ABSTRACT
When one thinks of monolithic states, few countries leap to mind faster than Maoist China. After 1949, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and its state machine reached out to control more and more aspects of China’s economy, polity, and society. At no time in the past 350 years has the state exercised as much power over the lives of its citizens. 1 Fortified by a loyal army of communist cadres, who, imbued with Marxist-Leninist ideology, attacked society through incessant mass campaigns, the state appeared to have penetrated all aspects of Chinese society and to have maximized its control over it. In the rural areas, the state forced villagers into collectives and imposed a bureaucratic hierarchy on the countryside to control the means of production—land, labor, and capital—as well as the production and distribution of almost all rural produce. While terms such as “totalitarianism,” “Oriental despotism,” or the “Asiatic mode of production” have flaws as analytic categories, they do impart the flavor of the statist world of the Chinese farmer under communist rule.
