Rural China was remarkably transformed through numerous campaigns led by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in the twentieth-century Chinese revolution. Among these campaigns, land reform, otherwise known mainly as a land redistribution movement with particularly noticeable egalitarian and idealistic characteristics, has come under scrutiny by economic scholars and political scientists. Brian DeMare's recent monograph on land reform takes a great step further to successfully evoke the cultural dimension of this agrarian revolution. Unsatisfied with frequently used book structures that adopt either the vertical narrative of chronological order or a horizontal layout of several aspects, DeMare in this book follows the strategy of his Mao's Cultural Army (2017) to construct a day-by-day narrative of the development of rural China's agrarian reform—in the author's words, a “land reform plotline.” The author has a clear understanding of the distinctions and interactions between “Mao's narrative of revolution” and “what truly occurred in rural China” (x). In other words, DeMare strives to reveal land reform's intricate situation between idealized stories dominated by party ideology and uneven realities embedded in rural China.

As the book's subtitle, “the Story of China's Agrarian Revolution,” suggests, DeMare handles the topic of land reform in a refreshing way, using skillful story-telling that brings to my mind the talented works of Jonathan Spence. Following the land-reform plotline, the book covers every step of the movement: the work team's arrival, organizing the masses, dividing classes with peasants and landlords at each end of the spectrum, struggling with the designated “landlords” or local tyrants, and finally to the problematic Fanshen, which remains a doubtful success in terms of improving the living standard and political consciousness of the rural residents. At the beginning of each chapter, vivid stories from both famous land-reform novels such as Ding Ling's The Sun Shines over the Sanggan River and non-fiction documentaries by William Hinton and Isabel Crook are judiciously recounted by the author to best represent the historical context of individuals’ land reform experiences rather than the grand revolution narrative. Moreover, in his comprehensive analysis DeMare also includes the land reform exhibition, a visualized and fictionalized way of introducing rural revolution to urban residents that is neglected in the usual scholarly literature. He believes that “stories, which transform complex and messy events into tidy narratives with linear plotlines, are essential to the craft of history” (159). By critically mining and applying fiction for historical research and presenting his research results in a story-like narrative, the author actually elegantly deconstructs the “shared narrative” of land reform and successfully unveils the counterpart of over-simplified stories.

Although fictional stories serve as the entry point to a stage of the land reform in each chapter of the book, DeMare gives equal weight to other types of source, including county-level archives, selectively published archives, newspapers, and internal publications. These sources tell a complex story. As discussed in the first chapter, work teams, encompassing experienced peasant-worker cadres and so-called intellectuals (zhishifenzi), were sent down to the villages to lead the land reform campaign. But for the bourgeois zhishifenzi, whose own class standing was uncertain, siding with the peasantry in the class struggle also constituted a kind of personal revolution. DeMare fully demonstrates the suffering and difficulties they encountered. The peasant work team members, mostly illiterate but rich in revolutionary experience, receive less attention, however, and this might have been more fully developed. The fact that a work team consisted of cadres with different educational backgrounds and personal histories, which influenced their views of class struggle and the use of violence, is another area worth further attention. However, regardless of the inner differences of work teams, they needed to concentrate on mobilizing the masses for the coming struggle. As discussed in the second chapter, bitterness-speaking was widely adopted as the general method in organizing villagers. But what differed from the official narrative depicting bitterness-speaking as a successful mobilization method is that the bitterness was hard to find. For many places where there were very few large landowners, and for many villagers who actually had harmonious relationships with those so-called landlords, no bitterness could be found other than ones based on personal experiences, which had to be transformed into class hatred.

In chapter three the author reminds us that the class division process was theoretically based on economic factors, but in fact was fairly pan-politicized and even stigmatized. In theory, “the definition of a landlord was based on the percentage of income derived through exploitation versus labor” (93). But it was charges of evilness, corruption, and sexual abuse imposed on these exploiters that played a larger role in deciding their miserable fate. Moreover, DeMare pays particular attention to the foreignness of CCP's political terms, such as “class” (jieji), “landlord” (dizhu), and “peasant” (nongmin), clarifying these words’ Japanese origins, a not surprising finding given the fact that many modern Chinese terms were directly or indirectly borrowed from modern Japanese. However, I think it would be more interesting if the ideological evolution behind those words, especially their Russian origins, was considered; and indeed, this has been already done by some Chinese scholars.

To quote Chairman Mao, “Revolution is not a dinner party” but “an act of violence by which one class overthrows another,” hence the violence of land reform. Deeply rooted in the party's ideological belief that only through fierce class struggle could land reform be successful, the abuse of violence seems to have been inevitable. DeMare discusses the varied extent of violence displayed in different regions in chapter four, including horrible tortures of landlords in the name of searching for hidden wealth at one end of the spectrum, while at the other end land reform in the Beijing suburbs was relatively peaceful and resulted in very few deaths. The author seems to believe that the Communist Party overemphasized the fierceness of struggle and that the voice of moderate party leaders like Xi Zhongxun, whose sayings are frequently quoted in the book, was somehow submerged in the class struggle narrative. However, in a revolutionary party that was committed to achieving radical social transformation through endless self-struggle, “democracy and fair burdens” (157) could never be a long-lasting goal of the Great Revolution, but only an expedient promise to address temporary setbacks.

From a more critical and rigorous perspective, it might be argued that even though DeMare has done his best to uncover the complexity of the land reform campaign, there is still little possibility of understanding comprehensively every aspect of the complicated 1946–1952 land reform and China's agrarian revolution in a book-length study. As stated in the very beginning of his book, “In reality, rural China was an expansive and endlessly diverse place, and it stubbornly resisted any simple characterization” (5). The question of “what truly occurred in rural China” is thus still hard to answer, owing to the fact that most available sources, including archives, official documents, and newspapers, side with the voice of the state, while personal stories from individual accounts are still inadequate to challenge the dominant narrative of the Chinese Communist Revolution. Nonetheless, DeMare's compelling land reform research is no doubt methodologically innovative and of great significance in uncovering untold stories of rural China's grassroots revolution.