Big Democracy

2019 ◽  
pp. 99-127
Author(s):  
Joel Andreas
Keyword(s):  
Political Participation ◽  
Cultural Revolution ◽  
Party Organization ◽  
Party Leadership ◽  
Rebel Groups ◽  
The Masses ◽  
Local Party ◽  
The Cultural Revolution

Chapter 5 recounts the initial upheavals of the Cultural Revolution, when Mao called on workers to form “rebel” organizations to challenge the authority of the party leadership in their factories. Mao called this unbridled political participation “Big Democracy,” which he contrasted to more civil and institutionalized forms. By fomenting a movement independent of the party organization and loyal to no one but himself, Mao was able to introduce greater autonomy into mass supervision, with lasting consequences for cadre behavior. Local party cadres were criticized for abusing their power, seeking privileges, suppressing criticism from below, isolating themselves from the masses, and governing in a bureaucratic fashion. Virtually all were thrown out of office, and rebel groups were invited to help decide who among them were fit to be rehabilitated. After the party organization was paralyzed, however, factories polarized into rebel and conservative camps and the country descended into increasingly violent factional contention.

Control and Style: Discipline Inspection Commissions Since the 11th Congress

1984 ◽  
Vol 97 ◽  
pp. 24-52 ◽  
Author(s):  
Graham Young
Keyword(s):  
Communist Party ◽  
Cultural Revolution ◽  
Chinese Communist Party ◽  
Political Authority ◽  
Chinese Politics ◽  
Party Organization ◽  
Party Leadership ◽  
The Chinese Communist Party ◽  
The Cultural Revolution

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.

Chinese Art of the Cultural Revolution

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
William H. Ma
Keyword(s):  
Young People ◽  
Cultural Revolution ◽  
Mao Zedong ◽  
Chinese Art ◽  
Political Propaganda ◽  
The Arts ◽  
Cultural Sites ◽  
The Masses ◽  
Visual Materials ◽  
The Cultural Revolution

The art of the Cultural Revolution in China, created during the ten-year period from 1967 to 1977, includes a large variety of visual materials in different media. Generally characterized by unambiguous and heroic images that appealed to the masses, these artworks became powerful tools of political propaganda. Most scholars attribute the beginning of the Cultural Revolution to the 1965 play HaiRui Dismissed from Office. Written by Wu Han, a local Communist official, the play was a thinly veiled critique of Mao Zedong. Though semi-retired in the early 1960s, Mao was determined to hold on to power by launching a new revolution to reawaken young Chinese people and root out the counterrevolutionary and anti-proletarian elements in society. Under Mao’s directive, people, places, and things representing the Four Olds (Old Customs, Old Culture, Old Habits, and Old Ideas) were targeted and violently attacked by young people wearing red armbands and carrying the Little Red Book, a collection of quotes by Mao. Party officials, teachers, professors, authors, and artists had their homes raided and were publically dragged out by the Red Guards for public humiliation. In addition, historical and cultural sites were desecrated and vandalized. While the real violence only lasted the first few years, it set the tone of militarism and revolutionary fervor for the next decade, which permeated through all the arts.

How far right local party organizations develop

2016 ◽  
Vol 23 (6) ◽  
pp. 804-820 ◽  
Author(s):  
Antonis A Ellinas ◽  
Iasonas Lamprianou
Keyword(s):  
Organizational Development ◽  
National Level ◽  
Organizational Outcomes ◽  
Party Organization ◽  
Far Right ◽  
Data Set ◽  
Party Leadership ◽  
Party Organizations ◽  
Unique Data ◽  
Local Party

The literature on far right parties emphasizes the importance of party organization for electoral persistence. Yet, a lot is still unknown about the organizational development of these parties. This article examines the microdynamics of organizational development and explores why some party organizations succeed and others fail. It focuses on the local rather than the national level and analyzes grassroots activities rather than party leadership, institutions, or members. To analyze organizational development, the article uses an original and unique data set of 3594 activities of the Greek Golden Dawn (GD) supplemented by interviews with the GD leadership and activists as well as with evidence from hundreds of newspaper reports. It uses this evidence to trace local party activism and to document variation in local organizational outcomes. To account for why some local party organizations succeed or fail, it suggests that, rather than solely following electoral logic, the organizational development of far right parties also relates to the way they respond to challenges from antifascist groups and state authorities.

The Chinese Communist Youth Movement, 1949–1966

1970 ◽  
Vol 42 ◽  
pp. 105-130 ◽  
Author(s):  
Victor Funnell
Keyword(s):  
Communist Party ◽  
Cultural Revolution ◽  
Party Organization ◽  
Youth Organizations ◽  
Youth Movement ◽  
Red Guard ◽  
The Cultural Revolution

In the Cultural Revolution, the task of dismantling and reorganizing the Communist Party has not spared the various youth organizations that operated under the Party's aegis. Mao's injunction to “bombard” the bourgeois central headquarters within the Party has involved a similar bombardment of lesser headquarters in dependent establishments. Just as the Party organization was by-passed in the formation of rebel committees, so Communist youth organizations have been subsumed or swamped in the Red Guard movement. The Youth League in particular, as the Party's “main assistant,” has shared its fate.

The Radical Students in Kwangtung during the Cultural Revolution

1975 ◽  
Vol 64 ◽  
pp. 645-683 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hong Yung Lee
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Revolution ◽  
Political Institutions ◽  
Political System ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Distinctive Character ◽  
The Status ◽  
Future Direction ◽  
The Masses ◽  
Self Examination ◽  
The Cultural Revolution

The Cultural Revolution was a large-scale self-examination by the Chinese of their political system, involving all the ruling groups as well as the whole population. Not only specific policy issues but also social. economic and political institutions and their value premises were subjected to this examination. Hoping to reverse the trend towards social restratification based on Party bureaucratism, Mao sought to build a mass consensus on the future direction of the revolution. However, in the process of “freely mobilizing the masses,” some social groups found that their interests called for a radical restructuring of the Chinese political system, while those of others lay in the status quo. As the Cultural Revolution (CR) unfolded, the masses and the elite further divided among themselves over the various issues: elite groupings took conservative or radical positions, and formed coalitions with corresponding sections of the masses. Consequently, the division between the radicals and the conservatives cut through both the elite and the masses and set in motion forces that gave the Cultural Revolution its distinctive character.

The Cultural Revolution, Soviet Mentality, and the Order of Discourse

2019 ◽  
Vol 29 (2) ◽  
pp. 221-250
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Revolution ◽  
Initial Position ◽  
Material Force ◽  
Active Involvement ◽  
The Arts ◽  
Creative Force ◽  
Object Of Study ◽  
The Individual ◽  
The Masses ◽  
The Cultural Revolution

One of the main topics of theoretical discussions following 1968 was raised by Michel Foucault, who argued for the formative role of discourse - that discourse has regulating effects that extend not only to the structure of utterances, but also to speakers themselves. The shift in viewpoint that Foucault accomplished has provided a way to see discourse not only as a medium of power, but as power itself, a power that generates the subjectivity of those who use or gain access to use of a given discourse. Recognizing this power in discourse enabled Foucault to overturn the traditional conception of the individual as the ontological source of speech (“the creative force determining the initial position of writing”) and to redefine it as a function of the utterance itself that guarantees grammatical unity and the conceptual and stylistic cohesion of speech. This analytical perspective is applicable to the historical materials on the debates about the paths and methods of the Soviet cultural revolution that the victorious proletariat should employ in order to shore up the social victory of October 1917. The problems confronting Soviet theoreticians and agents of the cultural revolution had much in common with those that would be conceptualized later on in discussions from the 1970s and 1980s. The form of assimilation of this normative order and the mechanisms of ideological Interpellation, which imply the active involvement of Soviet citizens in production of discourses, are the central topics in this examination as they provide insight into how an idea becomes a material force and how it captures the masses. The immediate object of study is the worker and village correspondent (rabkor and selkor) movement of the 1920s as well as its understanding by theorists of the Left Front of the Arts

Thought Reform and Cultural Revolution: An Analysis of the Symbolism of Chinese Polemics

1977 ◽  
Vol 71 (1) ◽  
pp. 67-85 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lowell Dittmer
Keyword(s):  
Political Culture ◽  
Cultural Revolution ◽  
Educational Achievement ◽  
Cultural Transformation ◽  
Social Categories ◽  
Major Purpose ◽  
Thought Reform ◽  
The Masses ◽  
Chinese Political Culture ◽  
The Cultural Revolution

Although the major purpose of the Cultural Revolution was to transform Chinese political culture, the way in which this transformation took place has remained unclear. This paper attempts to understand cultural transformation as a process of interaction within a semiological system, consisting of a network of communicators and a lexicon of political symbols. The pragmatic aspect of this process is the outcome of an interplay among the intentions of the elites, the masses, and the target of criticism: political circumstances during the Cultural Revolution were more benign to the cathartic and hortatory intentions of the masses and elites than to the expiatory needs of the target. The syntactic aspect of the system concerns the relationship among symbols: These were found to form a dichotomous structure divided by a taboo barrier, which elicited strong but ambivalent desires to achieve a revolutionary breakthrough. The semantic aspect of the symbolism refers to problematic dimensions of experience in Chinese political culture–the psychological repression imposed by a system of rigid social censorship, the political discrimination practiced against certain social categories, the persistence of differences in income or educational achievement in a socialist system–and suggests that these “contradictions” may be resolved by bold frontal assault.The symbolism of Cultural Revolution polemics has now become part of Chinese political culture. Its impact seems to have been to inhibit social differentiation (particularly hierarchical), to encourage greater mass participation, and to foster more frequent and irreconcilable conflict among elites.

Settling Accounts with the Cultural Revolution at Beijing University 1977–78

1980 ◽  
Vol 82 ◽  
pp. 308-333 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robin Munro
Keyword(s):  
University Students ◽  
Educational Policy ◽  
Cultural Revolution ◽  
New Approach ◽  
The Status ◽  
Student Enrolment ◽  
The Masses ◽  
The Cultural Revolution

The purpose of this report is to focus upon two events of some significance that took place at Beijing University (Beida) between late November 1977 and 1978. The first of these was a spontaneous, grassroots polemic concerning an innovation of the Cultural Revolution period. At issue was the radically new approach to the problem of rearing new generations of proletarian intellectuals, namely, the “worker-peasant-soldiers7” student enrolment policy, whereby university students were selected through recommendation by the masses instead of on the basis of examination results. This polemic constituted an uninvited interlude in the carrying out at Beida of the nationwide “third campaign” in the criticism of the “gang of four,” and focused upon the problem of how, in the light of recent changes in educational policy, the status of worker-peasant-soldier students was to be evaluated.

Factions

2021 ◽  
pp. 19-40
Author(s):  
Dong Guoqiang ◽  
Andrew G. Walder
Keyword(s):  
Middle School ◽  
Cultural Revolution ◽  
Committee Member ◽  
Top Down ◽  
Standing Committee ◽  
Party Leadership ◽  
Large Cities ◽  
Rebel Groups ◽  
Party Secretary ◽  
Red Guard

This chapter begins by discussing how Feng County's leaders established a Cultural Revolution committee. The first party secretary, Gao Ying, was the head, and the vice-heads were Shao Wen and one other party standing committee member. The county leadership was able to maintain top-down control of the campaign for almost half a year. Not until the end of December 1966, several months after such events in China's large cities, did Red Guard and rebel groups begin to target Feng County's party leadership. The rebellion of students and others was very slow to develop, but the first stirrings were in the county seat, at Feng County Middle School. Feng County's rebel movement was so small, and so late in developing, that there were no factional divisions of the kind that emerged in China's large cities early in the autumn of 1966. The chapter then looks at the formation of the first broad alliance of local rebels, one that would play a key role in the county's factional conflicts over the next decade. The alliance became one of the county's two large factions, henceforth known by its abbreviated name, Paolian.

Huxian’s Foolish Old Men Create New Scenes: Huxian Peasant Paintings from the Cultural Revolution and their Ideological Discourses

1969 ◽  
pp. 44-67
Author(s):  
Dean Ashton
Keyword(s):  
Communist Party ◽  
Cultural Revolution ◽  
Chinese Communist Party ◽  
Rural China ◽  
Discursive Formation ◽  
Large Numbers ◽  
The Masses ◽  
Professional Artists ◽  
Old Men ◽  
The Cultural Revolution

Huxian Peasant Paintings are a product of the Chinese Cultural Revolution. Ostensibly painted by peasant amateur artists, they depict idealized peasants in rural China. The paintings were reproduced in large numbers and distributed as posters for the masses. Further evidence has shown that the amateur artists were in fact given detailed training by professional artists under the guidance of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). This paper seeks to analyze the images as important political texts from the Cultural Revolution because of the influence of the CCP. Using discourse analysis, this paper argues that these posters are an important discursive formation that allowed the CCP to transmit ideology to a largely illiterate or semiliterate rural population.

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