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J OF CHIN POLIT SCI (2016) 21:393394
DOI 10.1007/s11366-016-9420-4
Elizabeth J. Perry, Anyuan: Mining Chinas Revolutionary Tradition
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012), 392 P. $75.00 Hardback, $34.95 Paperback
William Hurst1
Published online: 11 July 2016# Journal of Chinese Political Science/Association of Chinese Political Studies 2016
This book represents Elizabeth Perrys work at its best, as she uses previously unknown or under-studied archival sources to bring a fresh perspective to the case of the Chinese Communist Partys (CCP) mobilization of workers at the Anyuan coal mines in the 1920s, and its subsequent place in the construction of an elaborate political mythology. This is a case with which scholars are broadly familiar, but which they have failed to understand in its full depth and complexity. This book should be essential reading for both political scientists and historians interested in either the early stages of Chinese communist activism or the later writing and revision of its revolutionary narrative. Written in a style accessible to students and non-specialists, the book will have broader appeal than most academic titles.
Located in the mountains close to the border of Hunan in a relatively remote part of Southern Chinas low-income Jiangxi Province, the Anyuan mines were perhaps an unlikely setting for the CCPs first comprehensive attempt at worker mobilization, but they also proved to be the nursery in which tactics and ideologies that later became hallmarks of the Party were first developed and in which...