Thaxton argues that the memory of the great famine under Mao shaped villagers' resistance to the socialist state.

Introduction; 1. The Republican era and the emergence of Communist leadership during the anti-Japanese war of resistance; 2. The ascent of the vigilante militia: the violent antecedents of Mao's war; 3. The onset of collectivization and popular dissatisfaction with Mao's 'yellow bomb' road; 4. The mandate abandoned: the disaster of the great leap forward; 5. Strategies of survival and their elimination in the great leap forward; 6. The escape from famine and death; 7. Indignation and frustrated retaliation: the politics of disengagement; 8. The market comes first: the economics of disengagement; 9. Persistent memories and long-delayed retaliation in the reform era; Conclusion.

Ralph A. Thaxton, Jr, is a Professor of Politics and the Chairman of the East Asian Studies Program at Brandeis University. He is the author of Salt of the Earth: The Political Origins of Peasant Protest in China (1977) and China Turned Rightside Up: Revolutionary Legitimacy in the Peasant World (1983). He was named a Post-Doctoral Fellow at the University of California Berkeley Center for Chinese Studies (1974-5) and a Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study (2002) and has won numerous prizes and fellowships, including a Harry Frank Guggenheim Fellowship, a Chang Ching-kuo Foundation International Fellowship, and the United States Institute of Peace Fellowship.