Death and Transfiguration: Liu Shaoqi's Rehabilitation and Contemporary Chinese Politics

1981 ◽  
Vol 40 (3) ◽  
pp. 455-479 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lowell Dittmer

Liu Shaoqi, the highest-ranking Chinese Communist leader to fall victim to China's Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, was posthumously rehabilitated in spring 1980. His rehabilitation was accompanied by the publication of new materials on his life and career, enabling us to fill in various lacunae and to attempt a more comprehensive assessment of his political import. If the vindication is successful among China's still somewhat skeptical masses, Liu may come to serve as a popular symbol of the folly of spontaneous mass participation in politics and the essential continuity of China's Marxist-Leninist tradition from the 1950s to the 1980s. To China's officialdom, Liu will represent the ultimate integrity of the Party apparatus, an avatar of the self-cultivated rectitude of the “clean official.”

1994 ◽  
Vol 139 ◽  
pp. 704-713 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elizabeth J. Perry

In his survey of the field some years ago, Harry Harding noted that the study of contemporary Chinese politics stood then on the threshold of a third generation of scholarship. While the first generation had been limited by the atmosphere of the Cold War and the second had been overly influenced by the Cultural Revolution, Harding held out hope for a third generation able to surpass its predecessors in both substance and theoretical sophistication. Nearly a decade has passed since the publication of Harding's prescient article and in fact such a third generation can now be discerned - distinguished from the first two not only by the prevailing political atmosphere, but also by its theoretical perspective and access to source materials.


Author(s):  
David J. Lobina

The introduction of recursion into linguistics was the result of applying some of the results of mathematical logic to the study of language. In particular, recursion was introduced in the 1950s as a general property of the mechanical procedure underlying the grammar, in order to account for language’s discrete infinity and expressive power—in the 1950s, this mechanical procedure was a production system, whereas more recently, of course, it is the set-operator merge. Unfortunately, the recent literature has confused the general recursive property of a grammar with specific instances of (recursive) rules/operations within a grammar; more worryingly still, there has been a general conflation of these recursive rules with some of the self-embedded structures these rules can generate, adding to the confusion. The conflation is manifold but always fallacious. Moreover, language manifests a much more generally recursive structure than is usually recognized: bundles of the universal (Specifier)-Head-Complement(s) geometry.


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.


1984 ◽  
Vol 36 (2) ◽  
pp. 284-307 ◽  
Author(s):  
Harry Harding

Research on contemporary Chinese politics can be divided into two distinct generations since its initiation in the early 1960s. The first, produced before the Cultural Revolution, was characterized by general description rather than systematic comparison or sophisticated conceptualization. The second generation, which appeared in the late 1960s and early 1970s, assigned greater attention to describing the variation of Chinese politics over space and time, identifying the informal norms and mechanisms by which Chinese politics operates, and developing general theories of the Chinese political process. In a third generation, which is just now beginning to emerge, we should see efforts to absorb the new sources of information now available about China; to sort, test, and amalgamate the competing models produced by the second generation; to integrate the analysis of Chinese politics with the rest of comparative politics; and to study Chinese politics in an interdisciplinary fashion.


Author(s):  
Rachel Kranson

In the 1950s and early 1960s, American Jews wrestled with new models of masculinity that their new economic position enabled. For many American Jewish novelists, intellectuals, and clergy of the 1950s and early 1960s, the communal pressure on Jewish men to become middle-class breadwinners betrayed older, more Jewishly-authentic, notions of appropriate masculinity. Their writing promoted alternative, Jewish masculine ideals such as the impoverished scholar and the self-sacrificing soldier, crafting a profoundly gendered critique of Jewish upward mobility.


1974 ◽  
Vol 57 ◽  
pp. 146-148 ◽  
Author(s):  
William W. Whitson

Although many readers would probably interpret William Parish's article in the previous issue of The China Quarterly (“Factions in Chinese Military Politics,” CQ, No. 56, pp. 667–699) as an attack on my 1969 assessment of the historic role of the Field Army in post-1950 Chinese politics, I am nevertheless sincerely grateful to him for keeping the dialogue about “loyalty systems” alive. Indeed, I am struck by the irony of our respective positions. He seems to argue that, while the Field Army loyalty system apparently (according to my statistics) had little demonstrable impact on elite assignments before the Cultural Revolution, the same system apparently (according to his statistics) helps clarify factional behaviour within the PLA during and after the Cultural Revolution. The irony of this is doubled since the statistical evidence which I now have available argues that “the old boy net” of the Field Armies actually had a diminishing impact on the domestic politics of China in the late 1960s. By then the Military Region as a geo-political unit had replaced the Field Army as a temporary focus of individual and collective PLA loyalties.


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