The Anti-Rightist Campaign and Political Labelling

Author(s):  
Ning Wang

This chapter contends that, although some intellectuals were labelled rightists because of their sharp criticism of Party policies and cadre officials (for their abuse of power) or because of their advocacy of greater intellectual freedom, many others were so labelled due to factional conflicts, personal animosity, grudges, and/or the mishandling of interpersonal relations. The chapter suggests that, although the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) launched the Anti-Rightist Campaign to punish opponents of the state, intellectuals and officials took advantage of it to attack their peers and competitors. As Party bosses and heads of work units had the power to interpret state policies and to determine a person's fortune, those individuals who did not truly display dissent but simply failed to adequately manage their relations with these power holders inevitably suffered in politically motivated campaigns.

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.


1977 ◽  
Vol 71 ◽  
pp. 473-497 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jürgen Domes

Early in March this year visitors to China reported seeing in Canton a wall-poster with the headline “ [I]t's not a ‘gang of four’ but a gang of five!” (pu shih ‘ssu-jen-pang,’ erh shih wu-jen-pang!). The poster alleged that the new chairman of the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party and premier of the State Council, Hua Kuofeng, had been a loyal follower of the Cultural Revolutionary Left led by Chiang Ch'ing, Wang Hung-wen, Chang Ch'un-ch'iao and Yao Wen-yüan from the beginning of the Cultural Revolution. It went on to claim that although he had turned against the personnel of the Left, he nevertheless remained a supporter of Leftist policies even today. We do not know whether the wall-posters “vilifying Chairman Hua,” for which seven men and two women were reportedly executed in Hangchow on 11 March 1977, and 26 people in Shanghai in early April, had carried the same accusation. But there is some evidence that certain, as yet unidentified, forces in China take a different view of the policies and attitudes of Hua Kuo-feng during the intra-elite conflict of the last few years, from that of most foreign observers of Chinese politics. Such observers have generally argued, since the spring of 1976, that Hua is a “middle-of-the-roader,” a politician having more in common with the ideas and values of the now dominant complex of veteran cadres and generals than with those of their “radical” Cultural Revolutionary adversaries.


Asian Survey ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 56 (2) ◽  
pp. 325-347 ◽  
Author(s):  
Patrick Gorman

This article explores the relationship between netizens and the Chinese Communist Party by investigating examples of “flesh searches” targeting corrupt officials. Case studies link the initiative of netizens and the reaction of the Chinese state to the pattern of management of social space in contemporary China.


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