Two Revolutions: Village Reconstruction and the Cooperative Movement in Northern Shaanxi, 1937-1945.(Review)

Two Revolutions: Village Reconstruction and the Cooperative Movement in Northern Shaanxi, 1937-1945, by Pauline B. Keating. Stanford, California, Stanford University Press, 1997. xvi, 340 pp. $49.50 U.S.

The decline of Marxist-Leninist-Mao Zedong thought as an operative ideology in the People's Republic of China has inspired much reflection on the meaning and legitimacy of the Chinese revolution of 1949. For a long time, Western scholarship was shaped by two paradigmatic works. Chalmers Johnson's 1962 book Peasant Nationalism and Communist Power argued that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) came to power by harnessing popular anti-Japanese nationalism. In The Yenan Way in Revolutionary China (1971), written in part as a response to Johnson, Mark Selden countered that it was the CCP's socio-economic reforms, a kind of peasant populism, that garnered them mass support. …