Dear Colleagues,
I am happy to announce the publication of my new book Land Wars: The Story of China’s Agrarian Revolution. The book is now available for purchase from Stanford University Press at https://www.sup.org/books/title/?id=30630.
Land Wars draws on new archival sources, but also on vivid narrative accounts of rural revolution from Ding Ling, Eileen Chang, and William Hinton. It will be of interest to anyone concerned with the connections between narrative and history.
From the back cover:
Mao Zedong’s land reform campaigns comprise a critical moment in modern Chinese history, and were crucial to the rise of the CCP. In Land Wars, Brian DeMare draws on new archival research to offer an updated and comprehensive history of this attempt to fundamentally transform the countryside. Across this vast terrain loyal Maoists dispersed, intending to categorize poor farmers into prescribed social classes, and instigate a revolution that would redistribute the land. To achieve socialist utopia, the Communists imposed and performed a harsh script of peasant liberation through fierce class struggle. While many accounts of the campaigns give false credence to this narrative, DeMare argues that the reality was much more complex and brutal than is commonly understood—while many villagers prospered, there were families torn apart and countless deaths. Uniquely weaving narrative and historical accounts, DeMare powerfully highlights the often devastating role of fiction in determining history. This corrective retelling ultimately sheds new light on the contemporary legacy of land reform, a legacy fraught with inequality and resentment, but also hope.
Brian DeMare <bdemare@tulane.edu>