Tiger, Tyrant, Bandit, Businessman: Echoes of Counterrevolution from New China

While the past twenty years have seen a growth in the body of literature that explores the establishment of the People's Republic of China from a “grassroots” perspective, few studies have been as enjoyable, beautifully written, and accessible as Brian DeMare's Tiger, Tyrant, Bandit, Businessman. Centering on four criminal cases drawn from Poyang County archives, DeMare both delves deeply into the characters of each case, but also what each case file can reveal about the rural experience of the Communist takeover. This is a valuable contribution to the existing literature, and perhaps more rarely, it is a book that proves extremely adept in illustrating how historians use archival sources in their research in a way that is appropriate to teach with.DeMare begins with his setting: Poyang County, an obscure corner of Jiangxi Province, representing “the furthest reaches of government administration in China” for most of recorded history (ix). Deftly sketching Poyang's geography and more ancient history, the author turns his attention to the situation of the 1930s, 1940s, and early 1950s. As he points out, rural life in China during the late 1940s and early 1950s “was anything but tranquil,” with “paranoia [that] went all the way to the core of the People's Republic” seeing “enemies” located around every corner and in every shadowy alley (19). This paranoia, and the very real consequences thereof, is evident in the chapters that follow.The meat of the book is organized into four chapters, each tracing one casefile. These four cases explore how rural areas experienced the arrival of and establishment of Chinese Communist authority. The cast of characters ranges from bandits, to scholars, to merchants, to cuckolding wives, to murdered cadre. While each chapter is relatively self-contained—DeMare has done a beautiful job of crafting stand-alone chapters, set off with a helpful “cast of characters”—each chapter adds another thread to the author's questions and meditations on both what to do with these various casefiles and how each of these narratives fits together. While a slender book, Tiger, Tyrant, Bandit, Businessman elegantly sheds light on how the establishment of a new Communist regime impacted rural society, and how the transition was anything but orderly. He has also given an honest assessment of what he can—or cannot—derive from archival sources. I have often found scholars afraid of admitting “I don't know”; DeMare takes this head-on in several instances, and it is to his credit that he does so.DeMare succeeds in his goal of illustrating the “arrival of state power at the grassroots level” (133). While he points out that the “weaponization of daily language started with the Nationalists” (51), an important facet of the cases he looks at, he convincingly illustrates the kinds and strength of state power brought to bear in an area that had never really seen more than county-level administrators insofar as centralized bureaucracy went. Tiger, Tyrant, Bandit, Businessman paints a compelling picture of how the arrival of a new power deeply impacted many facets of rural life.While much of the information DeMare sets out from his reading of these files is fascinating, it is all set to best advantage by his writing. Showing a flair that the cultural workers from his first book (Mao's Cultural Army) probably would have appreciated, the book is a pleasure to read: lucid, vivid, informative, and entertaining. Further, Tiger, Tyrant, Bandit, Businessman includes a number of maps, which are very helpful when following the narrative. The author's conceit of adding a “cast of characters” to the beginning of each chapter was likewise useful in getting the lay of the land before diving into the chapter.Finally, DeMare should be commended on creating a narrative that is both of interest to specialists, and an excellent book to bring into the classroom. Indeed, while reading Tiger, Tyrant, Bandit, Businessman, I was reminded of one of the best examples of those already-rare books, Susan Mann's Talented Women of the Zhang Family. It can be difficult to explain to undergraduate students what the craft of history is and how we piece together our narratives from disparate sources, but DeMare explains clearly at the end of each chapter what he could and could not derive from the casefiles, what challenges he was presented with, the uncertainties he had based on the sources, and what questions he was left with.Tiger, Tyrant, Bandit, Businessman is a pleasure to read and offers much insight for both specialists and students. With engaging prose, an entertaining “cast of characters,” and useful reflections on the author's own experiences with these casefiles, DeMare has crafted a narrative that successfully shows why careful reading of archival documents from an obscure corner of Jiangxi Province sheds light not only the rural experience of the Communist Revolution but on the historian's craft as a whole.