The Institutionalisation of the Chinese Communist Revolution: The Ladder of Success on the Eve of the Cultural Revolution

1968 ◽  
Vol 36 ◽  
pp. 61-92 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michel Oksenberg

By the mid 1960s, the leaders of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) had structured the opportunities and career choices available to the Chinese people. In their individual decisions, the Chinese people had to confront the questions Mao wanted them to face, such as whether to join the Party, to serve the people, and to become heavily involved in political life. Mao and his associates had helped to shape the determinants of social mobility and delineate the skills needed to get ahead and along in China. By 1965, the violence, uncertainty, and turmoil which affected lives during the revolutionary era had given way to a period of more stable, predictable, and structured career patterns.

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-25
Author(s):  
Dominic Meng-Hsuan Yang

Abstract When the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) came to power, one million mainland Chinese were forcibly displaced to Taiwan with Chiang Kai-shek's regime. Today, this event is still largely considered as a relocation of government or a military withdrawal operation instead of a massive population movement. Contrary to popular belief, many of the displaced mainlanders were not Nationalist elites. Most were common soldiers, petty civil servants, and war refugees from different walks of life. Based on newspapers, magazines, surveys, declassified official documents produced in 1950s Taiwan and contemporary oral history, this article uncovers the complicated relationship between the regime in exile and the people in exile. It argues that the interdependency between the two, in particular between the migrant state and the socially atomized lower class migrants, was formed gradually over a decade due to two main factors: wartime displacement and the need to face an unfriendly local population together.


1984 ◽  
Vol 97 ◽  
pp. 24-52 ◽  
Author(s):  
Graham Young

The legacies of the Cultural Revolution have been nowhere more enduring than in the Chinese Communist Party organization. Since late 1967, when the process of rebuilding the shattered Party began, strengthening Party leadership has been a principal theme of Chinese politics; that theme has become even more pronounced in recent years. It is now claimed that earlier efforts achieved nothing, and that during the whole “decade of turmoil” until 1976, disarray in the Party persisted and political authority declined still further. Recent programmes of Party reform, therefore, still seek to overcome the malign effects of the Cultural Revolution in order to achieve the complementary objectives of reviving abandoned Party “traditions” and refashioning the Party according to the new political direction demanded by its present leaders.


1969 ◽  
Vol 37 ◽  
pp. 54-83 ◽  
Author(s):  
Merle Goldman

From its inception until at least the Cultural Revolution, the Communist regime in China has had a twofold aim for its intellectuals: it has sought to indoctrinate them with the exclusive ideologies of Marxism-Leninism-Maoism, and it has tried to utilize their skills to develop an industrialized and modernized society. The Chinese Communist Party has attempted to implement these two policies by an insistence on the strict orthodoxy of thinking individuals, on the one hand, and by the encouragement of intellectuals to work creatively at their jobs on the other. This contradictory approach has resulted in a policy toward the intellectuals that has been alternatively severe and relaxed. Though the main trend is usually in one direction or the other, there have always been counter-currents present which can be revived when necessary.


Modern China ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 43 (3) ◽  
pp. 322-352 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ding Xiaodong

This article argues that the Chinese Communist Party has adopted a unique understanding of law. Unlike the liberal view and the unwritten constitution view, which generally consider law as positive norms that exist independently of politics, the party understands law as a reflection of the party’s and the people’s will and a form of the party’s and the people’s self-discipline. In the party’s view, liberal rule of law theories are self-contradictory, illusive, and meaningless. This article argues that the party views the people as a political concept and itself as a political leading party, marking a fundamental difference from a competitive party in a parliamentary system. The legitimacy of the party’s dominant role and the party-state regime, therefore, depends on whether the party can continue to provide political momentum to lead the people and represent them in the future.


Author(s):  
Christian P. Sorace

This chapter examines how the Chinese Communist Party engineered “glory” in the aftermath of the Sichuan earthquake by mobilizing the discourse of “Party spirit” (dangxing). In addition to being responsible for state administration and economic growth, the cadre is also an embodiment and conduit of Party legitimacy. Antithetical to Max Weber's definition of institutions as that which remove embodiment from governance, in China, cadres are Party legitimacy made flesh. As flesh, they must be prepared to suffer. This chapter argues that the Party revitalizes its legitimacy by showing benevolence and glory, which depend on the willingness of cadres to suffer and sacrifice themselves on behalf of the people. In the aftermath of the Sichuan earthquake, these norms and expectations were implemented in concrete policy directives and work pressures.


2017 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 65
Author(s):  
Satriono Priyo Utomo

During the leadership of President Sukarno, China had an important meaning not only for the people of Indonesia but also as a source of political concept from the perspective of Sukarno. In addition, China also had significance for the Indonesian Communist Party (PKI) as a meeting room prior to communist ideology. The paper employs literary study method and discusses about diplomatic relations between Indonesia and China during the Guidance Democracy ( 1949-1965). The relationship between two countries at that time exhibited closeness between Sukarno and Mao Tse Tung. The political dynamics at that time brought the spirit of the New Emerging Forces. Both leaders relied on mass mobilization politics in which Mao used the Chinese Communist Party while Sukarno used the PKI.Keywords: Indonesia, China, diplomacy, politics, ideology, communism


1967 ◽  
Vol 32 ◽  
pp. 3-36 ◽  
Author(s):  
Charles Neuhauser

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.


2016 ◽  
Vol 227 ◽  
pp. 653-673 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alessandro Russo

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.


1969 ◽  
Vol 38 ◽  
pp. 92-119 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard Baum

At the time the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) issued its now-famous Circular Notice of 16 May 1966, which roundly criticized Peking's Mayor P'eng Chen and thereby ushered in a dramatic new stage of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, a large-scale and intensive Socialist Education Movement was still being implemented systematically in the Chinese countryside.


2021 ◽  
Vol 8 (6) ◽  
pp. 135-140
Author(s):  
Qiangwei Zhou ◽  
◽  
Meng Li ◽  

Since the founding of the people’s Republic of China 70 years ago, under the premise that the Chinese people choose the Communist Party of China and the firm political direction guarantee that the Chinese people unswervingly accept the leadership of the Communist Party of China, our party has led the people through arduous efforts and struggle to overcome and break through all kinds of difficulties and obstacles that hinder the progress and development of the Chinese nation. Our party led the diligent and life-loving Chinese people to create world-renowned achievements in rapid economic development and the oriental miracle of long-term social stability, enabling the once-suffering Chinese people to achieve a great leap from standing up, getting rich to becoming strong. These remarkable achievements are great historical practices and fully prove that the socialist system with Chinese characteristics and the national governance system have distinct Chinese characteristics. They are in line with the development direction of human civilization, and have a powerful system of vitality and great superiority. It is the system and governance system to promote China’s economic and social progress and people’s all-round development. Adhering to and leveraging the significant advantages of China’s national system and national governance system, and gathering the strength of the entire people to do great things, is an inexhaustible source of power to ensure that the Chinese nation realizes the “two centenary” goals and realizes the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation.


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