This study examines the struggles of peasants during the years of the Great Leap Forward Famine (1959–61) through the lens of Da Fo village (a pseudonym) in the North China Plain. In doing so, Ralph A. Thaxton looks at the various patterns of peasant activism as well as the survival strategies that peasants employed to empower themselves and challenge the state during the contentious period of the 1950s to the 1970s. The analysis sheds light on how the Maoist revolution worked at the village level, how the Communists succeeded in seizing local power, and how the revolutionary process created an authoritarian regime that became increasingly alienated from its rural base.
Catastrophe and Contention in Rural China consists of nine main chapters. The introduction lays out the conceptual framework for understanding peasants' encounters with the village agents of the Maoist state in the 1950s. Through a critical study of oral materials, Thaxton places the story of Da Fo within a larger picture of popular response to food shortages and mass starvation caused by the Maoist state, and stresses that the state's violence against peasants was deeply rooted in earlier revolutionary and state-making processes. Chapters 1–3 trace the emergence of the Chinese Communist Party leadership in Da Fo during the early twentieth century. As with other villages in northern China, Da Fo was affected by the collapse of political order and the escalation of rural violence. Consequently, political power shifted from the educated landholding elites to the illiterate, marginal elements of the village militias. The Anti-Japanese War exacerbated this trend and led to the indiscriminate killing of collaborators of the puppet regime. Violent politics became the norm among the militia leaders, who controlled the local Communist movement and dominated the Da Fo party branch. After 1949, these militia leaders established the socialist order and implemented Mao's policies of land reform and collectivization.
Chapters 4–6 constitute the core of this book and discuss in detail the struggles of peasants during the Great Leap Forward, their resistance against the state-imposed agricultural policies, and their survival strategies during the harsh years of the Great Famine. The village party leaders supported the Great Leap Forward and enforced the Maoist policy of forced labor. They compelled villagers to work around the clock in large-scale irrigation, construction, and infrastructure projects. They used physical coercion and public humiliation to mobilize people. Some low-level officials were torn between their political duty to the state and the survival of their relatives and neighbors. But in the end, political considerations took precedence over concern for the well-being of fellow villagers.
As many traditional organizations fell apart in the wartime period, peasants in Da Fo had no institutional mechanisms for protesting against local party leaders. Faced with the state's draconian measures, peasants turned to a range of nonviolent tactics, such as running away, begging, stealing crops, and eating immature crops (chiqing), in order to stay alive. According to Thaxton, these patterns of low-profile resistance enabled people to ease their pain and suffering, and this explains why peasants in Da Fo did not publicly rebel during the famine. Chapters 7–9 explore the legacy of the Great Leap Forward in Da Fo, especially during the Cultural Revolution. There are many cases in which the famine survivors took advantage of the new political campaigns to express their grievances and retaliate against local party leaders responsible for the starvation during the Great Leap. The concluding chapter shows that even in the reform era, memories had a far-reaching impact on state–society relations, as survivors of the Great Leap were determined to settle old scores.
Thaxton's findings and analytical insights make important contributions to the study of regime consolidation in the Maoist era. First, Thaxton challenges the conventional understanding that the Chinese Communist state encountered little or no resistance when it consolidated its power in the early 1950s. Elizabeth J. Perry's analysis of the Shanghai Strike Wave in 1957 has drawn attention to the outbreak of well-organized, widely coordinated, urban resistance against the Maoist regime (see “Shanghai's Strike Wave of 1957,” China Quarterly, no. 137 [1994]: 1–27). In a similar fashion, Thaxton's study of peasant activism in Da Fo presents another good example of collective and protracted resistance against the state in the countryside. Second, this work builds on James C. Scott's concept of moral economy, as it examines a wide range of survival strategies that peasants in Da Fo employed to challenge the state (see The Moral Economy of the Peasant: Rebellion and Subsistence in Southeast Asia [New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1976]; and Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance [New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1985]). While acknowledging that peasants drew on cultural values rooted in the past, such as the practice of reciprocity, the right to subsistence, and traditional religious beliefs, Thaxton indicates that their actions were also informed by a basic understanding of rights: the right to a decent living and human dignity, and not just the subsistence right of traditional moral economy. This perspective has significant implications for understanding the emergence of rights consciousness in China today.
Highly readable and informative, Thaxton's work, which combines analysis of oral sources and admirable use of theories, is essential reading for anyone who is interested in the study of peasant activism, regime consolidation, and the Great Leap Forward in Maoist China.
