Class Discourse And Local Ethics

This research takes the political mobilization of China’s land reform before and after the war of liberation for the research object, and tries to examine the impact of land reform in China’s political process from the perspective of class discourse interacting with local ethics.Overall, the land reform has played a decisive role in the victory of the Chinese revolution. Land reform movement split the landlords’land to the poor and the needy, and changes the economic structure of rural society, which helps to maximize mobilization of peasants to participate in the revolution. A key part of the land reform mobilization embodied in the process of deconstruction of the traditional structure of rural society, which caused by Chinese Communist Party using class discourse to infiltrate rural society. All this resulted in reestablishing social power structure and social life norms and help to lay the organizational foundation for conducting the Chinese revolution to extract resources.Previous studies take class discourse as CPC’s means of discourse to carry out land reform, class discourse on rural transformation process is divided into two parts: the distinction between class identity and class vocabulary merge into daily life. When land reform is placed in the context of60years of history of the People’s Republic of China, social life and power structure constructed by class discourse has dominated the political development along60years. However, after the Reform and Opening up, rural society quickly returned to the state prior to the class discourse dominance. Explanations of class discourse provided by previous studies come into a dilemma: why can’t ideology take root in rural areas?This article attempts to solve the plight of traditional research, with the introduction of new materials of revolutionary literature, it could easily find local ethics in literature text while those were hidden deeply in the archives. Class struggle in the countryside mixed with a wide range of elements:family kinship, good and evil moral values, revenge mentality and so on. Class discourse has to face local ethics during the infiltration, the entanglements between class discourse and local ethics is the main line of this study.This article consists of six parts. The first part is the origin of the research questions; the second part is literature review, and proposed research hypothesis:new rural society constructed the class discourse is based on the local ethics; the third part discusses how class discourse construct revolutionary literature and the process of peasants accepting the ideological education; fourth part discusses class discourse enter the rural area by using some local ethical elements; part five discusses local ethic become obstacle to class discourse; the final part gives summary that because ideology cannot forge solid combination with the local ethics, and thus it cannot take root in rural area.This study believes that, precisely because class discourse took advantage of local ethical ideals and good and evil moral system to mobilize the peasants, the fundamental structure of the local ethics would hinder class discourse in the rural area to build a solid social norms and power structure, which caused political campaigns in1950and1960’s also mixed with elements of the local ethics, and the ideology cannot firmly rooted in the rural areas...