The peasant in the Chinese national question: 1900--1949

This dissertation intends to be a systematic and comparative study on the intellectual foundations of the various Chinese peasant movements that took place during the first half of the twentieth century. The study is based on two inter-related theses: The first thesis argues that the Chinese peasant movements in the first half of the twentieth century were national movements in nature in the sense that the ultimate purpose of the intellectual leaders of the peasant movements was to save the Chinese nation rather than to promote the interests of the peasantry. The measures adopted by some intellectual groups to satisfy the demands of the peasantry were methods or secondary purpose rather than primary purpose. The nation was always put ahead of the peasantry. Different groups of intellectuals turned to the peasantry because they all realized that in order to save the Chinese nation, the peasantry had to be used and transformed. The second thesis proposes that there were different kinds of national movement in China during the first half of the twentieth century, because the intellectual leaders of the national movements had different views and visions of the present and the future of the Chinese nation. Accordingly, there were also different kinds of peasant movement in China during the same period. These two theses are taken for granted because the arguments supporting them put forward in previous studies are quite convincing. The focus of this study is on the third thesis, which suggests that Chinese intellectuals' perceptions of the Chinese peasantry were deeply influenced by their perceptions of the Chinese nation; and Chinese intellectuals' policies toward rural China and the Chinese peasantry were largely determined by their grand plans for the Chinese nation. Therefore, the different perceptions of the Chinese peasantry held by the various groups of Chinese intellectuals can be largely attributed to their different perceptions of the Chinese nation, and the difference in the policies adopted by the various groups of intellectuals are linked to the difference in their grand plans for the Chinese nation. This third thesis the natural development of the first two theses.