Force and Contention in Contemporary China

Ralph A. Thaxton, Jr is Professor of Politics at Brandeis University and a Research Affiliate at the Harvard University John King Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies. He is the author of Catastrophe and Contention in Rural China (2008) and the winner of multiple international fellowships, including grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation, the Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation, and the United States Institute for Peace. Professor Thaxton has been a fellow at the Dartmouth College John Sloan Dickey Center for International Understanding and a distinguished Croxton Lecturer in the Amherst College Department of Political Science.

• Cast of characters: Da Fo and surrounding villages (1945–2012); Introduction; 1. The violent dawn of reform; 2. Contemporary tax resistance and the memory of the great leap's plunder; 3. Birth planning and popular resistance; 4. Rural schools and the 'best citizens of the state': the struggle for knowledge and empowerment in the aftermath of the great leap; 5. Official corruption and popular contention in the reform era; 6. The rise of the electricity tigers: monopoly, corruption, and memory; 7. The defeat of the democratic experiment and its consequences; 8. Contentious petitioners and the revival of Mao era repression; 9. Migration and contention in the construction sector; 10. The rise of the martial artists and the two faces of mafia; Conclusion. Big questions, small answers from Da Fo.

'Ralph Thaxton is one of the finest scholars of modern China working today. His forensic attention to the story of Da Fo village, which this excellent study continues, illustrates the universal in the particular. He works with themes involving memory, struggle, power, and resistance which, while intimately linked to an understanding of the development of rural China from the late 1950s onwards and their resonance right up to the present, deploy a rich and diverse menu of intellectual resources and tools to make sense of the unique and often traumatic pathway that individuals traveled over this time. An extraordinary achievement, which is in parts inspiring, stimulating, and, in the end, deeply moving. Whoever reads this and his other studies will view Chinese history and politics, and the myriads of lives of which it has been constituted, with fresh eyes. A masterful and masterly account that deserves the widest possible audience.' Kerry Brown, Kings College London and Director of the Lau China Institute