On October 1, 1949, a rural-based insurgency demolished the Nationalist government of Chiang-kai Shek and brought the Chinese Communists to national power. How did the Chinese Communists gain their mandate to rule the countryside? In this pathbreaking study, Ralph A. Thaxton, Jr., provides a fresh and strikingly original interpretation of the political and economic origins of the October revolution. Salt of the Earth is based on direct interviews with the village people whose individual and collective protest activities helped shape the nature and course of the Chinese revolution in the deep countryside. Focusing on the Party's relationship with locally esteemed non-Communist leaders, the author shows that the Party's role is best understood in terms of its intimate connections with local collective activism and with existing modes of local protest, both of which were the product of rural people acting on their own grievances, interests, and goals. The author's collection and use of oral historiesfrom the last remaining eyewitnessesand written corroborative materials is a remarkable achievement; his new interpretation of why China's rural people supported and joined the Communists in their quest for state power is dramatically different from what has come before. This book will stimulate debates on the genesis of popular mobilization and the growth of insurgency for decades to come.

Ralph A. Thaxton, Jr., is a Professor of Politics at Brandeis University, where he served as Chairman of the East Asian Studies Program from 2004-08. He is a Research Associate at the Harvard University John King Fairbank Center for East Asian Research. His most recent publication is Catastrophe and Contention in Rural China: Mao's Great Leap Forward Famine and the Origins of Righteous Resistance in Da Fo Village (Cambridge University Presss, 2008). He also is author of Salt of the Earth: The Political Origins of Peasant Protest in China (University of California Press, 1997) and China Turned Rightside Up: Revolutionary Legitimacy in the Peasant World (Yale University Press, 1983). He was named a Post-Doctoral Fellow at the University of California (Berkeley) Center for Chinese Studies 1974-75 and a Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton (2002). He has won numerous prizes and fellowships, including a National Endowment for the Humanities University Teachers' Fellowship, a Harry Frank Guggenheim Fellowship, a Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation International Fellowship, and the United States Institute of Peace Fellowship. During his tenure at the Dickey Center Professor Thaxton will be working on a sequel to Catastrophe and Contention in Rural China and on issues that are central to reform and stability in contemporary China.