Jeffrey Javed’s monograph on violence-based political mobilization in China is as thorough as it is ambitious, and as psychological as it is political. The roughly two-hundred-page book (not including notes or references) boils down to a central thesis: establishing the PRC was as much a moral struggle as it was an institutional challenge. In so doing, Javed’s book pulls on a thread that scholars have long recognized but never quite untangled; namely, that the PRC’s origins contrast with classical patterns of state formation and even from its closest peers.

Whereas classical state-building efforts are defined by incremental gains in institutional capacity, modern China’s formative years were punctuated by recursive mobilization. Yes, the PRC was a proto-Leninist state, yet Mao’s China achieved that which Lenin and other like-minded leaders never could: penetrating society all the way down to the natural village. Yes, state-building in China was as violent—if not more so—as that of any other post-revolutionary regime, but whereas the likes of Stalin and Pol Pot quietly killed millions Mao had his enemies assaulted in broad daylight, in the public squares.

Why was violence in China such a public affair? What impassioned those who participated in it? And how did the Chinese communists contain and channel that carnage without being subsumed by it? At first glance, Javed’s inquiry may lead readers to recall classical debates on contentious politics, such as that between James C. Scott and Samuel Popkin, who sparred over the mobilizing potentials of morality versus opportunity. Javed goes a step further. In the case of China, he posits, neither collective tradition nor economic utility was sufficient to produce the degree of grassroots mobilization deemed necessary for remolding Chinese society in the Party’s image. Instead, CCP agents had to redefine moral boundaries and evangelize the masses into them through their complicity in public acts of violence.

According to Javed, the moralization of violence was necessary for at least two reasons. First, class cleavages and animosities were simply not deep enough to propel and justify the redistributive violence that communists saw as necessary for uprooting the existing elite. Instead, class awareness had to be “forged in the crucible of collective struggle.” Second, the shared trauma of perpetrating collective violence cultivated a sense of solidarity between the complicit masses and their CCP instigators. This violent bond would, in turn, render the masses ready and willing participants for future mobilization.

Most of the book is dedicated to illustrating the methods and psychology by which the CCP’s brand of morality was constructed and exploited to provoke hatred and justify violence toward target groups, including landlords, rich peasants, rightists, intellectuals, or whomever the Party deemed a threat to the revolution. Specifically, Javed aims to show that the CCP’s moral construction not only precipitated mass violence but that this violence reinforced the CCP’s moral foundation. In this effort, Javed compiles an impressive array of data and evidence, from extensive archival work and field notes to regression analysis using government statistics gleaned from internal party documents.

Javed’s investigation links the origins of moral-mobilizational to traditional Chinese rituals of social propriety and righteous governance that were recognized and expropriated by CCP agitators, in particular Mao, who witnessed examples in the countryside as early as 1927. The rest of the book proceeds by demonstrating how these rituals were repurposed by the CCP to conflate traditional moralities with more contemporary class consciousness. Morality-based violence explains why China often saw higher rates of societal struggle in areas with lower class consciousness, as demonstrated through a case study of the Huabei and Jiangnan regions. Similarly, Javed shows that violence was not limited to those of the wrong economic class but also targeted those deemed as deviating from moral boundaries. Unsurprisingly, so-called morally “bad classes” far outnumbered economic “landlord classes” across China.

As a careful researcher, Javed lays out arguments, sources, and evidence in detail. Indeed, the attention given to explaining how a former friend or neighbor would be reimagined by the masses as a tyrant or oppressor almost makes the process seem comprehensible, even mundane. This attention to detail and the frequent reference to morality can at times, however, make some of the content harder to penetrate. While those who make it through the book in one sitting will be rewarded, more strategic readers are encouraged to begin with Javed’s conclusions first, which appear at the end of every chapter and provide a lucid summary of the argument. It is also here that more critical readers may find their bones to pick.

Mixed into these conclusions, for instance, are several big-picture claims that rub against some of the literature’s most seminal scholarship. In addition to Michael Mann’s (1984) “infrastructural power” as “institutional capacity” (“The Autonomous Power of the State: Its Origins, Mechanisms and Results.” European Journal of Sociology 25[2]: 185-213), Javed points to “mobilizational power.” Contra Timothy Snyder’s (2016) conclusion that violence in World War II was greatest in areas where the state was absent (Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning), Javed argues that social violence in early China was a feature of state control. Where Joel Migdal (1988) sees delegation of power to localities as a risk to state consolidation (Strong Societies and Weak States: State-Society Relations and State Capabilities in the Third World), Javed depicts the enabling of local vigilantes as central to the CCP’s subjugation of local authority. In a nod to Charles Tilly (2003) (The Politics of Collective Violence), Javed argues that war and eliminating internal competitors were not sufficient for the consolidation of the state authority in China. Instead, “state-building was simultaneously [a] coercive and normative mobilization process (p. 204).” In each case, Javed has an argument to make, but the evidence in support is not conclusive.

While Javed successfully argues that moral mobilization contributed to mass-based violence, it is unclear whether this violence was necessary for state-building. As evidence, Chapter 6 shows that regions seeing more moral mobilization in land reforms also had faster agricultural growth, sent more volunteers during the Korean War, and arrested more people during future political campaigns. However, the broader ingredients of causality are not entirely in order. In Chapter 4, for instance, we learn that moral-based violence was higher where CCP control was greater, the logic being that the masses in these areas could assault their targets without fear of retribution. But if control facilitates moral mobilization and societal violence, it is harder to see how exactly the latter contributes to state formation. Returning to the case at hand, readers may also take issue with the broader context of early state formation in the PRC. It is fair to argue that PRC founders were equally if not more occupied with mass mobilization as they were with building up state capacity. However, this was also a period during which China was receiving massive amounts of assistance, including large amounts of human capital and institutional capacity, from the Soviet Union.

Overall, this book represents an intrepid foray into Mao’s, and the early CCP’s, ability to fuse order and chaos in the making of the modern Chinese state. To be sure, the role of moral mobilization has been underappreciated in previous work and for that Javed’s contribution will make an impact on future conversations. As to whether moral mobilization as a concept ought to be inducted into the lexicon of state formation, this reader is more circumspect. For all its mass mobilization work, the CCP was simultaneously de-mobilizing the Chinese people from realizing their self-interests, their passions, and their industry. Even when it comes to violence, local party organizers at times feared the passions of the mob could boil out of control. That was surely a lesson that Mao’s successors carried with them when setting the stage for the PRC we know today.