Social and Political Change in Revolutionary China: The Taihang Base Area in the War of Resistance to Japan, 1937-1945 (review)

The Taihang region was an important Communist base during the war of resistance against Japan. Situated in the heart of the Jin Ji Lu Yu (Shanxi-Hebei-Shandong-Henan) border area, Taihang was the home of the 129th division of the Eighth Route Army. Also based in the Taihang Mountains were the Northern Bureau, the headquarters of the Eighth Route Army, the Jin Ji Lu Yu border government, and the Jin Ji Lu Yu Central Bureau (during the civil war period). Except for Ralph Thaxton's China Turned Rightside Up and a treatment of Ren Village and its vicinity (also a Communist base) in a chapter of my book Mobilizing the Masses, little work has been done on the Taihang base area as a whole. Thus, Goodman's recent publication Social and Political Change in Revolutionary China contributes much to our understanding of this significant Communist base in North China.

This study focuses mainly on the revolutionary processes in the three counties of Liaoxian (Zuoquan ), Wuxiang , and Licheng , all located in southeastern Shanxi Province. The text is divided into two sections: the first half deals with political development and the second with social reform. Each section has an overview of Party policies on these topics. Because of the way the book is organized, some materials are repeated in various chapters.

The Taihang revolutionary process described here by Goodman is vastly different from that portrayed by Ralph Thaxton in China Turned Rightside Up. Goodman was able to obtain valuable internal Party documents that were not available to Thaxton in the early eighties. In any case, Goodman's study decidedly puts an end to Thaxton's thesis that the Chinese Revolution was essentially a "peasant-led" movement. Goodman shows beyond any doubt that the revolution in this region was "stage-managed" (borrowing a term from my book on Henan) by the Chinese Communist Party. Even though it was a closely coordinated movement, the Party still encountered some difficulties during the process, and it had to revise its policies to adapt to the environment. The author shows that the revolution was an "incremental," zigzag process, punctuated by unintended consequences, heated and divisive internal debates, and excesses committed by overenthusiastic CCP fundamentalists.¹ In addition, the redistributive part of the revolutionary program generated much tension among Party cadres as well as the rural social classes.

The book has two strong points: first, it is an in-depth county-level study in which the author uses a comparative approach. Goodman is critical of the "grand theory" (p. 2), for example as in Chalmers Johnson's nationalism, Mark Selden's social reform, Tetsuya Kataoka's organizational capacity, and Ralph Thaxton's peasant-led revolution. He warns scholars against an "overgeneralization of CCP experience" (p. 4) and urges us "to develop sounder theorizing by building explanation from the bottom up, particularly by acknowledging the differential factors and approaches that were significant in different localities and base areas" (p. 5). The book underscores the various patterns of change and local processes, on both the county and subcounty levels.

By now, it has become apparent to scholars that the Chinese revolution was not a one-size-fits-all affair. In recent studies, many scholars (Tony Saich, Gregor Benton, Pauline Keating, Ralph Thaxton, Keith Schoppa, Peter Seybolt, and myself) have used a local approach in examining the revolution, looking at it as a number of variegated "local revolutions." After all, a peasant-based revolution like the one in China was essentially a grass-roots movement. Party policies, although formulated at high levels, had to be adaptable to local conditions. Party cadres often found that the revolutionary experience acquired from one village (usually a test-case village) was not readily applicable...