The original French edition of this book, published in 1967, was widely acclaimed as the best introduction to Chinese Communism ever published. A fresh, bold interpretative survey, it focuses on the dynamic social forces underlying the Chinese Communists' rise in three short decades from obscurity to power. The author seeks above all to relate the events of this tumultuous period to certain tentative generalizations about the nature and course of the revolution. He is concerned less with the May Fourth Movement as such, for example, than with the revolution's intellectual origins, less with...

Exploring one of the most dynamic and contested regions of the world, this series includes works on political, economic, cultural, and social changes in modern and contemporary Asia and the Pacific.

The leading specialist on China's twentieth century peasant resistance reexamines, in bold and original ways, the question: Was the Chinese peasantry a revolutionary force? Where most scholarly attention has focused on Communist-led peasant movements, Bianco's story is one of peasant thought and action largely unmediated by modern political parties. This volume pays particular attention to the...

This book focuses on 'spontaneous' rural unrest, uninfluenced by evolutionary intellectuals. Yet it raises issues inspired by the perennial concerns of revolutionary leaders, such as peasant 'class consciousness' and China's modernisation.

This original comparative study of Mao's China and Stalin's Soviet Union highlights the similarities between the two: the all-powerful bureaucracy; the over-exploitation of the peasantry; control over writers and artists; repression and labour camps.