The socialist practices in the early People's Republic of China have received ample scholarly attention in recent years. Among these works, Brian DeMare's Land Wars is a very thorough, thought-provoking study that complicates extant literature and will certainly deepen readers’ understanding of the essence of Chinese socialism.
The book's first chapter focuses on the arrival of work team members at rural villages. DeMare bases this section mostly on archival materials. For DeMare, the dispatching of land reform work teams first and foremost embodied the changing power dynamics between the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and the young urban intellectuals, who made up most of the work team members after the release of the May Fourth directive of 1946. The CCP increasingly mobilized the intellectuals to join the work teams with the intention of transforming their ideology through engaging in revolutionary practice. DeMare points out that these activists were not passive targets of “transformation” but indispensable historical agents who “played a crucial role in organizing and mobilizing peasants” (p. 46). He shows that the work team members engaged in a largely unanticipated web of power and discourse: the CCP wanted them to be firm or even radical, the rural communities they entered were fraught with suspicion and rumor, and the rural cadres and urban intellectuals within the team might also be divided. In this chapter, DeMare also engages with the disparate land reform narratives of three representative authors who experienced it: Ding Ling, Zhang Ailing, and William Hinton. He demonstrates that Ding Ling emphasizes the intellectuals’ “transformation,” Zhang Ailing is highly cynical, and Hinton points out that intellectuals were better equipped than peasant cadres.
Beginning in chapter 2, DeMare establishes his own narrative pattern whereby each chapter starts with descriptions of land reform written by the above-mentioned three authors. The retelling of their writings in this and later chapters might be a little confusing for readers who are unfamiliar with their works, and the paraphrasing of the plots without much critical analysis may leave readers wondering what they can get out of these retellings. The narrative based upon primary and secondary sources, however, is cogent. DeMare effectively shows how the work teams utilized a series of techniques, the most prominent one being “speaking bitterness,” to promote hatred and struggle. During this process, the traditional elitist power structure in the villages was subverted, women were empowered, and peasants learned new political vocabularies as a result of the work team's painstaking efforts. DeMare affirms that the goal of the Chinese agrarian revolution was “not just to redistribute land but to utterly transform village societies” (p. 52). At the same time, the process involved “forcing struggle on unwilling peasants” (p. 71).
New concepts played a prominent role in rural class struggle. In chapter 3, DeMare details the appearance and application of Maoist class categorization and traces the etymological roots of such jargon as “rich peasant” (funong) and “middle peasant” (zhongnong). Pointing out that the most notorious label, “landlord” (dizhu), did not exist as a concept before land revolution, DeMare shows that the policy of classifying and treating people as such was often vague, arbitrary, and awkward, and the boundaries fluid. He suggests that the strong push for equal landholding facilitated the use of violence, which was cautioned against by a few party leaders, yet to no avail. The process of inventing the Chinese landlord, as DeMare narrates, also implied the demonizing of individual landlords as economic exploiters, sexual predators, and moral deviants.
As the book shows, the consequence of land reform was almost inevitably the violent torture and killing of landlords, which was often precipitated by revolutionary rituals of public denouncement and humiliation. To be sure, physical abuse and mass killing of landlords were not in line with the officially pronounced policy of the CCP, yet the Party's ideological ambiguity acquiesced to peasant violence, for it had announced that the work teams should never “[throw] cold water on the masses” (p. 112). Behind the Party's open opposition to the advocacy of “peaceful land reform” and its unrelenting invention and reinforcement of rural division and confrontation lies its deeply entrenched tenet that a great mass movement cannot, and should not, be refined and gentle.
Profound political and cultural transformation did occur, yet whether the artificial manufacturing of rural antagonism and violence would lead to true liberation remained an unresolved question. DeMare raises this issue at the end of chapter 4. In chapter 5, he argues that despite the CCP's official rhetoric about the positive changes land reform brought to the countryside, it was overall a failure because the cadres turned into new, predatory elites, women were still dominated by the patriarchy, and the rural economy developed unevenly, while landlords and their dependents inherited a harmful political label. One of DeMare's notable contributions in this chapter is his emphasis on how landlords’ female family members were victimized.
As revealed in this study, the contradiction inherent in the Party's effort to empower the peasantry and its violent means, overblown propaganda, and mixed results will make readers rethink the human cost of any subsequent agricultural development project. The book, however, falls short of a trenchant introduction, which provides lengthy general information about the Chinese rural revolution yet does not present a compelling argument, aside from stating DeMare's plan to “[analyze] the party's attempt to transform the Chinese countryside” (p. 25). Yet what we finally see is not just the “attempt” and literary representations but the multifaceted results. DeMare recapitulates only in the conclusion that the CCP was in fact “unable to … provide universal peasant emancipation” (p. 161) and the violence it encouraged traumatized both villagers and work team members. He should have more forcibly enunciated the problematics of Chinese land revolution on a theoretical level.
