The peasant movement that swept China in the mid 1920's originated in Kwangtung Province in 1922 when P'eng P'ai organized peasant unions in Haifeng hsien. The unions spread into neighboring hsien, but not until 1924, following the reorganization of the Kuomintang and its alliance with the Chinese Communist Party and the subsequent creation of the Peasant Bureau and Peasant Institute, did the peasant movement spread throughout the province. The peasant unions grew rapidly and by June 1927 they had enrolled perhaps 700,000 members. The very explosiveness of the movement's development and the increasingly violent tactics used by peasant organizers to mobilize the peasants aggravated a growing rift between factions within the Kuomintang. This rift led to the collapse of the United Front of the KMT and CCP and destroyed the peasant movement. Beginning in June 1926 counter-revolutionary forces attacked the unions. Peasant forces that survived these first onslaughts were crushed by regular Kuomintang troops in 1927 and 1928. This thesis is an examination of the peasant movement in Kwangtung from 1922 to 1928, and it seeks to explain why the movement ended in failure. To answer this question various characteristics of seven regions within the province are discussed, providing the material for an analysis (that appears in Chapter III) of why some regions organized peasant unions more successfully than others. The second chapter traces where and when unions developed and how strong they became. The third and concluding chapter of the thesis compares and contrasts the material presented in the preceding chapters, and it concludes that not only the breakdown of the United Front doomed the Kwangtung peasant movement to failure, but that the strength of the local, traditional society determined how successful the unions would be. / Arts, Faculty of / History, Department of / Graduate

The Zapatista National Liberation Army (EZLN) rose up in Mexico’s southeastern state of Chiapas on January 1, 1994. The Zapatistas’ process of consolidating territorial autonomy and stance of radical refusal are a challenge and threat to the Mexican state and neoliberal governance practices. At the center of that autonomy process are changes in gender equity and gendered relations of power that are crucial to the gains of the project. This multi-sited ethnography of that process takes place in a zone of contact where local practices and struggles for indigenous rights, autonomy, and women’s rights meet with solidarity and opposition. My dissertation follows two strategic lines of inquiry. First, women’s bodies have been central to both nation building and to alternative forms of nationalism and tradition. In Mexico, indigenous women have been the raw material of these projects. The EZLN included questions of gender and women’s equity from the beginning of the movement. This contrasts with other social movements of the past few decades in Latin America, and with the conventional wisdom that it is necessary to elide gender contestations and challenges to patriarchy in order to make gains as a movement. I argue that the overall struggle has not in fact been undermined, but strengthened. I examine the extent to which Zapatista women have forged new subjectivities (affirming both gender equality and collective cultural difference) in defiance of local patriarchal control, gendered state violence, and of discourses that characterize them as victims of their culture. Second, I argue that the analysis of these changes in gendered relations of power reveals how the Zapatista autonomy project is integrating difference without reverting to previous models of belonging premised on assimilation or the recognition of difference solely at the individual level. The EZLN rejected a solution based on ethnic citizenship in favor of indigenous autonomy and collective rights; their autonomous governance offers important insights into state power and its effects, and into strategies and alternatives to inclusion in the neoliberal project. / text

The important and exemplary role that Internet technology played in enhancing the publicity campaign of the Chiapas insurgents in their struggle for political reform in Mexico, is the focus of this thesis. By examining the Internet as an alternative distribution network for Subcomandante Marcos' communiques, it can be conjectured that the technology provided him with a space through which his voice could be heard in the international political arena. It was a space both external to Mexican government control, and through which Macros disseminated a powerful discourse representing the insurgents' political goals and grievances--one contrary to that being transmitted by the state-controlled media. Internet technology, it can be argued, generated the necessary national and international public consciousness, opinion, scrutiny and support for the Chiapas insurgents, that ultimately transformed their conflict with the Mexican government from a violent war of arms, to one of peaceful negotiation and dialogue.

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This thesis studies the rhetoric of the Zapatista Revolution and social movement through the analysis of Zapatista messages using the method of cluster criticism. It explores changes in the rhetoric of confrontation and the rhetoric of peace used by the Zapatistas to further their cause during the last ten years of the revolution.

Grounded in the geographies of Chiapas, Mexico, the dissertation maps a cartography of Zapatista indigenous resistance practices and charts the production of decolonial political subjectivities in an era of neoliberal governance and low intensity conflict. It analyzes the relationship between local cultural political expressions of indigenous autonomy, global capitalist interests and neoliberal rationalities of government after more than decade of Zapatista struggle. Since 1996, Zapatista indigenous Mayan communities have engaged in the creation of alternative education, health, agricultural production, justice, and governing bodies as part of the daily practices of autonomy. The dissertation demonstrates that the practices of Zapatista indigenous autonomy reflect current shifts in neoliberal state governing logics, yet it is in this very terrain where key ruptures and destabilizing practices emerge. The dissertation focuses on the recolonization aspects of neoliberal rationalities of government in their particular Latin American post Cold War, post populist manifestations. I argue that in Mexico's indigenous regions, the shift towards the privatization of state social services, the decentralization of state governing techniques and the transformation of state social programs towards an emphasis on greater self-management occurs in a complex relationship to mechanisms of low intensity conflict. Their multiple articulations effect the reproduction of social and biological life in sites, which are themselves terrains of bio-political contention: racialized women's bodies and feminized domestic reproductive and care taking roles; the relationship between governing bodies and that governed; land reform as linked to governability and democracy; and the production of the indigenous subject in a multicultural era. In each of these arenas, the dissertation charts a decolonial cartography drawn by the following cultural political practices: the construction of genealogies of social memories of struggle, a governing relationship established through mandar obedeciendo, land redistribution through zapatista agrarian reform, pedagogical collective selfreflection in women’s collective work, and the formation of political identities of transformation. Finally, the dissertation discusses the possibilities and challenges for engaging in feminist decolonizing dialogic research, specifically by analyzing how Zapatista members critiqued the politics of fieldwork and adopted the genres of the testimony and the popular education inspired workshop as potential decolonizing methodologies. / text