"This original, important, and readable work offers a stimulating new interpretation of the Chinese Revolution and a mass of fresh, interesting evidence. Thaxton's argument breaks with conventional wisdom on a number of significant points and poses important challenges to all extant interpretations of the revolution as a whole. Thaxton's work explodes the simplistic dichotomies that have framed too many discussions of the Revolution itself and of the longer-term relationship between the CCP and the rural population. Salt of the Earth heralds a new post-Cold War era in our understanding of the Chinese Revolution."--Kenneth Pomeranz, author of The Making of a Hinterland "A most vivid and impressive contribution to a growing corpus of scholarly works on the various concrete ways in which the Chinese Communist Party was able to link itself to a rural 'mass base' in various areas of North China during the decades before 1949. Based on a judicious analysis of a vast body of oral history data drawn from interviews with peasants in three counties during the years 1985 and 1993, it sheds enormous light on the specific socioeconomic and cultural situation in one particular area while at the same time raising serious questions about both the Chinese Nationalist and Communist official histories of the period. Quite apart from its relevance to the general political history of China during those fateful years, it provides an amazingly vivid example of the possibility of doing local rural history in a way that brings alive the abstractions of socioeconomic and cultural history."--Benjamin Schwartz, author of Chinese Communism and the Rise of Mao