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By late 1967, there had been clear signs that China's Cultural Revolution had entered the phase of retrenchment and moderation. Despite continuing radical extravagance, Beijing's efforts revolved around taming the divided mass movement and establishing new organs of local power. In this nationwide milieu, the province of Hunan stood out as a remarkable exception. It was in Hunan that there emerged a diffused yet vigorous movement in opposition to Beijing's attempts to rebuild the Party and state authorities. This movement, the Shengwulian, has been discussed by a number of China scholars. Conventional scholarly wisdom regarding this critical episode, however, seems to be based on several less-than-accurate premises. Using newly available sources, this paper re-examines the Shengwulian episode, with a special focus on how nationally significant issues, radiating out from the political center, played themselves out in relation to local contingencies, cleavages and complex power relationships. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite a growing literature on peasant protest in contemporary China, we know little about why some protests are more sustained, disruptive and violent--in a word, militant--than others and thus pose a more serious challenge to the political order. The influential concept of "rightful resistance" cannot explain protest militancy, because it only applies to civil protest. This article studies a case of unusually militant peasant protest in Qizong, Hunan. The protest became militant because the peasants rallied around well-educated and fearless leaders and established a layered and encompassing protest organization. Empowered by central policies on lowering taxes and fees on the peasants (the so-called "peasant burden") and the Confucian norm of subsistence, the peasants successfully mobilized for drastic reduction of the burden. Local government could not contain the protest, having lost its moral authority and lacking the resources either to suppress it or to make sufficient concessions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]