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4 pages/≈1100 words
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APA
Subject:
History
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Essay
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English (U.S.)
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Topic:

Yuan-Tsung Chen and Yu Liu’s Works and their Connection to Land Reform

Essay Instructions:

Second Essay Assignment

 

Yuan-tsung Chen’s The Dragon’s Village and Yu Liu’s “Why Did It Go so High? Political Mobilization and Agricultural Collectivization in China” both deal with the land reform movement in China.  Chen’s book is a memoir; Liu’s article is a scholarly analysis.  For this essay assignment, you are required to use Dragon’s Village to evaluate the argument presented in “Why Did it Go so High?”  Does the evidence presented in Dragon’s Village confirm Liu’s findings, or call them into question?  Note that in writing your essay, you are free to focus on a particular part or parts of Liu’s argument—there’s no need to evaluate the entire argument.  (Indeed, you most likely do not have the background to evaluate her comparisons with the Soviet Union.)  You should also feel free to discuss problems and limitations of Dragon’s Village as a source. 

 

Your essay should be approximately 1200 words (about five pages) and is due on April 10, at 10 AM.  Please do not bring a hardcopy to class.  Instead, upload your paper using the “upload assignments” tab on Blackboard.  Papers submitted after the deadline will be marked by the system as “late,” and will be downgraded. As on your last essay, you will be judged by the extent to which: 

 

  1. You offer a sound and convincing argument;    
  2. You demonstrate careful reading of the sources; 
  3. You include ideas from lecture and other assigned readings as appropriate; 
  4. You craft a well-written and well-constructed essay; 
  5. You demonstrate understanding of the history presented thus far in class; 
  6. You are able to write a paper that is free of careless errors. 

Please be certain to cite the readings you use.  Your citation format can be informal, but it should cite the reading and page number.  For example, (Dragon’s Village, p. 25).  No use of other than assigned readings is permitted.  Do not use sources from the Internet.  Please be careful to guard against plagiarism and other forms of cheating.  If you have questions about what constitutes plagiarism please contact me or Nick Mason.

 

Essay Sample Content Preview:

Chinese History
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Chinese History
In her novel The Dragon’s Village, Yuan-tsung Cheng talks extensively about the Land Reform that took place in China from 1949 to 1950. During this period, land was taken away from the landlords and redistributed to the peasants in Chinese countryside. In Why Did It Go so High? Yu Liu argues that the process of collectivization of land in 1955-56 in Communist China was a rather peaceful occurrence that was not marred by resistance from the peasants. The author contrasts this with collectivization in the Soviet Union which encountered significant resistance from the peasant farmers. In this paper, The Dragon’s Village is used to evaluate the argument that Yu Liu has presented in this article Why Did It Go so High? Specifically, this paper argues that the evidence presented by Yuan-tsung Cheng actually supports a particular part of Yu Liu’s argument.
In Why Did It Go so High? Yu Liu talks about the relative lack of resistance by the Chinese peasants in rural China during the country’s agricultural collectivization campaign. Quite the opposite, Liu (2006) points out that the process of collectivization in the Soviet Union faced much heavier resistance from the peasants. To support his argument, Liu (2006) analyzes several factors including the legitimizing disclosure; the basic-level Party apparatus; the social control system; the innovative class system; and the outcomes of the 1949 to 1950 Land Reform. From the year 1955 until the year 1956, in a period commonly called the High Tide of socialism, the number of collectivised peasant households in the rural parts of China went up from 14.2% of the total, or 16.9 million households, to 91.2%, or 109.4 million households (Liu, 2006). After analyzing the five aforementioned factors, Liu (2006) concludes that the High Tide in the Chinese countryside was by and large an organizational success. This is primarily because the organizers of the far-reaching land reform were efficient, dense, and cohesive, whereas the organized were dependent, paralyzed, and divided (Schoppa, 2013).
One argument that Yu Liu has used in his argument is Land Reform. Land Reform, as Liu (2006) pointed out, reshaped the Chinese countryside in three notable ways: firstly, Land Reform obliterated the traditional self-rule system in the country’s rural regions. In so doing, it destroyed the reservoir in which rural social power concentrated. The second way is that the Land Reform in rural China brought new leadership to power that was faithful to the country’s Communist Party. The third notable way is that Land Reform established the legitimacy of the Communist Party amongst a large proportion of people in the Chinese countryside (Liu, 2006). Traditional villages in rural China were self-ruled from the three abovementioned ways in which Land Reform reshaped rural China.
Prior to the reform, the rural elites and landlords managed the rural communities in every public sphere. The Communist Party got rid of the entire layer of this class through a bloody Land Reform. In excess of 2 million rural elites, especially landlords, were killed and the rural social power was destroyed (Liu, 200...
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