Marxist Thought in China

While Mao Zedong might still be China's most famous communist, only scholars of the history of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) have heard of Wang Jiaxiang and even they have never studied his career in detail. But recent Chinese publications show that there were very few CCP leaders who had such a tremendous impact on the Chinese communist movement in general and Mao Zedong's career in particular. This article will show that Wang not only supported Mao during the power struggles of the 1930s and helped convince Stalin that Mao should be acknowledged as the CCP's leader, but that Wang also played a decisive role in establishing Mao Zedong-Thought as the Party's guiding ideology. The release of numerous Party documents in the last five years also throws some light upon the relations and conflicts between Mao Zedong and other CCP leaders such as Wang Ming, Zhou Enlai, Zhang Guotao and Liu Shaoqi in the decade between the Long March and the Seventh Party Congress of 1945.

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

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 Sixth Plenum of the 11th Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) met in Beijing from 27 to 29 June 1981. On its agenda were two items: changes in the highest-level leadership of the CCP, and the “ Resolution on certain questions in the history of our party since the founding of the People's Republic of China.” ‘ Though the Plenum's decisions to a large extent confirmed and made official trends and policies that had become apparent during most of the previous year, they were nonetheless remarkable. The western press has, not unsurprisingly, focused on the replacement of Hua Guofeng by Hu Yaobang as Chairman of the CCP's Central Committee. However, the Plenum's reassessment of the Party's history since 1949; of the roles of Mao Zedong, Hua Guofeng and other CCP leaders; and of the nature of Mao Zedong Thought, are undoubtedly of greater significance in terms of the development of the People's Republic of China (PRC): as indeed is the fact of Hua Guofeng's demotion rather than his outright dismissal or “ purge.”

Reviewed by: Zhou Enlai: The Enigma Behind Chairman Mao by Michael Dillon Yafeng Xia (bio) Michael Dillon. Zhou Enlai: The Enigma Behind Chairman Mao. London and New York: I. B. Tauris, 2020. xi, 302 pp. Paperback $29.95, isbn 978-178-831-930-0. Among several books in English on the late Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai (who served from 1949 to 1976), two stand out. The first, by Barbara Barnouin and Yu Changgen, “explores the nature of” Zhou’s political behavior and assesses how such behavior affected twentieth-century Chinese history.1 The second, by former senior Chinese Communist Party (CCP) historian Gao Wenqian, which is based on classified party documents and personal interviews with high-level party officials, provides a revisionist account of Zhou Enlai. This volume is an abridged English translation of Gao’s Wannian Zhou Enlai (Zhou Enlai’s Later Years), which, having been adapted for Western readers, includes the stories of Zhou’s earlier years prior to the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976) and elaborates the political context of the Cultural Revolution and the behavior of other actors (chapters 2–7, pp. 21–104).2 Relying primarily on Chinese sources supplemented with writings by Western journalists who visited CCP bases during the War of Resistance against Japan and foreign diplomats stationed in Beijing in the 1950s and the 1960s, Michael Dillon presents a sympathetic account of Zhou’s life from his birth in 1898 to his death in 1976 in twenty-three chapters. This is a standard biography of Zhou, covering his childhood, education, upbringing, personality, political activism, and revolutionary activities, presenting a thorough picture of Zhou the diplomat and statesman. Dillon argues, “This private side of Zhou Enlai is one [End Page 263] of the reasons why he became the world’s favorite Chinese Communist, but Zhou’s character was complex” (p. viii). According to Dillon, Zhou “was a statesman rather than simply a political operator and achieved much on the international stage” (p. ix). But scholars on Zhou Enlai and the history of the CCP will not be pleased, as the book does not add much to what they have already known about Zhou. To correctly understand and evaluate Zhou’s historical role in the Chinese Communist movement and the People’s Republic of China (PRC), it is crucial that we correctly understand Zhou’s relationship with Mao Zedong, the CCP Chairman and China’s paramount leader from 1949 to 1976. The reviewer cannot agree with several of Dillon’s major assertions, such as, “Zhou had remained personally close to Mao, never criticized him in public, and was himself never criticized openly :: : . Eventually he was attacked, viciously but covertly, by Mao’s wife, Jiang Qing” (p. 264). I feel that the author is unfamiliar with some of the new findings on Zhou Enlai that have been revealed in the last two decades. In the following paragraphs, I try to set the record straight. The relationship between Zhou Enlai and Mao Zedong has attracted much scholarly attention, and it is a key issue in our understanding of Chinese politics in the late 1960s and early 1970s. There are three popular models of the relationship: Zhou was a faithful follower of Mao; Zhou was a puppet of Mao; and Zhou was a moderating force on Mao, which is the version the official Chinese Communist historiography promotes.3 Dillon falls into the third model, as he writes, “During the Great Leap and particularly the Cultural Revolution, Zhou was in an impossible position. To survive, he said and did things he would have preferred not to. By surviving, he ensured a degree of damage limitation and protected many friends and colleagues” (p. 270). For years, Zhou was “the Beloved People’s Premier,” a sensitive and effective administrator and a moderating force in the PRC’s politics. He was good-looking, urbane, brilliant, and a master diplomat. He always valued the nation’s needs above his own. He managed to save hundreds of purged officials during the Cultural Revolution. But Gao Wenqian turns the tables on Zhou. According to Gao, Zhou was a tragic backroom schemer, a puppet of his master Mao, and a man who so rigorously observed a...

Since 1978, the Chinese Communist Party（CCP）decided to make the “reform and openness” economic policy in Mainland China. Today, more than 20 years high-degree economic growth drives the China’s comprehensive national power into a huge enlargement that we have never seen before. Because of the CCP still not gives up the “one-party oligarchy” political system yet, and its notorious human right records, most people in the world are worried about a rising non-democratic communist great power rising in the east Asia. Of course, the CCP itself understands a rising China will make the international community uneasy; therefore, they promote the “peaceful rising” thesis/strategy. The first part of this research is to analyze the theoretical implications of the “peaceful rising” thesis, I do this work from four theoretical perspectives: international system, (neo)-realism, hegemonic stability thesis, and the “China threat” thesis. Second, I research the background of the “peaceful rising” thesis by mean of China’s domestic politics, economic growth, military-security environment, and the subjective intentions of the CCP leaders. Third I describe the practical performance and its influence to international politics on the promotion of the CCP’s “peaceful rising” strategy, especially in the impact on Taiwan national security. According to my research, I find the “peaceful rising” strategy certainly have some effect, including: it decreases the negative image of the China as a threat; it helps to construct an amicable international environment; it extends more time to develop economy; and it good for the Chinese people reconstruct national confidence and self-esteem. The strategy certainly to have some influence over international community, therefore we have to watch out the development of this “peaceful rising” strategy.

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.

International negotiations rarely occur under conditions of perfect or completely symmetric information. In the course of pursuing foreign policy, states withhold certain information and intentionally communicate that which is false or misleading. A particularly common instance of incomplete information is that occurring after a change in leadership. When a new government takes office, the nation’s policy positions inevitably undergo a major transition. A change of leadership while a state is conducting prolonged negotiations over long-term issues is likely to change both their trajectory and outcome. The other party concerned in such negotiations is unfamiliar with the new government and its ways, yet historical interaction has made its own circumstances and preferences commonly known to both sides. This is a situation of asymmetric information. The leadership transition of one state frequently arouses suspicions and feelings of insecurity in others, because they have no way of comprehending the actual policy preferences and positions of the new government. Changes in government leadership have engendered several asymmetric information scenarios in the course of contemporary Chinese foreign policy. Around the time the People’s Republic of China (PRC) was established, neither the Soviet Union (USSR) nor the major Western powers had any understanding of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) leadership. They were suspicious and hesitant, often adopting a wait-and-see stance in their dealings with the new government. Following the Kuomintang (KMT) retreat to Guangzhou, for example, the USSR accordingly moved its Chinese embassy to the Guangdong capital, despite the ostensible bond of communism between the USSR and the Chinese communists. American ambassador to China, John Leighton Stuart is another example. Mao Zedong’s ‘leaning to one side’ concept notwithstanding, Stuart remained in Nanjing, and in August 1949 was prepared to visit the Chinese Communists in Beiping. The US knew too little about the Chinese communist leadership to be sure whether or not to broach a relationship with the new regime. It was in January, 1979, shortly after the Cultural Revolution and at the start of the open door policy, when the western world still knew little about the new generation of CCP leaders, that the Vice Premier of the State Council, Deng Xiaoping, and his wife Zhuo Lin accepted an invitation to a formal

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.

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.

Between 1949 and 1976, under Mao Zedong’s 毛泽东 leadership, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) implemented socialist economic policies. In the 1950s, the central planning of industry (with an emphasis on heavy industry) was introduced, modeled on the five-year plans of the Soviet Union, and agriculture was collectivized. Following the collapse of the Great Leap Forward and the political split with Moscow, China’s economic policies in the 1960s and 1970s vacillated between Mao’s ultraleftist tendencies and more conventional socialist policies advocated by such leaders as Liu Shao-ch’i 刘少奇 and Deng Xiaoping 邓小平. Mao attacked his opponents for taking the capitalist road and largely succeeded in suppressing their proposed policies until his death in 1976. After Mao’s death, advocacy of various reforms became more acceptable. One important early sign of the new atmosphere was the announcement in 1977 that entrance examinations for China’s universities (which had been attacked and closed down during the Cultural Revolution) would be reestablished. Deng Xiaoping returned to power, and at the Third Plenum (of the Eleventh Central Committee of the CCP) in December 1978 the famous four-character policy gaige kaifang (改革开放), a reform of the economic system and an opening up to the outside world, was promulgated. Beyond the strong signal that the reforms were intended to remedy some of Mao’s mistakes, it was not clear exactly what the slogan would entail in practice. Indeed, even in the early 21st century the specifics of the reforms are still the subject of substantial disagreements within the CCP leadership. However, there can be no doubt that the reforms since 1978 generally have succeeded in both the system reform aspect, marked by the decollectivization of agriculture and the dismantling of Soviet-style central planning in industry, and the opening-up aspect, leading to China’s entry into the World Trade Organization (WTO) in 2001. It is also beyond doubt that the reforms have resulted in rapid economic growth (by the official statistics, an average annual growth of real gross domestic product of 9.7 percent between 1980 and 2009). However, it is also true that in the early 21st century many Chinese people remain desperately poor, and the reforms continue to be incomplete and controversial.

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...

Politics in China is an authoritative introduction to how the world’s second most populous nation and rapidly rising global power is governed today. Written by leading China scholars, each chapter offers an accessible overview of a key topic in Chinese politics. The opening section provides readers with a firm grounding in China’s modern political history from the fall of the last imperial dynasty to the victory of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and the founding of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) in 1949, the radicalism of the era of Mao Zedong (1949–1976), the dramatic economic reforms carried out by Deng Xiaoping and his disciples (1978–2012), and the rise and rule of Xi Jinping (2012–present), who has consolidated more personal power than any CCP leader since Mao. The next section sets the framework of politics in the PRC with chapters on the ideology of the CCP, the structure and dynamics of China’s communist party-state, the role of law and legal reform, and the policies behind the country’s spectacular economic transformation. The book then shifts to a discussion of a series of major political issues in China today: reform and resistance in the countryside; changes and challenges in the cities; the arts and culture; the environment and climate change; public health; population policy; and internet politics. The final chapters of the book cover politics in four important areas located on China’s geographic periphery: Tibet, Xinjiang, Hong Kong, and Taiwan.

Thirty years of reform have brought significant changes not only to the economy but also to the nature of governance and the challenges that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) will face in the future. Before the reform program started, policy was decided by a small elite based in Beijing, with Mao Zedong often dominant, and with few alternative sources of information for China’s citizens either with which to assess government performance or to compare China with government performance in other countries. A relatively small percentage of the population was urbanized and a modern middle class was nonexistent. The current situation faced by the CCP is dramatically different with an urban population that exceeds 50 percent, a growing middle class, an economy that is increasingly integrated with global production chains and a population that is networked. This creates new challenges for governance, especially with respect to rising expectations from an increasingly affluent population, and from the challenge of new social media and information flows. The CCP leadership under General Secretary Xi Jinping has clearly identified control over new social media as a significant challenge together with more effectively combatting corruption within the CCP. However, the major factor determining the CCP’s continued rule will rest primarily on its management of the economy, the subject of another paper.

In the winter of 1947 a teenaged girl from a small Shanxi village was beheaded with a hay-cutter-turned guillotine – Liu Hulan was another victim of the bloody Chinese Civil War of 1946–1949 in which the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and the Nationalist Party vied for control over the country. Her membership of the CCP and active involvement in its armed struggle within the local People's Militia drew her into danger as the village came into Nationalist hands. Within weeks of her execution, the CCP mobilised the story of Liu Hulan to rally support for its campaign. Mao Zedong himself declared that hers was ‘A great life and a glorious death’ and personally penned the calligraphy of this epithet that now graces the various memorials and materials constructed and produced in her honour. A peasant girl of enormous courage and bravery, defiant in the face of death and resistant to her captors’ demands that she recant her communist beliefs and betray her comrades, Hulan has been hailed as a heroic communist martyr for well over half a century.