COMPTES RENDUS - AFEC

Comptes rendus
addition historians of China will find this an indispensable guide to both
issues and literature on that country's peasantry.
The greatest strength of Bianco's research is his relentless questioning
of arguments about the Chinese peasantry that seem to him, and subsequently
to others, to fly in the face of peasant expérience elsewhere in
the world. With superb control of both primary and secondary sources, in a
scholarly and critical way Bianco has always been prepared to challenge
received wisdom. Nowhere is this clearer than in Chapter 11 ("Peasant
responses to Chinese Communist Party Mobilization Policies, 1937-1945")
of this collection where Bianco takes issue with the more starry eyed of
académie commentary which has long argued that during the War of Résistance
to Japan the Chinese Communist Party (hereafter CCP) not only
successfully mobilized peasant support behind a moderate séries of nationalist
policies but also used that mobilization as the foundation for its
subséquent conquest of the state in 1949. As Bianco argues hère and elsewhere,
the War of Résistance to Japan was in many ways a peasant révolution
in the absence of the peasants. Moreover, there is little évidence of
peasant support for the political changes being wrought by the CCP, or at
least without doing considérable damage to the concept of 'peasant support'.
From the start Bianco's concern has been to examine peasant
movements and peasant activism, especially those that occurred without
the involvement of the CCP. During the second half of the twentieth century,
this was of course no easy task for any académie not least because of
the attitude of the Chinese state to the topic of peasant révolution, and also
at least partly in resuit because of the attitudes of other non-Communist
governments to that of the People's Republic of China. Though the peasantry
became glorified as a driving force of the Chinese révolution by the
CCP, Bianco argues that the peasantry is predisposed to be reactive and
localist, rather than having the capacity to universalise their political actions,
let alone being in any sensé drivers of a modernising project. Bianco's
Chinese peasants are more likely to be inherently conservative and
reactionary, as were their European pre-modern counterparts.
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