Revolution in the Highlands - (State & Society in East Asia) by Stephen C Averill & Joseph W Esherick & Elizabeth J Perry (Hardcover)

About the Book

This extensively researched and elegantly written study offers a fine-grained analysis of the origins of the Chinese communist revolution in the countryside. Building on decades of research in newly available sources and multiple trips to Jiangxi, Stephen Averill provides a de...

Book Synopsis

This extensively researched and elegantly written study offers a fine-grained analysis of the origins of the Chinese communist revolution in the countryside. Building on decades of research in newly available sources and multiple trips to Jiangxi, Stephen Averill provides a definitive local perspective on the rise of a revolution that reshaped China and the world. A rich work of social history, it goes beyond conventional Mao-centered narrative to explore the social cleavages that enabled the revolution to grow and dramatically influenced the structure of conflict within the party itself. Posthumously published with an introduction by Joseph W. Esherick and Elizabeth J. Perry, this book will stand as a memorial to the remarkable scholarship of a pioneer researcher on the social history of the Chinese revolution. Students and scholars interested in modern China and in the social origins of revolution will find it essential reading.

Review Quotes

an important work, one of the best available on the early history of the communist revolution in rural China....we may be grateful to Joseph Esherick and Elizabeth Perry for undertaking to edit the book for publication posthumously, as well as the splendid introduction they have provided to go with it.

this rich and insightful study has...set a new standard for analyzing the Chinese Communist Revolution.

Anyone interested in the formative years of the Chinese Communist Party will be richly rewarded by this lengthy, well-argued and nuanced study of the Jinggangshan base area in the late 1920's: this is a work that will be cited for years to come as well as a fitting legacy for a superb scholar.

Stephen Averill made himself master of the details of the Communist experience in Jinggangshan. This rich, dense study critically examines how the environmental and social context of the Jinggangshan region shaped the politics and strategy of Mao and other local leaders. . . . Highly recommended.

Stephen Averill's monograph on this subject has been long awaited, and the wait has been worthwhile. The depth and sharpness of the scholarship, and the highly complex social ecologies and turbulent histories it documents, make Revolution in the Highlands a study for all scholars who work in the fields of modern and contemporary Chinese studies.

This is one of the best books yet on Chinese Communism in its early rural period, written from a wealth of sources by a master of historical exposition. So familiar is the author with the political anthropology and physical features of the highlands in which Mao Zedong and his comrades hatched their revolution that he writes about it almost as an insider, restoring depth and complexity to events reduced to parody by party drillmasters and hagiographers. He analyzes the particular issues of the party's sojourn in the Jinggang Mountains in the late 1920s and early 1930s against the background of the broad sweep of the Chinese revolution, which he illuminates with insights into the moment of birth of its unique style.

This is the most sophisticated analysis yet written on the early rural revolution and base-area building, and the book stands as a major contribution to the understanding of Chinese Communism....Stephen Averill lifts the Communist revolution into a new, exciting dimension.

About the Author

Stephen C. Averill (1945-2004) was associate professor of history at Michigan State University.