COMPTES RENDUS - AFEC

Comptes rendus
nasty (1906-1911); to be found in East China (Jiangsu and Zhejiang) and
Southeast China (Jiangxi, Fujian, Guangdong); to involve 1 000 to 5 000
people; and to be concemed more with tax résistance or other forms of
government résistance than anything else. Secret society violence was
limited with about one quarter of ail rural disturbances based on intercommunal
violence.
However, a far more important resuit of Chapter 4's overview is its
messages about research. It not only tackles the issues surroundings the
availability of data, but points out with considérable flair (and without
belabouring the argument explicitly) that statistics are only one tool at the
historian's disposai: in the end a judgement is also required, and that
judgment also requires a wider reading, both from understandings of
China's rural development and peasant life elsewhere. The immediately
following chapters examine différent types of peasant violence identified
in the overview. Thèse include riots against poppy-tax collection and
opium eradication campaigns, and land rents and taxes, as well as food
riots.
An important aspect of Bianco's research is the identification of inter-communal
violence (xiedou) as a spécifie analytical category of peasant
activism, where families, clans, villages, or even sometimes counties
were pitted against each other. As opposed to conflicts between rich and
poor, or between government and governed, thèse were not in any sensé
class-based insurrections. Chapters 9 and 10 look respectively at intercommunal
violence in the pre and post-1949 periods. In Chapter 9 Bianco
argues that inter-communal violence not only continues patterns of conflict
found in the previous centuries, with a higher incidence in Southeast
China than elsewhere, and clashes largely over resources (land, water,
transport) common, but also that there is in many respects the évolution of
cultures of inter-communal violence. Revenge too, as in the past, might
then be a potent cause of inter-communal violence. Chapter 10 extends the
analysis of inter-communal violence into the era of the PRC. While acknowledging
the particular nature of state intervention in social management
under the PRC and the extent to which it necessarily changed the
incidence and processes of inter-communal violence, Bianco also high-
548