While the socialist transformation following the establishment of the People’s Republic in 1949 has long been a subject of scholarly debate and fascination, the Party’s penetration into rural communities and the local responses during the early 1950s have received relatively limited attention. The official historical narrative in China often portrays the early PRC as a “golden age,” marked by the “liberation” of poor peasants through land reform and mass mobilization. The Party’s grand narrative characterizes this period as having established social stability and harmony through the extermination of bandits and counterrevolutionaries with widespread social support. However, recent research challenges this grand revolutionary narrative, revealing that the Communist takeover was by no means smooth. Jeremy Brown’s research on Communist rule in Guizhou and surrounding areas in southwest China, for example, demonstrates that the new regime faced violent resistance from former power holders, ethnic minorities, and peasants, as it struggled to assert control and “did not hold a monopoly on terror.”Footnote ¹ Similarly, Brian DeMare, in his first book, Land Wars: The Story of China’s Agrarian Revolution (Stanford, 2019), also contests the generalizations about a seamless takeover, exploring the brutal and intricate realities of land reform.

In his latest book, Tiger, Tyrant, Bandits, Businessman, Brian DeMare takes his analysis further, by illustrating the actual process of Communist penetration and the assertion of social control in rural communities where the Party had almost no organizational presence before 1949. Through micro-level case studies of rural communities in the early 1950s, DeMare provides a detailed examination of the significant resistance the new regime faced from former power holders, bandits, and even peasants, as well as detailing how the Party extended its influence and solidified its authority. DeMare’s study reveals the often violent confrontations and struggles that accompanied the Communist push to integrate rural communities into the socialist order.

In many regions, the Communists were unprepared for the takeover and underestimated the extent to which people would resist the new government. Various individuals and groups, even including those whom the new regime had vowed to liberate, actively participated in uprisings, assassinations, and other “counterrevolutionary” activities. DeMare draws on the archives of the Public Security Bureau of Poyang County in Jiangxi Province to investigate four criminal cases from the early years of the PRC, a transformative period when the Communists sought to bring Party rule down to the village level through various campaigns. Poyang County lies on the shores of Lake Poyang, China’s largest freshwater lake, in the middle Yangtze region. Focusing on the political and social changes in the county, DeMare examines how each of these four criminal cases reveals different forms of resistance the new regime encountered. As DeMare explains, these cases were not isolated incidents but rather represent a nationwide phenomenon during the early years of the PRC (19). The central research question explores the complexities of Communist control from the “perspectives of the villagers and townsfolk,” offering a grassroots view of the struggles that accompanies the Party’s efforts to assert its authority (1).

The organization of this book is unconventional for an academic monograph. After a brief introductory chapter that sets the stage by introducing Poyang and its social dynamics before and after 1949, the book then progresses through four balanced chapters. Each focuses on a specific casefile. Casefile 1 discusses the fierce resistance from bandits and secret societies that the Communists encountered after 1949. When the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) entered the region, they found a fragmented and militarized society plagued by frequent banditry and the influence of secret societies. The collapse of Nationalist authority did not lead to any significant change in the behavior of local bandits, who refused to accept Communist rule. In the summer of 1949, a small group of bandits launched attacks on a Communist outpost in Xiejiatan Township. This resistance was soon bolstered by the Big Sword Society, a secret organization with thousands of followers, who attacked Communist work teams and resisted the collection of the grain tax. Local powerholders, entrenched in secret societies, maintained their authority with firearms and defied Communist control. Although initially successful, ambushing a small Communist detachment, the uprising was eventually crushed by better-equipped PLA soldiers.

The second casefile further illustrates the Party’s determination to penetrate rural communities. Local strongmen quickly recognized that the Communists were different from previous imperial and Nationalist states, which had shown little interest in directly intervening in local governance. In Poyang, the administrative structure before 1949 was largely based on self-governance through a hamlet-neighborhood system (baojia). In contrast, the new regime aimed to extend state power down to the village level, dismantling the traditional power structure. Casefile 2 focuses on the assassination of a Communist cadre in 1949 by Big Tiger, the neighborhood chief of Fengtian Village, in resistance to the Party’s tax collection efforts. Big Tiger was arrested a year later and initially sentenced to a fixed prison term. The county chief, however, intervened so that his sentence was changed to the death penalty. This case exemplifies how the Party used mass campaigns and the legal system to assert its authority and dismantle the old social order.

The Party’s initial plan to remake rural society from the bottom up—by propagating class struggle and mass mobilization to legitimize the new regime—was not always successful. Efforts to instill class consciousness among peasants often underestimated the strength of entrenched power dynamics and lineage ties in the villages. Casefile 3 highlights the difficulties of political penetration in Likuang Village. A landlord named Xu, who had escaped during the land reform, returned to Likuang to expose two other landlords responsible for the murder of Comrade Cheng, a Communist, in 1930. Though the two were arrested, they later escaped from jail with the help of middle peasant Mai and other villagers, who hid them. These middle peasants, who were supposed to be the Party’s natural allies, aided the landlords due to shared lineage ties and their involvement in the Bodhisattva Society, a local religious group. The landlords were recaptured only after landlord Xu, acting as a secret agent for the Party, infiltrated local groups and revealed their hiding place. This case reveals the contest between two forms of peasant association: one rooted in long-established village lineage and religious solidarity, and the other sponsored by the Party as a tool for political control.

Casefile 4 brings to life the story of Merchant Zha, a local businessman struggling with the transition from Nationalist to Communist rule. Zha was charged by township cadres with a number of crimes, including profiteering during the Nationalist period through military liaison and gathering intelligence for General Li’s anti-Communist forces after liberation. Zha was sentenced to ten years in jail. it was later revealed, however, that the charges were all false, and the county’s People’s Tribunal determined that his only crime was refusing to hand over a landlord’s property during the land reform. He was released on parole. According to DeMare, this case illustrates the Communist’s unique “dual-track legal system.” In addition to the People’s Court, which tried common criminals such as bandits and spies, county cadres set up People’s Tribunals at the district level to handle cases related to land reform and other revolutionary campaigns. These tribunals became the “legal enforcers” of land reform and the Party’s expansion into villages Poyang (18). This system gave local cadres great power, underscoring the arbitrary and abusive nature of justice in the early years of Communist rule.

DeMare primarily uses the four casefiles (comprised mainly of confessions) from the Public Security Bureau to reconstruct the activities of local power holders, bandits, Communist cadres, and others, revealing what the rural revolution meant for local people. Through these narratives, the author captures the complexities of the Party’s establishment of rural control. Unlike most academic monographs, DeMare’ uses confessions and other official sources to reconstruct individual stories, without extensively engaging with the existing scholarly literature on many of the important issues it raises. He acknowledges that these sources are “fractured and contradictory,” making them incomplete and not fully reliable (134). Nevertheless, the book reveals many valuable points that deserve further scholarly discussion. For example, in all four stories, DeMare observes how language could be weaponized, with the Party using labels to delegitimize political rivals and justify its political penetration. Another significant issue worth discussion is how the Communists, as outsiders, navigated local communities with indigenous social and religious networks.

More importantly, DeMare’s work demonstrates how official sources can be used to recover the voices of individuals often lost in historical narratives. This may not be a book for readers seeking a coherent narrative. But as DeMare notes, “history lives at the intersection of our sources and our narrative instincts,” implying that the past is open to interpretation (135). This ambiguity encourages readers to actively engage with the complexities of this transformative period in rural China. Scholars, students, and general readers seeking to understand the social transformation in rural communities of the early PRC will find the book of great interest.