ABSTRACT
Under a new multi-class united front approach, Chinese Communist Party (CCP) activists coped more successfully with existing rural social structures by implementing reformist agrarian policies to achieve revolutionary ends. However, while a more comprehensive record of the history of the Communist revolution in wartime North China is now in the making, far less is known about the earlier attempts at radical peasant mobilisation there in the 1920s. The process of 'state' penetration of rural society accelerated dramatically after the 1911 Revolution, and more destructively with the advent of the warlord era. The various forms of social conflict were, however, still very much part of the traditional order, and it is impossible to distinguish within the above categories any form of collective violence that was amenable to a modern revolutionary movement. It is against this background of escalating predatory and protective violence that the embryonic Chinese Communist revolutionary movement made its first attempts at peasant mobilisation in North China.
