Content area
Full Text
* Corresponding author. Email: [email protected]
Land Wars: The Story of China's Agrarian Revolution By Brian DeMare. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2019. 260 pp. $80.00 (cloth), $24.00 (paper).
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...