J014: Politics and State Building at the Grassroots: County Governance Practices in the 1950s

Organizer(s)

• 

  Wankun Li

  School of Humanities,
  University of Strathclyde, United Kingdom

Chair(s)

• 

  Wankun Li

  School of Humanities,
  University of Strathclyde, United Kingdom

Paper Presenter(s)

• 

  Shigu Liu

  Department of History
  Xiamen University, China (People's Republic)
• BD

  Brian DeMare

  History Department
  Tulane University, United States
• 

  Man Zhang

  Institute of Sinology,
  University of Freiburg, Germany
• JW

  Juan Wang

  Political Science Department
  McGill University, Canada

Discussant(s)

• SC

  Shuji Cao

  Shanghai Jiao Tong University, China

Session Abstract: Primarily relying on archives from one county in Jiangxi province, the collection of papers in this panel explores various political dynamics and the process of state building at the grassroots in the 1950s. Whereas scholars of Communist China have produced local case studies, this panel brings together a group of scholars across different disciplines who study archival documents from the same county, and thereby offering a unique and wholistic recount of state-building at the grassroots. Based on archives from the public security bureau and the court in the county, Liu Shigu explores the formation of two local factions either as a legacy of the past from the Kuomindang period or a construction by the Communists in the process of political campaigns. Diving in the languages adopted in criminal case files, Brian DeMare notes how northern cadres as outsiders attempted to make revolutions and state building in the unfamiliar terrain of the south. Focusing on criminal cases of rape, Zhang Man investigates the interplay between law and politics at the time and probes into the process through which “rape” was constructed as criminal offense. Drawing from the reports from the county government and its public security bureau in the 1950s, Wang Juan details the building of the coercive apparatus of the state, namely local police and activist-based community policing, and contends that these enforcers of law and order paved social foundations for group conflicts later on.

Presentations:

• Factional Politics: The Organizational Structure and Interpersonal Networks of Kuomintang’s Grassroots Regime, 1926-1949
  

  Paper Presenter: Shigu Liu – Xiamen University
• Northern Interrogators, Local Suspects: Language and Place in the Archives
  

  Paper Presenter: Brian DeMare – Tulane University
• Rape, Law, and Politics in Early 1950s China
  

  Paper Presenter: Man Zhang – University of Freiburg
• State Building, the Political Economy of Punishment, and the Institution of Mass-Line Policing in Communist China (1950-1962)
  

  Paper Presenter: Juan Wang – McGill University