Wretched Rebels: Rural Disturbances on the Eve of the Chinese Revolution

Lucien Bianco started to study modern Chinese history out of a deep sympathy with the peasantry just as Mao Zedong was launching the Cultural Revolution against supposed "capitalist roaders within the Party.â[euro] After firsthand contact with Maoist China, however, Bianco realized that the Communist Revolution he had imagined was incompatible with the reality he found. Having highlighted the variety and complexity of rural unrest (intercommunity feuds, salt smuggling, sects, secret societies, unregistered land, resistance to reform and conscription, and so forth), Bianco then argues that the high incidence of anti-tax resistance cannot be explained with the tools of Marxist analysis. [...]what emerges from Bianco's narrative analysis is a rural world in which an impoverished, oppressed, pragmatic, suspicious, parochial, and localized peasantry often reacted in bursts of energy to expansion of a state apparatus unable to eliminate threats to rural subsistence.