of the twentieth century.

The book starts with a typology of rural unrest, which Bianco loosely divides into three categories: actions targeting the state, the class structure, or the community. He shows that resistance to the state occurred much more frequently than protests against class-based economic exploitation. Having highlighted the variety and complexity of rural unrest (intercommunity feuds, salt smuggling, sects, secret societies, unregistered land, resistance to reform and conscription, and so forth), Bianco then argues that the high incidence of anti-tax resistance cannot be explained with the tools of Marxist analysis. In terms of their desperate grievances, ignorance, repertoires of action, and violence, Chinese peasants behaved much like peasants elsewhere, such as French peasants during the ancien régime. They protested against corrupt state agents and their elite allies, against reforms that entailed immediate burdens and contradicted traditional ways, and against the state agents responsible for military conscription. Social science typology is an intricate subject that Bianco makes legible through nuanced graphics of case studies.

At the same time, what emerges from Bianco's narrative analysis is a rural world in which an impoverished, oppressed, pragmatic, suspicious, parochial, and localized peasantry often reacted in bursts of energy to expansion of a state apparatus unable to eliminate threats to rural subsistence. Peasants were condemned to poverty and illiteracy and often acted vengefully. Nonetheless, the Chinese state in the early twentieth century, while administratively breaking down, proceeded (unevenly) to increase financial exactions for policing, reparations, modernizing reforms, and war. It is thus not surprising that in terms of targets, grievances, and repertoires, Chinese peasant unrest recalls rural France prior to the economic and political revolution of the nineteenth century.

To this day, despite the Communists' claim to have emancipated the peasantry, Chinese rural folk still act more like traditional subjects than modern citizens. Modernization programs have failed to change the basic pattern of rural unrest in which the people act locally, parochially, and reactively. For readers unfamiliar with French history, a key question thus emerges: how was the French peasant world transformed from the beginning of the seventeenth century to the mid-nineteenth century? Or from the Chinese angle: why did China fail to transform the rural sphere—a failure manifest in today's unrest? Granted, the origins of the Communist Revolution lie in the failure of earlier regimes to improve the living standards of peasants and transform them into citizens of a modern nation. Prompted by Bianco's major findings, I also wonder whether a new view can be advanced on the widespread rural unrest that accompanied the birth of the Communist state. Most of the three million “bandits” the Communist army claims to have suppressed in the early 1950s were actually participants in uncoordinated anti-tax riots. They were reacting to the unprecedented and unbalanced extraction by the new state of some twenty percent of rural production. Bianco's work demonstrates how and why Chinese peasants dealt with the intrusion of outside forces of the last century, and it should be read by anyone interested in the fate of peasants throughout the world.