If you had to choose just one book to understand popular protest in China, which would it be?

I suppose it would be Red Star Over China by Edgar Snow.

Edgar Snow is the American journalist who visited Mao and his comrades in 1936, when they were still viewed as ‘Red bandits’ and were hiding from the government in inaccessible places in northwestern China?

Yes, and in some ways it seems the most dated of the books I’ve chosen, because it presents a totally rosy portrait of the Communist revolution. But I think for understanding modern China it’s extremely important. And that’s because it does, in rather sympathetic but comprehensive detail, point out both the importance of the land revolution, and the nationalistic revolution, as key elements in Mao Zedong’s revolution.

What do you mean by the land revolution and the nationalistic revolution?

The land revolution was the taking away of land from landlords and redistributing it to peasants. It was the inequality of land distribution that was a very important element in generating support for the Chinese Communist revolution and a very important economic basis for it. And the Communists from the 1920s on, until they won power in 1949, and then afterwards, as a formal state policy, took away land from the landlords and redistributed it to peasants. Of course, after the Communist regime was established, land reform took a very different direction – with collectivisation and the establishment of communes and so forth.

The nationalistic revolution was China’s regaining of sovereignty from foreign powers. China, unlike many other countries, was not overtly colonised by the West. Nevertheless from the mid-19th century, the time of the Opium Wars onwards, large portions, especially of Chinese cities, became de facto colonies of Western countries. And there was a large foreign presence there: a missionary presence, a business presence, and a diplomatic presence. Also, in 1937 the Japanese invaded China. And Edgar Snow did his interviews for the book in 1936-7 with Mao and other leaders of the revolution as they were actively fighting the Japanese. So the book also gives a very good flavour for the rise of modern Chinese nationalism and the importance of nationalism in the Chinese Communist revolution. Edgar Snow’s book helps illuminate those two things probably more than any other I can think of.

And, in your view, it’s hard to understand contemporary China without understanding these two issues?

That’s right. For one thing, one of the things that is most challenging to the contemporary Chinese leadership is once again the land issue. After 1949, in the 1950s and early 1960s, land was collectivised. This meant that land in China technically belonged to the collective, which could be either the local village or a sub-village unit known as the production team. But, after the death of Mao Zedong in 1976, after Deng Xiaoping launched his economic reforms, one of the things that followed was decollectivisation. And what one sees today is the selling of land by collective units in China. What local officials are doing is, in effect, selling that formerly collective land to developers. It’s particularly true in areas surrounding cities, but actually it’s true in much of China. And much of the protest one sees in China today is protest by farmers who are being dispossessed of their land.

And one has the situation today in China where there are well over 100 million migrant workers. They have left the countryside and are working in cities, but they receive – or have up until now received – much of their social support from the countryside, from the fact their families still have land back in the countryside. So, as these families are becoming dispossessed, it’s creating a real crisis of social security. And part of the reason the Chinese government recently has been so actively passing laws on property rights and on the circumstances under which one can or cannot transfer land out of collective hands into other hands, is because this problem is resurfacing. They are once again dealing with the problem of a dispossessed peasantry in the countryside. And so I think the land problem remains, although in changed form, really key to understanding the challenges that face the contemporary Chinese leadership.

So too does nationalism, and yet it too of course takes a different form. There is no Japanese military invasion that the Chinese leadership is currently fighting. But it sees itself in some ways as fighting a kind of intellectual or ideological or cultural invasion from other countries. It’s always under pressure to maintain its nationalist credentials. Especially in a situation where this is no longer a very strong Marxist-Leninist ideology in China, nationalism has become a tool that the leadership would like to use. But it’s a tricky one as nationalism can take lots of different forms.

By tricky, you mean that, because of Mao’s success in beating back foreigners from Chinese soil, nationalism is a key part of the Chinese Communist Party’s legitimacy. And yet they’re scared that it could come back to bite them.

Nationalism really is a two-edged sword. If you look at the major influential protest movements in China from the mid-19th century on, they have all had a very important element of nationalism within them. The book I have chosen by Joe Esherick, about the Boxer uprising, is about that: the Boxer rebellion was an early expression of popular nationalism against foreigners.

But nationalism was, over time, directed against the Chinese government as well. For example, the May 4 movement of 1919 began as a nationalistic movement, to protest about the fact that China was being disadvantaged by the terms of the Treaty of Versailles that ended World War I. But that nationalism was not only directed against the foreign powers; it was also directed against the Chinese state that had capitulated to those foreign demands. And we see this again and again.

Very frequently, when you have nationalist protests in China (which seem to happen every few years, for example when NATO bombed the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade, or early in the Bush administration, when there was the incident with the EP-3 spy plane) it’s just a very tricky issue for the Chinese leadership. On the one hand they don’t want to squash nationalistic protest because it’s important for people to feel proud about Chinese sovereignty. On the other hand, they’re also quite aware that nationalistic protest can quite easily morph into protests that are aimed against the state itself. And those, of course, become very problematic.

Again and again you’ll see in an early stage of a nationalistic protest the Chinese state providing a certain amount of support to the protesters. But, after a rather limited period of time, they try to demobilise that very same protest before it begins to take on other kinds of issues and becomes politically volatile.