The Political Use of Lu Xun

1982 ◽  
Vol 91 ◽  
pp. 446-461
Author(s):  
Merle Goldman
Keyword(s):  
20Th Century ◽  
Communist Party ◽  
Chinese Communist Party ◽  
The Political ◽  
Lu Xun ◽  
Great Leap ◽  
Historical Figures ◽  
Political Factions ◽  
Great Leap Forward ◽  
The Great Leap Forward

As dynasties have traditionally used historical figures for their own political purposes, so too has the Chinese Communist Party used famous figures for its political purposes. Perhaps, more than any other person in the 20th century, the Party has used the prestige of China's pre-eminent modern writer Lu Xun for a wide variety of political, ideological, and factional purposes. Since his death in October 1936, his life and work have been interpreted in different periods to conform to the latest mutation in party policy. And when the Party became factionalized after the Great Leap Forward, different political factions used Lu Xun to represent their conflicting political positions.

The Chinese Communist Party in the 1960s: Prelude to the Cultural Revolution

1967 ◽  
Vol 32 ◽  
pp. 3-36 ◽  
Author(s):  
Charles Neuhauser
Keyword(s):  
Communist Party ◽  
Cultural Revolution ◽  
Chinese Communist Party ◽  
Commedia Dell'arte ◽  
Great Leap ◽  
Great Leap Forward ◽  
The Chinese Communist Party ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
The Great Leap Forward ◽  
The Cultural Revolution

The recent events in China are surely drama of the highest order, but at times it has seemed that the actors themselves were not entirely sure who was writing the lines. In fact what we seem to be witnessing is a form of commedia dell'arte: improvisation within a certain tacitly understood framework. The cultural revolution appears to have taken new turns and to have broken into new channels precisely because the actors have been faced with new and unforeseen circumstances as it has run its course. No faction in the struggle has been able to impose its will on the Party or the country by fiat; new devices and stratagems have been brought into play in what has looked like desperate attempts to gain the upper hand. It has clearly been a battle of the utmost seriousness, but there appear to have been limitations on the resultant chaos. Economic disorganisation does not seem to have occurred on the scale of the later stages of the Great Leap Forward. Nor, despite the clashes, confusion and bitter infighting, have new centres of power, totally divorced from the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) itself, arisen. The cultural revolution has been pre-eminently a struggle within the Party.

Tibetans do the Housework, but Han are the Masters

2020 ◽  
pp. 146-160
Author(s):  
Benno Weiner
Keyword(s):  
Communist Party ◽  
Chinese Communist Party ◽  
High Tide ◽  
Great Leap ◽  
Great Leap Forward ◽  
United Front ◽  
The One ◽  
The Great Leap Forward ◽  
Minority Nationality ◽  
Party Congress

This chapter looks at the events in Zeku County and beyond from the end of the High Tide in summer of 1956 through the eve of the Great Leap Forward in late 1957. This period, referred to as an “un-Maoist interlude,” was marked by a retreat from plans for rapid collectivization and even saw a push during the One Hundred Flowers campaign to encourage open criticism of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) so that its mistakes could be rectified. A centerpiece was soliciting critiques from United Front figures, particularly Han intellectuals but also leading minority nationality figures. Among the latter, many complained that the autonomy the CCP promised non-Han communities at the time of “Liberation” had proved more mirage than fact. Far from a reactionary stance, in the months following the Eighth Party Congress, this critique was widely promoted in Party and government circles.

Rwanda and China

2020 ◽  
pp. 219-247
Author(s):  
Graham Harrison
Keyword(s):  
Communist Party ◽  
Late Stage ◽  
Chinese Communist Party ◽  
Poverty Reduction ◽  
Early Stage ◽  
Agricultural Transformation ◽  
Great Leap ◽  
Chinese Case ◽  
Great Leap Forward ◽  
The Great Leap Forward

This chapter reviews the contrasting experiences of Rwanda and China. It does so to show how an early-stage and late-stage capitalist transformation might reveal risk involved in developmentalism. Rwanda’s post-genocide government is analysed as early-developmentalist. Here the focus is on agricultural transformation. An analysis of Rwanda’s developmentalism focuses on the insecurity of the elite, the insecurities of the region, and the challenges of reconstruction. The Chinese case starts with the accession to power of the Chinese Communist Party. It looks at the violence of the Great Leap Forward and then the post-Mao period. It analyses the sources of growth in China since 1978, showing how the state’s legitimacy shifted from socialist nationalism to a growth obsession in which capitalist accumulation became the source of legitimacy. It emphasizes China’s massive nut incomplete progress in poverty reduction and transformation.

Yang Xianzhen's Critique of the Great Leap Forward

1992 ◽  
Vol 26 (3) ◽  
pp. 591-608 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Schoenhals
Keyword(s):  
Communist Party ◽  
Chinese Communist Party ◽  
Central Committee ◽  
Great Leap ◽  
Great Leap Forward ◽  
The Chinese Communist Party ◽  
The Great Leap Forward

Kang Sheng—a veteran counter-intelligence official and close political ally of Mao Zedong's—is said to have remarked in the winter of 1959 that among the critics of the Great Leap Forward (GLF) there was ‘One soldier’ and ‘One civilian’ whose criticisms were ‘in close harmony’. The soldier was Peng Dehuai, China's Minister of Defence, who had clashed with Mao at the Lushan Conference that summer, and whose criticism of the GLF had subsequently been denounced by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) Central Committee as an ‘attempt at splitting the Party´ and ‘a ferocious assault on the Party Center and Comrade Mao Zedong's leadership’. The civilian was Yang Xianzhen, the President of the Central Party School, who had aroused Kang's wrath by condemning the GLF as hopelessly Utopian, and by claiming that it already had brought on starvation and might yet bring about the collapse of the CCP.

scholarly journals Mummifying the Working Class: The Cultural Revolution and the Fates of the Political Parties of the 20th Century

2016 ◽  
Vol 227 ◽  
pp. 653-673 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alessandro Russo
Keyword(s):  
Political Parties ◽  
Working Class ◽  
20Th Century ◽  
Communist Party ◽  
Cultural Revolution ◽  
Chinese Communist Party ◽  
Party Systems ◽  
The Political ◽  
The Cultural Revolution

AbstractA number of prolonged political experiments in Chinese factories during the Cultural Revolution proved that, despite any alleged “historical” connection between the Communist Party and the “working class,” the role of the workers, lacking a deep political reinvention, was framed by a regime of subordination that was ultimately not dissimilar from that under capitalist command. This paper argues that one key point of Deng Xiaoping's reforms derived from taking these experimental results into account accurately but redirecting them towards the opposite aim, an even more stringent disciplining of wage labour. The outcome so far is a governmental discourse which plays an important role in upholding the term “working class” among the emblems of power, while at the same time nailing the workers to an unconditional obedience. The paper discusses the assumption that, while this stratagem is one factor behind the stabilization of the Chinese Communist Party, it has nonetheless affected the decline of the party systems inherited from the 20th century.

Third Sister Liu and the Making of the Intellectual in Socialist China

2010 ◽  
Vol 69 (1) ◽  
pp. 57-83 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eddy U
Keyword(s):  
Communist Party ◽  
Chinese Communist Party ◽  
Local Resistance ◽  
Political Subject ◽  
The Social ◽  
State And Society ◽  
Chinese Intellectual ◽  
Great Leap Forward ◽  
Social Type ◽  
The Great Leap Forward

Through an analysis of Third Sister Liu, a popular musical of the early 1960s, this article illustrates how the Chinese Communist Party mobilized state and society to express disparaging ideas about the intellectual during the Great Leap Forward. The Chinese intellectual was not any specific social type, group, or individual, but a substrate upon which the party organized and promoted its vision and division of society. Official representations, organization, and the threat of punishment underpinned the party's efforts and produced local resistance toward the party's understanding of the intellectual. The author's analytical approach stresses the social work of construction that reproduced the intellectual as a major political subject, an official classification, and an embodied identity in socialist China. The analysis illuminates heretofore obscured dimensions of Communist Party rule and experiences of those affected by the classification.

scholarly journals The Political Leadership of Mao Zedong

2018 ◽  
Vol 2 (4) ◽  
pp. 28-33
Author(s):  
Donia Zhang
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Revolution ◽  
Chinese Communist Party ◽  
Mao Zedong ◽  
Party Leader ◽  
The Political ◽  
Second Phase ◽  
Political Movements ◽  
Great Leap Forward ◽  
The Great Leap Forward ◽  
The Masses

This paper presents an analysis of the former Chinese Communist Party leader Chairman Mao Zedong's political career (reigned 1949-1976), with regards to his success and failures. Mao was one of the most prominent Communist theoreticians who governed a quarter of humankind for a quarter of a century. His political philosophy, particularly his Method of Leadership, focusing on the "masses" is discussed here. The analytical arguments are centered on three phases of his leadership: the rise, the apex, and the fall. In the first phase, the paper attributes his victory before 1949 to his profound understanding of Chinese peasants. In the second phase, it elaborates on his successful method of leadership in the early 1950s. And in the third and last phase, it criticizes his disastrous political movements, particularly the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution, from the late 1950s to the mid-1970s. The study hopes to offer an objective and a balanced view of Chairman Mao, who had a complex personality and was a highly controversial figure in human history. The article also wishes to help readers gain a better understanding of China's top leader in recent history, and how China came to be what it is today.

Latin America and the Soviet-Chinese Conflict (the 1960s – mid-1970s)

2021 ◽  
pp. 149
Author(s):  
Andrey Schelchkov
Keyword(s):  
Latin America ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
20Th Century ◽  
Communist Party ◽  
Chinese Communist Party ◽  
New Left ◽  
The Political ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
Communist Movement ◽  
The Chinese Communist Party

The disagreements and rupture between the Chinese Communist Party and the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) were the most important event in the history of the International Communist Movement in the 60s and 70s of the 20th century, which had a huge impact on the fate of communist parties around the world. Latin America has become a place of fierce rivalry between Moscow and Beijing for influence on the political left flank. Moscow's tough opposition to any attempts by the Chinese Communist Party to increase its influence in the continent's communist parties without resorting to splitting them caused a backlash and a change in the policy of criticism within the parties to a policy of secession of independent “anti-revisionist” communist parties. Maoist communist parties emerged in all countries of the continent, opposing their policies to the pro-Moscow left parties. Maoism was able to penetrate not only the old communist movement but also the ranks of socialists, leftist nationalists and even Christian democrats. It often became the ideological and political basis for a break with the “traditional” left parties, a kind of transit bridge towards the “new left”. The ideas of Maoism were partly accepted by the trend of the “new left”, which gained special weight among the intelligentsia and students of the continent. This article is devoted to the emergence and development of the Maoist Communist Parties, the reaction of Moscow and Havana in the political circumstances of Latin America in the 60s of the 20th century.

scholarly journals Der Große Sprung nach Vorne (1958 - 1961). Eine Auseinandersetzung mit den Ursachen der „Drei bitteren Jahre“.

2015 ◽  
pp. 69
Author(s):  
Linus Konzett
Keyword(s):  
Communist Party ◽  
Complex Structures ◽  
Communist Party Of China ◽  
Great Leap ◽  
Great Leap Forward ◽  
The Great Leap Forward

The Great Leap Forward (1959 - 1961).  A debate on the causes of the „Three bitter Years“. The following pro-seminar paper deals with the interwoven and complex structures of the Communist Party of China in the late 1950s and the early 1960s and their socioeconomical policy of the so called „Great Leap Forward“ that lead in connection with  miscalculation, supression, terror and utopian ideas to the most fatal famine in China’s history.     

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