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.They might join with ordinary peasants to made demands of the state or resist taxes, or they might join with the state to suppress local disturbances.The state tried to preserve a balance between the peasantry, local elites, and the central government.Rural elites were necessary and natural allies in the business of government, but also potential rivals for resources.A smallholding peasant economy prevented the emergence of great houses that might challenge the court.But if this balance failed, the state could itself become a target of popular wrath.DefinitionsLet us take “revolution” in the sense of “social revolution” or a fundamental reshaping of class structure and social relations.Fundamental political change – reshaping the basis of the polity – will be part of a social revolution, as will rapid cultural change.“Rebellion,” on the other hand, refers primarily to illegal, organized protest; at its outer limits rebellion seeks to replace the existing government with a new one while demanding minor modifications of the class structure and political institutions.11 Revolution, at least as a self-conscious act, is entirely modern.There are no historical examples of peasants acting on their own to make a revolution.From the point of view of the “state” – the institutions of governance – rebellion is of little consequence.The structures of power and class will be restored.From the point of view of the “government” (the court and its officials) rebellion106The road to revolution, 1895–1919is as serious a matter as revolution, and of course rebels are treated as traitors.From the point of view of peasants, they emerge as political actors as much in rebellion as in revolution.It should be noted that I categorize the “peasantry” quite loosely, to refer to non-elite rural residents.Whereas peasants are sometimes defined more strictly as actual tillers or members of farming households, and sometimes even exclude non-landowning tenant farmers and laborers, my looser definition has the advantage of associating people who shared a culture, spoke the same dialects, were prey to the same economic shifts, and whose families might intermarry.12 Not only might the purely “peasant” daughter be married to a peddler but the peasant son might be apprenticed to a barber or apothecary who in turn might buy land for his son to till.Even the professional bandit often kept village ties.But the question remains, how do peasants decide whether to acquiesce in their fates or to revolt? The decision is not made solely on the basis of hard times and exploitation.Indeed, one school of scholarship rejects such considerations explicitly.Theda Skocpol posits that peasants are always exploited (by definition, as it were) and emphasizes the relation between class and institutional arrangements, especially the state, as the key factor in explaining peasant uprisings.13 Yet do peasants perceive themselves as being equally exploited at all times? Peasant perceptions of injustice will change according to circumstances.It may be very difficult for scholars to discover the subjective moral universe of a peasantry, but to dismiss it as irrelevant is no solution.14“Exploitation” here refers not simply to expropriation of surpluses, but, as Barrington Moore has put it, coercive demands without reciprocity.15Legitimate authority requires reciprocity, administrative competence, and a shared sense of the goals of the community.It is the notion of reciprocity, I believe, that is particularly useful in thinking about the issue of exploitation in China.Many social scientists have abjured the notion of exploitation because it is highly subjective and emotive.Yet it is precisely a subjective sense of exploitation and injustice that explains peasant anger in twentieth-century China.Not only did rural elites lose their traditional social functions; as well, the state’s role was key in so far as it failed to curb the landed interests (including usurers), it imposed very disruptive “special taxes,” and it allowed roads, canals, and dikes to deteriorate.Political disorder, though winding down during the Nationalist decade (1928–37), continued to disturb markets and other institutions of the commercialized economy, and the currency remained unstable.Industry, both native and foreign-owned, grew but not fast enough to absorb population increases [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]