‘Loving Capitalism Disease’: Aids and Ideology in the People’s Republic of China, 1984–2000*

2020 ◽  
Vol 249 (1) ◽  
pp. 251-294
Author(s):  
Julian Gewirtz

Abstract This article examines how the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) interpreted HIV/AIDS in the period from 1984, when the Chinese government first introduced policies reacting to the disease’s emergence, to 2000, when China’s devastating epidemic began to receive worldwide media attention. Important new sources show how the CCP cast HIV/AIDS as a staging ground for debates about the risks of liberalization and an evolving metaphor for deviance from socialism even in an era of capitalistic changes. Just as anti-capitalist ideology shaped official understandings of HIV/AIDS, so too did HIV/AIDS shape official views about the perils of China’s ‘reform and opening’ and the risks of capitalism to China. This two-way flow of meanings, which carried epidemiological and human consequences, illustrates the need for scholars of this period to foreground the evolving official ideology and forms of resistance to global capitalism — in politics, culture, society and even public health — rather than only the more common and sanguine narrative of rapid growth and economic development. Far more than previously understood, the interplay between AIDS and CCP ideology in this period reveals crucial dynamics in the evolution of China’s ongoing encounter with global capitalism.

2014 ◽  
Vol 2 (3) ◽  
pp. 245-274 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stefan R. Landsberger

On 1 October 2014, the People’s Republic of China (PRC) will observe the 65th anniversary of its founding which ended a decades’ long period of oppression by imperialism, internal strife and (civil) war. Under the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), modernisation became the most important task. Marxism-Leninism and Mao Zedong Thought guided the nation along this path that would lead to modernisation and the recognition of the new, strong China. As the first three decades passed, it became clear that ideological purity and revolutionary motivation did not lead to the realisation of the dream of rejuvenation. In late 1978, the Maoist revolutionary goals were replaced by the pragmatic policies that turned China into today’s economic powerhouse. How has this radical turn from revolution to economic development been realised? How has it affected China’s political, social and artistic cultures? Is China’s present Dream structurally different from the one cherished in 1949?


2017 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 193-214
Author(s):  
Paul P. Mariani

In the 1950s, Shanghai witnessed a conflict between the Chinese Communist Party (ccp) and the Shanghai Catholic community. The ccp wanted this community to break ties with the pope and form an “independent” Catholic Church that would fall under the authority of the Chinese government. Many Catholics in Shanghai soon resisted what they perceived to be the unjust religious policies of the ccp. One of the “backbone elements” of Catholic resistance in Shanghai was young women. This study investigates how three young Catholic women dealt with the ccp’s encroaching religious policies. All three came from similar backgrounds and they all initially formed part of the Catholic resistance to ccp religious policies during the early 1950s. Afterward their trajectories differed dramatically due to the particular way in which the Communist revolution intervened in the life of each woman. This study thus illuminates the contested area of religious faith, state power, and gender in the early years of the People’s Republic of China. 上世纪五十年代,上海见证了中共与上海天主教会之间的冲突。中共命令上海天主教会断绝与教宗的联系,成为一个听命于中国政府的“独立”教会。上海的许多天主教徒很快就起来抵制这些他们视为不公正的宗教政策。反抗运动中的许多“骨干分子”是年轻女信徒。本文探究了三位年轻的女天主教信徒如何应对当时中共侵权的宗教政策。她们有相似的生活背景,并都在50年代初期参与了抵制中共宗教政策的运动。但是因为中共革命介入她们生命的不同方式,她们之后的人生轨迹大相径庭。这项研究因此阐述了在中华人民共和国初期,宗教信仰、国家政权与性别之间充满张力的互动。


Author(s):  
Benno Weiner

This chapter explores the period from summer 1955 to summer 1956, a year that saw the sudden introduction of class analysis and protocollectivization into Amdo's grasslands. Spurred by the nationwide “High Tide of Socialist Transformation,” which sought to collectivize agriculture at a sudden and startling pace, in fall of 1955, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) organized “intensive investigations” into Amdo's pastoral society, efforts meant to pave the way for the staged introduction of pastoral cooperatives. By early 1956, Qinghai's leadership had made cooperativization (hezuohua) the year's core task in pastoral areas. Under these circumstances, the underpinnings of the United Front came under pressure as socialism itself was declared the means to achieve nationality unity and economic development. With revolutionary impatience threatening to overwhelm United Front pragmatism, the rhetoric used to describe Tibetan elites began to shift as well. Rather than covictims of nationality exploitation, headmen and monastic leaders were increasingly transformed into representatives of the pastoral exploiting class.


1987 ◽  
Vol 110 ◽  
pp. 256-275
Author(s):  
Jon W. Huebner

On 1 October 1949 the People's Republic of China was formally established in Beijing. On 7 December Chiang Kai-shek (Jiang Jieshi), who had earlier moved to Taiwan to secure a final base of resistance in the civil war, ordered the Kuomintang (KMT) regime to withdraw to the island from Chengdu, Sichuan, its last seat on the mainland. The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) declared its commitment to the goal of unifying the nation under the People's Republic, and thus called for the “liberation” of Taiwan. Although Taiwan represented the final phase of the still unfinished civil war, it was the strategic significance of the island that became of paramount concern to the CCP, the KMT and the United States.


2006 ◽  
Vol 8 (3) ◽  
pp. 15-33 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael M. Sheng

In October 1950 the Chinese leader Mao Zedong embarked on a two-front war. He sent troops to Korea and invaded Tibet at a time when the People's Republic of China was burdened with many domestic problems. The logic behind Mao's risky policy has baffled historians ever since. By drawing on newly available Chinese and Western documents and memoirs, this article explains what happened in October 1950 and why Mao acted as he did. The release of key documents such as telegrams between Mao and his subordinates enables scholars to understand Chinese policymaking vis-à-vis Tibet much more fully than in the past. The article shows that Mao skillfully used the conflicts for his own purposes and consolidated his hold over the Chinese Communist Party.


2015 ◽  
Vol 50 (1) ◽  
pp. 141-174 ◽  
Author(s):  
AMY KING

AbstractThe Chinese Communist Party was confronted with the pressing challenge of ‘reconstructing’ China's industrial economy when it came to power in 1949. Drawing on recently declassified Chinese Foreign Ministry archives, this article argues that the Party met this challenge by drawing on the expertise of Japanese technicians left behind in Northeast China at the end of the Second World War. Between 1949 and 1953, when they were eventually repatriated, thousands of Japanese technicians were used by the Chinese Communist Party to develop new technology and industrial techniques, train less skilled Chinese workers, and rebuild factories, mines, railways, and other industrial sites in the Northeast. These first four years of the People's Republic of China represent an important moment of both continuity and change in China's history. Like the Chinese Nationalist government before them, the Chinese Communist Party continued to draw on the technological and industrial legacy of the Japanese empire in Asia to rebuild China's war-torn economy. But this four-year period was also a moment of profound change. As the Cold War erupted in Asia, the Chinese Communist Party began a long-term reconceptualization of how national power was intimately connected to technology and industrial capability, and viewed Japanese technicians as a vital element in the transformation of China into a modern and powerful nation.


2020 ◽  
pp. 1-23
Author(s):  
Huwy-Min Lucia Liu

This article discusses how the Chinese Communist Party governed death in Shanghai during the first half of the People's Republic of China. It examines how officials nationalized funeral institutions, promoted cremation, and transformed what they believed to be the unproductivity of the funeral industry into productivity (by raising pigs in cemeteries, for instance). I show how each of these policies eliminated possible sources of identity that were prevalent in conceptualizing who the dead were and what their relationships with the living could be. Specifically, in addition to the construction of socialist workers, the state worked to remove cosmopolitan, associational, religious, and relational ideas of self. By modifying funerary rituals and ways of interment, the Chinese state aimed to produce individualized and undifferentiated political subjects directly tied to the party-state. The civil governance of death aimed to produce citizen-subjects at the end of life.


2018 ◽  
Vol 47 (1) ◽  
pp. 103-141 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ilker Gündoğan ◽  
Albrecht Sonntag

Football has become a field of high priority for development by the central government of the People's Republic of China. After Xi Jinping took office as General Secretary of the Chinese Communist Party in 2012, a football development strategy was launched, including four “comprehensive” reforms. The purpose of this study is to examine the perceptions of these reforms by Chinese football supporters – a fundamental stakeholder group – through an online survey. Particular emphasis was laid on how nationalistic attitudes underpin supporters' expectations, especially with regard to the concept of the “Chinese Dream.” In addition, issues of football governance were also addressed.


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