Two revolutions : village reconstruction and cooperativisation in North Shaanxi, 1934-1945
Date
1989
Authors
Keating, Pauline B.
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Abstract
The broad aim of this enquiry is to assess the extent of revolutionary change achieved by
the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in strategic parts of the Shaanganning Border
Region during the Sino-Japanese War. The study is built around the significant contrast
between developments in the nine sparsely-populated counties which were directly
administered from Yan'an city (the Yanshu counties) and the five populous counties to
the north which formed the Suide subregion. Long-established differences in human
settlement patterns, agricultural practice, modes of political control and, in the mid-
1930s, different levels of exposure to communist-led insurgency resulted in different sets
of problems and different opportunities and challenges for the CCP in each of the two
subregions. The Suide subregion, with its high tenancy rates, powerful landlords,
fractious competition for land and an involuting agriculture more closely approximated
conditions in other CCP bases than did the rest of Shaanganning. On the other hand, in
the very secure, land-abundant parts of the Yanshu countryside in which any remaining
landlords had been cowed there was the possibility of thoroughgoing and unprecedented
village reconstruction through a migrant resettlement programme and some government
munificence (relative to other places).
Rural revolution is interpreted as meaning radical change in three analytically
distinct spheres: peasant-state relations, peasant-elite relations and the horizontal
relationships between village families. Land reform and the development of the economic
infrastructure were, in CCP understanding, the precondition for significant changes in
socio-political relations. And the migrant programme, the rural election movements,
taxation policies and tenancy reform enabled the CCP to persist with its drive to
restructure rural politics after land confiscations had been officially halted. The methods
and consequences of the implementation of each of these reform strategies in Yanshu and
Suide are examined in detail in this dissertation. The campaign to develop fannwork cooperation between peasant families was, in
my argument, the most revolutionary of the CCP's various rural reform strategies
because, for one thing, meaningful change in peasant-state and peasant-elite relations
required the building of new and strong village organisations. Predictably, the
cooperativisation movement took different forms in the Suide and the Yanshu
subregions. The different ecologies and settlement patterns in the two places had
produced locally-distinct cooperative customs between fann families, and the CCP's
first-step strategy of reviving traditional customs underlined this fact. In both Suide and
Yanshu, the drive to restore old cooperative practices was remarkably successful. But it
proved more difficult to expand mutual-aid practices beyond family or kin-based groups,
and to extend cooperation to tasks that had not, in the past, been undertaken
cooperatively. The CCP had some success in building new (in contrast to traditional) mutual-aid
teams in those parts of Suide where the power of the old elite had been broken.
However, residents of those Yanshu hamlets which had been built up by means of a
vigorous immigration programme over the previous six or seven years, and under CCP
patronage, were far more responsive to CCP innovations in the area of farm work
management than were fann families in more' solidary' villages. The cooperativisation
movement in the Suide subregion was generally characterised by a 'top-down' building
of model villages and a degree of regimentation. In the Yanshu counties, cooperative
forms were more varied, more modest in scope and were more independent of central
supervision and direction. Thus, a conclusion of my study is that the most successful of
the early peasant cooperatives were those that were developed in an atypical countryside
and in villages with atypical histories. There is not the same evidence of revolutionary
change in the Suide villages.
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