Hostname: page-component-84b7d79bbc-tsvsl Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-07-29T09:19:42.777Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Peasant Nationalism Revisited: The Biography of a Book

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  17 February 2009

Chalmers Johnson
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

It is now 15 years since Peasant Nationalism and Communist Power was first published and became known as a controversial book. However, when in the autumn of 1960 I began writing my doctoral dissertation in political science at Berkeley, it never once crossed my mind that I was writing something controversial or even publishable. For the previous two years I had been reading Japanese Government archives concerned with the Japanese war in China, 1937–45, archives that had been obtained for the Berkeley libraries by Professor Robert Scalapino from Hatano Ken'ichi, one of Japan's leading specialists on China and a Japanese governmental adviser during the so-called “China Incident.” These archives impressed me with a point that I thought was already widely accepted among scholars interested in the Chinese Revolution – namely, that the Japanese army had created conditions of such savagery in the Chinese countryside that the peasantry in overwhelming numbers had given their allegiance to the Chinese Communist Party as the only true leader of anti-Japanese guerrilla resistance. Because the Communist Party had openly championed resistance to Japan, it had won the “hearts and minds” of a significant proportion of the rural population, an achievement that guaranteed that in the postwar world it could no longer be regarded by the Kuomintang (KMT) as merely a “rebel faction”. When the Nationalists precipitated a civil war with the Communists after Japan's defeat, it was only natural that the mass of the population in the formerly occupied areas supported the Communists, and it was this factor of popular support, as in most other civil wars, that contributed most to the communist victory of 1949.

Type
Research Article
Information
The China Quarterly , Volume 72 , December 1977 , pp. 766 - 785
Copyright
Copyright © The China Quarterly 1977

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1. “Civilian loyalties and guerrilla conflict,” World Politics, Vol. XIV, No. 4 (07 1962), pp. 646–61Google Scholar .

2. An Instance of Treason, Ozaki Hotsumi and the Sorge Spy Ring (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1964)Google Scholar .

3. Journal of Asian Studies, Vol. XXII, No. 4 (08 1963), pp. 476–77Google Scholar .

4. The Tribune (London), 31 05 1963Google Scholar .

5. The China Quarterly, No. 15 (07–09 1963), pp. 166–71CrossRefGoogle Scholar .

6. Mao Tse-tung on the Chinese Revolution (Peking: Foreign Languages Press, 1963), p. 34Google Scholar .

7. See Tokuda, N., “Yenan rectification movement: Mao Tse-tung's big push toward charismatic leadership during 1941–1942,” The Developing Economies (Tokyo), Vol. IX (03 1971), pp. 83–99Google Scholar ; and Mō Taku-tō-shugi no keisei, 1935–1945 (The Formation of Mao Tse-tungism, 1935–1945) (Tokyo: Keiō Tsūshin, 1971)Google Scholar .

8. Po-ta, Ch'en, Mao Tse-tung on the Chinese Revolution, p. 29Google Scholar .

9. Quoted in Peasant Nationalism and Communist Power, The Emergence of Revolutionary China, 1937–1945 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1962), p. 192Google Scholar , footnote 1. Mao told Snow that the maximum size of the Soviet enclaves in central China was 9,000,000 people. According to the informants to whom Nym Wales talked in Yenan in 1937, the Party in 1934 had enjoyed the support of from seven to nine million people in central China (Li Teh, p. 115); in 1936 it held only north Shensi, with a population of from 500,000 (p. 57) to 900,000 (p. 88), and its army was down to 80,000–90,000 men (Chu Teh, p. 179). Wales, Nym, My Yenan Notebooks (Madison, Conn.: Mimeographed, 1961)Google Scholar .

10. “The changing nature and locus of authority in Communist China,” in Lindbeck, John M. H. (ed.), China: Management of a Revolutionary Society (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1971), pp. 34–76Google Scholar ; and “Caesarism in China,” Encounter (12 1976), pp. 76–83Google Scholar .

11. See, e.g. Potter, Jack M., Diaz, May N., and Foster, George M. (eds.), Peasant Society, A Reader (Boston: Little Brown, 1967)Google Scholar .

12. Wolf, Eric R., Peasant Wars of the Twentieth Century (New York: Harper and Row, 1969), p. 290Google Scholar .

13. Mao Tse-tung (Harmondsworth, England: Penguin Books, 1966), p. 203nGoogle Scholar .

14. Tse-tung, Mao, Selected Works (New York: International Publishers, 1954), Vol. I, p. 94Google Scholar .

15. “Chinese Communist leadership and mass response: the Yenan period and the Socialist Education Campaign period,” in Ho, Ping-ti and Tsou, Tang (eds.), China in Crisis (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968), Vol. I, pp. 397–437Google Scholar .

16. New York Review of Books, 3 December 1970, p. 45.

17. Moore, Barrington Jr, Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy, Lord and Peasant in the Making of the Modern World (Boston: Beacon Press, 1966), pp. 453, 454, 474, 475Google Scholar .

18. Ibid. p. 479.

19. Text in Schram, Stuart R., The Political Thought of Mao Tse-tung (New York: Praeger, 1963), pp. 208–209Google Scholar .

20. “On the correct handling of contradictions among the people,” text in East Asian Research Center, Harvard University (ed.), Communist China 1955–1959 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1962), p. 292Google Scholar . As for Mao's thoughts on the Sino-Japanese War itself, we have the observations of Nym Wales from Yenan in 1937: “Mao Tse-tung … was one of the few persons who thought a war between China and Japan was imminent in 1937. As early as August 1935 he began reorganizing his party line to meet this war situation. It Was not an easy task to bring all the Communists into line, and there was some trouble about deciding to give up the Soviets in the beginning. Even when I was in the Soviet districts in the summer of 1937, there was a big campaign against potential Leftists and Trotskyists, who did not want to cooperate with the Kuomintang. But Mao succeeded without causing a split in his party. … July 7, the day of the Lukouch'iao Incident, was a day of great victory for Mao, vindicating his political omniscience and right to leadership of the Chinese revolution.” My Yenan Notebooks, p. 211.

21. Piao, Lin, Long live the victory of people's war, in commemoration of the 20th anniversary of victory in the Chinese people's war of resistance against Japan (Peking: Foreign Languages Press, 1965), p. 11Google Scholar .

22. Ibid. p. 18.

23. My Yenan Notebooks, p. 39.

24. Gillin, Donald G., “‘Peasant nationalism’ in the history of Chinese Communism,” Journal of Asian Studies, Vol. XXIII, No. 2 (02 1964), p. 271Google Scholar ; and Selden, Mark, The Yenan Way in Revolutionary China (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1971), pp. 92–93Google Scholar .

25. Gillin, , “Peasant nationalism,” p. 273Google Scholar .

26. Ibid. p. 275.

27. Ibid. p. 277.

28. Ibid. p. 280, note 70.

29. Ibid. p. 273, note 27.

30. Tokyo: Asagumo Shimbun Sha, 1968, 610 pp., and 1971, 619 pp.

31. Hiroshi, Jōno, “Sekai saidai no rikugun tanjō no nazo” (The riddle of the birth of the world's largest army), Chūō kōron (The Central Review), 12 1965, pp. 211–23, particularly p. 213Google Scholar . See also Jono's book-length account, Sansei dokuritsusen-ki (Record of Revolutionary War in Shansi) (Tokyo: Sekka Sha, 1967), particularly pp. 40–41Google Scholar .

32. Gillin, Donald G., Warlord (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1967), p. 282CrossRefGoogle Scholar .

33. Ibid. p. 285.

34. The Nation, 27 April 1970, p. 506.

35. Selden, , The Yenan Way in Revolutionary China, pp. 92, 119–20, 277Google Scholar .