In his 2002 warning on pandemic corruption, Chairman Hu Jintao focused mainly on local governments and local officials, as if only they, and not Central government politicians, were giving villagers cause to resist the party-state. The thrust of the Deng and post-Deng reform, however, was to restore CCP control at the central and local levels, and this entailed supporting local strongmen such as Da Fo party secretary Bao Zhilong. In this respect, reform actually involved a political restoration of party-centered power as opposed to the charismatic-based power of the Mao period, and Beijing relied on recycled Mao-era officials and local party leaders in hinterland villages where the legitimacy crisis stemming from the Great Leap's damage persisted. This process favored political hustlers who had been in leadership positions previously, and they often became the ground-level agents of Beijing politicians in charge of important sectors of the reform-era political economy.

Sure enough, Da Fo's farmers say that reform-era corruption was structured in part by big-name Chinese Communist Party (CCP) officials in charge of centralized state monopolies. They point out that the extension of state monopoly into the hands of party boss Bao Zhilong's local political network engendered a pattern of audacious rent-seeking at both the macro and micro levels, and their stories reveal that this pattern stoked memories of Great Leap–era domination and abuse. Indeed, in some important ways, corruption in the village was a direct result of the monopoly power of the CCP.

Popular experience with the Central government control of electricity stemmed all the way back to the 1950s when the Mao-led CCP – following Lenin, who took electricity as an icon of modernity – promised to provide rural China with electricity to promote development and alleviate poverty. While the Great Leap saw the construction of miniature hydroelectric power stations in parts of the rural interior, the center did not invest in these stations. The Maoist emphasis, instead, was on commune-supervised electricity-driven water conservancy projects and irrigation wells. The primary beneficiaries were official networks and a few farmers in communes and model villages such as Dingcun in Liangmen People's Commune.

Mao Zedong's Great Leap Forward was a threefold war on Chinese villagers: a war for their resources, their bodies, and their minds. To capture the minds of village people, the Communist Party attacked the values and personal identities of the rural schoolteachers who stood for pluralistic discourse and fought against the reach of the imperious central party-state. In Da Fo, local party leaders loyal to Mao attacked the very people who, in the Republican period, had championed the efforts of villagers to stand up against Kuomintang state corruption and repression.

THE IMPACT OF THE GREAT LEAP FORWARD ON DA FO'S TEACHERS

In the early 1950s, the Communist Party set out to improve rural education, and the county party leaders set up a Teacher's Training School in Dongle county. According to Zheng Bingzhang, a graduate who went on to teach in Zhaozhuang village, the school graduated only fifty teachers in the years 1951–1955, and most villages were without qualified teachers. The situation deteriorated after 1955, and the school system collapsed during the Great Leap Forward. The Communist Party victory spelled trouble for Da Fo's vibrant system of schooling. The trouble actually began as early as 1951, before the so-called honeymoon phase of party rule, when the imposition of Mao's tonggou tongxiao (unified state purchase and sale of grain) policy on the Dongle county countryside had a devastating impact on rural education in general and on Da Fo's private school in particular. Prior to 1949, Da Fo village's school had been supported by voluntary private grain contributions from its big landowners, artisans, and small farmers – particularly from members of the dominant Bao lineage. Its teachers had a good track record of sending graduates on to Shangcun high school and the Kuomintang-managed postsecondary colleges, including the Daming Seventh Normal College – the regional college of first choice for young aspirants to teaching careers and official positions in the Nationalist government in the early 1930s. Teacher salaries, often paid in kind, were critical to sustaining the competitive position of Da Fo's school, and they constituted the largest part of the school's operating cost.

This book is about the troubled relationship between the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and village dwellers in a rural border area of China. These villagers hold durable memories of the most traumatic episode of the Maoist past, known as the Great Leap Forward, a state-driven campaign to regiment and collectivize every aspect of human life in the years 1958–1961. Imposed by Communist Party activists loyal to Mao at the county, township, and village level, this campaign produced the most catastrophic famine in modern world history, killing at least 40–45 million rural dwellers in one way or another. The scale of death from this campaign is mind boggling. Almost twice as many people died in the Great Leap famine as in the Taiping Rebellion – the world's most devastating civil war. Actually, Mao and his political base wiped out three times more people during this episode of war communism than were exterminated by Stalin's and Hitler's cadres, armies, and death squads in Eastern Europe between 1933 and 1945.

In the throes of the great famine, many of China's rural people came to believe that the Mao-led Communist Party had deliberately starved them to death. Their instincts were right. As early as March 1959, Mao Zedong knew about the famine unfolding in the countryside, yet he and his party still relentlessly pushed for higher levels of grain procurement, thereby delivering millions on millions of villagers into the arms of death.

People in Tianxia village, Qin'an county, Gansu province, suffered this fate. Here commune party leaders and their brigade-level accomplices seized all of the harvest for the state, leaving villagers to starve on a grain ration of only two liang per day – a far cry from the officially promised ration of one pound per day. Qin Ruisheng, one of Tianxia's survivors, lost her father and four siblings to the sharp hunger of late 1958. At age fourteen, Qin managed to survive by scavenging wild grass and plant stems from the stark landscapes of various brigades (villages). In the course of her desperate travels, Qin found that brigade-level cadres routinely tossed dozens of starved bodies into nearby ditches.

Notwithstanding the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) subversion of the electoral process, the repression of petitioners, and the exploitation of migrant workers, reform-era Da Fo underwent a subtle but profound change in its politics. The Central government wanted to restore the party's hold on local society, but in the Da Fo area the overall balance of power shifted in favor of a seemingly new social force. The shift, however, was orchestrated by the bearers of an age-old rural culture, and they were influenced, and to some extent driven, by memories of Great Leap–era harm. Operating on an alternative social compact and within a new state–market political economy, the leaders of this counterforce occasionally challenged Da Fo's party leaders for control of village politics. In time, their transvillage networks also penetrated the local police forces ensuring CCP control of the countryside, and so there was cooperation as well as conflict with official power.

In the Great Leap Forward, the Maoists had banned martial arts training in Dongle county and its villages. Furthermore, most of the farmers who knew martial arts and taught it to villagers were so emaciated and fatigued that they had no time to practice this activity, let alone to teach it to younger villagers. As a result, few of Da Fo's young villagers learned the arts of self-defense. Its families were more and more at the mercy of village Communist Party bullies who relied on brutal methods to rule. In the two decades following the Great Leap, most Da Fo farmers and their teenage sons were still caught up in a low-grade famine and had to live with long-term poverty and physical diminishment. Under the collective, they received 100 jin of grain per capita less than they needed to meet the minimum annual requirement for grain consumption. Most of them lived on sweet potatoes and other inferior tubers to survive. The teenage children who helped them with planting and harvesting were often very thin and weak, and thus unable to fully engage in family agricultural tasks. Once Da Fo party boss Bao Zhilong regained power in the last years of the Cultural Revolution, moreover, farmers’ fears of having to deal with commando Bao and his brutish clients and cronies were renewed.

The second decade of the Deng-led reform brought up bittersweet memories of the Great Leap Forward, when Da Fo's famers were promised that the changeover to the commune would deliver a better life, only to be flattened by a dwindling food ration and exhaustion from overwork in the collective fields. The disbanding of the collective was more than welcomed by villagers, many of whom equated reform with permission to rescue themselves from the restrictive and demeaning labor regime of the Mao era. With reform, Da Fo's farmers were quicker to rise for work each morning, more eager to engage tilling and petty trade, and more hopeful that each day's increment of labor would distance them from the damage of the past.

This hope was still alive in the mid-1990s. But, as we have seen, fifteen years of reform had resulted in a renewed tax burden, another radical assault on procreation, and a rise in tuition payments – all piled onto, and entwined with, the fines, bribes, and extortions of Liangmen township leaders and public security forces. By 1995, Da Fo's farmers were working longer and harder to feed the rent collectors of the reform-era political system, and daily survival was again encumbered by a single-party state whose agents were undermining democratic institutional experiments and closing down avenues of supposedly legitimate remonstration. Fortunately, the existential dilemma of Da Fo's farmers was not as dire as in the Great Leap, for they now had the option of exit: they could flee with minimal penalty. Flight, therefore, became the order of the day. Increasingly, as the second decade of reform wore on, Da Fo's hard-pressed farmers joined in the greatest internal migration in human history, supposedly stimulated by the pull of reform policy.

PUSH FACTORS

By the early twenty-first century, approximately 120–130 million rural migrants had left the countryside to find work in emerging towns and cities benefiting from China's economic boom. Of the forty million migrants laboring in the construction industry, nearly 70 percent were of rural origin. Few of them held the residential permits required to stay in the cities without police harassment.

A FISSURED LEGITIMACY

The story of Da Fo village, and its sister villages in this interior North China border area, sheds light on an important paradox of contemporary Chinese politics: the Communist Party–led Central government apparently has overall legitimacy nationally and yet hidden fissures in its legitimacy in the deep countryside. The case of Da Fo introduces us to political contention within one of these fissures. It tells us that we cannot grasp the genesis, or essence, of authoritarian China's unresolved legitimacy crisis without carefully studying the way in which memories of Chinese Communist Party (CCP)-inflicted suffering in the Mao era persist in the lives of rural people, providing the psychological and emotional bullet points that inform and direct defiance, resistance, and contention.

Many Da Fo survivors of the Great Leap–era famine remember it as the most traumatic episode of one-party dictatorship, retaining smoldering resentments of its horror. Reform-era Central government policies, and their local implementation, delivered new injustices, stoking fears of a repeat of past loss. Da Fo's inhabitants drew on memories of regime misconduct in the Mao period to protect themselves from the renewal of party-structured aggrandizement and lawlessness in the present. These memories of the traumatic past constitute what James C. Scott calls “weapons of the weak,” and villagers relied on these weapons to bolster their quest for survival in the present. Da Fo's history calls us to reflect on how this process factors into a type of grass-roots contention that is suppressed but not fully controlled by the Central government, nor by its political base in the villages, towns, and markets of the unknown interior – many of which were decimated, if not devastated, in the Leap famine and shortchanged by the post-Mao center.

THE FALSE PEACE OF REFORM AND THE ROLE OF EPISODIC MEMORY IN RESISTANCE

Bringing in the missing variable of episodic memory and studying the case of Da Fo, we can begin to grasp how memory of the Great Leap and its famine influenced resistance in the post-Mao period. The Deng Xiaoping–conceived reform sailed Da Fo's villagers into the headwinds of the Great Leap past, raising villagers’ fears of once again being caught in a rapidly evolving political storm in which the sky would collapse and the land and life itself would be turned upside down. The fears fed into resistance, ongoing or otherwise.

At the turn of the twenty-first century, the central problem facing Da Fo villagers was political corruption. Hu Jintao, the chairman of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), visited Xibaipo village in Hebei province in December 2002, where he gave a passionate speech about the critical urgency of fighting corruption in China. According to one report, Hu subsequently stated in a special emergency meeting of the Politburo: “It is not a few local governments, but most of the local governments; it is not a few officials, but most of the officials who are corrupt and suppressing people with state power. Are they not forcing the people to rise up to overthrow the Communist Party?” In Origins of the Chinese Revolution, Lucien Bianco reminds us that corruption – not simply social misery and the destabilizing consequences of the Japanese invasion – proved fatal to the Nationalist government.

Some Da Fo farmers, including those who had supported Mao's pre-1949 insurgency, said the fate of the corrupt Communist Party would be the same as that of the Kuomintang. Worried about this possibility, and using corruption as a pretext to put his own clients in key positions, in 2013 Xi Jinping kicked off his presidency with a vow to pull out all stops in fighting official corruption. The ensuing offensive, reminiscent of Mao-era anticorruption campaigns, was orchestrated to present the supreme leader of the Communist Party as a man of the people and, according to Andrew Wedeman, to “build legitimacy.”

Building legitimacy through campaigns that did little to actually change the corrupt habits of Mao-era rule was difficult, however. Beijing's failure to institute such change is an important reason why the post-Mao period, including the reign of Deng Xiaoping, saw an explosion of popular resistance to corruption. In the Liangmen township–Da Fo village area, this resistance was charged by memories of Communist Party rule in Mao's great famine. It seems that there was nothing like the outbreak of Deng-era corruption, and resistance to it, at play locally in the initial phase of post-Stalinist USSR politics. Why the difference? For one thing, Nikita Khrushchev apparently ran a very tight ship. His party – and the KGB – relied on internal administration to regulate official corruption.

The CCP and Violence

The rule of the CCP is rooted in terror and violence. This is less special, unusual or evil than it might seem. All modern states are built as much on warfare, conflict and repression as on a social contract between citizens and rulers. The creation and use of conflict and the application and display of violence are normal instruments of rule, even in the most peaceful democracies. A state's monopoly of violence is never a certainty but has to be fought for and defended against external and internal competition, not once but constantly.

The CCP however has been highly unusual in the extent, frequency and scale of the application of violence and the ability to find or create ever new enemies to rally against: in the Party, in the nation or abroad. The CCP and its state were an almost perfect example of mid-twentieth-century totalitarianism, the instrument of the whims of an absolute, deified leader. Totalitarianism is different from ordinary dictatorship or authoritarianism. Totalitarian rule and its ideology enter all institutions of society and reach all individuals, dedicating them to constant mobilization for the relentless application of violence for war and terror on an industrial scale.

The CCP's defining feature is its absolute dedication to the transformation of society born from the early-twentieth-century Chinese obsession to ‘save the nation’. In despair over China's ‘national humiliation’ at the hands of Western powers and – even more jarring – Japan, students, scholars, activists, politicians and even military leaders explored virtually any idea, ideology or concept that might be the philosopher's stone of modernity, strength and power.

Marxist socialism was just one of these. Certain aspects, such as socialism's stance against nationalism and a revolutionary strategy firmly rooted in an analysis of industrialized Western societies, badly fitted an early-twentieth-century Chinese perspective on progress and modernity. Yet socialism's very root in Western progress and modernity also made it immediately appealing. It claimed scientific status and promised objective truth; condemned traditional rule, religion and established privilege; prescribed a radical overhaul of society and a fundamentally new social order; and legitimated the use of violence against anybody that stood in the way.

As a student of contemporary China, I have long noticed the reluctance among my fellow China specialists to wield a broad brush. I have also become increasingly convinced of the necessity to do so. General discussions about contemporary China are often woefully ignorant of the vast store of specialist knowledge. Specialists themselves focus on a particular slice of Chinese reality and, with few exceptions, are reluctant to enter debates even within China studies that take them beyond their core expertise. This book is an attempt to fill this gap. Writing a book for both lay and specialist audiences at once comes with an obvious risk: you may find that you reach none of them. I certainly hope that I have avoided this pitfall and that both general readers and China specialists will take away useful knowledge or insights from this book. If they don't, I apologize, but at least I tried.

This book would never have seen the light of day without the support of many among my colleagues, friends and family. I would in particular like to thank those who have read and commented on parts of the manuscript: Alka Shah, Bill Callahan, Eric Thun, André Gerrits, Barend ter Haar, David Parkin, three anonymous reviewers and my editor, Lucy Rhymer, at Cambridge University Press. It goes without saying that I alone bear final responsibility for any remaining errors in this book.

When the People's Republic embarked upon its reforms in the late 1970s, it did not simply ‘open up’ to take advantage of the opportunities that the world had to offer. China's opening up coincided with, and was part of, a fundamental restructuring of the capitalist world order that was taking place at the time and that continues until this day. These changes are often captured under the headings of the end of the Cold War, or the rise of neoliberalism and globalization, and have opened up spaces around the world that China can and sometimes must fill. It does so together with a growing list of other rising countries, such as Brazil, India, Indonesia, Turkey or, in the slightly longer run, Iran or South Africa. China's rise is thus a vital part of rather than the only source and cause of a fundamental restructuring of the global order. Although China has the very considerable advantages of size and being a first mover, there is nothing uniquely Chinese or historically inevitable about its rise. History has no memory and China isn't special. Despite its current growth, wealth and power, it is not China's destiny to ‘rule the world’, although it is very likely to become (and in fact already is) a very significant power.

To say that the world will be much more than a Chinese place does not mean that this book's China-centric view is inappropriate. Quite the contrary, looking at the world from Chinese perspectives will facilitate the realization that the emerging world order is fraught with uncertainty rather than the straightforward passing of the baton into Chinese hands. Even though the world is becoming more Chinese with every passing year, it is also becoming more Indian, Latin American, Islamic, and even more European and American. The future is very unlikely to be one of China superseding the West or more specifically the US. Neither is it likely that a separate Chinese world will develop in parallel with a Western world. Globalizing Chinese capital, people, goods and culture merge with those from other parts of the world. Globalization does not equal Americanization, Japanization, Sinification, Islamization or Westernization, terms that describe the struggle between separate and unequal worlds.