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As China has increasingly reintegrated itself into the capitalist world since the 1990s, fewer and fewer people remember the Communist revolution that galvanized a generation of young Chinese idealists. In this posthumously published monograph, the late Stephen C. Averill reminds us that the revolution was both agrarian and anticapitalist in nature. It marked a process lasting at least fifty years and left a legacy that still affects Chinese thinking and politics today. Averill's scholarship was perhaps rooted in his experiences during the Vietnam War, which led him to seek an understanding of the peasant revolution in East Asia in the last century. He focused his research on its initial phase in the remote Jinggangshan massif, the region straddling two south China provinces where Mao Zedong and other party leaders built the first viable Communist base area with a ragtag force. This exemplary experience eventually grew into a full-fledged revolution that engulfed the whole of China and once threatened to spread to peasant societies elsewhere throughout the world.
This study emphasizes how Mao Zedong transformed himself from an urban-based radical into a leading practitioner and theoretician of peasant revolution, how he interacted with parochial forms...