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SUMMARY:Modern China Lecture Series Featuring Yixin Chen — Famine and Rebellion: The Counterrevolutionary Case of the Chinese People’s Life-Saving Army in the Western Stream Villages\, 1959-1960.
DESCRIPTION:register for hybrid zoom attendance\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nSpeaker: Yixin Chen\, Professor of History\, University of North Carolina Wilmington.  \n\n\n\nThis talk explores why numerous cases of counterrevolutionary groups emerged in rural China during the Great Leap Forward famine of the late 1950s\, despite the brutal and large-scale Suppression of Counterrevolutionaries campaigns earlier that decade. Focusing on the case of the “Chinese People’s Life-Saving Army\,” formed by peasants in the Western Stream (xixi) Production Brigade in southern Anhui Province in 1960\, this study highlights how the group’s grain-stealing actions were not acts of political rebellion but survival strategies during the famine. Far from fitting the state’s definition of counterrevolutionary behavior\, these actions represented collective resistance to starvation. The study argues that local authorities and judicial institutions played a central role in politically overinterpreting these struggles for food. Through the excessive use of state violence and ideological overreach\, acts of self-preservation were reframed as counterrevolutionary offenses. This mischaracterization contributed significantly to the dramatic increase in rural counterrevolutionary group cases during the Great Leap famine. \n\n\n\nYixin Chen earned his Ph.D. from Washington University in St. Louis and is a professor of history at the University of North Carolina Wilmington. His book\, When Food Became Scarce: How Chinese Peasants Survived the Great Leap Forward Famine (Cornell University Press\, 2024)\, provides a grassroots analysis of why some peasants survived while others in the same village\, despite facing identical food shortages\, did not. The book argues that the natural environment and lineage-based social mechanism played crucial roles in peasant survival during this prolonged ordeal. An expanded Chinese edition of the book\, titled Jingyan Jihuang (Experiencing the Famine)\, authored by Chen\, was published by the Chinese University of Hong Kong Press in January 2025. Professor Chen specializes in the socioeconomic history of modern China and has published extensively in academic journals in the U.S.\, China\, and Hong Kong\, in both English and Chinese. In 2009\, he received the Vernon Carstensen Memorial Award for the best article published in Agricultural History. He is currently working on a book that explores organized peasant counterrevolutionaries in Mao’s China. \n\n\n\nAlso via Zoom. Register at: https://harvard.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_hOiD_AYoTeKJI3XpNB7Jmw \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nVenue
URL:https://fairbank.fas.harvard.edu/events/modern-china-lecture-series-featuring-yixin-chen-famine-and-rebellion-the-counterrevolutionary-case-of-the-chinese-peoples-life-saving-army-in-the-wester-stream-villages-1959-1960/
LOCATION:CGIS Knafel K262\, 1737 Cambridge Street\, Cambridge\, MA\, 02138\, United States
CATEGORIES:Modern China Lecture
ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://fairbank.fas.harvard.edu/wp-content/uploads/2025/01/Yixin-Chen.jpg
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