Brian DeMare. Land Wars: The Story of China’s Agrarian Revolution.

Abstract

Brian DeMare’s Land Wars: The Story of China’s Agrarian Revolution is a beautifully written account of land reform in China, one of the most brutal and transformative historical processes in modern Chinese history. DeMare weaves literary descriptions of life in villages during the late 1940s together with archival sources to uncover the tortuous process by which land was redistributed. In doing so, he highlights how the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) used land reform to inculcate a revolutionary consciousness into peasants, who were its main objects, intellectuals heading up the work teams that managed it, and urban citizens who were subject to propaganda about how land reform would allow the Chinese to fanshen—to throw off the shackles of the past and construct a new socialist future (133). The book begins with a short account of the stages of land reform in China throughout the mid-twentieth century. This sets the scene for those readers not already familiar with the policy, which is useful, because the rest of the book does not take a chronological approach. There is a nod to Sun Yatsen’s idea of Land to the Tiller, an indication of how land reform was not entirely of the CCP’s own making, and here DeMare could perhaps have highlighted how land reform was a global movement, not one confined to Communist countries. In China, there was no land reform without Mao Zedong, who created the ideological justification for the policy and made decisions about its implementation. It was Mao, who in 1927 advocated violent land reform as the basis of rural revolution, and it was Mao, who divided rural society into rich landlords pitted against poor peasants, even if the reality was much more complicated.