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.After his death,however, the area quickly reverted to the lucrative cash crop.The incident,scarcely of national importance, demonstrates the capacity of rural societyto resist outside pressure.Yuan could send his troops in once the rebellionwas under way, but the government in Beijing could hardly prevent suchuprisings in the first place.Peasants could not yet mount the political stage,demanding to speak with their own voice.But let us examine precisely howthey could still express grievances.Peasants: Resistance, rebellion, and revolutionTo look ahead for a moment: peasants emerged as major political actors inthe 1930s and 1940s.It is they who made the Chinese revolution.They had always been prone to resistance, riot, and rebellion, but a self-consciouspeasant movement emerged only in the late 1920s.Then, peasants shapedthe revolution to the point of defining it: they determined its limits, itsferocity, its direction.As we will see, the peasantry was in turn shaped by but also shaped  the Chinese Communists.The fundamental questionsregarding the peasants in the twentieth century are: (1) What problems didSocial conditions in the countryside 105they face and what were the causes of these problems? (2) Why did theyrebel and how did they come to support the Communists? (3) How did theyperceive the state and what did they want it to do for them? Indeed, thesequestions are fundamental to our understanding of China.The first twoquestions have received the greatest scholarly interest, and we will examinethe second in some detail in later chapters, but more attention should bepaid to the third question.Historically, all the great agrarian civilizations had to deal with ruralunrest, but Chinese peasant revolts seem especially frequent.The state s needfor agricultural surplus placed it at odds with peasants and with local elites,and the fact that per capita surplus was low meant that at times of naturaldisaster and bad harvests the state s demands could threaten a community.The Qing gentry were nothing like the great aristocrats of the previousmillennium; they were relatively weak vis-à-vis the state.At the same timethey might identify with community rather than state when struggle brokeout.Peasant revolts therefore had both a class character when ordinaryfarmers attacked landlords, and a more explicitly political character whenrural elites joined peasant movements attacking the state, or at least its localrepresentatives.Although elites were tightly bound to the state  throughConfucian education, the exam system, and the state s promise to protectproperty rights  gentry status was not inheritable, and family wealth wasdivided each generation.In other words, local elites felt downward socialpressures.They might join with ordinary peasants to made demands of thestate or resist taxes, or they might join with the state to suppress local distur-bances.The state tried to preserve a balance between the peasantry, localelites, and the central government.Rural elites were necessary and naturalallies in the business of government, but also potential rivals for resources.Asmallholding peasant economy prevented the emergence of great houses thatmight challenge the court.But if this balance failed, the state could itselfbecome a target of popular wrath.DefinitionsLet us take  revolution in the sense of  social revolution or a fundamentalreshaping of class structure and social relations.Fundamental politicalchange  reshaping the basis of the polity  will be part of a social revolu-tion, as will rapid cultural change. Rebellion, on the other hand, refersprimarily to illegal, organized protest; at its outer limits rebellion seeks toreplace the existing government with a new one while demanding minormodifications of the class structure and political institutions.11 Revolution,at least as a self-conscious act, is entirely modern.There are no historicalexamples of peasants acting on their own to make a revolution.From thepoint of view of the  state  the institutions of governance  rebellion is oflittle consequence.The structures of power and class will be restored.Fromthe point of view of the  government (the court and its officials) rebellion106 The road to revolution, 1895 1919is as serious a matter as revolution, and of course rebels are treated astraitors.From the point of view of peasants, they emerge as political actorsas much in rebellion as in revolution.It should be noted that I categorize the  peasantry quite loosely, to referto non-elite rural residents.Whereas peasants are sometimes defined morestrictly as actual tillers or members of farming households, and sometimeseven exclude non-landowning tenant farmers and laborers, my looser defini-tion has the advantage of associating people who shared a culture, spoke thesame dialects, were prey to the same economic shifts, and whose familiesmight intermarry.12 Not only might the purely  peasant daughter bemarried to a peddler but the peasant son might be apprenticed to a barberor apothecary who in turn might buy land for his son to till.Even theprofessional bandit often kept village ties.But the question remains, how do peasants decide whether to acquiesce intheir fates or to revolt? The decision is not made solely on the basis of hardtimes and exploitation.Indeed, one school of scholarship rejects suchconsiderations explicitly [ Pobierz caÅ‚ość w formacie PDF ]