Reinventing Mao`s Peasant Revolution Theory: Agrarian Structure and Peasant Power in Pre-1949 South China

Abstract

The 1997 annual meeting of the Association for Asian Studies featured a presidential roundtable on “The Futures of Asian Studies” in which Professor James. C. Scott of Yale University rekindled a decade-old debate between the “thin” formalization of the rational choice school and the “thick” description of the culture school. With that in mind, this article discusses southern Chinese peasants in the pre-1949 period in depth. It also represents an attempt to reinvent Mao Zedong’s peasant revolution theory in South China in a new light. Since 1997 marks the sixtieth anniversary of the demise of Chinese Communist rule in the Jiangxi Soviet, this article therefore has important implications for the study of contemporary Chinese state-society relations for the coming years.