| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 104.3

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 104.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Asia

Ralph A. Thaxton, Jr.. Salt of the Earth: The Political Origins of Peasant Protest and Communist Revolution in China. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. 1997. Pp. xix, 425. $65.00.

This is an important contribution to the burgeoning literature on the nature of the popular mobilization that accompanied the rise to power of the Chinese Communist Party in the years prior to the 1949 Communist victory. Historians and political scientists have long been interested in this question, but the field has been enriched by the increased data—particularly on local history—available under the less controlling regimes in power since Mao Zedong's death. Several scholars have used reminiscence literature and particularly the documentary record of local Communist movements to produce more fine-grained studies than have been available to date. Ralph A. Thaxton's exhaustively researched study uses all these sources as well as oral history—interviews with some 200 elderly rural people over the course of eight visits between 1985 and 1993—to write the local history of the saltmakers' resistance movements in five counties of the North China plain (just north of the Yellow River where Henan, Hebei, and Shandong come together) in the 1930s and 1940s. . . .

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