Some Peasants’ Good Times under Mao: Privileged Lives in Mao-Era Rural Militias

Abstract

This article re-examines a part of peasants’ exclusively privileged experiences of joining militias during the Mao era. The supporting sources come from a variety of informal repositories over eight provinces, such as statistical tables and rosters of rural militias, documents of departments of armed forces, and materials for conferences and classes of militia members. Although these sources are geographically scattered, quantitatively scarce and systematically incomplete, they present significant parts of peasants’ lives involved in Mao Zedong’s mass campaign of mobilisation and militarisation. Based on them, this article explores the political honours, the economic benefits and the enforcement power one enjoyed by joining the rural militias, in addition to the tensions that existed even in the same village centred on pocketing militias’ privileges in the countryside. Exposing these inequalities produced just by owning membership of rural militias challenged the mainstream of existing scholarship depicting Chinese peasants’ lives under Mao as similarly tough and deprived. This exploration also pays attention to the Cold War context that justified and glorified peasants’ good times in the militias, highlighting the Cold War element that contributes to the Mao era nostalgia in today’s China.