Conclusion and the Future of the Chinese Communist Party

NEWLY RELEASED SOVIET DOCUMENTS reveal that during the 1920s the Soviet Foreign Ministry East Asian specialists assigned growing significance to the British crown colony of Hong Kong. One may credibly argue that, at least in Britain's case, Cold War conflicts with the Soviet Union for influence over existing colonies, for example, Hong Kong, and in such developing countries as China, began in 1920. This article examines the interactions and issues generated by the collision of British Hong Kong, the Soviet Union and China during the 1920s. It investigates the extent of Soviet involvement in Hong Kong and South China, the reasons why the communist movement collapsed so drastically in both places by the late 1920s, divisions between Comintern and Soviet Foreign Ministry (MID) officials over Soviet policy toward the area, and Hong Kong's significance in Soviet policies toward both China and colonial

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.

Was Maoist China a Clone of the Soviet Union? Felix Wemheuer Lucien Bianco, Stalin and Mao: A Comparison of the Russian and Chinese Revolutions, translated by Krystyna Horko. 448 pp. Hong Kong: Chinese University Press, 2018. ISBN 978-9882370654. $65.00. Elizabeth McGuire, Red at Heart: How Chinese Communists Fell in Love with the Russian Revolution. 462 pp. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018. ISBN 978-0190640552. $34.95. It has become fashionable in Western China studies to write about transnational entanglements between the People's Republic (PRC) and the Soviet Union or to compare the development of both countries. The similarities of Stalin's Soviet Union and Mao's China are obviously many, making it impossible to cover them all in a single text. Two new books approach this comparison from different angles. Lucian Bianco looks at the great leaders and macropolitics in Stalin and Mao: A Comparison of the Russian and Chinese Revolutions, while Elizabeth McGuire uses a focus on personal relations and microhistory in Red at Heart: How Chinese Communists Fell in Love with the Russian Revolution. This review discusses the two monographs within the larger context of Western China studies and with attention to paradigm shifts in Sino-Soviet relations. Paradigm Shifts in Western China Studies Since the mid-1930s, Western scholarship regarding the impact of the Soviet Union on the Chinese Revolution and later the PRC underwent several paradigm shifts. During World War II and under the alliance of the United States and China against the Japanese Empire, Chinese Communists were often considered anti-imperialists and nationalists. The bestseller Red Star over China, written by the American journalist Edgar Snow, contributed to [End Page 442] the view of Mao Zedong as a grassroots revolutionary. The lives of communist leaders in the revolutionary base area in Yan'an were presented by Snow as simple and egalitarian. Therefore, Snow saw Chinese communism as an alternative to bureaucratic state socialism in the Soviet Union.1 When the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) took power in 1949, the Cold War had already started. Anticommunist hardliners in the McCarthy era blamed "liberals" of the former Roosevelt administration and scholars in China studies for underestimating the communist threat and causing the "loss of China." In the 1950s, the newly founded PRC was often seen in the West as a "Soviet satellite state" and "totalitarian dictatorship." Western perception started to change significantly due to the rise of the Anti–Vietnam War movement and the New Left around 1968. Activists and many scholars then saw Maoist China through the lenses of anti-imperialism and Third World liberation movements.2 The New Left considered the Cultural Revolution (1966–76) an experiment in mass participation and rural based-development strategies. Western media reports about the horrors of the Cultural Revolution were often ignored as "anticommunist propaganda"; violence was rationalized, because "revolution is not a dinner party," as Chairman Mao had said. The guerilla fighter and the "barefoot doctor" became poster children for an alternative development model to Western and Soviet modernity. CCP criticism of "Soviet revisionism," and in part Western scholarship, emphasized the "Chinese way" of building socialism.3 From the 1930s until the early 1990s, the history of the CCP was often written as step-by-step emancipation from domination by the Comintern and the Soviet Union. The departure from revolutionary Maoism in China after "Reform and Opening" in 1978 destroyed many dreams and illusions. However, it was only after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the opening of the archives of the Comintern and CPSU (Communist Party of the Soviet Union), that the history of the Chinese Revolution was rewritten again. The new findings from archives deconstructed the myths that the CCP had taken an independent path from the Soviet Union. Stalin's guidance and Soviet support had played [End Page 443] a crucial role in creating the second United Front with the Nationalists (GMD) against Japan in 1937 and in bringing the CCP into power in 1949.4 Archival documents show that Soviet advisers influenced the development of the political and economic system in China in the early 1950s based on the Stalinist model. In the fields of culture, education, agriculture, and policies...

ABSTRACTIn their early history, the Chinese and Korean Communists had little contact with one another. However, similar fates brought them together, and some Korean revolutionaries in China voluntarily joined the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). After a futile effort to establish a Communist party in Korea, the Korean Communists shifted their attention to Chinese Manchuria. Under extremely difficult circumstances, different factions of the Korean Communist organizations either willingly or under force disbanded. However, after winning support from the Comintern, the CCP recruited a substantial number of Korean Communists. Thus, within a short period of time, the CCP expanded its strength in Manchuria. It also shouldered responsibility for assisting the Korean Communists in their efforts to establish their own party. In the aftermath of the September 18th Incident in 1931 the CCP Central Committee called for an armed struggle against the Japanese invaders. The Korean Communists in Manchuria became a force to be reckoned with. After the CCP gradually shifted the focus of its policy toward the War of Resistance against Japan, the Korean Communists in China became integrated into the CCP army.

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.

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 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.

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 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.

The Chinese and Japanese communist parties: three decades of discord and reconciliation, 1966–1998

Reviewed by: Finding Women in the State: A Socialist Feminist Revolution in the People's Republic of China, 1949–1964 by Zheng Wang Aminda Smith Finding Women in the State: A Socialist Feminist Revolution in the People's Republic of China, 1949–1964 by Zheng Wang. Oakland: University of California Press, 2017. Pp. xv + 380. $85.00 cloth, $34.95 paper, $34.95 e-book. I recently attended a lecture by a well-known China watcher who is often cited for her expertise on Chinese Communist Party (CCP) policies related to women and gender equality. When an audience member asked whether there were contestations, over antifeminist policies, between the Party leadership and officials in the Women's Federation (Funü lianhehui 妇女联合会, or Fulian), the speaker responded by claiming that the Fulian cannot be considered a feminist organization as it is simply an arm of the Party. While this claim is not entirely false, it is misleading. Moreover, such a position is all too common in the reportage and scholarship on the People's Republic of China (PRC): the CCP is often portrayed as a thoroughly patriarchal, Borg-like monolith, just as masculinist and oppressive to women as any other modern state power, despite its early claims to the contrary. Thus, Zheng Wang's forceful and convincing argument to the contrary makes her new book a crucial intervention in the fields of PRC history and the history of Chinese feminism. As her title suggests, among [End Page 408] Party members and PRC state leaders, Wang finds committed feminist women, who truly endeavored to bring about a socialist feminist revolution. Finding Women in the State, organized into two parts and eight chapters, considers the work of Chinese Communist feminists through a series of cases. Because Wang's argument requires the close reading and unpacking of extremely rich and detailed source materials, her chapters are quite dense. And her discussion is so wide-ranging that one sometimes senses at least two different books in this one volume. But in the end, all of the pieces coalesce around Wang's answer to an important historiographical question: how do we evaluate the CCP's famous claim to have liberated women, epitomized in Mao Zedong's all-too-oft-quoted pronouncement that "women hold up half the sky"? The research conducted over the past several decades suggests one answer: Chinese women were, and remain, partially liberated—thanks to the whims of a male-dominated and patriarchal Communist Party that nevertheless maintained its rhetoric supporting gender equality and thus sporadically promoted women's rights when doing so did not undermine other Party goals. Wang shows, however, that what appears to be a series of half-hearted and superficial concessions made by a masculinist state are actually evidence of hard-won victories achieved by women working in the Women's Federation and other Party-state units; these feminists were truly committed to the Maoist claim that women's liberation was central to China's socialist revolution. Wang does not deny that the sites in which state feminists worked, such as the Women's Federation, were inseparable parts of the Communist Party. Indeed, it was enthusiasm for socialism's liberatory promise that led these women to join the revolution. Those feminists who held positions within the PRC state certainly demonstrated their loyalty to the Party. Crucially, however, Wang shows that cadres and leaders who did women's work (funü gongzuo 妇女工作) also saw themselves as quasi-independent actors, dedicated to opposing patriarchy in Chinese society and in the Communist state. And their pursuit of a bona fide feminist agenda caused repeated clashes between state feminists and other Party members, including those in the central leadership. This book traces the histories of those state feminists committed to women's work. It demonstrates that while their battles were all uphill and against strong opposition from many Party men, [End Page 409] state feminists fought hard and sometimes successfully fomented real change for Chinese women. Wang reveals that the effects of state feminism can be seen everywhere during the socialist period, even in high-level Party policy and propaganda. She also argues, however, that historians must search for feminism in PRC history because it...

Throughout the history of the People’s Republic of China (PRC), disagreement has existed concerning the extent to which Chinese Communism might be considered authentically Marxist. In general, most of the available literature tends to simply accept the Chinese Communist self-identification as Marxist. No binding consensus among independent Sinologists, however, is found and resistance has taken on a variety of forms throughout the history of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP)—some partisan and some genuinely analytic. The academic literature produced during the entire period of CCP rule in China has been characterized by wide differences in the acceptance of its Marxist authenticity. It has always been tacitly or explicitly accepted that the Marxism of the CCP at its founding in 1920–1921 was in a form acceptable to the Bolshevik rulers of revolutionary Russia. Having been founded directly through the influence of the Third (or Leninist) International, the CCP had to conform to the Bolshevik interpretation of Marxism. Since Lenin had taken “creative” liberties with the original doctrine, some have maintained that the Marxism of the CCP had never been truly Marxist. To add further difficulty to any analysis of the Marxism of the CCP, it is generally understood that Mao Zedong, who gradually assumed the leadership of the CCP, was not particularly well versed in any variant of Marxism. Over the years and under the pressure of circumstances, Mao delivered varied formulations of his revolutionary ideology. How much those formulations accorded with any variant of Marxism became a matter of interpretation. Some scholars hold that by the time of the “Great Leap Forward,” Mao had devised his own ideology. All of this speculation generated controversy within the CCP leadership. By the time of Mao’s demise in 1976, the doctrine of a “second revolution” animated Deng Xiaoping and his followers. It is still a matter of considerable controversy whether that post-Maoist doctrine, in any sense, is Marxist in content or aspiration.

Lecturer in Political Science, University of Canterbury, Christchurch, New Zealand. The research for this article was begun on a post-doctoral fellowship at the Centre for East and Southeast Asian Studies, Lund University, Sweden, and completed with the help of a research grant from the University of Canterbury.CCP[Symbol Not Transcribed] [copyright]China in the 21st century is a post-communist society with a communist government. How does the Chinese Communist party (CCP) maintain its political acceptability as it goes about dismantling the socialist system? How can the government maintain popular support when the uniting force of Marxist-Leninist-Maoist ideology is spent and discredited? And what has taken the place of communist ideology? Since the two major political watersheds of the last ten years of the Mao era and the dramatic events of 1989, the CCP has undergone a repackaging, similar to the re-invention of the British Labour party under Tony Blair.(1) The CCP would like to extend its rule over China indefinitely; to do so, it is attempting to move from a revolutionary party to a political party. In the post-1989 era the outward symbols and the all-important name brand CCP[Symbol Not Transcribed] [copyright] remain, but the content and meaning of the party's activities have changed significantly.Rather than the revolutionary romanticism of the Mao period, 'scientific guidance' is the new theme of CCP rule. Party strategists now acknowledge the collapse of faith in Marxist revolution and in the dictatorship of the proletariat and Marxist economics, but they have yet to find another means to justify the one-party state in China. The new economic and political goals of the post-Mao era are symbolized by the Four Cardinal Principles and the Four Modernizations of Deng Xiaoping. In practice this has meant adopting marketization and other capitalist style systems - but never calling them that - while maintaining the CCP dictatorship. Post-1989 and throughout the 1990s, Prime Minister Jiang Zemin attempted to forge a new consensus in China, a logic for continuing CCP rule indefinitely. The party leadership is determined that the CCP will avoid the fate of the Communist party of the Soviet Union and that it will learn from its mistakes.(2) Party thinktanks are also studying the fate of other long-term one-party states, such as Mexico, and trying to learn from their mistakes and successes. In 1999 Jiang Zemin announced the 'three represents,' which called for the party to represent the 'advanced social productive forces, the forward direction for China's cultural advancement, and the truest representative of the fundamental interests of China's vast population.'(3) Now party leaders are refining notions of turning the CCP into a 'party for all the people' (quanmin dang). At meetings for senior leaders at the resort of Beidaihe in September 2001, Jiang hinted that the CCP's long-standing goal of class struggle had been abandoned. He said that the party had to open its door to the 'new classes' of private business people and professionals and that in the current era business people and professionals had displaced workers and peasants as the 'vanguard' of society.(4)Propaganda is playing a central role in the repackaging of the CCP. Propaganda - publicizing the government's activities and educating the population - has always been an essential element of the CCP hold on power. The Central Propaganda Department (Zhongyang xuanchuanbu) of the CCP sets guidelines for the Chinese media, film, drama, art, news, literature, and education and disciplines those who break the rules on what can and cannot be presented in those media.(5) The propaganda system (xuanjiao xitong) remains one of the key groupings of bureaucracies within the Chinese political system.(6) This article surveys the modernization of the propaganda system in China and examines continuities and new developments in the system, particularly attempts to manufacture consent for the re-invention of the CCP. …

The ‘Party and Youth League’ model in the Chinese communist movement was copied from Soviet Russia, but its practice by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and the Youth League has been little studied, especially at the local level. This article draws on a variety of sources to analyse the model's operation in Shanghai. My findings reveal a lasting rivalry between the Communist Party and the Youth League in Shanghai, which both experienced a rise and fall from 1925 to 1927. Despite efforts from leaders on both sides, this conflict went unresolved. The Youth League's transformation from a ‘younger brother’ to a ‘powerful competitor’ within the revolutionary communist community vividly reflects the fact that the Chinese communists were far removed from the iron rule of Bolshevism at that time, and highlights the complexities and difficulties of localizing the international communist movement.

The political in North Korea has been characterized as a Dominant Party-State System. Since mid-1980s, however, its political has displayed two interesting aspects. Formally, broad System has been maintained; in practice, however, Workers' Party of Korea, Korean People's Army, and government have come to acquire respectively different and considerably strengthened roles. Under this new regime, Kim Jong Il (Suryong) directly rules over party, government, and military. Meanwhile, political-ideological base, military base, and economic base are administered respectively by party, army, and government. Interestingly, while power of party still overwhelms that of military and government, party's means of influence has changed from giving direct orders to providing provisions or encouraging policy outlines. Key words: North Korea, Communist parties, East Asian politics Introduction The political in Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK or North Korea) has experienced significant changes since death of its longstanding leader, Kim Il Sung, in 1994. No plenary meeting of party's Central Committee (PCC), highest leadership body of North Korea, has been held since December 1993. In addition, two significant political institutions, presidency and Central People's Committee (CPC), were abolished by constitutional revision that took place in 1998. Specifically, abolishment of CPC weakened consulting channel between Workers' Party of Korea (WPK) and government. These changes, in turn, reinforced roles of cabinet and Korean People's Army (KPA), both previously controlled by WPK. In other words, under rule of Kim Jong Il, the cabinet responsibility system on which administrative-economic apparatus is concentrated, is actively operating, and politics, or Songun policy, has become central theme of North Korean politics. This makes KPA driving force of economic development and national security. Previous literature on political in North Korea has shown different findings regarding Suryong (great leader) system, Suryong's direct rule, party-government relations and party-military relations in eras of Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il. Specifically, most studies are divided into two perspectives regarding core issue of socialist political systems, party control. Some scholars argue that similar to era of Kim Il Sung's rule, WPK under Kim Jong Il exercises guidance and leadership over government and KPA. This is so even though he has bolstered status of KPA and autonomy of cabinet.1 Meanwhile, other scholars point out that because of development of military-first politics and cabinet responsibility system, previous relations among party, government, and KPA have significantly changed, or at very least, formerly direct control WPK once had has been weakened during Kim Jong Il era.2 If so, why were previous studies on socialist political systems concentrated on relations between communist party, government, and military? According to Schurmann's seminal study,3 socialist political systems, especially Chinese communist in 1960s, can be analyzed by focusing on hierarchical structure among Chinese Communist Party, People's Liberation Army, and government. That is, power structure in socialist countries is characterized by communistparty dominant pattern within a strict power triangle that consists of communist party, government, and military.4 Thus, Schurmann's study implies that for analysis of socialist political systems, we need to scrutinize identity of supreme power and its relations with other actors. In this regard, North Korea is not so different from other socialist political systems. …

It All Hinges on China: Environmental Governance in the Twenty-First Century