Righteous Revolutionaries illustrates how states appeal to popular morality—shared understandings of right and wrong—to forge new group identities and mobilize violence against perceived threats to their authority. Jeffrey A. Javed examines the Chinese Communist Party’s mass mobilization of violence during its land reform campaign in the early 1950s, one of the most violent and successful state-building efforts in history. Using an array of novel archival, documentary, and quantitative historical data, this book illustrates that China’s land reform campaign was not just about economic redistribution but rather part of a larger, brutally violent state-building effort to delegitimize the new party-state’s internal rivals and establish its moral authority.

Righteous Revolutionaries argues that the Chinese Party-state simultaneously removed perceived threats to its authority at the grassroots and bolstered its legitimacy through a process called moral mobilization. This mobilization process created a moral boundary that designated a virtuous ingroup of “the masses” and a demonized outgroup of “class enemies,” mobilized the masses to participate in violence against this broadly defined outgroup, and strengthened this symbolic boundary by making the masses complicit in state violence. Righteous Revolutionaries shows how we can find traces of moral mobilization in China today under Xi Jinping’s rule. In an era where states and politicians regularly weaponize moral emotions to foment intergroup conflict and violence, understanding the dynamics of violent mobilization and state authority are more relevant than ever before.

Jeffrey A. Javed is a former postdoctoral fellow at the Lieberthal-Rogel Center for Chinese Studies and the Weiser Center for Emerging Democracies at the University of Michigan. He currently lives in San Francisco.

List of Illustrations
List of Tables
Acknowledgements    
Abbreviations for Major Archival and Documentary Sources    
Part I: Theory and Origins
Introduction                                                       
Chapter 1. The Context and Structure of Violent Land Reform after 1949
Chapter 2. Tracing the Origins of Moral Mobilization                                              
Part II: Mobilizing Violence         
Chapter 3. The Process of Moral Mobilization                                                                    
Chapter 4. Coercive Control and Mass Mobilized Violence                                                     
Part III: Collective Identities and State Authority
Chapter 5. Constructing Class Enemies in Huaibei and Jiangnan                              
Chapter 6. Ingroup Solidarity and State-building During and After Land Reform
Part IV: Comparative Perspectives and Conclusion
Chapter 7 Moral Mobilization in Comparative Perspective                            Appendix A. Notes on Methodology and Sources                              
Appendix B. Table of Landlords Struggled Against in Baoshan County for Chapter 5
Bibliography     
Index