Twentieth-Century China: New Approaches (Routledge Studies in Social and Political Thought) by Jeffrey N. Wasserstrom

Author:Jeffrey N. Wasserstrom
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: Humanities
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Published: 2007-03-13T16:00:00+00:00

Goldstein have rightly put it, the revolution was "not the predetermined working out of structural factors or the inevitable Big Boom emanating from the mixture of revolutionary preconditions and revolutionary consciousness" (Hartford and Goldstein 1989:33).

While it is clear that there is not one formula for analyzing the course of the revolutions in China, the case of Xiaoshan County suggests key sources of revolutionary change: context, culture, human agency, and contingency. Only the latter cannot be factored with certainty into other revolutionary processes. The random event of Shen's assassination and the unpredictability of the Japanese invasion and its particular degree of violence in this county, for example, would not be replicated elsewhere. The remaining sources, however, are central in analyzing the contours of the revolutionary process.

This study suggests that the significant contexts for penetrating the patterns of long-term political and social change were natural units – microregions (e.g., the Three River system and the Yongxing and northern Puyang river basins) and their components, here called arenas. Microregions shared a sufficient commonality of natural ecological conditions to give rise to similar public agendas (e.g., water-control interests or economic orientation) and to some similar social, economic, and cultural structures (e.g., agricultural strategies, rent systems, lineage structures). A microregion's commonalities helped shape the scope and nature of political and social action as in Shen's Southern Sands-based rent-resistance movement in 1921 and in the anti-Japanese guerrilla activity of South Township and the areas to the south and west in the 1930s and 1940s.

Microregions were internally differentiated into ecological arenas that were sometimes overlapping, perhaps even multioriented. Though the integrity of the Three River microregion was naturally maintained in its defining dimension of water control, in urban and some aspects of economic orientation, for example, a western arena faced Hangzhou, while an eastern arena faced Shaoxing. Such dual orientation could bring conflicting allegiances in political and economic goals and policies that might affect the common agenda of water control. Historical, cultural, and some natural factors further divided the western arena into Within the Dike and the Southern Sands. These arenas helped shape the social-political structures and processes that contributed to the nature of local revolutionary action. The revolutionary self-government effort in the quasi-frontier Southern Sands, for example, could not have been effectively replicated in Within the Dike or, for that matter, in South Township.

The dynamism of the relationships among the three natural arenas which made up Xiaoshan County points to the interpretative dangers of relying on the county (or indeed any political unit) as the analytical unit of change. Analysis of political and social developments and specifically of the differential revolutionary process requires primary attention to the natural

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