ABSTRACT
Class and class struggle are central to the CCP and their role in the Party’s revolution in the countryside. The Agrarian Revolution (1927–1937) and the Land Reform (1946–1952) are two defining moments that represent contrasting paradigms in the CCP’s land policy and use of class struggle. Unlike the extant scholarship, the chapter explores the subject from the viewpoint of discourse theory instead of common objectivist and representationalist perspectives. It proceeds from the premise that classes and class struggles must be made and that classes can become ‘real groups, actually mobilized or organized, only at the cost of political work’. Both the Agrarian Revolution and the Land Reform centred on the countryside, the peasantry, and land. The paramountcy of these elements to the CCP is attributable to the nature of the Chinese Revolution, which Mao Zedong articulated as a protracted, rural-based, and armed struggle. Class and class struggle were involved not so much to the end of defeating the Nationalist Party and seizing state power but in order to effect a systemic transformation of the ‘feudal’ Old China into a socialist New China. The driving force of the Revolution was class struggle, while classes were the subjects and objects of the Revolution. Hence, the CCP mapped a historical materialist template of revolutionary social change onto Chinese society, labelled its identified friends and enemies as exploited and exploiting classes, and posited inevitable and irreconcilable antagonism between these classes. In so doing, the Party created classes and class struggle, constructed a new reality, and embedded a simple story of insurgence in a framework of historical materialism.
