The Chinese Peasant and Communism
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 2910695 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Mary C Wright (0000-0002-9422-2522, corresponding author) |
| Year | 1951 |
| Volume | 24 |
| Issue | 3 |
| Pages | 256 |
| Publication date | 1951-09-01 |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Pacific Affairs (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0030-851X • E-ISSN: 1715-3379 |
| Publisher | JSTOR (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.2307/2753727 |
| OpenAlex | W2334438216 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 4 |
THE political importance of the Chinese peasantry, largely ignored for several decades, both in China and abroad, has been underscored by the Chinese Communist consolidation of power. In China modern conservative and liberal political movements have focused their attention on what appeared to be the more dramatic aspects of reform and modernization. Earlier Communist leaders for quite different reasons gave a similarly low priority to peasant aspirations and peasant mobilization. Western observers for their part failed to find in the Chinese agrarian scene tensions and pressures of the type which had accompanied significant peasant movements elsewhere. Customary categories were misleading. The Chinese landlord did not have the vast holdings of his Latin American or Eastern European counterpart, but forty or fifty acres. The peasant was not the heir of recently emancipated serfs but the product of two thousand years during the course of which a prosperous, free-holding peasantry had been both the norm and the ideal. Little attention was given to the genuinely revolutionary agrarian tensions which were mounting or to the fact that throughout Chinese history widespread tenancy had been a sign that the existing state was about to collapse. Yet it is now plain that the fall of the Chinese Nationalist government was hastened when a disgruntled peasantry withheld taxes, evaded conscription and refused to fight, and that the Chinese Communists rose to power because they had learned to organize and to use the peasantry. The political importance of the Chinese peasantry is no discovery of the Chinese Communist Party, although that is the only action group which has seriously applied itself to the problem of using the peasantry in recent decades. Traditionally political power in China was recognized to rest on the consent of the peasantry and the support of the intelligentsia or literati-scholar class. The peasantry was the source of both military man power and all of the material necessities of life. The intelligentsia was in a position either to govern to the satisfaction
Agrarian society · China · Communism · Economic history · Landlord · Leasehold estate · Peasant · Political economy · Political science · Politics · Sociology · China's Socioeconomic Reforms and Governance · Chinese history and philosophy · History · Law
| Citations per year | 0.08 |
|---|---|
| Citation span | 1975 - 2023 (49) |
| Highly cited | No |