Crimson Rain: Seven Centuries of Violence in a Chinese County (review)

In this richly detailed work, Rowe examines the local history of Macheng county, in present-day Hubei province, from late Yuan times through the early twentieth century. As the title suggests, he chooses violence as his organizing theme; the county witnessed truly horrific episodes of violence particularly during the seventeenth-century Ming- Qing transition and in the 1920s and 1930s—the "dynastic transition" between imperial and communist rule. This focus allows Rowe to make an important contribution to a growing body of literature—historical, anthropological, and literary, helpfully discussed in his introduction—which seeks to look past the normative Confucian representation of Chinese social reality as grounded in harmonious personal relations and to engage the gritty texture of life as actually lived in China. Although the book is deeply rooted in local history, the author's goal is to explore large questions concerning the nature and causes of violence, in the hopes that such a long-term view will shed light on the meaning of China's violent modern experience.

Rather than focusing uniquely on the violent events themselves, Rowe seeks to embed extreme eruptions in more routine forms or repertoires of violence, which he relates to socioeconomic structures. His most basic assertion is that a stark division between haves and have-nots in Macheng across the centuries is the root source of smoldering class enmities, which could be ignited by any number of secondary causes. He finds, for example, that forms of servile labor were widespread during the mid- to late Ming and even lasted—presumably in attenuated form—into the twentieth century. But Rowe's explanation is not monocausal. He notes the "muscular Confucianism" embraced by many of Macheng's local elites who built forts in the mountainous periphery of the region, serving for centuries as refuges from bandits, marauders, and occupying armies. He notes as well the passion for martial arts that gripped both commoners and elites. He skillfully illustrates the competing representations of violent events (and thus of justifications for the use of violence) found in local historiography from Ming times through the present day (including Communist reconstructions of Macheng local history). He notes that localism, or lineage ties, could and did attenuate the expression of class enmity on a regular basis.

The strength of the volume is its impressive mastery of local detail, which anyone who has attempted to work in late imperial local history will surely appreciate, as well as the author's verve in bringing local and national perspectives together. Unfortunately, Rowe's sources do not always allow him to probe key issues, such as the revolts of Macheng's bondservants, in as much detail as he would have liked. It would be interesting to know how bond servitude intersected both with lineage structures and with a marketizing economy, and why bondservants did not flee in greater numbers. But such minor concerns should not obscure the evocative portrait that Rowe creates. Surely in the back of the author's mind was today's China, an increasingly violent society, perhaps headed for another "dynastic transition" in the near future. A translation of this work should be made available to China's leaders.