Where You Labor Is Where You Sing: The New Folksong Movement of 1958 and the Fissured Mediascape of Maoist China

Modern China ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 009770042094358
Author(s):  
Mark McConaghy
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
Communist Party ◽  
Chinese Communist Party ◽  
Modern China ◽  
Analytical Strategy ◽  
Creative Agency ◽  
The People ◽  
Great Leap Forward ◽  
The Great Leap Forward ◽  
Maoist China

This article examines the New Folksong Movement (NFM) of 1958–1959, which was launched by the Chinese Communist Party in conjunction with the Great Leap Forward (GLF) campaign. It employs an analytical strategy called fissured reading, whereby a discursive assemblage that seems ideologically uniform can be made to reveal the myriad tensions that its own positive facade works to conceal. While the NFM seems suffused with songs of praise for the GLF, closer inspection reveals a project riven with tensions regarding the creative agency of the people, the persistence of “old” songs in popular culture, and dialects. Such methodological concerns were in fact foundational to modern folk study in China as it developed from the 1920s onward. Understanding such historical connections can help us rethink the cultural revolutions in modern China as fissured projects, with tense cracks just beneath their surface that indicate unresolved contradictions passed on from one generation of reformers and revolutionaries to the next.

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.

Famine in Imperial and Modern China

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kathryn Edgerton-Tarpley
Keyword(s):  
Communist Party ◽  
Chinese Communist Party ◽  
18Th Century ◽  
Modern Science ◽  
Modern China ◽  
Famine Relief ◽  
State Legitimacy ◽  
Late Imperial ◽  
The People ◽  
Relief Operations

Famines have played an important role in China’s history. Because the Confucian classics interpreted natural disasters as warnings from Heaven, in ancient and imperial China feeding the people in times of crisis was viewed as an essential part of retaining the mandate to rule. Formative famine-relief measures were codified in China’s first imperial dynasty, the Qin (221–206 bce). The importance assigned to famine relief increased in the late imperial era, when a diverse array of local elites worked in tandem with officials to manage and fund relief operations. The Qing state (1644–1912) devoted an extraordinary amount of resources to famine relief, particularly during its 18th-century heyday. Beginning in the 19th century, however, the beleaguered late-Qing state increasingly lost the capacity to prevent droughts and floods from resulting in major famines. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, China’s nascent modern press drew national and international attention to frequent famines, leading to the burgeoning of foreign and nonstate relief activities in what came to be called the “land of famine.” After the fall of the Qing dynasty in 1912, famines continued to be a test of state legitimacy. But Chinese modernizers largely rejected Confucian interpretations of famine in favor of the claim that modern science and technology would provide the best defense against disasters. By the 1940s, both the Chinese Nationalists and their Communist rivals called on people to sacrifice for the nation even during famine times. The Chinese Communist Party came to power in 1949 promising that under Communist rule “not one person would starve to death,” but within a decade it presided over the most lethal famine in Chinese and world history. The horrors of the Great Leap Famine of 1958–1962 forced Chinese Communist Party leaders to make changes that ultimately paved the way for the rural reforms of the 1980s.

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.

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.

A hundred-year-long story (for the anniversary of the Сommunist party of China)

2021 ◽  
pp. 5
Author(s):  
Vladilen G. Burov
Keyword(s):  
Communist Party ◽  
Cultural Revolution ◽  
Xi Jinping ◽  
Armed Struggle ◽  
Republic Of China ◽  
The People ◽  
The World ◽  
Great Leap Forward ◽  
The Great Leap Forward ◽  
General Secretary

On July 1, 2021, celebrations were held in Beijing on the occasion of the centenary of the formation of the Communist Party of China. Its history is full of various tragic and heroic events. After a five-year period of cooperation with the Kuomintang (the National Party of China), due to the betrayal of the latter, a fifteen-year armed struggle between the two parties for power begins, interrupted for the time of Japan's aggression against China. In 1949, the People's Republic of China was created under the leadership of the Communist Party. The period of socialist construction is replaced by the time of the “great leap forward” and the people's communes, and then by the years of “the cultural revolution”. After 1976, the country gradually begins to implement a policy of reform and openness, which continues until the present time. The Communist Party comes to its anniversary with huge achievements, China has become the second most economically powerful power in the world. The General Secretary of the Communist Party Xi Jinping made a speech at the celebrations. First of all, he recalled the time when, as a result of the opium wars, China turned into a semi-colonial, semi-feudal country and paid tribute to the memory of the revolutionaries of the older generation who ended this condition. Then he listed the majestic tasks that the Chinese state faces in the field of domestic and foreign policy. The experience of the Chinese Communists in implementing the modernization of their country attracts attention all over the world and certainly deserves to be studied.

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.

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.

Together in the Same Boat: Exiled Nationalist State and Chinese Civil War Exiles in 1950s Taiwan

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-25
Author(s):  
Dominic Meng-Hsuan Yang
Keyword(s):  
Oral History ◽  
Communist Party ◽  
Chinese Communist Party ◽  
Local Population ◽  
Lower Class ◽  
Population Movement ◽  
Popular Belief ◽  
Mainland Chinese ◽  
The People ◽  
Main Factors

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.

Law According to the Chinese Communist Party: Constitutionalism and Socialist Rule of Law

Modern China ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 43 (3) ◽  
pp. 322-352 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ding Xiaodong
Keyword(s):  
Communist Party ◽  
Rule Of Law ◽  
Chinese Communist Party ◽  
Dominant Role ◽  
Political Concept ◽  
The People ◽  
State Regime ◽  
The Chinese Communist Party ◽  
Socialist Rule Of Law ◽  
Party State

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.

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