Force and Contention in Contemporary China. Memory and Resistance in the Long Shadow of the Catastrophic Past by Ralph A. Thaxton, Jr (review)

In this last volume of his trilogy about rural China under Communism, Ralph Thaxton sets his aim at revealing the contemporary crisis of legitimacy of the CCP in the "deep countryside," while tracing this crisis (and the policies that engendered it) back to the original sin of the Great Leap Forward and the ensuing famine. The popular memory of that disaster, Thaxton argues, shapes the attitudes of today's villagers while institutional practices introduced during collectivization still inform the Party-State today. The result is a sprawling, unnerving, frustrating, and historically myopic book, chock-full of details but almost always baffling in terms of analysis.

The tone—especially for anybody who might not be already familiar with Thaxton's élan—does not leave any doubt about the author's blanket assessment of the Maoist enterprise. Everything in the "dark Maoist past" (330) was monstrous (37), a folly; Thaxton mentions, in passing and without much in terms of explanation or nuance, the "vigilante institutions of Mao-era killing," (26) the "terrifying mechanism of Maoist rule," (38) "the perversion, corruption, and violence that were part of the DNA of the Mao-led Chinese Communist Party" (148). The hukou system is described as a form of "apartheid." Now, of course, Thaxton is not alone in such judgements. But such generic moral condemnation of an entire historical period runs against the more nuanced and complex understanding that historians of the PRC have produced in the last couple of decades—historians whose work Thaxton sometimes cites but clearly does not find useful. Also, and more importantly, the tone reveals and reinforces the flaws in his arguments. Because Thaxton needs to continuously show how everything in contemporary China reverts to the essential evils of Maoism—and specifically to the Great Leap—he ends up producing, despite the richness of detail and the incredible array of oral sources, a uniform, unchanging picture, with a uniformly and always corrupt Party, incapable of providing anything for the oppressed people; a sad, and largely a-historical caricature.

Thaxton vividly illustrates several aspects of rural life in the post-Mao era, from the failure of democratic elections to the introduction of birth control, from mafia-like martial arts brotherhoods to rural education, and there is plenty of interesting material presented here (the book is over 400-pages long). Yet, the overarching compulsion to trace all this back to the Great Leap Forward (or its memory) often brings Thaxton to stretch logical or historical connections well beyond what seems acceptable. In more than one case, he is forced to add to, explain, or "translate" the statements of his interviewees in order to make that connection—as in the case of Bao Guoshan's interview when Thaxton tells us what Bao "really was asking." The memory of the Great Leap is deployed to explain anything in the post-Mao period, from anti-tax mobilization (83), to reluctance to enlist the police to back up peasants' claims (85), to even the desire of keeping second or third daughters despite the draconian birth planning laws (116-117). It is very difficult to see how the trauma of the famine can really be a factor (let alone an explanation) for such a varied array of phenomena; thus the Great Leap becomes a refrain, almost a rhetorical passe-partout that Thaxton relentlessly adopts. Relentlessly, and often unconvincingly: at least in a couple of instances (as, for example, on 267) even he is forced to recognize that we need more evidence to link the trauma of the Great Leap with present-day contentious attitudes. Yet the entire book is based on the assumption of that very link.

Part of the reasons for the hollowness of that claim is that, especially for a monograph that is supposedly centered on the persistence of collective...