BOOK REVIEWS

David S.G. Goodman, Social and Political Change in Revolutionary China: The Taihang Base Area in the War of Resistance to Japan, 1937-1945

Study of the communist bases in the countryside in China between 1937 and 1945 progressed tremendously during the final twenty-five years (1), and especially during the closing decade, of the twentieth century. The Chinese authorities opened their archives and published extensive collections of documents from them, which contributed greatly to the boom in this field of research. The opening of the archives was particularly timely in the case of the Jin-Ji-Lu-Yu frontier region (Shanxi-Hebei-Shandong-Henan), in fact, more precisely, the area at the foot of the Taihang mountains (in the south east of Shanxi), which provided the material for Goodman's present study. It was there that Deng Xiaoping lived and was active for most of the war; with him were other leaders who have not always since been in favour with the regime: Peng Dehuai, Yang Shangkun, Bo Yibo and Li Xuefeng. All the more reason why the Taihang bases, which were eclipsed during Mao's lifetime by the model and the myth of Yan'an, have been given favourable attention by his successors. By the end of the 1980s, there were no fewer than 120 locally recruited historians working on the Taihang bases (2).

Thanks to the dozen or so monographs (3) now covering nearly all the revolutionary bases where the communists made preparations for their victory in 1949, the initial question (the choice between Chalmers Johnson's “national” thesis and Mark Selden's “social” thesis) has been replaced by the real history—rather than the ideal one—of that decisive period. This history has become ever more meticulous and more locally based. Goodman concentrates his enquiry on three of the 58 counties (xian) wholly or partly included within the Taihang base: Liaoxian, Wuxiang and Licheng. The book's layout is very simple, perhaps too simple. The logical and chronological progression between the two parts is perfectly well founded: firstly, the “political order” dealing with preliminary tasks (maintaining security and political construction), and then “social reform”, a reform that prefigures the revolution itself. It is the layout within each of these two parts that seems too compartmentalised: a chapter on the Taihang base, indeed on the Jin-Ji-Lu-Yu frontier region as a whole, followed by three monographic chapters on each of the three xian, which brings out the variables (the characteristics and the sometimes divergent experience of the three xian) more clearly than it does the overall process or the common themes. Let us examine some of these themes.

The first, already mentioned in relation to the book's two-part structure, is the priority of establishing military and political control over a given region. Without such control, the communists could not even begin to mobilise the peasants. While they did try patiently to consolidate control, they were often reduced to defending it, and not always successfully. We have long been tempted (since we know the outcome) to consider the final victory of the communists as inevitable, and thus we are likely to miscalculate the cost and the fortuitousness of their enterprise.

Broadly speaking, it was the Japanese army that dictated the division of this eight-year story into four periods.

1) The Japanese army was little in evidence in these mountains up until the end of 1938, so it did not prevent the establishment and rapid expansion of a power that was still not yet officially communist: the League of Sacrifice for National Salvation (abridged as Ximenghui) presented itself as the expression or the vanguard of the resistance fighters' united front, as promoted by Yan Xishan, the master of Shanxi. For all that, at the local level, the League was attacked by the political establishment of the various xian who accused it of hiding among its leaders many who were secret communists, and of playing into the hands of the CCP. There was no “political vacuum” here at the start of the war; the invasion did not—as is often claimed—put the existing authorities to flight; and the authorities did not stand idly by while a competing power was established.

2) In 1939, the Japanese came back and friction between communists and Yan Xishan increased to the point of setting off a real civil war (from December 1939 until March 1940). Since the united front did not survive, the CCP established direct control over the base, taking over most of the committees and the members of the League of Sacrifice.

3) The three subsequent years (up until mid-1943) were the most difficult period because of the intense Japanese activity and the terrible reprisals that were inflicted in response to the Hundred Regiments' offensive launched in August 1940 by Peng Dehuai.

4) The base was forced to contract during the third phase, but it was reinforced and expanded during the last two years of the war thanks to a shortage of manpower among the Japanese forces, hard-pressed as they were in other theatres of war.

To say that the communists always put military security and political control before social revolution does not imply, obviously, that they gave up on the latter. Done well, it could consolidate their power, whereas there was a risk that it might be destabilised if they went about the task badly. In the three xian studied by Goodman, their performance was at best patchy. The intellectuals, being the earliest members and the most active among the resistance fighters monopolised most of the leading positions in the new administration. In 1940, many of them were brutally thrown out, particularly in Licheng. After the break-up of the united front, the CCP set about purging its ranks of elements guilty of being associated with the front, or merely suspect by reason of their social origins: someone who had studied at Taishan or Peking could only be the son of a landowner or a rich peasant. Many of these intellectuals deserted the cause that had deserted them; they left the base never to return; and resentment led others to revolt. In October 1941, the communist administration of the Licheng xian was attacked by 500 members of the Sixth Trigram, a sect which, while it represented strictly local interests, those of privileged people threatened by the communists' social policy, also expressed the aspirations of young, well-off women, who sought something more than being shut in at the whim of their husbands, and the resentment of the most enlightened section of the local elite, the victims of the sectarianism... of that other sect, the Communist Party. Though it was mercilessly put down, the revolt of October 1941 was followed, nonetheless, by two more. The lesson was not lost, however, on the communists, who recruited women, gave them responsibilities in running the xian, and reinstated some intellectuals, even to leadership posts.

They also put the egalitarianism of their social policy right, and stopped favouring the recruitment of poor peasants and agricultural workers to the Party, the administration and peasant associations. At the time of the “consolidation”—a euphemism for the purge—of the spring of 1940, the CCP set a priority quota of “proletarian” elements (agricultural workers, farmers and poor peasants) to be recruited. From 1942 onwards, disappointed by the performances of the new recruits (many were illiterate, too poor to devote much time to non-agricultural tasks and difficult to control in the presence of landowners and rich peasants), the Party went back to giving responsibilities to middle peasants. More importantly, the CCP then decided to rebuild the economy around the middle peasants rather than the poor peasants. Among the “old” middle peasants and the “new” (a minority of rich peasants stripped of some of their land or forced to sell it because of discriminatory taxes, and a majority of poor peasants who had been promoted thanks to the communists' social policy), the middle peasants became, by the end of this period, the majority social category: they represented two-thirds of landholding families and owned almost two-thirds of the cultivable land in the Taihang base area.

This class, which by 1944-1945 had become the social basis of the new regime (this was not to be the case, of course, once the new regime was extended to the whole of China), was hardly what the communists would have chosen. They argued endlessly over it—and many cadres were more harshly critical of the middle peasants than of the poor peasants. The communists were driven to choose between two partners who, through the elimination of the landowners, had become rivals and sometimes enemies (social tensions among peasants became more acute in the “liberated” villages); they judged that, all things considered, it was more opportune to rely on the middle peasants and a better bet to place on their shoulders the development of production.

Poor or middle peasants aged forty or over could take orders, but never became activists. The generation gap is another theme developed by Goodman. The communists recruited among the young: age was a criterion for loyalty that was more decisive than social origin. As to the latter, we should note that peasants who had some property (middle peasants) allowed themselves to be converted more easily than did their poorer and more exploited brothers. And let us repeat that, when it came to enthusiasm, the prize unquestionably went to young intellectuals. These themes—and others too, such as the role of violence and force, how a political system was built that worked from the top down, and so on—confirm the conclusions of other books. Among these conclusions, agreed on by Goodman and other writers, we should mention again the pre-eminent role of intellectuals and schools (4), the dominant role of the CCP (in the process of becoming a Party-state), which eclipsed that of the peasant masses (5), the sacrifice of social revolution to political construction wherever the two aims came into conflict (6), and lastly, the arduous onward march of the communists, step by step, forced to pick their way among the rocks (7). It is reassuring that a solid study such as Goodman's should not weaken but rather should corroborate earlier conclusions. It is doubly precious, moreover, for the convincing way in which it characterises the Licheng revolt (cf. pp. 240-245) and for its perceptiveness, applied equally to the sociological analysis and to the firm, local basis of the study.

Translated from the French original by Philip Liddel