Lucien Bianco, Jacqueries et révolution dans la Chine du XXe siècle
2006; Volume: 2006; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês
10.4000/chinaperspectives.612
ISSN2070-3449
Autores Tópico(s)Diverse Historical and Scientific Studies
ResumoPatiently, passionately, Lucien Bianco has successfully concluded a mission that looked impossible : to explore the immensity of the Chinese peasantry and to describe the behaviour, over the half-century preceding the conquest of power by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), of those 400 million people who cultivated in the traditional way 100 million hectares and eked out a miserable existence from it.From his very first article ("Les paysans et la révolution : Chine 1919-1969"1 , followed by "Sociétés secrètes et autodéfense paysanne (1921-1933)" 2 , and by "Peasant movements" 3 ), Bianco threw doubt on a number of certainties relating to what was then considered the greatest peasant revolution in world history.His provocative hypotheses served to inspire dozens of innovative monographs, particularly in the United States.He succeeded eventually in winning access in the People's Republic to a wealth of local archive material and monographs (xianzhi and wenshi ziliao) made available only in the 1980s and 1990s.This was the basis for a book, published in 2001, the title of which reflected its originality :Peasant Without the Party : Grass-Roots Movements in Twentieth-Century China 4 .Its original analyses are partly taken up again in Bianco's new book.And he goes on to offer a much more orderly and systematic presentation of the results of his enquiries, thus crowning nearly four decades of research.This work of maturity is an overview, recalling in some respects the ambitions of former doctoral theses-but free of the stylistic ponderousness one associates with this kind of production.
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