What Is The Theme Of The Dragon's Village By Mao Zedong

On October 1st, 1949, communist leader Mao Zedong proclaimed the People’s Republic of China, naming himself as head of the state. The declaration ended over six years of bloody civil warfare against the Guomindang (GMD, Chinese Nationalist Party) led by the Chiang Kai-Shek, whose eventual unpopularity and corruption drove them to flee China altogether. Chairman Mao’s popular revolutionary vision for the People’s Republic Of China aimed to favor the peasantry, whereas the redistribution of land from rich, semi-feudal landlords to the poor peasants would actualize communist ideals of an utopian society. Yuan-tsung Chen, in her novel The Dragon’s Village, describes the experiences of Guan Ling-ling, a young communist volunteer who encounters the complexities of class relations, land reform, and patriarchy present among the peasantry of a rural peasant village in North China. Using Ling-ling’s various interactions with other volunteers and with the peasantry, Chen explores the ways in which the unique cultural climate of rural China worked with, and sometimes against the newly adopted Maoist …show more content…
Despite the grim outcome, though, Mao’s reign over China was undeniably unique in it’s application to the rural peasantry, differentiating itself from Marxist-Leninist principles utilized in other communist countries such as Soviet Russia. As reflected in Chen’s semi-autobiographical novel The Dragon’s Village, the uniqueness of the Chinese Revolution can be attributed to the ways in which the traditional, cultural climate of the rural peasants interweaved with Maoist ideologies to shape, and eventually progress into what is now the modern semi-communist Chinese