Description: Bianco focuses on "spontaneous" rural unrest, uninfluenced by revolutionary intellectuals. The author shows that predominant forms of protest were directed not against the landowning class but against state agents, and suggests that 20th-century Chinese peasants were less different from 17th- or 18th-century French peasants than might be imagined.
Brief description: Lucien Bianco is former Director of Studies and former Director of the China Center, École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales.