Land Wars: The Story of China's Agrarian Revolution by Brian DeMare (review)

Land reform campaigns undertaken by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) between 1945 and 1952 resulted in the expropriation of more than 10 million landlords and the redistribution of 43% of China's cultivated land. Surprisingly, given the scale of this enterprise and its importance in the extension of CCP power, no previous English-language study has provided a comprehensive history of land reform. Brian DeMare's new book does scholars and students of China's revolutionary history a great service by filling this gap.

Extending upon the methodology developed in his excellent first monograph, ¹ DeMare approaches rural revolution as a participatory political performance in which rural audiences reenacted "scripts" from cultural productions in mass campaigns and in their everyday lives. To understand how stories of revolution translated into revolutionary practice, Land Wars: The Story of China's Agrarian Revolution focuses on the "narrative script" first spelled out in Mao Zedong's 1927 "Report on an Investigation of the Peasant Movement in Hunan" (湖南農民運動考察報告) and reproduced in land reform novels penned by early participants in these campaigns. Land reform was, as DeMare puts it, "a moment of discursive explosion, a time when the campaign and its distinctive rhetoric spread to many narrative forms, from simple songs and slogans to full-length novels and operas" (98).

Throughout the book, DeMare makes extensive use of Ding Ling's celebrated land reform novel The Sun Shines over the Sanggan River (太陽照在桑乾河上 Taiyang zhao zai Sangganhe shang ) and the lesser-known Love in Redland (赤地之戀 Chidi zhilian), by Zhang Ailing (張愛玲 1920–1995; also known as Eileen Chang). Despite their differing political inclinations, Ding and Zhang both drew, in these fictional works, on their experiences as members of land reform work teams, which played a crucial role in organizing and mobilizing the rural populace. The CCP inculcated work teams composed of intellectuals with the revolutionary narrative that structured these novels before dispatching them to the countryside to make fiction become reality.

By reducing messy and diverse realities to a neat and tidy narrative, stories that the CCP told in these cultural productions made agrarian revolution comprehensible to the people who carried it out. For cadres and activists, this narrative made land reform and the violence that accompanied it seem like a historical necessity. To illustrate the enduring power of these stories, DeMare also makes frequent reference to Fanshen, by William Hinton (1919–2004), ² the widely read account of land reform in a Shanxi village that brought Mao's narrative of rural revolution to a global audience and influenced the writings of future historians.

The organization of DeMare's book follows the stages of this revolutionary narrative, with work teams arriving in the village (chapter 1), organizing activists to air pent-up grievances and "speak bitterness" (chapter 2), dividing peasants into newly introduced class statuses that soon became accepted as natural social categories (chapter 3), struggling [End Page E-9] against landlords (chapter 4), and finally bringing about the economic, political, and economic liberation of fanshen (翻身) or "turning" (chapter 5). But, far from adhering uncritically to the revolutionary narrative, DeMare demonstrates how the party's vision of land reform was manufactured, deployed, and received in the countryside, often with unexpected results.

The book succeeds admirably in capturing the ironies and complexities of these campaigns, revealing dissonances between the CCP's grand narrative and the realities of land reform. We read, for example, of party officials trying to figure out what to do when villagers marched into Chongqing to "settle accounts" with the urban relatives of landlord families, driving some to suicide, after rural landlords did not have enough grain to meet their demands. In this instance, officials encouraged landlord relatives to "donate what they could to peasant bill collectors" and made sure that only the "truly counter-revolutionary were dragged back to the countryside to answer for their crimes" (150).

Because DeMare's book is an overview of land...