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Reviews of Books
on the non-Communist side, and Chen Yi, one of the
leading military figures on the Communist side). Only
someone who already knows the story well could keep
them sorted out. The book's style is referred to by
William Jenner, in the introduction, as "dissection
under the microscope." It could also be called refusing
to give up any detail gleaned from research for the
price of readability. What the book badly needs is
another, abridged version, which would make it accessible for the great majority of potential readers who do
not know the story but should.
A second element that an abridged version should
include is more background. The New Fourth Anny
lost its headquarters at the depths of the Anti-Japanese War. The United Front itself was a product of
Japanese aggression, and the failure of the United
Front was one of the key reasons why Chinese resistance against the Japanese was weakened. And yet the
Japanese hardly appear in this book.
I hope that the idea of an abridged version may be
taken seriously, because it would be tragic to see the
product of so much detailed, painstaking, and passionate research remain available only to the few scholars
who can make their way through the dense and lengthy
text.
DIANA LARY
University of British Columbia
JIN QIU. The Culture of Power: The Lin Biao Incident in
the Cultural Revolution. Stanford: Stanford University
Press. 1999. Pp. xiii, 279. $45.00.
The Cultural Revolution in China remains one of the
most baffling events in recent Chinese history. Despite
an increasing body of excellent research, much is still
poorly understood in terms of the motivations of key
participants. This is especially the case with respect to
the death of Lin Biao, Mao Zedong's chosen successor, who according to official accounts died in a plane
crash in Mongolia after trying to flee following a failed
coup. How do we explain that China's top military
figure, whose prowess on the battlefield was crucial in
bringing the Communist Party to power in 1949, could
have been so naïve to have turned against Mao, when
he must have known that he could not win? Why would
he have tried to flee to the Sovjet Union of all places?
The increased availability of original sources in
post-Mao China and the access to many of the participants in such events have allowed researchers to begin
to answer a number of the conundrums. In so doing,
they provide more plausible answers than either Chinese official accounts or those Western accounts that
view the Cultural Revolution as a principled struggle
over policy and the future of the revolution. Jin Qiu is
in an ideal position to research the demise of Lin Biao,
being the daughter of one of Lin's senior generals, air
force chief Wu Faxian. She unabashedly notes that she
began her research in order to clear her father, who
was put on trial in 1980-1981 as a counterrevolutionary, together with others purged in the Cultural RevAMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW olution, including Mao's wife Jiang Qing. Qiu combines her privileged access to key survivors and
unpublished materials with secondary sources to provide a highly informative and persuasive account of
what might have happened.
Essentially, she shows that Lin Biao and his fellow
generals never had any intention of challenging Mao
and certainly did not plan a coup d'état. The Lin Biao
that emerges from these pages is sickly and passive. In
fact, even when he knew that Mao was probably going
to purge him, he did not rouse himself to fight back.
This passive Lin is a far cry from the active conspirator
portrayed in official accounts. While Qiu does acknowledge that policy differences between Mao and
Lin slowly emerged, they were not decisive in causing
the split. In fact, she makes it quite clear that both
Mao and Zhou Enlai knew that Lin was not engaged in
some underhand plot and that he did not wish to usurp
Mao's position nor turn the military against the party.
So what does explain these extraordinary events? To
find the answer, Qiu takes us into the inner sanctuaries
of Chinese politics and stresses the role of "extrainstitutional" factors in the politics of the Cultural
Revolution. She uses this micro view to recast our
understanding of the macropolitics of the time. It is a
world of a paranoid patriarch, a dysfunctional family,
scheming wives, sycophants, and unruly children. Qiu
blows away some of the fancy metatheorizing by
showing how much of what happened was the response
to palace intrigues and family enmities and jealousies.
Insofar as there was a plot, it was pondered by Lin's
ambitious son, Lin Liguo. The son used his famous
father to push his own career in the air force and to
build a loose association of officers who were willing to
fantasize about killing Mao and setting up their own
regime. In major part, Liguo saw this a response to the
impending purge of his father. However, the plan was
farcical and seemed to represent nothing more than
youthful swagger and bravado.
Despite her access, even Qiu cannot answer for us
what really happened on the ill-fated flight on September 12-13, 1971. Clearly, when the plane took off there
was no intention to fly to the Soviet Union; rather
Dalian in Northeast China was Lin's destination, and
perhaps we shall never know what transpired. More
importantly, Qiu has difficulty in explaining why Mao
did turn against Lin so dramatically. While she does an
excellent job of placing the specific events in the
broader context of the unfolding Cultural Revolution,
she relies on some rather simplistic writings drawn
from psychology to explain the actions of an impatient,
paranoid Mao. She concludes that what eventually
brought his downfall was Lin's refusal to write a
self-criticism following the Second Plenum of August
1970. Mao's patience appears to have worn out after a
year, and he decided to remove Lin from the scene.
The tragedy of Lin's flight and death was the result of
Mao's paranoia and the machinations of a dysfunc-
APRIL 2001
Asia
tional family. Fancy theory it may not be, but it seems
closer to the truth than many other accounts.
TONY SAICH
Harvard University
MARK RAVINA. Land and Lordship in Early Modern
Japan. Stanford: Stanford University Press. 1999. Pp.
xx, 278. $45.00.
Scholars on both sides of the Pacific have long debated
the nature of the early modern order in Japan. They
have dubbed it variously "centralized feudalism," a
"federation," the "Tokugawa state," the bakuhan state
(a combination of bakufu and han, or domains), and
the "flamboyant state," among others. Adding to this
discourse is Mark Ravina, who offers a different
model. Using Mizubayashi Takeshi's "revisionist"
term, he argues that Japan during the years 1600-1868
is best explained as a "compound state." Focusing on
the large domains of the "country-holding" daimyo,
who were eighteen in number and whose territories
comprised one-third of the territory of Japan, Ravina
maintains that they functioned as autonomous states
even as they acknowledged the legitimacy and authority of the Tokugawa bakufu. Japan was, in short, a
collectivity of states within a state (here Ravina makes
useful analogies with late eighteenth-century Prussia).
The perspective adopted is important in that it takes
the political order on its own terms and declines to
view it as an imperfect precusor to the nation-state—a
problem with some other studies. But Ravina also
contends that below this group of eighteen "we can
discern a more amorphous category of powerful lords
and great domains . . . [which] manifested many of the
same qualities" (p. 3). Although beyond the bounds of
the present book, future work on some of these other
domains is necessary to support that assertion.
The stated purpose of this work, which is written in
fluid, felicitous prose, is to "examine the political
implications of demographic change and protoindustrial development" (p. 9). In situating his study during
the mid-Tokugawa period, Ravina is a part of a trend
in recent scholarship that has concerned itself with this
previously "dead" period. A political economy approach allows him to examine how daimyo rule was
shaped by conflicting obligations (e.g. between the
commoners he ruled and the samurai retainers who
served him) and points to the ambiguous boundaries of
daimyo autonomy.
Ravina aptly focuses on three of the eighteen largest
or "country-holding" daimyo. These three domains
point to the range of conditions in early modern Japan:
Yonezawa, with a large samurai population and a
commercial economy; Hirosaki, with a large samurai
population and an underdeveloped economy; and Tokushima, which stands in sharp contrast to Hirosaki,
with a small samurai population and a highly commercialized economy.
In examining how daimyo rule was situated in
relation to shogunal authority, Ravina identifies three
AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW
551
bases for authority: feudal, patrimonial, and suzerain.
Suzerain authority, the autonomy of the lord in civil
affairs, was only one strand of political practice, however. Feudal authority tied daimyo and shogun as well
as retainer and daimyo (including the shogunal house
as the largest daimyo) but did not give the shogunate
suzerainty over commoners outside its own holdings.
Patrimonial authority could be a source of tension,
since retainers subsumed their patrimony into the
daimyo's household or house; as a result, a retainer
could legitimately work to depose a lord who acted
against the best interest of the house.
These multiple sources of legitimacy became a
source of conflict and struggle that are examined in the
three case studies. In each of these, Ravina takes a
fiscal approach, since taxes were "the central link
between state and society" (p. 24). Domain governments struggled to find a balance between the demands of their retainers for revenue and the resistance
of their commoners to taxes; that balance was deeply
affected by demographic factors and protoindustrialization, both of which the domains tried to influence or
control. Yonezawa relied on patrimonial and suzerain
authority to promote weaving among its samurai retainers; this was an activity that ran contrary to much
samurai tradition but was called for by the lord as a
form of service to his house (to help his retainers
provide for themselves) as well as service in the
interests of the lord's people (since it would obviate
the need for higher taxes that might cause peasant
contention). In Hirosaki, invocations of patrimonial
and suzerain authority were similarly invoked in an
abortive effort to promote samurai farming, i.e. to
resettle retainers in the countryside where they could
support themselves. (Programs in both domains provoked resistance from retainers whose patrimonial
authority was challenged by these policies.) Lastly, in
Tokushima, the daimyo's attempts to promote the
domain's export crop of indigo, and to secure its
reputation, led to conflict with the bakufu; the Tokugawa sought to invoke feudal authority in arguing that
Tokushima, in its efforts to oppose bakufu-supported
cartels in Osaka, had no authority to act independently. Still, in an interesting twist, Tokushima officials
were willing to draw the bakufu in to domainal polities
when their own patrimonial perquisites were challenged by an adopted lord.
Clearly this book will not end the debate about the
early modern order, nor will the term "compound
state," in my estimation, find universal acceptance as
the defining term for it. Yet the term, importantly,
points to the multilayered bases of political authority
that differentiated the early modern from the modern
state. Ravina's study makes a sophisticated argument
about the nature of Tokugawa polities and the political
economy that greatly enriches existing discourse.
CONSTANTINE N. VAPORIS
University of Maryland-Baltimore County
APRIL 2001