From Rural Revolution to Urban Revolutionization: A case study of Luzhongnan

Abstract

Based on materials from local archives and the author's interviews in Shandong Province, this paper uses case studies in the Luzhongnan prefecture to trace how the rural revolutionaries rose to prominence and to discuss their cultural impact on Mao's urban revolution after 1949. The paper begins by examining the intellectual origin of the Chinese revolution in this region, and then moves to a discussion of the end of political urbanism in the anti-Japanese War and the Civil War. As a result of wartime mass mobilization, peasants became the most dynamic forces in the political arena. Peasant cadres were systematically recruited and trained to run local governments. Eventually, they surpassed the revolutionary intellectuals both in number and in importance. When the CCP came to power, the peasant cadres were assigned to take over urban China. These rural revolutionaries were committed to the mission of creating a 'new socialist man', and rural revolutionary culture became the cultural orthodoxy of the People's Republic of China. This paper explores the nature and characteristics of the political and cultural programs, referred to as 'cultural de-urbanization', launched by Mao Zedong and his rural revolutionary followers in order to remold the urban people's mentality by the rural revolutionary tradition and practice.