The State Attack on Entitlement and the Origins of China's Great Leap Forward Famine

FAIN: RZ-50948-08

Brandeis University (Waltham, MA 02453-2728)
Ralph A. Thaxton (Project Director: November 2007 to November 2014)

Research to culminate in the writing of a co-authored book examining the famine in rural Anhui province that resulted from Mao's Great Leap Forward. (36 months)

This is a study of catastrophic events in China for the 1945 to 2005 period, particularly of how the Communist Party-led state in China has engineered an attack on the fundamental entitlements of the peasant household, including the entitlement to private land ownership. This study that provides a two-dimensional, micro- and macro-level picture of the origins of this milieu and its relationship to the formation of the revolutionary socialist order and to the embedded modality of socialist rule that periodically and episodically has revived it in China under Mao and afterward.