Finding Women in the State: A Socialist Feminist Revolution in the People's Republic of China, 1949–1964 by Zheng Wang

This dissertation examines the motivations, logic, and functions of media control in the People’s Republic of China (PRC). Rather than telling the history of media control in modern China, or giving a comprehensive account of the techniques employed by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) to control the media, it investigates the origins of the CCP’s theoretical approach to the media, as well as the consequences of the resulting concepts for practical media work in the PRC. The first half of the thesis tracks the genesis of the Party’s media concept and reconstructs the conditions that contributed to its rise in the first half of the twentieth century; the chapters in the latter half follow this concept in its implementation through a number of case studies from the early 1950s through the late 1990s. Since the day of its founding, the CCP has placed great emphasis on questions of media and propaganda; after 1949 the party-state has claimed full control of the Chinese print, broadcast, and electronic media. Asking for the reasons behind this claim, I argue that it must be traced back to the Party’s desire to bring about the transformation of human consciousness and to create an environment conducive to this process, a utopian project informed as much by the Leninist version of Marxism as by Neo-Confucian ideas of education and state-society relations prevalent in the late imperial era. This project and its underlying fundamental assumptions have survived – in greatly transmuted form – to the present day and continue to inform the strict control of the Chinese media, even when such controls clash with other political and socio-economic interests of the Party-state. I propose to take the media as a variable to measure changes in the CCP’s approach to governance. The Party’s handling of the media serves as a mirror of state-society relations; consequently, the investigation into the media provides us with information on the CCP’s conceptions of governance under changing circumstances. I argue that over the past twenty years, the CCP has successfully altered and reinterpreted its vision of the state and its position therein; it has adopted a more flexible set of methods to achieve its fundamental political objectives. At the same time, however, the ultimate goals of the Party – originally formulated in Yan’an – have changed remarkably little.

Translating the Socialist State:Cultural Exchange, National Identity, and the Socialist World in the Early PRC Nicolai Volland (bio) The founding of the People's Republic of China (PRC) in 1949 marked not only the start of a profound transformation of the Chinese state institutions, the society, and the economy, but also the beginning of a monumental project to redefine the nature of the Chinese nation-state and its position in the world. The establishment of a new government was to give new meaning to the Chinese nation, in its own eyes, and in terms of its interaction with other nations. The politics of "leaning to one side (yi bian dao)," that had been agreed on in 1949,1 meant that the PRC was conceived as a state in the broader framework of the "socialist camp" from its very first hour.2 The integration of the PRC into an emerging socialist world that spanned half of the globe, from Berlin to Pyongyang, from Warsaw to Hanoi, and from Sofia to Novosibirsk—was a momentous event and gave legitimacy to the young regime that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) was starting to build; it left an imprint on this regime for decades to come. On the topmost plane of politics, the PRC's entry into the socialist camp was translated into a series of bilateral treaties that the Chinese government signed with other socialist nations, and with the Soviet Union in particular. These processes have been relatively well-researched.3 However, the institutionalization of China's cooperation with the socialist nations of Eastern Europe and Asia could be but a first [End Page 51] step in the enormous project of redefining the Chinese nation-state. The next task for the CCP, arguably at least as important as winning diplomatic recognition from its new allies, was to reshape the nation's identity in the minds of its citizens. This new identity had to be both national and international; it was to define the nation-state and at the same time to transcend the national borders. To generate this kind of consciousness among the citizens of the nations in the socialist bloc was key to consolidating the new regimes—a task faced not only by the Chinese government, but by the other socialist nations as well. In this process, cultural factors played a key role, and a fundamental mechanism to create a feeling of cohesiveness and shared goals and values was the promotion of cultural exchanges.4 Soon after the founding of the PRC, the CCP thus began to set up a network of contacts and institutions entrusted with fostering exchanges in the cultural field designed to anchor the PRC firmly in the socialist camp. The government set out to build a cultural diplomacy that would assist and complement the PRC's efforts on the high-level diplomatic fronts and would penetrate deep into the populace to instill identity politics in the people's minds. In contrast to the formation of foreign policy in the early PRC, these efforts in cultural diplomacy have received surprisingly little scholarly attention.5 This article is an effort to explore some of the institutional dimensions and fields of activity of cultural exchange between the PRC and the [End Page 52] Soviet Union and the socialist countries of Eastern Europe, and to relate them to the complex patterns of identity politics in the early Cold War era.6 In the following pages, I will discuss several crucial avenues of cultural exchange that characterized the involvement of the PRC in the cultural diplomacy of the socialist camp. These include mutual visits of orchestras, writers, and drama troupes, the participation of Chinese delegations in international competitions and festivals, and the exchange of students in fields such as arts, drama, and music. Finally, an especially important field was the translation of literature across the socialist camp. In a coordinated effort, representative examples of the national literatures—in particular new works written in the socialist spirit—were translated simultaneously into multiple languages and circulated across the bloc. Readers in Poland thus read the same Russian novels at the same time as their peers in Romania, North Korea, and the PRC, and Chinese...

When Mao Zedong shouted loudly, “The central people’s government of the People's Republic of China is established today” at the Tiananmen tower on October 1 of 1949, that very moment not only symbolized the emergence of the Chinese Communist Party as the victor in the Chinese civil war, but also signaled the beginning of the geographical and political separation across the Strait. “The Republic of China” and “the People’s Republic of China” have taken their respective controls across the Taiwan Strait for more than 60 years and the cross-strait relations experienced “military standoff and hostile confrontation.” When Taiwan lifted the ban on visiting relatives in Mainland China in the 1980s, the stance of “mutual confrontation and zero contact” was transformed into the phase of “open and exchange; cold government and enthusiastic citizens” with military conflicts largely reduced. However, the two consecutive Taiwanese presidents Lee Teng-hui and Chen Shui-bian proposed the highly contentious “special state-to-state relationship” and “one country on each side” respectively. This led to the complete lack of trust from both sides and the People’s Republic of China unilaterally shutting down the official communication channel. When Ma Ying-jeou took the presidency in 2008, the governments of both sides began to resume their roles as promoters of the normalization of the cross-strait relations under the principle of the “1992 Consensus.” Nevertheless, the “two political entities” have been established for more than 60 years which have developed their own politics, economics and cultures.Although the current cross-strait relations are having great future prospect, they are only limited to “economic” exchanges. The “political” aspect is still confined to the “One China” and “Taiwan independence” policies firmly held by the governments across the strait. In addition, the potential “party alteration” in Taiwan every four years creates more uncertainty to the cross-strait stability. Although the cross-strait relations have witnessed a U-turn, the subjective and objective factors surrounding the person in power inevitably affect the cross-strait relations. Taiwan witnessed its first party alteration in 2000 when the KMT ended its rule for more than 50 years. Chen Shui-bian’s successful bid to the presidency was then confronted with issues such as how to break the cross-strait deadlock and the direction of Taiwan’s economic development in view of China’s emerging economic power. As a result, it is worth examining in details how the China policy was formulated and the effects thereof under Chen Shui-bian’s government amid pressures from both the United States and China internationally and the resistance from the opposition party domestically. Finally, the research conclusion is drawn from the evaluation on how the Democratic Progress Party responses to China as China constantly pushes on the economic front without sacrificing Taiwan’s sovereignty at the Post- Chen Shui-bian era as the summary of this thesis.

Reviewed by: China's Lonely Revolution: The Local Communist Movement of Hainan Island, 1926–1956 by Jeremy A. Murray Fabio Lanza Jeremy A. Murray. China's Lonely Revolution: The Local Communist Movement of Hainan Island, 1926–1956. SUNY Series in Chinese Philosophy and Culture. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2017. 237 pp. $85.00 (cloth), $25.95 (paper). China's Lonely Revolution is the first study in English of the Communist movement on Hainan Island, from the unpromising founding of the local Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in 1926 to the first few years after the liberation of the island by a joint offensive of mainland forces and the Hainan column in 1950. In this well-researched monograph, Jeremy A. Murray provides another vivid example showing that the Chinese Revolution was not a univocal, centralized, or even well-coordinated affair. Rather, the long and complex struggles of Communist fighters—as well as all the other non-Communist actors who joined them—from the 1920s up to the Second Sino-Japanese War and the Chinese Civil War look more like a series of "revolutions," sharing overarching, if continuously evolving, goals but embedded in local situations and expressed in specific and contingent practices. This is already enough to recommend the book. Murray focuses on the Hainanese character of the Hainan Communist revolution, clearly pushing against an official "mainland" narrative that, since the early 1950s, has obscured the role of local leaders and islands activists who, basically with no support from and often with no connection to the central CCP, kept the revolutionary struggle going. As the Hainan leaders proudly declared in 1950, "for twenty-three years, the Red Flag did not fall" (1) on the tropical island. Murray's analysis of these 23 years is often cast against the knowledge that this regional emphasis would eventually create problems for Hainan CCP leaders in the early 1950s, when they would be accused of "localism" and often marginalized in the implementation of center-driven policies; he thus connects the political struggles of the early People's Republic of China (PRC) with the long history of "pragmatism, improvisation, and isolation" (1) that characterized the Hainan revolutionary experience. After a mad rush through centuries of Hainan's relations with the mainland in the first introductory chapter, the book follows a more or less chronological sequence: Murray describes the shifting political prospects of Hainan revolutionaries in the 1910s and early 1920s, moving then to the founding of the CCP and the early, troubled history of the Communist movement in Hainan, which, like its mainland counterpart, was almost completely annihilated by Nationalist repression. The Japanese occupation led to a very unstable alliance between the two Chinese parties, but it was a different alliance that would be crucial for the fate of the revolution, that between the Communists and the indigenous Li (黎) people who inhabited the island's interior. This was, as Murray notes, one of the main factors that allowed for the Hainan column—as the local CCP group was [End Page E-13] called—to survive and establish solid bases, but it was also an alliance that was declaredly anti-Guomindang, as it was the Nationalists (and not the Japanese) who had exercised unprecedented pressure on Li territories. The second half of the book is by far the most interesting and revealing, as Murray describes three important moments in the history of the Hainan Communist movement and of its relationship with the larger revolution taking place on the mainland. Chapter 6 details the refusal on the part of the Hainan fighters to leave the island and join the main force in the north of China, as ordered by the central CCP, a refusal that was motivated by practical and political considerations and that left the local forces almost completely isolated in fighting for their own survival during the civil war. The liberation of Hainan in 1950, when People's Liberation Army troops crossed the treacherous Qiongzhou Strait to join the local Hainan guerrilla fighters, is taken up in chapter 7; the military conquest was a brief affair, but a more lasting, if theoretical, battle was fought over how to construct the narrative of liberation...

PurposeOne of the standard practices of Communist Parties around the world is to employ art, including music, as a channel to spread political ideologies. This study aims to scrutinize the reception of Beethoven's music, particularly from a political viewpoint, by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in the People's Republic of China (PRC) during the early years of its rule, i.e. from 1949–1959. The ambiguity of Beethoven's own political outlook may have provided an opportunity for the CCP to choose the composer and his music in support of its aims.Design/methodology/approachTo understand why and how the CCP could exploit Beethoven and his music to support its political ideologies, a series of Chinese writings on Beethoven between 1949 and 1959 have been studied. Those literatures not only helped the composer gain reputation and popularity in the PRC, but also provided a platform for the CCP to manipulate such candidate and his music. Finally, the reception of the performances of the Ninth Symphony in 1959 in the PRC is singled out for close examination.FindingsDuring the first ten years of the establishment of the PRC, the quantity and quality of the articles on Beethoven expanded considerably. These writings continued to reflect the reception of Beethoven and his music with the addition of political nuances that could be interpreted in the CCP's favour.Originality/valueThis paper seeks to examine the PRC's artistic policies, with a particular emphasis on the reception of Beethoven and western classical music.

The generally accepted view of the first United Front in China was that the Communist International (Comintern) initially proposed this policy in 1920, at approximately the same time that Marxist study groups were being formed into a communist party in China.' According to this view, an active policy of alliance between the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and the Guomindang (GMD) began in 1922, as a result of the intervention of Henk Sneevliet (Maring), an agent of the Moscow-based Comintern. These dates assume the existence of the CCP prior to the Comintern's adoption of the United Front, an interpretation that most recently published Western histories of the CCP accept.2 Not surprising, historians from the People's Republic of China (PRC) and the former USSR also subscribe to this view because to do otherwise would devalue the CCP's role.3 However, this traditional view that the CCP was integral to the United Front is contradicted by a wealth of evidence showing that the Bolsheviks proposed this policy almost three years before the CCP was formed. In fact, Soviet officials first promoted an alliance with Sun Zhongshan (Sun Yat-sen) during summer 1918 before there were any communists in China at all. The Comintern followed suit during spring 1919, more than a year before Marxist study groups were formed. Finally, with the Comintern's backing, in January 1921 Chen

After the Second World War, a bipolar world, known as the Cold War Era, has been clearly formed between the Western Bloc and Communist Bloc while the United States and the Soviet Union at the peak on each side. In Eastern Europe, the United States was restrained and felt helpless about Soviet expansion in this area with the perception of Yalta system. On the other hand, in Asia, with the breakdown of talks, an all-out war resumed. A Chinese civil war fought between Kuomintang (also as KMT or Chinese National Party) and Chinese Communist Party (CCP). At the end of 1948, KMT has occupied the inferior position. In the early period of 1949, CCP forces crossed the Yangtze River and successfully captured Nanking, the capital of KMT’s Republic of China (PRC) government. On October 1, 1949, Mao Zedong proclaimed the People’s Republic of China (PRC) with its capital at Beiping, which was renamed Beijing. Chiang Kai-shek and millions of Nationalist Chinese retreated from mainland China to the island of Taiwan. Confronted with the CCP takeover of mainland China, the United States came to reformulate its China Policy which later marked a turning point in Sino-American relationship during the period of 1949 to the middle 1950. In June 1948, the leader of Federal People’s Republic of Yugoslavia, Josip Broz Tito, was officially denounced and his party, the Communist Party of Yugoslavia (CPY), was ejected as a member of the Cominform by the Soviet Union. Since the West branded Tito a Soviet puppet for his loyalty and constancy of faith to Stalinism, the Tito-Stalin Split presented a whole new realm of possibilities to the United States for its dilemma in china—“Chinese Titoism.” With the influence of Stilwell Incident over Sino-American relationship and the facts of Tito-Stalin Split, Truman made an about-face change to U.S. China Policy in 1949. By the early 1949, the Truman Administration has already been making plans to diverge from Chiang and his KMT such as the publication of China White Paper; at the same time, Truman Administration keeping making chances to have conversations with the CCP. By meeting and negotiating with the CCP officials, Truman Administration attempted to disunite Communist China and the Soviet Union, expected Mao to be the “Asian Tito,” and then Communist China can joint forces with the United States to fight against the Soviet Union, especially in the Asia-Pacific region. Until the outbreak of Korean War in June 1950, the United States finally realized that what it faced is hostile china along with the Sino-Soviet partnership. By applying Graham T. Allison’s three decision-making models, namely, the Rational Actor Model (RAM), the Organizational Behavior Model (OBM), and the Governmental Politics Model (GPM) as the theoretical structure and basis, the thesis would step by step explore the decision-making process of Truman Administration in engaging China to counter the threat from the Soviet Union during the period of 1949 to the middle 1950 through the perspectives of the rational assessment and choice on national interest, struggles between/among organizations based on different target and organizational culture, and pulling, hauling and bargaining games among relative bureaucrats. In addition, the thesis also applied the principles from Alexander L. George’s book, Presidential Decision-making in Foreign Policy, to aim at examining how President Truman’s, who has the final say, character, personality, value and world views made effect in the decision-making process of the target case study. In the process of theory confirming, the thesis discovered that by the period of transformation of Chinese regimes in 1949, the Tito-Stalin Split of 1948 presented the United States a new inspiration for the Communist World, that is, the Eastern Bloc is not a rigid “Iron Curtain.” Truman Administration considered that Titoism may set its roots upon China, the Yugoslav-Soviet Conflict could be a replay situation that occurred in mainland China, and both would put the strategic thought—Engaging China to counter the Soviet Threat—into practice. Nevertheless, from the historical perspectives, this kind of strategic thought seemed over-optimistic, which did not conform to fully rational considerations. However, with regard to the background of the early Cold War Era and the suspicion between the Truman Administration and KMT, the alternative that the United States took reflected the principles of “bounded rationality model.” As a result, by examining the decision-making process of Truman Administration in engaging China to counter the threat from the Soviet Union during the period of 1949 to the middle 1950, what the thesis explored not only the facts about the Sino-American relationship in this period, but also the continuity and change of Truman’s China Policy along with its cause and effect.

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...

China's Expanding Engagement in Global Health Dennis Van Vranken Hickey (bio) For most of the nineteenth and much of the twentieth century, China was called, "the sick man of Asia (东亚病夫, dong ya bing fu)."1 But those days are over. As President Xi Jinping observed, "China has bid farewell to the problems that plagued its people for thousands of years, including hunger, shortages and poverty" (Yu 2019, 19). As described below, China is now one of the world's top economic, political and military powers. China: An Economic Power By the late 1970s, China had lived through more than a century of turmoil. Key drivers of the chaos included imperialist encroachment, the Sino-Japanese War (1937–1945), the Chinese Civil War between the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and the Chinese Nationalist Party (Kuomintang or KMT), a series of natural disasters and the unsound economic policies embraced by Chairman Mao Zedong after "liberation" in 1949. All of this changed after Deng Xiaoping became the supreme leader in the People's Republic of China (PRC) in the late 1970s and launched the so-called "reform era." But the country's economy did not really take off until after Deng made his landmark journey south to Shenzhen in 1992 and accelerated the "reform and opening up" process.2 Figure 1 (below) shows China's astounding gross domestic product (GDP) growth from the early 1990s onward. Since the 1990s, China has experienced a transition from a largely agrarian society with a planned socialist economy into a global economic powerhouse. The CCP calls the new approach "market socialism" or "socialism with Chinese characteristics" and bristles at suggestions that it strongly resembles capitalism. Whatever one calls it, the transformation has enabled China to become the second largest economy in the world—enjoying a double-digit annual growth rate from 2000 to 2010 [End Page 327] and roughly 7 percent since then. In the past decade, millions of Chinese have joined the middle class which now numbers roughly 400 million and is expected to exceed 550 million by 2022 (Iskyan 2016). The exploding middle class is playing a part in a governmental strategy that is expected to help the country's economy transition away from dependence on exports and toward domestic consumption (Zhang 2019). It appears that China is well on its way toward achieving the CCP's stated goal of creating a "moderately well-off society" by 2021. Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 1. China's GDP Growth in Current US Dollars Source: World Bank national accounts data, and OECD National Accounts data, https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.MKTP.CD?end=2017&locations=CN&start=1961&view=chart. China: A Political Power As China's economy has exploded, the country's political influence has likewise grown. To be sure, economic partnerships seem to have largely paved the way. The PRC has surpassed the United States as the largest trading partner of numerous countries in the global south—particularly those in Africa and Latin America. And the country is "expected to spend over US$1 trillion on its "Belt and Road" initiative (BRI)—seven times the size of the Marshal plan in real dollars" (US Global Leadership Coalition 2018). [End Page 328] This ambitious project will integrate the economies of 65 countries that include 70 percent of the world's population, 30 percent of the GDP, and 75 percent of the earth's energy reserves. The land-based version of the new Silk Road consists of a series of economic corridors connecting the PRC with nations in Central and Western Asia, the Middle East, and Europe. The sea-based Silk Road will traverse the South China Sea, the Indian Ocean, the Mediterranean and eventually connect China to Central Asia, Africa and Europe. China has pledged not to transform itself into a "global hegemon" that "bullies" other countries (Yu 2019). Still, some suspect Beijing's motives as the government's leadership has increasingly pointed to the Chinese approach to development as an alternative pathway for states in the global south to follow. It has even established alternative international organizations—most notably the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB)—to help the...

This book, a breathtakingly panoramic analysis of Sino-Burmese relations from 1949 to the present, demonstrates that this traditionally neutralist Southeast Asian country occupied a more significant role in Beijing's Cold War strategy than one would assume from the standard monographs on China's policy in Asia, focused as they are on the battlefields of Korea and Indochina.From China's perspective, the importance of Burma (or, by its current official name, Myanmar) lay in two, closely interrelated factors: the country's precarious geographical situation and its determined efforts to pursue a nonaligned course. Sharing a common border of more than 2,000 kilometers, both Chinese and Burmese leaders were acutely aware of the possible negative consequences of any serious disagreement between Rangoon and Beijing, all the more so because Burma's other neighbors—particularly India and Thailand—also mattered a lot in Chinese security policies. Although the leaders of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) had a strong stake in preventing any major power from gaining a foothold in Burma and using it to encircle the People's Republic of China (PRC), the Burmese governments, frequently troubled by domestic instability, could ill afford to arouse the wrath of the behemoth to the north.Under such circumstances, both Chinese and Burmese leaders were keen on presenting their bilateral relations as a pauk phaw (fraternal) partnership. With the exception of a few short periods (e.g., 1967–1969), they carefully refrained from publicly criticizing each other, even if they did harbor suspicions about their partner's intentions. In the post–Cold War era, this tendency has been particularly pronounced, as the PRC became a virtual ally of the Burmese military junta in the face of Western sanctions. Consequently, foreign observers, many of whom felt unnerved by the strategic and human rights implications of that alliance, were often prone to depict Myanmar as “a client state of China” (p. xvii).The two authors of this book who endeavored to challenge these views by marshaling solid factual evidence are exceptionally well qualified to do so. Fan Hongwei of Xiamen University, an expert on modern Sino-Burmese relations, unearthed an impressive amount of hitherto untapped Chinese archival and oral history sources to investigate China's policy toward Burma in the Cold War era (1949–1988). David I. Steinberg of Georgetown University, a distinguished specialist on Burmese politics and economy with previous experience in the field of Chinese studies, analyzed the post-1988 evolution of the China-Myanmar partnership, paying particular attention to economic and strategic relations.As Fan insightfully notes, “China-Burma relations were one of [the] highlights in Beijing's peripheral diplomacy …. The Cold War was the defining factor in Sino-Burmese relations” (p. 7), both before and after the Burmese military coup of 1962. Instead of a narrow focus on bilateral ties, Fan aptly places the Sino-Burmese partnership into the broad context of Beijing's relations with other Great Powers. Anxious to foil U.S. (and later Soviet) strategies of containment, the PRC sought to cultivate amicable relations with Burma so as to demonstrate China's benign intentions toward the non-Communist Southeast Asian countries, and outcompete Washington, Moscow, and New Delhi in regional geopolitics. Occasionally, even such distant events as the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956—which shocked and frightened Burma and other nonaligned states—could induce the CCP leaders to make concessions to Rangoon. Such Chinese considerations considerably enhanced the bargaining position of the otherwise vulnerable Burmese governments. For instance, Fan provides extremely valuable documentary evidence indicating that India's recognition of Ne Win's newly established military regime in 1962 prompted Beijing to act likewise, and that CCP leaders initially refrained from protecting the interests of Burma's beleaguered ethnic Chinese minority lest they alienate the junta in Rangoon.At the same time, Fan correctly points out that the Chinese conception of using Burma “as a positive policy example to other states” (p. 9) could not only reinforce but also weaken Beijing's interest in cooperating with Rangoon. From 1975 on, the CCP leaders, having gradually normalized their relations with the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), felt they no longer had to accord special importance to the Sino-Burmese partnership, not least because Burma—unlike Thailand or Singapore—had adopted a neutral rather than pro-Chinese stance in the post-1979 Sino-Vietnamese conflict.This model of multilateral analysis might have been worth applying to the Sino-Burmese conflict of 1967, an episode that Fan places solely into the context of the Chinese Cultural Revolution and Ne Win's domestic policies. The “spillover effect” of the Red Guard movement must have played a decisive role in that conflict in June 1967, but neither the local overseas Chinese nor the PRC diplomats were as willing to comply with the restrictions imposed by the Burmese military regime as they had been in 1964. Still, the inflexible stance of the Chinese side may also have been reinforced by Beijing's displeasure over the fact that in February–March 1967, Rangoon had hosted a meeting between United Nations General Secretary U Thant and North Vietnamese Colonel Ha Van Lau for the purpose of finding a negotiated solution to the Vietnam War (an idea the CCP leaders fiercely opposed at that time). Furthermore, the Chinese stance might have been connected to the forceful intraparty takeover of the radical Maoist wing of the Communist Party of Burma (CPB) in April–June 1967.Although Fan provides much-needed insight into China's mediative role in the failed peace talks between Ne Win and the CPB in 1963, he does not examine the CCP-CPB partnership as systematically as he describes state-to-state contacts. Consequently, it remains somewhat unclear why Beijing continued to provide massive material assistance to the CPB in the 1970s, at which time the two governments were already in the process of normalizing their relations. A likely reason for China's post-1971 “dual-track diplomacy” (pp. 136–138) is that in this period, the CCP leaders were actively competing with Hanoi for the allegiance of the Thai, Lao, Cambodian, and other Southeast Asian Communist guerrilla movements, and hence they were eager to retain their dominant influence over the CPB, despite Rangoon's protests. Such a competition-centered explanation would be in accordance with Fan's analysis of China's earlier reluctance to support the Burmese Communists. As he perceptively notes, in 1963–1964 the Soviet Union adopted a passive stance toward the Burmese guerrillas and instead “used the BCP problem to harm Sino-Burmese relations. As a result, Beijing's aim was to counterattack the Soviet Union's intention of alienating Burma from China” (pp. 76–77).The multilateral model of analysis used by Fan is similarly characteristic of Steinberg's description of post-1988 Sino-Burmese relations. “Myanmar is one of several countries in which Chinese and U.S. interests are in opposition,” Steinberg points out. “Potential Chinese rivalries with India also result in calculations by both governments of supportive policies for Myanmar, which has become a nexus of Sino-Indian relationships. These policies affect the ASEAN states, ASEAN as an institution, the United Nations, and Japan as well” (p. 159). He astutely notes that although the PRC has consistently opposed Western sanctions against Myanmar on the grounds that they amounted to interference in the latter's internal affairs, the state-supported Chinese oil companies—unable to compete effectively against their well-established Western rivals in non-sanctioned countries—found these sanctions advantageous to their interests. Ever since Myanmar became an integral part of Beijing's “string of pearls” strategy (p. 305), whose aim is to secure Chinese access to the Indian Ocean, U.S. efforts to reach rapprochement with the military regime (and thus weaken its allegiance to China) have aroused just as much suspicion among Chinese observers as America's earlier strong-arm tactics.Steinberg's chapters cover the economic dimension of Sino-Burmese cooperation far more extensively than the sections written by Fan, not least because in the post–Cold War era, Beijing's growing dependence on energy imports has created a “new and enhanced relevance” (p. 162) for hydrocarbon-rich Myanmar in Chinese economic strategy. A particularly commendable aspect of Steinberg's investigation is the attention he pays to the fact that China's recent Myanmar policy has not been shaped solely by the central leaders but also by such local actors as provincial and county authorities. He provides an immense amount of statistical data on a wide range of bilateral interactions, from Chinese investments in Burmese industry to Burmese drug trafficking to the PRC, and colorfully describes the economic role occupied by Myanmar's increasingly influential ethnic Chinese community.Steinberg correctly emphasizes that, from a Burmese perspective, the post-1988 Sino-Myanmar partnership has been a “partial, uncomfortable dependency” on China rather than “total dependence” (p. 262). He points out that the Burmese junta, headed by fervently nationalistic officers, made sustained efforts to diversify its arms imports and thus lessen its reliance on Chinese arms sales. He argues that Myanmar's massive post-1988 military buildup reflected mainly the junta's domestic and external threat perceptions, such as its unrealistic fear of a U.S. invasion. Although these observations are valid, one may add that post-1988 Sino-Burmese reconciliation, interlocked as it was with Western sanctions against the junta, seems to have greatly facilitated this trend. The Burmese leaders no longer feared that China might regard the buildup as a U.S.- or Soviet-inspired threat to its own security.All in all, this book is a uniquely comprehensive monograph on post–1949 Sino-Burmese political, security, and economic relations. Although it does not cite Burmese books and articles to the same extent as Maung Aung Myoe's similarly themed work, In the Name of Pauk-Phaw: Myanmar's China Policy since 1948 (Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 2011), its skillful use of Chinese archival documents and oral history sources enabled its authors to gain unprecedented insight into certain disputed events, though more from a Chinese than a Burmese perspective. The book's trilingual bibliography encompasses most of the scholarly publications relevant to its subject, save the aforesaid monograph and a few works that Bertil Lintner, Oliver Hensengerth, Michael Charney, and Wayne Bert wrote about the CPB, U Nu's China policy, and Chinese reactions to the Burmese democratization movement. Steinberg and Fan masterfully integrate the history of the Sino-Burmese partnership into the larger context of Cold War politics and by doing so illuminate the Cold War from a novel angle. Furthermore, the observations they make on various aspects of recent Chinese-Myanmar cooperation—such as the nationalist Burmese leadership's unwillingness to become too subordinated to its colossal neighbor—offer valuable lessons for specialists of Sino–North Korean relations too.The generally excellent quality of the book is marred only by a few translation errors and other minor inaccuracies, but some of these—such as the mistranslation of the Communist Information Bureau as “Communist Party Intelligence Agency” (p. 14), hung weiping (Red Guards) as “red enemies” (p. 100), and the United Arab Republic as “United Arab Emirates” (p. 73)—are embarrassing in a scholarly publication of such significance. In other respects, the elaborate structure and style of the text is fully in accordance with its valuable content.

CHAPTER 30 - Accounting Education in the People's Republic of China

Journal of Democracy 14.1 (2003) 18-26 [Access article in PDF] The Limits of Authoritarian Resilience Bruce Gilley The success of the recent leadership transition in the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) might be interpreted as evidence that China's authoritarian regime is historically unique. More than a decade after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the communist orders of Eastern Europe, the CCP not only remains in power but has installed a younger, better-educated, even more confident set of successors at its head. And the CCP's Sixteenth Party Congress in November 2002 marked the first smooth leadership transition in a communist regime not to have involved the death or purging of the outgoing leader. Authoritarian regimes have been traditionally understood by political theorists as being terminally weak at their core, due to the absence of any of the checks on power that the rule of law, the separation of powers, or popular contestability would afford. The view is that the inherent weakness of these regimes will inevitably become more pronounced as the relative balance of resources shifts over time away from the state and toward autonomous social forces, often as a result of such forms of development as economic growth or international opening. At these stages of development, it is generally believed, authoritarian regimes find themselves suffering from what might be called "the logic of concentrated power"—that is, the tendency for power to concentrate in the hands of a few individuals or personalistic factions and to be fatally misused by them, with results that typically include misgovernment, a deterioration of legitimacy, corruption, and weak norms of conduct among governing elites. 1 But China—whose people represent roughly half of that part of the [End Page 18] world's population which is not allowed to choose its leaders though democratic elections—has so far defied the traditional model. Some have attempted to account for this in terms of a fundamental reconsolidation of the CCP's house following the nadir of the Party's legitimacy after the 1989 Tiananmen protests. The CCP, these observers argue, appears to have effectively solved the democracy deficit without democracy by putting in place mechanisms that have mitigated, or possibly eliminated, the traditional weaknesses of authoritarian regimes. Andrew Nathan nicely sums up the evidence for such mechanisms under the rubric of "regime institutionalization." I think that this characterization is mistaken, a point I will argue below in reference to three features of authoritarian regimes that have historically been among the most difficult to institutionalize: 1) the process of elite promotions; 2) the maintenance of elite functional responsibility; and 3) popular participation. Certainly by comparison to the bedlam of the Mao Zedong era, the People's Republic of China (PRC) is today a fairly institutionalized state. But relative to the actual needs of contemporary Chinese society, the PRC falls conspicuously short: Any given feature of a political system can be said to be "institutionalized" only when it is both consistent with a state's normative ideals and effectively implemented. By these standards, the evidence of PRC institutionalization remains faint. Nor does it seem likely that such institutionalization will eventually strengthen. Indeed, since 1949, there have been discernable cycles of consolidation and breakdown in China: The limits of regime institutionalization have been reached before and, in response, the "logic of concentrated power" has reasserted itself. Something similar is likely to happen again and, in due course, weaken the institutionalization apparent at the CCP's recent Sixteenth Party Congress. Present Institutionalization Samuel P. Huntington characterizes political institutionalization as the process by which a given feature of a political system acquires the traits of "adaptability, complexity, autonomy, and coherence." The feature in question may be a process, an institution, or a rule. When institutionalization is achieved throughout a political system, Huntington says, it produces government which is "effective, authoritative, [and] legitimate." 2 Although this definition suffices to explain a government's effectiveness or authoritativeness, Huntington has almost certainly misconceived the particular nature of the problem of legitimacy in an authoritarian context: He fails to grasp that for any of the above mentioned features of...

February 01 2020 Editor's Note Author and Article Information Online Issn: 1531-3298 Print Issn: 1520-3972 © 2020 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology2020President and Fellows of Harvard College and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Journal of Cold War Studies (2020) 22 (1): 1–3. https://doi.org/10.1162/jcws_e_00923 Cite Icon Cite Permissions Share Icon Share Twitter LinkedIn Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Search Site Citation Editor's Note. Journal of Cold War Studies 2020; 22 (1): 1–3. doi: https://doi.org/10.1162/jcws_e_00923 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu nav search search input Search input auto suggest search filter All ContentAll JournalsJournal of Cold War Studies Search Advanced Search This issue begins with an article by Gregory V. Raymond examining Thailand's response to Soviet-backed Vietnam's occupation of Cambodia from 1979 to 1989. Vietnam's intervention in Cambodia in 1979 had the positive effect of bringing an end to the murderous violence perpetrated by the Khmer Rouge (resulting in the deaths of up to 2 million people), but Vietnam established a brutal occupation regime of its own in Cambodia and fought a devastating war against Khmer Rouge insurgents, who sought to return to power. The presence of Vietnamese forces along Thailand's borders posed an exigent security threat, not least because Vietnamese troops conducted cross-border raids against presumed Khmer Rouge positions, shelled border towns in Thailand, and drove refugees onto Thai territory. Raymond shows that Thai leaders responded to this threat not by significantly beefing up their military forces but by vigorously pursuing diplomacy and coalition-building. He explains this choice as a... You do not currently have access to this content.

The Republic of China (ROC), which was created in 1912, succeeded the territory and complete national sovereignty of governments of successive dynasties of China. Therefore, it is simply called "China" in the international community. Ten years after the founding of the ROC, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) was formed under the direction of the Comintern (Third International) and then expanded its forces by taking advantage of the opportunity of Japan's invasion of China. In 1949, the CCP, under the support and assistance of the former Soviet Union, took control of the mainland area of the ROC by force and declared the founding of the People's Republic of China (PRC) on October 1 of the same year. The CCP set up a different state on the mainland area and the government of the ROC was relocated to the Taiwan area, and since then, two mutually exclusive regimes have coexisted in China, and thus the so-called issue of China emerged in the international community.

The consolidation of a state rests not only on military and administrative power, but most importantly cultural power. Only cultural power can consolidate systems of thought and standards of value. From the outset, the Chinese Communist Party recognized culture as a power of influence. Contrary to the negative opinion towards peasant farmers (which Marxists customarily held), the Chinese Communist Party did not stigmatize peasant farmers as passivists and pacifists, but instead mobilized them using cultural power and thereby creating Peasant Movements. This strategy forcefully induced regime change. After the founding of the People's Republic of China, the Chinese Communist Party further prioritized control over cultural power as a matter of national and strategic importance. As the Cultural Revolution came to an end, and the Chinese Government sought to reconnect its people with its cultural heritage, four masterpieces of Chinese Classical literature were produced in the form of television series, and were largel successful. Notably, audiences of these televised Chinese masterpieces also happen to be current practitioners who are leading the transition of the Chinese government away from Marxist-Leninist ideologies and principles, and towards classical Chinese values such as ”ho” (peace) and ”yi” (justice).As China's successful economic reform reached its thirtieth year, the Chinese government produced another television series titled ”Rise of Great Nations”. This series narrate nine countries that had ”risen” in the past five hundred years. While China is not included in the list of the ”risen”, the series itself provoked much discourse-both domestic and foreign-regarding Cina's new role in a new era. There are five sections in this paper. Introduction and conclusion aside, the three core chapters are respectively analyses on: 1) the critiques of foreign scholars toward the television series; 2) historical comparisons of Chinese and world history; and 3) the causes and prequisites that lead to the rise of a nation. This paper aims to study the historical perspective of the People's Republic in comparison to the histories of the nine countries which the People's Republic seeks to highlight itself. This paper finds that culture is a critical source of power to peace and worldwide integration in a multipolar world system.