REBELS AND REVOLUTIONARIES IN NORTH CHINA 1845-1945
This essay summarizes and critiques Elizabeth Perry's social history of peasant rebellions in the north east Huai-pei region of China with particular reference to the Nien Rebellion of 1851-1863, the Red Spears movement 1911-1948 and Communist infiltration and mass mobilization of the peasant masses between the mid-1920s and 1945. The basic thesis of the author is that the outbreak of collective violence in the region was the product of ecological factors, basically the cycle of flood, drought and famine to which it had been subject for centuries, and in reaction to which it was a survival strategy. The form of that revolt, primarily predatory behavior such as the banditry of the Nien period or the village protection of the Red Spears period, was affected by the social structure and the influence of outside forces. The Communists found it very difficult to achieve dominant influence in the region and such success as they achieved was largely due to their willingness to devise strategies which responded to the needs of the local population and their traditions. The weakness of the Perry study is it borrows from the history of the period those elements which supports her point of view and ignores others which might help explain what was needed to convert a peasant revolt into a revolution.
The region under study lies north south between the Yellow and Huai rivers, which have carried onto the soil of its flat alluvial plains silt or loess from the highlands which have made them fertile and capable of producing hardy drycrops such as winter wheat, sorghum and soybeans in good times, but which periodically are visited by catastrophic floods and drought which bring in their wake sand and water shortages and consequently disease and famine. This "exceptionally harsh habitat" and "highly precarious ecosystem" which was made even worse at different historical junctures by governmental...