Moral Mobilization: Outrage, Sympathy, and Violence in Early Maoist China

• In Event: New Directions in the Study of Emotions and Violence

Abstract

How do political actors mobilize people to participate in collective violence against their neighbors? While the existing literature emphasizes the importance of material incentives, entrenched social cleavages, and revenge motives in driving collective violence, it has underplayed how moral beliefs and emotions inhibit or motivate ordinary citizens’ willingness to participate in or condone violence. Looking at the case of the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) mass mobilization of violence during its post-revolutionary land reform campaign in the early 1950s, I demonstrate that the CCP mobilized villagers to participate in public rituals of violence and to denounce, beat, torture, and kill alleged “class enemies” where it engaged in moral mobilization. Through moral mobilization, Party and state cadres leveraged shared norms of care and fairness to demarcate a virtuous ingroup and a villainous outgroup, eliciting sympathy for the former and outrage against the latter. In this “war for sympathy” against local elites, cadres elicited villagers’ sympathy for the suffering of their fellow villagers to generate ingroup solidarity, while rousing outrage against a select number of alleged transgressors among the local elite to push them, as a group, outside of the community’s “span of sympathy” (Coser 1969), transforming them into targets deserving of violent reprisal. Arguing against class cleavage and material incentive explanations, I use a “most different” design that delineates parallel processes in two radically different socioeconomic contexts: the impoverished northern region of Huaibei and the prosperous southern region of Jiangnan in central-eastern China. The within-case process tracing for each case draws on numerous archival documents, internal Party documents, oral histories, memoirs, and local gazetteers from Anhui and Jiangsu provinces.

Author

• Jeffrey Arshad Javed, University of Michigan