Extract

The traditional approach to the Chinese Communist revolution emphasizes how the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) exploited peasant nationalism, social-economic division, and mass emotion in local societies to mobilize the populations. Another book that replicates this approach to the study of the Communist revolution in Northwest China could make important empirical contributions, but few readers out of the field would be interested in it.

In Accidental Holy Land: The Communist Revolution in Northwest China, Joseph W. Esherick takes a different approach. Instead of focusing on social mobilization, Esherick reorients our attention to the CCP itself, especially how it envisioned, debated, and struggled over the revolution in Northwest China. The result is an innovative reinterpretation of the revolution that highlights human agencies and historical contingencies. The reason the book deserves broad scholarly attention, though, is how foregrounding party politics allows Esherick to bring the historiography of the Chinese Communist revolution into dialogue with the emerging scholarship on information politics.

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