Anyuan Mining China's Revolutionary Tradition [Hardcover]

How do we explain the surprising trajectory of the Chinese Communist revolution? Why has it taken such a different route from its Russian prototype? An answer, Elizabeth Perry suggests, lies in the Chinese Communists creative development and deployment of cultural resources  during their revolutionary rise to power and afterwards. Skillful cultural positioning and cultural patronage, on the part of Mao Zedong, his comrades and successors, helped to construct a polity in which a once alien Communist system came to be accepted as familiarly Chinese. Perry traces this process through a case study of the Anyuan coal mine, a place where Mao and other early leaders of the Chinese Communist Party mobilized an influential labor movement at the beginning of their revolution, and whose history later became a touchstone of political correctness in the Peoples Republic of China. Once known as Chinas Little Moscow, Anyuan came over time to symbolize a distinctively Chinese revolutionary tradition. Yet the meanings of that tradition remain highly contested, as contemporary Chinese debate their revolutionary past in search of a new political future.

Elizabeth Perryis Henry Rosovsky Professor of Government at Harvard University and Director of the Harvard-Yenching Institute. She is the author of many books, most recently:Mao's Invisible Hand: The Political Foundations of Adaptive Governance in ChinaandPatrolling the Revolution: Worker Militias, Citizenship and the Modern Chinese State.

This book is classic Perry -- elegantly and clearly written, based on rich and previously unexplored source material, full of human detail on political actors at the local level, presenting a gripping narrative and a clear analytical thrust. Perrys account of Anyuan is fresh and original, making a convincing case for the areas enduring contribution to the revolution. - Joseph W. Esherick, UC San Diego, author ofAncestral Leaves