The Party as agent of social transformation

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

Will China Democratize?Disruption without Disintegration Zbigniew Brzezinski (bio) Given the pace of change in our time, it is very difficult to make predictions about what will happen ten years hence. If forced to hazard a judgment, I would predict that a decade from now there will still be a state calling itself the People’s Republic of China. More likely than not, however, it will no longer be governed solely by the Chinese Communist Party. In other words, I think that there is going to be significant change, even disruptive change, but probably not disintegrative change. While it would be unrealistic to expect China’s future pace of economic development to be sustained at recent levels, it is quite likely that China will achieve reasonably impressive economic growth over the next decade. That growth may decelerate, and at some point the economy may even encounter serious difficulties. But in all probability, the overall economic condition of China will continue to improve. For that very reason, however, I envisage some significant discontinuity in the character of China’s political system—though without there necessarily being a dramatic change in the designation or even the external appearance of that political system. Let me put it differently. I think it is highly unlikely that Communist Party dictatorship and increasing socioeconomic pluralism can long co-exist. Therefore, some significant discontinuities from the current situation are likely. At the same time, the extent of these discontinuities—and particularly their sharp edge—is likely to be dulled by relatively successful and continuing economic progress. In that [End Page 4] context, some tension and conflict between the socioeconomic system and the political system will become inevitable. Moreover, China is likely to be thrown increasingly into the global community simply through the impact of international communications. I am told that there are now several million satellite dishes in China capable of receiving television programs from abroad. I am also told that, as of 1997, some one hundred thousand Chinese actively participate in the Internet. There are hundreds of thousands of Chinese traveling or studying abroad. In brief, communist dogmatism cannot continue to be maintained in its present form. At some point, the party dictatorship will have to crack, and the party itself will have to share a significant portion of its authority with other social forces in Chinese society. That necessity may create a period of political tensions and acute dislocations. The likely outcome will be a situation in which the Chinese Communist Party, by itself and in its present form, will no longer be able to govern China. I do not think, however, that the changes are likely to be acute or intense enough to result in the overt and dramatic overthrow of the Communist Party and the termination of the People’s Republic of China. Instead, we are likely to witness a process of political change that is much more complex, perhaps in some respects even more difficult, and certainly at times very tense, one that will probably culminate in the present Chinese state continuing in name, but no longer in form and substance. I do not mean to suggest that the party is going to embrace this kind of change voluntarily. The process that I envisage will involve political unrest or other circumstances that impose upon the party the necessity of change; the party will have to come to an accommodation with these pressures, or else eventually face a revolutionary situation. To some extent, I am betting on the prospect that the Chinese political elite will be intelligent and realistic enough to see that it must make the necessary accommodations. Of course, the party will have to invent a lot of new ideological formulas to justify these accommodations, but it has already invented plenty to justify the present situation. President Jiang Zemin told me in July 1997 that joint-stock ownership of state industries is permissible according to the thought of Marx and Engels because it is a form of public ownership. He is playing with words to justify ownership by individual stockholders. He and his successors will find other formulas to justify whatever concessions the party is compelled to adopt. At some point...

This chapter examines the socialist transformation by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), focusing on the case of the reorganization of intermediate associations in Chongqing. The socialist transformation of the Trade Associations promoted in the 1950s brought together the various organizations, practices, and social relations that had colored China's social economy into a consolidation centered on the CCP. In this sense, the socialist transformation by the CCP was an attempt to ensure stability by restricting the free operation of the social economy and keeping economic activity within each region through centralization of power and profit in the regime and the containment of critical forces. In contrast, the socialist transformation promoted by the CCP was also an attempt to introduce other-oriented and broad-based rules backed by state power. This seemingly contradictory situation glimpsed in the socialist transformation led to the formation of another principle of decentralization and the development of the so-called “Economies of Feudal Princes (zhuhou jingji)” after the Reform and Opening-up policy, which coexisted with the orientation toward the integration of development dictatorship. In this sense, the 1950s can be said to be the starting point for the formation of “regions” in modern China.

One of the defining characteristics of a communist state, it was suggested in Chapter 1, is the existence of a communist or Marxist-Leninist party exercising dominant political authority within the society in question. Not all the parties we shall consider in this chapter in fact call themselves communist. The Polish party, for instance, is called the Polish United Workers' Party, and the Albanian party is called the Party of Labour of Albania (see Table 4.1). Nor are these parties necessarily the only parties that are permitted to exist in their respective societies; almost half of them, in fact, permit more than one party to exist, with seats in the legislature and a formally independent status (see Table 3.1). In none of these states, however, is any genuinely competitive political party permitted to exist, and the non-communist parties in these countries are generally of a more or less 'puppet' character, contesting elections together with the communist party on the basis of a common list of candidates and with a common manifesto. The dominant role of the communist party within the political system, and within the party of its central leadership, is indeed the essential characteristic of a communist state not just to political scientists but also so far as the communist party authorities themselves are concerned; it was to resist any challenge to that role that the Soviet Union and its allies intervened in Czechoslovakia in 1968 and appeared likely to do so again in Poland in 1980–81.

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...

At the present time, the Communist Party is not looked upon as an agent for revolutionary change. It is seen as an archaic artifact that needs to be left in the dustbin of 20th century history. Some in the “New Left” argue for a “post-party politics” – because contemporary party politics are so “closely bound up with structures of power, the possibility that political parties will transform themselves and formulate a new politics is extremely low” (Wang 2016, 169). In sum, we should not have faith in the Party in radically changing social formations. However, this view abstracts from the political and social dynamics of communist parties. Communist parties provide the “affective infrastructure” for activists (Dean 2016) and create the flexible, disciplined organizational form necessary for maneuvering through the complexities of a revolutionary moment. An investigation of the historical and contemporary “line struggles” within the Chinese Communist Party gives insight into how communist parties can foster change in a social formation. This paper seeks to install hope that the Party, particularly the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), can once again create revolutionary change.

The production of Mao’s images in photographs and paintings became one of the most significant propaganda tasks of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) since Mao’s rise in Yan’an. During the Yan’an period (1937–1949), the CCP developed an unsophisticated but efficient model of producing Mao iconography in various forms, attracting professional photographers and painters from big cities to join this endeavor. These individuals brought advanced skills, ideas, and creativity to Yan’an, and they became Communist Party cadres who played key roles in making urban cultural policies after 1949. However, after 1949, the Yan’an model of iconography production came into conflict with the existing print culture in big cities, especially Shanghai. The one-party state encountered private publishers who made profit from producing Mao iconography. The CCP implemented standardization and censorship to discipline private industry and corralled it into the planned economy. During the “socialist transformation” (shehuizhuyi gaizao) (1953–1956), the cultural industry, including Mao iconography production in Shanghai, became state controlled. By tracing the evolution of Mao iconography production from the Yan’an period to the early years of the PRC, this thesis examines how “print socialism” evolved in Yan’an and developed in big cities after 1949. It also investigates how the Communist state utilized, absorbed, and eventually transformed the capitalist print industry to serve its socialist political culture.

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

Reviewed by: The Dictator’s Dilemma: The Chinese Communist Party’s Strategy for Survival by Bruce J. Dickson Kerry Brown (bio) Bruce J. Dickson. The Dictator’s Dilemma: The Chinese Communist Party’s Strategy for Survival. New York: Oxford University Press, 2016. xii, 352 pp. Hardcover $27.95, isbn 978-0-19-022855-2. The title of this new work by American political scientist Bruce J. Dickson is a little misleading. It sounds like the book will be largely speculative and join a long list of those that have already appeared contemplating various challenges the Communist Party faces along with assessments of how it might deal with these. In fact, at the heart of this study is material taken from a number of public opinion surveys conducted in China between 2010 and 2014 in different places and across different socioeconomic groups. In that sense the book is more about current public opinion in modern China than anything that is going to happen in the future. Chinese public opinion is something of a mystery. Pew and other surveys produce annual assessments of the mood within China toward the government, and they invariably record high levels of satisfaction. This is hardly surprising in view of the high costs those who challenge the Party’s monopoly on power pay—some of whom Dickson refers to in his chapter on democracy and the understanding of it within the country. Despite this, surveyors do now have strategies to uncover more nuanced aspects of Chinese opinion, and Dickson’s book illustrates some of these. The fact that the data presented covers a period of elite leadership transition, from Hu Jintao to Xi Jinping, during 2012 and into 2013, adds to its significance. Beyond their intrinsic value, therefore, they also provide a useful audit of how this event—one which had a huge impact on the wider public but was, as far as we know, decided by only a handful of people—affected public views about where they thought their country was going. [End Page 268] Some things widely evidenced in already extant surveys elsewhere are simply reaffirmed here. On the whole, Chinese respect central leaders more than they do local ones. Perceptions of the corruption, efficiency, and work ethic of local leaders are almost uniformly negative. There are also clear differences linked to generation and age. The older generation of Communist Party members who joined in the era prior to the 1980s are shown to have done so for idealistic reasons. Those who joined afterward largely did so through pragmatic calculations of the usefulness of membership for their career. A more complex issue addressed in the book is that of what motivates fidelity toward the one Party state among the public. Dickson refers to the large amount of material that shows that through modernization, rising living standards, and development (the things the Party currently builds public support on in China) countries are likelier to eventually end up as multiparty democracies of one form or another. In many ways, until now, China has bucked this trend. But the key question is whether, for all its declarations of marching into an eternal, glorious future, the Party is in fact stimulating the kinds of wealth-creating model that will end up leading to its inevitable demise. Dickson is frank about some of the tactics the Party utilizes now to support its rule—tolerance for most things but utter inflexibility on the matter of organized challenges in the political realm. For those who dare wander into this area, it deploys repression and threats. The problem with this tack, however, is its expense, and the likelihood it has of eventually alienating people. Does this use of such harsh methods indicate that deep down the Party is aware of the paradox of pushing for a society whose prosperity, levels of education, and demands will eventually put it out of business? Anxiety about its sustainability must be one of the reasons why the Party in recent years has been assiduous in utilizing nationalistic narratives to gain support. But Dickson is right in contesting the usual statement that Party legitimacy post-Mao until the era of Xi, relied on GDP growth to gain public...

The Conference of World Communist and Workers' Parties held in Moscow in November 1957 was the largest gathering of world Communists since the birth of Marxism. Scholars have long assumed that the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) dominated the conference. Newly declassified archival records and memoirs indicate that the idea of convening a conference and issuing a joint declaration was proposed by both the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and the CPSU. During the conference the CCP leader, Mao Zedong, played an important role. Mao's extemporaneous remarks at the conference shocked the leaders of the CPSU. His comments on the Soviet intraparty struggle, his blunt remarks about nuclear war, and his declaration that China would overtake Great Britain within fifteen years created doubts and dissatisfactions in the minds of the delegates and cast a cloud over the conference. The Moscow Declaration also revealed incipient Sino-Soviet disagreements, portending Beijing's challenge to Soviet leadership in the socialist bloc. Thus, the Moscow Conference was a turning point for Sino-Soviet relations.

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

Vietnam Through Chinese Eyes: Divergent Accountability in Single-Party Regimes

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.

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.

The relationship between the state and the university is predominantly shaped at a national level which tends to reflect the specific traditions and circumstances of individual countries. In China the Communist Party has played a crucial role in university governance making it different from any other country. However the role of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in universities, particularly in private universities, has rarely been discussed in English literature. This paper examines how the University Communist Committee of the Party (UCCP) is set up and works within private universities, and the various patterns of institutional governance that can emerge. It draws extensively on documents of the CCP and interviews with 32 senior managers on 44 separate occasions. The study shows that while allowing private entrepreneurs considerable freedom to invest in higher education, the CCP still has control over the private universities in their socialist development. This is partly achieved through the requirement that every private university must have a UCCP to oversee the implementation of CCP policies in the university.