Social and Political Change in Revolutionary China
The Taihang Base Area in the War of Resistance to Japan, 19371945
By (author) David S. G. Goodman
Not available to order
Publication date:
06 September 2000Length of book:
384 pagesPublisher
Rowman & Littlefield PublishersISBN-13: 9781461643388
This history provides the first book-length study and the first county-level analysis of social and political change in the Taihang Base Area during the key years of the War of Resistance to Japan, which was instrumental in the establishment of the PeopleOs Republic of China. David Goodman explores revolution as process, arguing that the Chinese Communist Party was successful because of its management of revolutionary incrementalism. In particular, he examines the roles and interactions of a variety of groups, highlighting the activities of urban intellectuals, teachers, and peasant small-holders as agents of change. Based on new sources of information_including materials from the Taihang Base Area recently republished by the CCP, documentation and reports from the Taiyuan Archive that have not been made publicly available, and interviews with veterans of the Taihang Base Area_this meticulously researched work deepens our understanding of the social and political origins of the Chinese revolution by considering how both the rural population and the CCP adapted and changed within that process.
Goodman's repeated visits to the region since 1987 have permitted interviews of veteran revolutionaries to supplement the documentary record. The result is a remarkably rich account of the revolutionary process in a key North China base. . . . The sources are rich, and the analysis persuasive. It continues the project of understanding how the revolution really worked at the local level, and, like much recent work, it helps us understand both how the Communists succeeded in establishing local power and how that process could create a regime that gradually became alienated from its social base.