Chinese Communist Revolution

The communist revolution of China was led by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), which was founded in 1921 in the wake of the May Fourth movement. The CCP began as a very small Marxist‐inspired left‐wing intellectual club, with little political influence prior to its alliance with the Chinese Nationalist Party (GMD) in 1924. The GMD were motivated to ally with the CCP in order to obtain support from the Soviet Union in their fight with the northern warlords. With the help of the CCP, the GMD was remodeled from a loose organization into a Leninist party, and the GMD also received financial and other support from the Soviet Union. Meanwhile, the CCP also developed quickly by infiltrating the GMD‐controlled army and by expanding its organizations in the urban and rural areas of southern China. While the alliance between the GMD and CCP brought great success for both parties, tensions also grew as the parties pursued different agendas. After the initial military success against the warlords during the Northern Expedition, a growing number of the GMD's leaders and generals became very unhappy about the CCP's infiltration into the GMD‐controlled army as well as about the CCP's radical property redistribution policy, which was implemented in the territories recently occupied by the GMD's Northern Expedition army. As a result they no longer wanted to share the power with the CCP. In early 1927, shortly after Northern Expedition troops occupied Shanghai, the GMD started to purge the CCP‐controlled organizations in the city and labeled the CCP an illegal organization. The purge soon spread, with hundreds of thousands of CCP members and their sympathizers arrested and killed. In response, the CCP staged several military uprisings in late 1927 in places where they had strong influence. While all these uprisings were easily suppressed by the GMD army, the surviving members of the CCP were able to retreat to mountain areas and conduct guerrilla warfare.

Since Xi Jinping entered his third term, various memorials dedicated to the Chinese Communist Party(CCP) and the Communist Revolution throughout China have been regressing from their normal roles and functions. The Xiangshan Revolutionary Memorial Hall near Beijing, as of late 2019, is one such example. An analysis of the various documents, artifacts, and their layout, the museum's founding principles, exhibition content, and intentions revealed several distinct characteristics. First, the Xiangshan Revolutionary Memorial Hall lacks any blueprint for future development, philosophy, or national vision beyond the Communist Party's rule. Second, while Mao Zedong is portrayed as a great revolutionary leader who defeated the “comprador capitalist clique” and ended the “feudal” era, Xi Jinping is presented as a leader who, along with the CCP, must realize the “Chinese Dream”, demonstrating his legitimacy and historical legitimacy. Third, the negative aspects of modern Chinese history and the Chinese Communist Revolution are absent, and only the positive aspects of the CCP are highlighted. In an effort to emphasize the historical inevitability and legitimacy of the planned CCP rule, the uniqueness of the victory of the CCP Revolution, and the necessity of Xi Jinping’s greatness and leadership, too many data and facts are distorted, altered, omitted, or concealed. Fourth, the CCP employs a traditional unification strategy and tactic: anti-Kuomintang, anti-Chiang Kai-shek, anti-Japan, and anti-Americanism are used as political propaganda tools and means to unite and confront the United States by fostering patriotism and nationalism among the Chinese people. The Xiangshan Revolutionary Memorial Hall confirms that the history taught and propagated by the CCP is uniform, excluding or blocking diverse historical interpretations while enforcing the uniqueness and uniformity of historical facts. In other words, the seeds of Xi Jinping’s personality cult are sprouting. This violates the CCP’s principle of “prohibiting personality cults.” How persuasive will such an exhibition filled with distortions and exaggerations, emphasizing the inevitability of the advent of a communist society, the legitimacy of Chinese rule, and the exaltation of Xi Jinping’s greatness be to the people dissatisfied with the CCP’s one-party dictatorship and Xi Jinping’s dictatorship? If the Chinese people repeatedly see this kind of one-sided propaganda and publicity about Xi Jinping, they will ultimately develop hostility toward the Kuomintang, anti-Japanese and anti-American sentiments, and a one-sided belief in China’s greatness. As I have argued many times before, it is regrettable that Xi Jinping’s China is running in a direction that runs counter to the flow of history. It will be interesting to see how the exhibition at the Xiangshan Revolutionary Memorial Hall will change once Xi Jinping steps down from power.

Reviewed by: Mao's Generals: Chen Yi and the New Fourth Army Peter O. Hefron (bio) Lanxin Xiang . Mao's Generals: Chen Yi and the New Fourth Army. Lanham, New York, and Oxford: University Press of America, 1998. xi, 223 pp. Hardcover $37.50, ISBN 0-7618-1129-x. Lanxin Xiang, Professor of International History at Geneva's Graduate Institute of International Studies, has written a well-researched work that is part biography of Chen Yi and part military history of the Chinese Communist Revolution. It traces Chen Yi's career from radical student to founder and commander of the New Fourth Army (NFA). It is also a military history of the NFA, dealing especially with its pivotal role in destroying the main power base of the Guomindang (GMD) in central and eastern China during the 1947-1949 period. One of the book's strengths is Xiang's use of his interviews with surviving members of the NFA as well as his utilization of newly published primary sources, mainly from the People's Republic of China (PRC). The history of the Eighth Route Army, created by the veterans of the Long March, is well known. Xiang provides us with an in-depth look at what happened to those scattered Chinese Communist Party (CCP) guerrilla units in Southeast China that the CCP Central Committee left behind at the start of the Long March. From these units and their commanders arose the New Fourth Army. He traces the evolution and unification of these units during their three years of isolation from Mao Zedong's Yan'an headquarters. Communications were reestablished in late 1937, parallel to the creation of the second CCP-GMD United Front. From the surviving thirteen thousand "Red Bandits," Mao in Yan'an, Chen Yi and his guerrilla cohorts in southern China, and the Guomindang fashioned the New Fourth Army from October to December 1937. Xiang gives a detailed analysis of the chief battles of the NFA as well as of the controversies between Mao and the NFA leadership over correct military and political strategy. The NFA soon became a microcosm for the factional rivalry between Mao's real and imagined enemies within the CCP, ranging from the pro Stalinist Comintern group to potential rightists among CCP military officers. The NFA ostensibly harbored both varieties. The NFA also served as the arena for strategic debates between Mao and the NFA's leadership, soon personified by Chen Yi and a number of his generals such as Su Yu, Ye Fei, and Huang Kechang. At issue were three matters: Should the CCP continue to rely on Mao's guerrilla warfare strategy or escalate permanently to conventional mobile warfare using regular CCP troop units? By 1947, mobile warfare was favored and successfully practiced by the NFA. To do otherwise, Chen felt, would extend the civil war by allowing the GMD to dominate the battlefield. [End Page 248] Should the NFA follow Mao's periodic desire to rebuild the CCP guerrilla bases south of the Yangzi River or follow Chen's strategy of taking the revolution to the GMD's strategic heartland north of the Yangzi River? Xiang discusses this seesaw debate in detail. Finally, should the CCP's chief goal for the second CCP-GMD United Front be to fight the Japanese invaders or to use it as cover for the CCP to expand its territory, troops, and population at the expense of the GMD? Unlike the other two issues, this latter debate was easily won by Mao. Soon most of the NFA leadership accepted Mao's view that the anti-Japanese war was secondary. CCP expansion, even at the risk of restarting the civil war, was necessary if Mao was to defeat the GMD government after the Western Allies defeated Japan. Xiang includes an analysis of Mao's pre-1949 purges of his CCP opponents, most notably the anti-Bolshevik purge of the early 1930s and the 1942 rectification of both Rightists and Cominternists. Mao's egocentric determination to become "China's Stalin" through periodic purges, regardless of their impact on the revolution, is a forerunner of post-1949 Maoist excesses. Inevitably these issues focus the author's attention on the credibility...

The early relationship between the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and the Kuomintang (KMT) is regarded as an important issue in contemporary Chinese history, but the explanation of this phenomenon has differed for a long time. There is a major dispute in controversy in interpretations of this event. Some hold that the KMT ”accommodated Communists,” and the CCP insists that the Communists ”allied with the KMT,” The CCP realized that allying with the KMT was the correct choice at the time, and it was also in accordance with the Marxist-Leninist revolution strategy. Why dose the CCP say so? And what is the truth? This essay, from the perspective of the history of the Chinese Communist movement, attempts to understand what the CCP means by the ”historical conditions of the time?” Why was cooperation with the KMT the right historical choice? Is it possible or not to say, from the point of view of the CCP, that joining the KMT was ”the only choice?” In the 1920's, both parties were facing the difficulties of social mobilization, and there also existed the complementary interaction for revolutionary identification. In fact, the CCP leaders of that time clearly recognized that the only method which Dr. Sun Yet-sen would accept was that Communists could join the KMT as individuals, instead of as a group under the name of the CCP. On the other hand, because the Comintern was supporting both the CCP and the KMT, if the CCP did not join the KMT, the Comintern might have had to choose between the two parties. Since the danger of losing the support of the Comintern was much greater than that of joining the KMT, we may say that for the CCP, joining the KMT was in fact the one and only choice they had at the time.

TWENTIETH-CENTURY CHINA 111 RED LITERATI: COMMUNIST EDUCATORS AT ANYUAN, 1921-25 ELIZABETH J. PERRY, HARVARD UNIVERSITY Despite an accumulation of excellent scholarship on the Chinese Communist revolution, we are still hard pressed to offer a compelling answer to a question that goes to the heart of explaining the revolution’s success: How did the urbane intellectuals who founded the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) manage to cultivate a large and loyal following among such a distant stratum of the populace—illiterate and impoverished peasants and workers? Some scholars have pointed to the appeal of nationalism whereas others have emphasized the allure of class struggle as key to the Communists’ mobilizing effort,1 yet in either case it remains unclear just how a cadre of educated, cosmopolitan students and teachers conveyed their message across the enormous cultural gulf that separated them from the downtrodden masses. One might ask a similar question of many revolutions, of course, in light of the leadership role that intellectuals have typically played in nationalist and Communist movements around the world.2 It seems especially perplexing in the case of China, however, where Confucian precepts had long fostered a stark distinction between mental and manual labor. The superior status of the educated literati, celebrated in Mencius’ dictum that “those who labor with their brains rule over those who labor with their brawn,” contributed to a huge social and political distance between the “cultured” and “uncultured.” Moreover, although the iconoclastic New Culture Movement of the early twentieth century inspired many progressive Chinese intellectuals to repudiate Confucianism in favor first of anarchism and then of Marxism-Leninism, among ordinary workers and peasants these radical new ideas had made few inroads. How, then, did the highly educated young Communists manage to communicate foreign concepts of nationalism and Communism to their uneducated—and initially unreceptive—constituency? And how did such communication , in turn, translate into revolutionary action? For helpful comments on an earlier draft, I thank Nara Dillon, Christopher A. Reed, and two anonymous reviewers. 1 On nationalism, see the classic statement by Chalmers A. Johnson, Peasant Nationalism and Communist Power (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1962); and the more recent study by S.A. Smith, Like Cattle and Horses: Nationalism and Labor in Shanghai, 1895-1927 (Durham: Duke University Press, 2002). On class struggle, see Mark Selden, The Yenan Way in Revolutionary China (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1972). 2 John H. Kautsky, Political Change in Underdeveloped Countries: Nationalism and Communism (New York: Wiley, 1962); Edward Shils, The Intellectuals and the Powers (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1972); and Theda Skocpol, States and Social Revolutions (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1979). April 2007 ELIZABETH J. PERRY 112 Stephen C. Averill, before his untimely death, was on the threshold of providing an answer to this question through his meticulous scholarship linking the educational reforms of the late Qing and early Republican eras to the Communist revolution. As Averill observes in his book on the early Communist movement in Jiangxi, “it was a revolution promoted primarily by educated young scions of local elite families, who worked through activities centered on schools, study societies and other education-related institutions to introduce a radical political and social agenda into local elite political culture.”3 In making this argument, Averill departs from previous scholarly analyses. Helen Chauncey, for example, characterized the early Communists as “cautious, sometimes stymied, always uncomfortable in their approach to local school communities.”4 Although Chauncey acknowledges that schools became important centers for mobilization during the final stages of the Communist revolution, she attributes this later development to the cumulative effects of misguided Nationalist education policies, rather than to any conscious effort on the part of the CCP: “a matter of historical fortune, not party foresight.”5 This paper, which examines Communist activities at the Anyuan coal mine, supports Averill’s contention that schools and other education-related institutions were a central element in CCP strategy from the very beginning of the movement. But the impact of such institutions was not confined to elite circles. Radical intellectuals from elite families—“Red Literati” as I call them—drew creatively upon their social standing, moral authority and personal ties with local power holders to garner...

The ruling Chinese Communist Party (CCP) abolished its total ban on religious activities in 1982. However, the distrust that the CCP feels for religions remains obvious today, and the religious restrictions in contemporary China remain tight. Conventional wisdom tells us that the official atheist ideology of Marxism-Leninism is the main reason behind the CCP’s distrust for, and restriction of, religion. However, taking a historical institutionalist perspective, this paper argues that the religious restrictions in contemporary China are in fact rooted in the fierce political struggles of the country’s two major revolutions in the first half of the twentieth century. Without the support of religious groups, the Nationalist Republicans would have found it difficult to survive and succeed in overthrowing the Qing Dynasty during the Chinese Republican Revolution in the first decade of the twentieth century. Likewise, without cooperating with a wide range of religious groups, the CCP would have struggled to defeat the Nationalist regime and the Japanese invaders in the Chinese Communist Revolution between 1920s and 1940s. Thanks to the collaborations and struggles with various religious groups during the two revolutions which lead to its eventual ascent to power, the CCP thoroughly understands the organisational strength and mobilising capability embedded within religious groups. The tight restrictions on religious affairs in contemporary China is therefore likely to stem from the CCP’s worry that prospective competitors could mobilise religious groups to challenge its rule through launching, supporting, or sponsoring collective actions.

The victory of a revolutionary struggle depends on the effectiveness of the strategies. Mao Zedong argued that the success of the Chinese communist revolution relied on the three grand strategies that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) had adopted – party building, armed struggle, and the united front. Mao praised them as the CCP's three magic weapons. Yet, between 1921 and 1935, the CCP was most of the time under the strong influence of the Communist International (Comintern), and its strategy was rather incoherent, to say the least. It was only after 1935, and especially after the 1940s when Mao ascended to become the CCP's paramount leader, that these grand strategies became the guiding principles of the revolution.

This article revisits Chiang Kai‐shek's Kuomintang (KMT) party‐state during the Nanjing Decade (1927–37) of the Republic of China (ROC) and assesses how the actions and ideological propensities of the Nationalist regime affected prewar China's external relations with the United States. While both the KMT and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) were constituted as Leninist parties in the 1920s, due to the Soviet Union's military and economic aid for Sun Yat‐sen's republican revolution, they had very different political objectives and socioeconomic perspectives on China's state/nation‐building. Consequently, the KMT's and CCP's respective attitudes towards the United States also differed. Though Leninism is an antithesis to Western liberal democracy, it is not inevitable for a Leninist dictatorship to engage in confrontations with Washington, as the central leadership's inclinations and actions would determine how China approaches America. Chiang's Confucian Leninism opened up the friendly ties with the United States in 1928, which eventually consolidated into a strong U.S.‐ROC alliance during WWII and beyond, despite the KMT's autocracy. The essay will contrast briefly with the post‐1949 People's Republic of China (PRC), as the CCP experienced from Mao Zedong's radical Leninism, Deng Xiaoping/Jiang Zemin/Hu Jintao's consultative Leninism, to Xi Jinping's expansionist Leninism today. The evolving CCP positions have also affected the extent of cooperation and hostility between Beijing and Washington and illustrated how the changing attributes of the Chinese Leninist regime are crucial in determining U.S.‐PRC strategic trajectories.

Reviewed by: From Nothing to Nothing: The Chinese Communist Movement and Hong Kong, 1921-1936 Gordon Y. M. Chan (bio) Chan Lau Kit-Ching . From Nothing to Nothing: The Chinese Communist Movement and Hong Kong, 1921-1936. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1999. ix, 342 pp. Hardcover $59.95, ISBN 0-312-22428-1. As Professor Chan Lau Kit-Ching aptly observes, Hong Kong's first encounter with Chinese Communism predates July 1, 1997. It has been involved in the Chinese Communist movement ever since the movement's inception in 1921, and for many years before the Communist takeover in 1949 Hong Kong had served as headquarters for the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in Guangdong. The examination of this previously neglected history promises to shed light on our knowledge of the revolutionary movement not just in the locality of Hong Kong but also in Guangdong and the Chinese nation as a whole (pp. 1-2). Based in Hong Kong, Chan enjoyed a favorable position while exploring this topic. Besides ready access to local archives, both government and private, the proximity of Hong Kong to Guangzhou allowed her to conduct archival research conveniently in the Guangdong Provincial Archives, which hosts the most comprehensive collection of pre-1949 Party documents on Guangdong (including Hong Kong) accessible to both Chinese and foreign historians.1 Furthermore, the Feng Ping Shan Library at the University of Hong Kong has an impressive and expanding acquisition of historical materials on the CCP in Guangdong, published [End Page 412] both publicly and internally in the People's Republic of China (PRC). These resources were within "easy reach" (p. 12) for Chan, who teaches at the University. Given Chan's obvious advantages, the outcome of her research is, however, disappointing. Notwithstanding some shrewd observations, this present work is marred by a marked unfamiliarity with the historiography of the Chinese Communist Revolution. A quick historiographical survey will refute Chan's belief that there is "a dearth of regional studies of the Chinese Communist Movement, especially in the English language" (p. 2). Over the last two decades, Western scholarship has produced intensive studies of the revolution in local contexts,2 although they are predominantly rural in focus. Chan's study could well be a valuable contribution to the underrepresentation of the Chinese Communist urban revolution in the recent literature. Unfortunately, her lack of awareness of many major issues at stake, coupled with her reluctance to discuss the possible implications of her own findings with other scholars in order to enhance our general understanding of the CCP's history, suggests otherwise. The structure of this book is simple. Its four main parts trace the history of the CCP in Hong Kong and Guangdong from 1921 to 1936. The story begins with the small Guangzhou Communism Group that was initiated, in 1921, by Chen Duxiu, together with three Guangdong students he had taught in Beijing who had been exposed to the "new thoughts" of the May Fourth Movement. About a year later, the Socialist Youth League, which was to be superseded by the Communist Youth League in 1925, was established in the province. This organization represented the earliest Communist presence in Hong Kong (the CCP was not founded in the colony until 1924). As a British colony, Hong Kong expectedly exhibited many political and socioeconomic features distinct from those of Guangdong. The awareness of their existence impelled many Hong Kong cadres to ask their superiors on the other side of the border for special treatment and greater autonomy in pursuing revolutionary activities. Several times Chan emphasizes that these appeals mark the initial conception of "one country two systems"—a principle that the PRC employed to resolve the colonial questions of Hong Kong and Macao. The inference drawn here is interesting. Readers should bear in mind, however, that the desire of the regional Party branches for more autonomy based on concerns about their peculiar local conditions was common in the early history of the CCP and was by no means unique to the Communists in Hong Kong.3 Before 1925, Communists had made little headway in Hong Kong; it took the Guangzhou-Hong Kong Strike/Boycott to bolster their position. Because of this...

The victory of a revolutionary struggle depends on the effectiveness of the strategies. Mao Zedong argued that the success of the Chinese communist revolution relied on the three grand strategies that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) had adopted—party building, armed struggle, and the united front. Mao praised them as the CCP's three magic weapons. Yet, between 1921 and 1935, the CCP was most of the time under the strong influence of the Communist International (Comintern), and its strategy was rather incoherent, to say the least. It was only after 1935, and especially after the 1940s when Mao ascended to become the CCP's paramount leader, that these grand strategies became the guiding principles of the revolution.

How did revolutions facilitate empires’ transition to nation-states? This article compares the Bolshevik and the Chinese Communist Revolutions. It conceptualizes this Soviet–Sino comparison through three dimensions of nation-building: separating from a universal community, building a national cultural core and overcoming internal ethnopolitics. Both socialist regimes accommodated the nation-state model by fusing centralized control with limited autonomy for ethnic minorities. Yet, whereas the Soviet Union claimed to be a universal union of nation-states, which was supposed to keep accepting new members until it covered the entire globe, the People’s Republic of China resembled a typical nation-state that preserved multiethnicity and enclosed borders under the title of the ‘Chinese Nation’. In analyzing the influence of revolutions, this article probes three relations: inter-revolution, revolution–society and revolution–counterrevolution. Arising after the Bolsheviks as a follower-revolution, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) was confined to a national component of the USSR’s global communism project. This shaped the CCP’s enclosed geographical activity space, Han-dominated ethnic composition and the consciousness of national liberation. The CCP’s mobilization covered far wider social strata than the Bolsheviks’ had, which engendered stronger manpower and motivation to transform the traditional culture into a national culture. Being weak at its borderlands, the CCP was cautious about the doctrine of ‘national self-determination’, not daring to make it a geopolitical weapon for revolution export as the Bolsheviks had done in founding the Soviet Union. Owing to each of these differences in revolutionary trajectories, the CCP was more receptive to ‘China’ than the Bolsheviks were to ‘Russia’, and this led to two distinctive ways of reorganizing empires into nation-states.

A year after the sudden ending of the Sino-Japanese War (1937-1945), the second stage of the Chinese Civil War began and ended in 1949 with the victory of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). There is heated debate on the cause of the Nationalists’ defeat: Was it the CCP’s strengths or the Guomindang (GMD)’s weaknesses? The outcome of the war was ultimately an interplay between the GMD’s weaknesses and the CCP’s strengths. The GMD made serious tactical errors in areas where the CCP was strong, which exacerbated the GMD’s deficiencies, and bolstered the CCP’s status as a viable alternative. In terms of both popular support and military successes, the GMD fell short, which was in stark contrast to the CCP’s immense gains. This essay demonstrates how, first of all, the Nationalists lost the support of key social groups while the Communists won their support through the attraction of their ideology and the promise of socioeconomic reforms. Second, the GMD made errors that deeply weakened their military strategy while the CCP embraced mobile warfare. In the end, the GMD’s failures were not enough to lead to their defeat, nor did the CCP’s strengths alone cause their success.

Like Regime, Like Newspaper: Comparative Analysis on Newspaper Industries across Taiwan Strait (1949-1958) Abstract Ever since 1949, across Taiwan strait, the Republic of China on Taiwan ruled by Chinese Nationalist Party (Kuo Min Tang, KMT) and the People’s Republic of China on Chinese Mainland ruled by Chinese Communist Party (CCP) were antagonist to each other for a long time. Far-reaching changes were mandated both in Taiwan and Mainland China by the two regimes while communications between people on both sides of Taiwan strait were banned, and later vanished. Thus, to all professions across Taiwan strait, two groups of numerous experiments were performed at the same time. The experiences and consequences of these experiments influenced the working conditions, lives and cultures on both territories and evidenced distinction between the two national systems. As the most important media at the time, newspaper industry was highly regarded by both KMT and CCP. Although in the beginning of the political separation, newspaper industries across Taiwan strait were quite similar, the many newspaper policies raised by the two governments molded different environments for the industry. Experiments of newspaper industry under different regimes were taken place from then on. Within ten years, the newspaper industries evolved seperately across the strait, and around 1958, divergent newspaper systems appeared. Newspaper industry in Mainland China became a typical example of the industry under totalitarian regime, while newspaper industry in Taiwan showed itself a model of the industry under authoritarian regime. Base on the above historical background, what was the mechanism that caused and shaped different newspaper industries across Taiwan strait? How did newspaper industry respond to totalitarian or authoritarian ruling? What factors that differentiated authoritarianism from totalitarianism can be reached through the examples in newspaper industry? These questions reckon the necessity of comparative study on the same industry in two isolated and widely different regions during the same time period. This dissertation tries to be contributive to the answers. Newspaper industry is considered and studied here with its entire functionality. Not only are news reporting, editing and editorial writing examined, but newspaper’s producing, sales and management are also studied. Comparative historical analysis is applied as the main methodology with the assistance of knowledges from journalism, political science, sociology, business administration and accounting. Acknowledging newapapers as the “tongue and throat to the party” and tool for propaganda, CCP spared no effort to control newspaper industry. However, it’s means and artifices were nimble and flexible. From 1949, CCP elaborated a government-owned hierarchy newspaper system. Party leaders directed newspapers owned and operated by central to local governments, while tolerated temporary existence of some privately-owned newspapers. Following the establishment of the regime, CCP seized newspaper industry’s resources such as manpower, materials, financial supply, news announcing, circulation channels and market throughout Mainland China. The number of remaining privately-owned newspapers and circulation and advertising agent houses declined sharply and eventually died out in a few years. When CCP had monopolized the newspaper industry, consequently, it had monopolized the social capitals contained in the industry. Newspapers in the totalitarian country became part of the regime itself. On the other side of the strait, the retreating and exhausted KMT faced difficulties inside and outside Taiwan. For surviving, the adoption of a two-handed policy, with both suppressions and compromises was inevitable, which made the ROC of Taiwan an authoritarian country. Government’s publication moratorium and journalistic taboos set walls around newspaper industry, but also kept potential competitors away. Among the coexisting, fixed-numbered newspapers, those owned by government or KMT were in leading positions in 1949. However, due to the realism of authoritarianism, some “reservations,” such as social and crime news, popular supply and circulation markets, and advertisements had been made by the government for other newspapers to maneuver their future with free competition in these areas. Privately-owned newspapers utilized the opportunities created by these “reservations” to compete capitalistically. In ten years, resources contained in Taiwanese societies were gradually excavated and transferred to privately-owned newspapers when social capitals were being accumulated by them; meanwhile government- and KMT-owned newspapers began to ebb. Preparation for privately-owned newspapers to meet the further economic development and foundation for them to exceed government- and KMT-owned newspapers were established in this period of time. Ten years were short in history, yet long enough to create two completely different newspaper industries in two areas that were politically separated and isolated to each other. It was the decade right after the split in 1949 that the two regimes across Taiwan strait, CCP’s totalitarian and KMT’s authoritarian, formed newspaper industries based on each one’s political ideology. So ten years are long enough to have a specific newspaper industry appear under a regime’s specific ruling. Sensitive to its environment as any other news media is, newspaper industry is a product of the regime that brings about the media industry’s environment. Like regime, like newspaper.

From 1922 to 1927, an alliance between the Guomindang (GMD) and the Soviet Communists advanced a mass-media campaign aimed at wresting control from a regime dominated by warlords and unifying the Chinese nation. Soviet-inspired propaganda posters then flourished during the Northern Expedition as a novel approach to engage with the masses and facilitate the state’s policy. By analyzing the symbolic expressions in these political images, this paper examines the differences and similarities between the earlier printed political images and later propaganda posters and argues that both the GMD and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) regimes relied on propaganda networks and personality cults in order to maintain power. In the aftermath of the Qing dynasty, China endured instability and turmoil as warlords and political factions predominated. By the time of the Northern Expedition, the leaders of the GMD and CCP had become convinced that only rigid party organization with military discipline could achieve the goal of national unity.

In 1898, with the foundation of the Metropolitan University of the Qing Dynasty (Jingshi da xuetang) in Beijing, the modern higher education system was established in China. After the Qing Dynasty, China has been ruled by two political parties before and after 1949: Kuomintang (KMT) dated from 1911 to 1949 and Chinese Communist Party (CCP)1 dated from 1949 to present. The history of Nanjing University (NJU) can be traced back to Sanjiang Normal School founded by the Qing government in 1902. The NJU witnessed the development of modern higher education in China. The Nanjing city used to be the capital of the KMT regime and National Central University (NCU) was under the control of the KMT. Nevertheless, today Nanjing is the capital of Jiangsu province and NJU is under the control of the CCP. As commonly known, the KMT and the CCP followed different political systems. The political status of the city and the university has changed a lot. It is worthwhile to do a research on the party controls of the KMT over NCU and the CCP over NJU within a changeable century to find which political system benefit the university more. This thesis introduces and compares the party controls of the KMT over NCU and the CCP over NJU in chapter two (party controls over personnel) and chapter three (party controls over the whole university). Afterwards, chapter four discusses the continuum of the political controls from the Qing Dynasty, to the KMT and then to the CCP and chapter five gives a summary as the conclusion. It is commonly known that China has a long civilized history for more than five thousand years. Within this long period of time, China formed a traditional Chinese authoritarianism with a typical Confucian orientation and three related structural aspects, hierarchical system, paternalism and bureaucratic pattern. This traditional Chinese authoritarianism was widely accepted and adopted by all dynasties and political regimes in China. All the modern universities (including NCU and NJU) and political parties (including the KMT and the CCP) in China are influenced by this type of authoritarianism while they are at the same time influenced by the Soviet Union (mainly in party constructions of the KMT and the CCP) and western values (mainly in university affairs including university settings and university administrations) in the late days. So the traditional Chinese authoritarianism, Soviet Union influence and western values are the three most