Social Suffering and Political Confession: Suku in Modern China is a welcome contribution to our knowledge of how the Chinese Communist Party established its controls in rural Chinese society during and after the Maoist rise to power.

Sun reminds us, with Chen Duxiu, that the Communist Party did not find a natural, supportive base among rooted tillers. Instead, Mao's strategy was to recruit Party activists from people who were no longer farmers pure and simple – the poorest, marginal elements in the countryside. Mao's Party appealed to the emotional suffering of this latter group in order cultivate a cadre base willing to fight against the esteemed local elites who relied on kinship and lineage networks, and on Confucian rituals, to govern rural society historically.

The book is a treasure trove of new interesting information about the origins of Communist Party power and the land reform process in particular. Sun draws on the Diary of Yang Hansheng to portray the Party's routine methods of mobilizing rural people for land reform. He shows that the Party recruited the poorest members of village society to inquire about their sufferings and to “educate” these elements to understand the importance of class and evil exploiters – supposedly landlords. In reality, however, the main targets of struggle were not landlords but the heads of bao-jia who had press-ganged villagers for Kuomintang armies. The Party cadres frequently focused on these “landlords” in the struggle sessions of the land reform campaign. Sun shows how very complicated the process of classifying rural people into different class categories was, and he also underscores the tensions between outside Party work teams and the poor activists they relied on to penetrate and understand relationships in local society. One cannot but help wonder, in reading Sun's work, if the Mao-led Communist Party ever accurately understood rural society, since its ground-level brains were those of the most ignorant and stupid people in the countryside – Mao' so-called poor peasant-cum-lumpen base.

In the first chapter Sun shows that these marginal Party activists often twisted the confessions they elicited from ordinary villagers, and also engaged in the kind of false accusations and accusatory politics for which socialist regimes are notorious. He makes a convincing argument for understanding the land reform process as a state simplification of the great variation in the different social and economic conditions of village China, reminding us, as Helen Siu and Vivienne Shue have argued, that the Party work teams frequently cut the feet of rural society to fit the shoes of Party ideology. Sun also shows that these work teams directed class struggle against a landlord group that was numerically far smaller than Mao argued – a group that, in many cases, still upheld its moral obligations to peasants who had “feelings of gratitude towards them” (p. 41).

In chapter two, Sun adds to our knowledge of suku (“speak bitterness”), that is, the practice of Party-orchestrated sharing of personal suffering for inspiring hatred towards class enemies and for mobilizing people to join in a revolution against exploitation. Killing such “enemies” was central to the rise of the revolution. This message was spread within the Party and the People's Liberation Army (PLA). I found this chapter to be eye-opening. According to Sun, who bases his argument on a hitherto unknown Handbook of Suku, Mao himself was behind the suku movement, for Mao (a) personally edited the handbook for cadre use and (b) ordered this guide to be distributed to the PLA, whose leaders mobilized soldiers to speak out in suku meetings and to share their own stories of past suffering with villagers. The Handbook underscored that the purpose of suku was to win the hearts of local people, and soldiers were to use this movement to develop the narrative skills that would magnetize villagers to the Party's cause. Most interestingly, Sun argues that Mao defined and advanced the practice of suku, which was to save rural people who were assumed to be suffering and to develop their sense of suffering (even if they were not) in a manner that was useful to the Party seizure of power locally. Sun is astute, for throughout this book he hints that such suffering was not, in reality, pervasive in rural society. Many rural people could not come up with even one story of how they had suffered class injustice when pressed to do so in suku meetings.

This work underscores the messy, discriminatory and capricious nature of the land reform movement and its attendant process of classification, which, according to Sun, was influenced by local struggles and rivalries as well as Communist Party fanaticism. This process ran amok to the point where, in the Jinchaji base area, there emerged an anti-land reform movement within the PLA, whose soldiers had married into former affluent land holding households, and thus stood to suffer from suku and land reform.

While Sun argues that the Party sometimes even used Confucian values to appeal to the peasants' sense of immoral landlordism, the evidence that the Party successfully enlisted ordinary villagers in its efforts to this end is less than convincing.

Chapters three and four deal with a range of theoretical issues, running the gamut from how Freud's work on social neurosis can be utilized to understand the CCP-led revolt against traditional patriarchal domination, and the role of suku in unleashing Oedipal emotions and revenge, which was hiding itself “behind the mask of revolution” (p. 107). In the third chapter, Sun concludes that “… by encouraging peasants' rebellion through the Suku movement and Land Reform, the CCP actually built up and fostered its own control on peasants” (p. 109), and that this process created the framework in which Mao would fashion the new authoritarian state. Following this, chapter four is focused on how this state drew individuals into its orbit by attacking their individuality through propaganda and, importantly, a penetrative bureaucracy that had the power to inhibit people from thinking of self and community first – the political economy of the CCP would eclipse the what James C. Scott has called the moral economy of the peasant household. Sun argues that suku pulled rural people into the destruction of their “very way of life,” and, following Arendt, was the bridge to the ultra-oppression of the Great Leap and the Cultural Revolution.

The fifth chapter is on Suku and Power. Here Sun builds on Foucault to draw a comparative parallel between the history of Western confessional rituals that began to mutate into “mechanisms of registration,” arguing that the Communist Party also used suku confessionals to not only transform the peasants' value system but also to connect the narrative discourse of everyday life with state administrative power, registering this discourse in state dossiers and regulations aimed at colonizing and controlling dissent and conflict. This chapter is based on outside the box thinking about how suku became entwined with state-building.

In the final sixth chapter, Sun addresses the way in which local people received suku and coped with its message and promise: they learned that the Communist Party was a new parent of sorts, and that they had to collaborate with it if they were to survive and also help it save them and their country. Sun implies that they made this small leap because they were so accustomed to subservient political behaviour, and thus vulnerable to a suku process in which an authoritarian political structure would supplant the authoritarian family (p. 179), a process that conjoined daily life with the myth of a Communist delivered salvation from old protectors and rulers – parents and the Kuomintang.

There is no conclusion, but perhaps this is appropriate, for this insightful book cautions that we should keep open the question of what the Communist Revolution actually was about.