During and after the Cultural Revolution, radical leaders in the
Chinese Communist Party tried to mobilize rural society for
socioeconomic and political changes and move rural China to even
higher stages of collectivism. David Zweig argues that because
advocates of agrarian radicalism formed a minority group within
China's central leadership, they acted in opposition to the
dominant moderate forces and resorted to alternative strategies to
mobilize support for their unofficial policies. The limited
institutionalization of the system allowed the radicals to promote
their principles through "policy winds," speeches generated by
newspaper articles, networks of political allies, and organized
visits; they also linked their policies to ongoing political and
economic campaigns. In spite of this radical ideology and frequent
upheavals in the countryside, Zweig finds that Chinese peasants had
no ideological affinity for Mao's theory of the continuing
revolution and reacted to each policy change on the basis of how it
affected their personal, family, or collective interests. Despite
intense propaganda, cadres adjusted the impact of these radical
policies so that the peasants' conservative mindset,
entrepreneurial spirit, and desire to improve their own lot
remained intact.
Zweig examines the local realities of the radicals' program by
describing the results of specific policies; he discriminates among
the responses of officials at different bureaucratic levels,
peasants of varying income levels and family structures, and
villages with specific geographic and socioeconomic
characteristics. He draws on his own field research in Chinese
villages and interviews with Chinese college students and their
friends who had lived in the countryside and emigres in Hong Kong
who had lived and worked in rural China.
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