In reading journalist Edgar Snow’s Red Star Over China, we find a detailed account and direct oral evidence of the Chinese Communist leadership as well as the peasants they sought to mobilize. We read a variety of testimonies and accounts shared from Snow’s visit between the late summer and fall of 1936. Here was the Chinese Communist Party just having emerged from the epic Long March, an extended movement from its southern base, often under direct fire from the Guomindang armies, taking major casualties while marching over 5600 miles until reaching the Yan’an Base area in China’s Shaanxi Province. As Snow notes, his own book was completed “to the sound of gunfire by Japanese troops outside the walls of Peking”—with Japan moving south from Manchuria to open “eight years” of a Sino-Japanese war.
Decades later, we also have a study by an experienced historian of Chinese revolution, Joseph Esherick (1994), who worked both in Chinese archives and in the 1980s in interviews with aging, Chinese peasants themselves, to study the revolutionary process from “the bottom up” in rural society–as well as Party efforts to manage it.
In comparing these two works with different methodologies—journalism and history—and time periods of investigation, you are asked to consider places they overlap and differ, while analyzing the following question in your essay:
What do you see, in comparing evidence found in these two texts, as the most significant changes that the Chinese Communist Party brought to the countryside in its effort to gain popular support? Consider and discuss three possibilities while also selecting as your thesis the most significant among them and argue why this one might be the most relevant, important, or fundamental. Any potential complexities or further questions that these texts might suggest as we move forward in our study?
Paper length: 4-6 pages
Format: double-spaced, 1-inch margins, 12 point font. Uploaded to Canvas in .doc or .docx file.
Citations: Chicago / Turabian format required for citations and bibliography. You must use either footnote or endnote citations, plus a works cited bibliography. Note that papers that do not use proper citations (including precise page numbers) will likely receive a failing grade for our course essay assignments.
Remember, a quality essay is one that includes:
a thesis, central argument and statement of your main point(s) in the paper, clearly set forth in your paper’s introductory paragraph
concrete evidence – refer to the texts we have read to support your analysis or arguments. Short quotations are useful and effective, but avoid longer “block” quotations whenever possible. You do not need to do research beyond our assigned readings for the course for this assignment (if you do use sources beyond the course, however, be sure to cite them.)
a concluding paragraph summarizing your main points and raising further analytic implications.
