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Chapter 5 examines the organizational orders of Hunan rural communities. Community response to the social environment of peasant rebellions and state breakdown in the mid-19th century led to the militarization of the communal organizational context through a widespread militia system. The roles, functions, and structures of Hunan community militia organizations are described. The chapter also examines how community militia organizations in the late 19th century transformed themselves into an instrument of class rule by the landed elites and assumed a wide range of powers in the economic and political affairs of communities.

Chapter 1 of the book presents the two peasant revolutions under study as a puzzle. The author first builds four criteria for measuring the intensity of peasant revolutions: the sources of revolutionary dynamics, the scope of peasant participation, the control of local-level revolutionary organizations, and revolutionary outcomes. I then briefly discuss the origins and backgrounds of the Hunan and Jiangxi peasant revolutions and systematically compare them using the four criteria to show that they present an interesting puzzle whose solution will extend our knowledge of agrarian revolutions.

Chapter 3 advances an alternative organizational approach to the study of agrarian revolutions. It first discusses the role of formal organizations in agrarian communities. It then presents a comparative history of peasant communities with powerful cooperative organizations in different parts of the world, including Europe, Russia and Japan. The next section examines how the different origins of community cooperative institutions--imposed cooperation by lords or external authority and voluntary cooperation by peasants of roughly equal resources--resulted in distinctively different communal organizational principles along four dimensions. The last section of the chapter hypothesizes about the relationship between communal organizational principles and peasants’ rebellious tendencies.

The great growth in the Chinese church and what this might mean for a future China has been the source of much recent media debate as the world has begun to catch up with the development of Chinese Christianities over the past three decades. Chapter 8 assesses how state regulation has attempted to channel and control that growth and analyzes the three broad categories of writing that have emerged out of that attempt, in the form of official church, unofficial church, and academic writings. While “theology” proper designates the output of the state seminaries in an official Chinese construct of categories, the chapter also addresses the burgeoning theological writings in academia and outside the state church.

Chapter 4 examines the organizational orders of Jiangxi rural communities. Community response to the environmental imperatives of a “frontier society” in a resource-poor region resulted in a distinctive, corporate lineage-centered communal organizational context. The institutions, functions, and internal structures of Jiangxi lineage organizations are analyzed. Drawing on research by anthropologists and social historians, I discuss how strong corporate lineage institutions critically defined and mediated inter-class relationships.

Chapter 6 draws on the findings of the previous two chapters to explain the different peasant revolutionary patterns in Hunan and Jiangxi and how these patterns were shaped by communal social structures. The rural organizational orders in Hunan and Jiangxi enjoyed different legitimacy among peasants. Differences in ideology, source of elites and decision-making rules, control mechanisms, and interest redistribution resulted in different perceptions of the justice and fairness of communal social structures. I argue that agrarian revolution can be caused by peasants’ attempts to restructure unjust and unfair communal organizational orders and establish new rules for community cooperation. This is what happened in Hunan. In communities with legitimate organizational orders, as in Jiangxi, it is difficult for agrarian revolutions to emerge, even with strong mobilization from outside revolutionary organizations.

In Chapter 7 the author elaborates on an organizational theory of agrarian revolution and draws some broader theoretical implications for the study of peasant revolutions. These implications are fully consistent with the findings of recent comparative studies on revolutions. In general, these studies emphasize the role of non-material factors in the making of revolutions. In particular, they suggest that declining legitimacy of the present political order is crucial in determining peasants’ tendencies toward revolution. Moreover, they tend to emphasize the constraining roles of preexisting social structures of peasant communities and how they affect the success or failure of outside revolutionary organizations. The chapter also reassesses the established interpretations of the Chinese revolution, which tend to emphasize the central importance of the CCP mobilization of the peasant population. These interpretations overlook the importance of preexisting social structures of peasant communities and how they facilitated or impeded the CCP mobilization efforts. The chapter argues that studies of the Chinese revolution must pay due attention to the role of preexisting rural social structures in order to explain the varying outcomes of the CCP revolutionary strategies.

Chapter 2 reviews existing theories of peasant revolutions, making use of historical and empirical materials from the two revolutions to demonstrate their limitations in regard to explaining the puzzle. These include the Marxist class exploitation thesis, moral economy theory, rational choice theory, and various kinds of structural theories. The general theoretical strengths and weaknesses of each approach are discussed.

This chapter introduces the Prussian governments of the post-revolutionary period, situating them within a divided political landscape. The Brandenburg–Manteuffel and Manteuffel Ministries of State promoted ambitious reforms to bring stability after years of revolutionary upheaval in Prussia. These ranged from restructurings of criminal justice to the adoption of press management. Similar initiatives could also be seen in other German states in the 1850s and 1860s. Indeed, across Europe, this was a period of innovative state action. The chapter draws our attention to what reform in Prussia can tell us about government and state-building in the post-revolutionary period. It also places the post-revolutionary period within a longer history of transition away from lingering feudal structures, thereby encouraging us to turn back and to turn forward in our analysis of Prussian restructurings.

Chapter 5 considers how, in the 20th century, Kong Temple became subject to a modern political discourse. Where it was once oriented toward the past, the temple was now situated within the political and ‘scientific’ space of the nation. Yet the temple continued to create difficulties for those who wished to preserve it, and opportunities for those who desired to destroy the ‘old order’.

The year 1976 was monumental for China with the loss of important state leaders, and a tragic earthquake. Amidst all of the government’s active response to a panda starvation scare demonstrates the importance of this animal to China. A repeat starvation scare in the mid-1980s creates an opportunity to trace the transformation of China from Mao Zedong era to the Deng Xiaoping era by juxtaposing the two panda-starvation scares. The responses to these two scares demonstrate a shift in the perception of nature from one of state ownership to one of popular ownership and illustrate the dramatic increase in international participation in the study of the panda and the efforts to preserve this national treasure.