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

Whether in Europe or Asia, Soviet foreign policy amounted to more than diplomacy. There was also the Comintern which, although an international organisation of Communist Parties, was under the ultimate control of the Soviet Communist Party and therefore could not afford to ignore the interests of the Soviet state. In the conflict with Japan, Soviet needs were pressing; but those needs were extremely hard to meet. The Japanese Communist Party (JCP) had been suppressed almost to the point of extinction and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) was of little use. From the Manchurian incident in 1931 until 1934 the CCP, concentrated in Kiangsi, a province to the south-west of Shanghai, was too far from the Japanese front to offer any resistance. And Kuomintang (KMT) encirclement of these soviets made any enlargement of Communist power most unlikely. Indeed Chiang Kaishek’s campaign very nearly succeeded in wiping them out. On 16 October 1934 the Communists escaped by forced march — the Long March — to the north and west. Under the direction of Mao Tse-tung, who secured his supremacy en route at Tsunyi in January 1935, battered remnants of the Red forces reached the poverty-stricken province of northern Shensi that October.KeywordsCommunist PartyChinese Communist PartyUnite FrontSoviet LeadershipRadio ContactThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

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

Part I The view from the centre: Zimmerwald and the origins of the Third International, David Kirby the history of the Comintern in the light of new documents, Kevin McDermott the structure of the Moscow apparatus of the Comintern and decision-making. Part II The parties and the Comintern - Europe: the Comintern International and the British Communist Party, Andrew Thorpe the Comintern and a trotskyist menace to British communism on the eve of World War II, Yevgeny Sergeev about a few things we know better concerning French communism and the Communist International, Guillaume Bourgeois the Comintern and the Italian Commuist Party in the light of some new documents, Aldo Agosti the testing-ground of world revolution - Germany in the 1920s, Aleksandr Vatlin from Lenin's comrades in arms to Dutch donkeys - the Communist party in the Netherlands and the Comintern of the 1920s, Gerrit Voerman the highpoint of Comintern influence? - the Comintern and the Civil War in Spain, Tim Rees nationalist or internationalist? The Portuguese Communist Party's autonomy and the Communist international, Carlos Cuhna the Communist Party of Greece of the Comintern - evaluations, instructions and subordination, Artiem Ulunian Tito and the twighlight of Comintern, Geoff Swain. The parties of Comintern - the Americas and Asia: the Communist International and the American Communist Party, Hugh Wilford from Caribbean backwater to revolutionary opportunity - Cuba's evolving relationship with Comintern, 1925-1934, Barry Carr the COmintern, the Chinese Communist Party and the three armed uprisings in Shanghai, 1926-1927, Steve Smith peasants and the peoples of the east - Indians and the rhetoric of Comintern, Wendy Singer the Comintern and Japanese Communist Party, Sandra Wilson.

One of the most distinctive aspects of modern Chinese politics is the role of Tse-tung's This study investigates the concrete political and ideological process which gave rise to Mao's thought within the Chinese Communist Party, with special reference to the years 1935-45. This decade, which overlaps the Yenan period in Chinese Communist historiography, opens with Mao Tse-tung's rise to power at the Tsunyi Conference, and closes with the formal incorporation of his thought into the new CCP constitution at the Party's Seventh Congress. In the course of the study, it became apparent that Mao Tse-tung played a strong personal role in fostering the cult of his own person and thought. However, he received the enthusiastic support of a small group of Party intellectuals who gathered around him, of whom the most important is Ch'en Po-ta. Pending further research, conclusions regarding Ch'en's role must remain tentative, hut the initial evidence does suggest his influence on certain aspects of Mao's thinking, and in the formulation of a historio-philosophical rationale for Mao's claim to ideological supremacy. The study falls into two main periods; 1935-40 were years of ideological creativity, when the basic ideas behind Sinified were worked out by Mao and Ch'en; 1940-45 were years of ideological console idation, when the two men worked to systematize and disseminate Mao's thought as the CCP's official guiding doctrine. The conclusion emerges that the cult of Mao and his thought was not merely a simple concomitant of Mao's rise to power during this period. Rather, the dual cult was consciously created and propagated within and without the CCP as a deliberate act of policy on the part of the ascendant Maoists, with Mao and Ch'en very much at the core of this policy. From time to time, developments within the CCP, in Chinese domestic politics, and in the international arena intervened to accelerate or retard the Maoists' deliberate campaign to foster the ascendancy of Mao's thought. However, by the time of the CCP's Seventh Congress in 1945, the victorious Maoists had succeeded in their joint drive for the ''primitive accumulation of political and ideological power. Mao's power was by no means absolute, but the Chinese Communist Party -- and shortly the entire nation -- had entered the era of Tse-tung's In sum, this study contributes to our understanding of the Chinese Communist movement in four areas. It develops previous discussions of the ideological history of the CCP, especially regarding the emergence of the concepts of the Sinification of Marxism and Tse-tung's In using these ideological concepts as points of reference, this thesis also offers a distinctive approach to the study of elite politics within the CCP during the Yenan period. At the same time, Mao Tse-tung's personal role in fostering the twin cult of himself and his thought is brought into sharper focus than in previous studies. Finally, our knowledge of the early career of Ch'en Po-ta is considerably enhanced, particularly regarding his role as Party ideologist and historian in the service of Mao Tse-tung.

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...

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...

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

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.

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

Reviewed by: Mao Zedong and China in the Twentieth-Century World: A Concise History Tina Mai Chen Karl, Rebecca E. – Mao Zedong and China in the Twentieth-Century World: A Concise History. Durham: Duke University Press, 2010. Pp. 216. This remarkable book accomplishes what few other succinct accounts of major historical figures are able to do. In readable prose that is both accessible to students and engaging for the specialist reader, Rebecca Karl produces a compelling narrative of the political thought and actions of Mao Zedong that is deftly situated within the local and global historical conjunctures of the twentieth century. Attentive to the complexity of the historical and theoretical struggles in which Mao Zedong participated, the book smoothly transitions from accounts of military encounters and strategy, revolutionary Marxist theory, Chinese Communist Party (CCP) power struggles, details of Mao’s personal life, and critical insights into the historiography on Mao Zedong and twentieth century Chinese history. The result is an informative work that refuses simplistic or sensationalist understandings of the People’s Republic of China; a work that instead insists that the reader take seriously the ideological positions and social goals – and their failures – that animated Mao Zedong. The book is a welcome addition to existing biographies and intellectual histories of Mao Zedong. First, it is characterized by sustained attention to feminism and women’s liberation, alongside world historical developments. Second, even while Mao Zedong occupies centre stage in her narrative and analysis, Karl never insinuates that Mao Zedong orchestrated a revolution on the people of China as per ‘great man’ approaches to history that locate power in a leader and presume acquiescence by the people. Whether [End Page 446] discussing regional differences in peasant participation in land reform or the appeal of the Cultural Revolution outside China, Karl incorporates a discussion of why and in what manner individuals participated in the various mass campaigns of the era. The concise nature of the book precludes Karl from providing detailed information about the motives of specific social groups, but she constantly reminds us that people made decisions to participate in politics and that their actions were part of a broader process of producing and enacting consciousness through political participation. For example, with respect to the Cultural Revolution and dominant interpretations of this tumultuous and disastrous period in Chinese history, Karl addresses the claim that the Cultural Revolution is evidence of the blind obedience of Chinese who lack a tradition of independence and freedom. Karl acknowledges that the magnitude of participation in the Cultural Revolution is one of its defining characteristics yet, contra the above interpretation, she suggests that mass participation in attacks on the CCP reflect people’s decisions to act against the Party for not producing the type of society desired (p. 118). The attention to agency, history, and politics is personalized in interview interludes with: Wang Yanghua, one of the last living members of the Shanghai Underground Communist Party in the 1940s; Sabu Kohso, Japanese-born New York-based independent writer who encountered Maoism while in high school in Japan in the 1970s; and Wang Hui, leading literary and historical scholar in China and critic of Dengist reform. The interviews provide insight into how Mao’s ideas and practices shaped critical engagement with the politics of China (past and present). They remind the reader that the meaning and practice of the Chinese revolution was and is contested in the everyday. As such, the interviews also reinforce one of the themes of the book: “Practicing politics, in Mao’s terms, is part of everyday life” (pp. 57–8). As Karl elucidates, Mao Zedong continuously highlighted the interconnected complexity of each moment of struggle. As such, fascism, imperialism, local situations, and so on were all part of the revolutionary struggle. This makes for compelling theorizing, but often for disjointed or convoluted narratives. Yet, Karl successfully leads the reader through the labyrinth of overlapping and intertwined networks that defined and made the Chinese Revolution, including: CCP-PLA relations; Sino-Soviet relations; an emerging Third Worldism; debates within the CCP over the relative positioning of development and revolution; women’s liberation and feminism; personal relationships. The well-written and wide-ranging sub-sections...

To call Hitler evil may well be true and morally satisfying. But it explains nothing. Ian Kershaw, Hitler: 1936–1945 Nemesis , p. xvii. On November 29, 1937, a Soviet plane landed in a blizzard in Yan'an, the communist capital in the northern Shaanxi wasteland. On board were Peter Vladimirov, Moscow's new representative to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP); Kang Sheng, the CCP Central Committee's representative to the Communist International (Comintern), who would go down in history as the Chinese communists' most loathsome spy chief; and Chen Yun, the architect of the post-Mao economic reforms and at the time the Central Committee's representative to Xinjiang warlord Sheng Shicai. The most important passenger was Wang Ming (alias Chen Shaoyu), who had been in Moscow since 1931. The mission's arrival meant the beginning of a struggle for power between Wang, representing an internationalist Moscow-oriented tendency in the CCP, and Mao Zedong, calling for the Sinification of revolution. Mao would prevail before a year had passed, but he focused a good part of his attention in the remaining years of World War II on wringing Wang Ming–type communist cosmopolitanism from the CCP. World War I had generated powerful opportunities for globalizing forces because its horrors had led to widespread disenchantment with bourgeois-dominated nation-states. World War II shut down these opportunities while arming national liberation movements. In transforming the CCP during the 1937–45 Sino-Japanese War from a defeated, demoralized, and divided party oriented toward Moscow into an organization with a strong ethos, a clear sense of a separate Chinese identity, and a powerful army, Mao domesticated, militarized, and nationalized revolution in China.

A RGUABLY, the Japanese Communist Party (JCP) is the largest nonruling Communist party in the advanced industrial democracies in terms of party and front organizational membership, party newspaper readership and electoral support.' With the exit of the Italian Communist Party (PCI) from communism, the JCP became the largest nonruling Communist party by default rather than by a marked increase in its mass popularity. (See appendix 1). Unlike the PCI, which had transformed itself into a social democratic party, the JCP has retained its Marxist ideology and the organizational principle of democratic centralism. Notwithstanding the collapse of Communist regimes in Eastern Europe and the USSR and an overall crisis of communism, the JCP had succeeded in minimizing its electoral decline and had even staged a modest electoral recovery in the July 1995 Upper House Elections.2 In that election, theJCP captured 9.5 percent of the votes cast in the party proportional list in contrast to 7.9 percent three years earlier. In the April 1995 local elections, the JCP obtained 6.6 percent of the votes in the prefectural assemblies and 12.0 percent of the votes cast in the special-designated cities. Four years earlier, it won only 6.3 percent of the prefectural votes and 11.8 percent from the special-designated cities.3

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...

7 Between the Comintern, the Japanese Communist Party, and the Chinese Communist Party

Between the Comintern, the Japanese Communist Party, and the Chinese Communist Party: