Chinese Communist Party Leadership Research Articles

The Historical Different Meanings of Chinese Communist Party’s ‘The Party Commands Gun’ Under Mao Zedong and Deng Xiaoping

Since the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) established its own military force (People’s Liberation Army [PLA]), it has always emphasised ‘The Party Commands Gun’ (dangzhihuiqiang, µ³Ö¸»Óǹ). However, the high-ranking CCP leaders who hold ‘military power (junquan, ¾üȨ)’ would also use their influence in the PLA to influence or even change the direction of Chinese politics. In addition, the meaning of ‘The Party Commands Gun’ also varies by period, and the meaning of it is also quite different in different eras in the CCP party history. In this article, the author aims to analyse the connotation changes of the CCP’s political slogan ‘The Party Commands Gun’ from the perspective of historical evolution. Based on examples from the history of the CCP, the focus will be compared to the CCP’s revolutionary era, the Mao Zedong era and the post-Mao era of ‘The Party Commands Gun’. From the perspective of empirical analysis and historical evolution, the author reveals the evolution of the purpose of ‘The Party Commands Gun’ from the revolutionary era to Deng Xiaoping era.

Re-meme-bering Tiananmen? From collective memory to meta-memory on TikTok

The 1989 Tiananmen Square Massacre has been enshrined in the collective memory of different social groups globally in various ways, while the Chinese government enforces its own memory of Tiananmen through censorship and revisionism. These result in numerous memories of Tiananmen. Through a qualitative analysis of 27 TikToks posted on 3–5 June 2022, this study examines how Tiananmen is commemorated on TikTok on Tiananmen’s anniversary and what is remembered about Tiananmen. This study found that commemoration posts on TikTok remember the protests, casualties, the Chinese Communist Party leaders’ role, and the historical contexts, oft using the Tank Man image. The posts also remember the remembrance and memory formation of Tiananmen. Through commemorations, memes, and humor, some posts remember the Chinese government’s attempts to recreate the collective memory and other commemoration events. This is best described as meta-memories, where people remember the remembering and possess memory of the memory of events.

Lips and Teeth: China’s Buffer Thinking Toward North Korea

ABSTRACT Chinese officials characterize the bilateral relations between China and North Korea as ‘lips and teeth’ at times and most China scholars would also agree that North Korea is China’s buffer state. Despite the popularity of accepting this ‘buffering relationship’ between the two countries, few scholarly works explain this relationship in depth. What does ‘China regards North Korea as a buffer state’ mean? When and under what conditions did the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) leaders begin to view North Korea as a buffer state? Most importantly, how did such a buffer view shape China’s behavior when North Korea’s existence was endangered? The purpose of this article is to shed more lights on this unique geopolitical relationship forged in blood. It argues the CCP leaders’ first view on the Korean Peninsula was nationality minority. It was the Korean War that fundamentally changed the way the leaders perceived the value of the peninsula, from a non-geopolitical to a geopolitical one—North Korea is a buffer state keeping a hostile force away from the Sino-North Korean border. Evidently, China’s buffer thinking toward North Korea was one key factor contributing Chinese military and diplomatic protection over North Korea during the first North Korean nuclear crisis.

"May 4th Movement" of 1919 in speeches of Chinese Communist Party's leaders

Object of the study is the image of the May 4th Movement of 1919 in the official interpretation of history of Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in PRC. The goal is to trace changes in the interpretation of the Movement in speeches of Chinese Communist Party's leaders on the occasion of its anniversary. To do this, author conducts qualitative and quantitative content analysis of the relevant speeches of 1979, 1989, 1999, 2009 and 2019. There are five main conceptual blocks present in every speech: attitude towards tradition, assessment of past mistakes of CCP and role of Mao Zedong, "spirit of May 4th Movement", development goals and youth policy. In the course of analysis, changes in content of these blocks are traced. Thus, ideological transformation of PRC is viewed in the context of changes in official interpretation of a significant historical event. Memory of this event in China is filled with various meanings, including themes of democracy and youth rebellion, inconvenient for the ruling Communist Party. Author comes to the conclusion that at least since late 1990s CCP has begun to rely on nationalism as a new source of legitimization of its power. In the analyzed speeches it can be seen how, with a greater emphasis on the patriotic component of the "Movement", other meanings associated with it, primarily democracy and science, have fallen by the wayside. At the same time, there has been a transition from rejection of traditional culture to its acceptance.

From The Editors

From The Editors

Justice for Whom? Redressing the “1975 Shadian Incident” in the Post-Mao Era, 1978–2019

The “Shadian conflict,” which erupted in 1964 and continued until at least 1975, was the largest religious resistance of the Cultural Revolution, but its local dynamics and sociopolitical impacts are significantly understudied. This article sheds light on how Chinese Communist Party (CCP) authorities have dealt with Shadian Muslims’ petitions and requests for religious freedom from 1979 until 2019. It argues that the post–Mao Zedong CCP leadership has continued to implement the same mentality and methods as in the Mao period to deal with ethno-religious conflicts. At the center of this process lies the events of 1975 that have come to be known as the “Shadian incident” or “Shadian massacre,” in which around 1,600 Shadian Muslims were killed. The party’s approaches to redressing the events of 1975 have secularized and simplified the causes of the Shadian massacre and the religious requests of Muslim villagers by attributing the tragedy and villagers’ protests to factional struggles launched by “followers of Lin Biao and the Gang of Four” and “a handful of chaos-making figures.” Embedded in ongoing struggles between vernacular and official narratives of the 1975 tragedy, the Shadian problem has resulted in unreconciled discord between the CCP, which prioritizes the Maoist class-struggle mentality, and villagers, who emphasize Islamic religiosity.

“Law Does Not Come Down From Heaven”: Youth Legal Socialisation Approaches in Chinese Textbooks of the Xi Jinping Era

Schools constitute key sites for legal socialisation, the process whereby youth develop their relationship with the law. Yet, what does legal socialisation entail in the context of an authoritarian party-state such as China? The article examines this question by analysing Chinese citizenship education textbooks of the Xi era. The study finds that China's current textbooks contain elements associated with both a coercive and a consensual approach to legal education. Nonetheless, it is the consensual orientation that receives greater stress, as the books highlight the positive benefits of legal compliance and endorse the idea that youth should advance beyond the external supervisory stage to the self-discipline level of legal consciousness. Reflecting the attempt of the Chinese Communist Party leadership to draw on legality as a key source of legitimacy, this approach is nonetheless undermined by the propagandist tone of the textbooks and their ambiguous messages regarding citizens’ ability to challenge China's existing laws.

The Shenzhen Experiment: The Story of China's Instant City by Juan Du

Reviewed by: The Shenzhen Experiment: The Story of China's Instant City by Juan Du Susanne Stein (bio) The Shenzhen Experiment: The Story of China's Instant City By Juan Du. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2020. Pp. 376. With her equally instructive and highly readable monograph on the urban evolution of Shenzhen, Princeton-educated and Hong Kong-based architect Juan Du aims to dispel a powerful, multilayered myth at the heart of most "rise of China" narratives on the recent past. As the People's Republic of China's original and most prestigious Special Economic Zone (SEZ) and first major window to the outside world after three decades of increasing political and economic self-isolation, Shenzhen has long been stylized as the epitome of the economic reform policies initiated after 1978 by the central leadership under Deng Xiao-ping (1904–97); more recently, it has come to symbolize China's ascent to global power at the turn of the twenty-first century. Forty years after Shenzhen's inception as socioeconomic experimental zone, most of us are still ignorant of the city's complex developments beyond the legendary tale of "former fishing village turned megacity." That is why Du's multifaceted history, written for a "broad intellectual audience," is a welcome addition to existing scholarship on Shenzhen's urban and social landscape (p. 359). By exposing and contextualizing common misconceptions about Shenzhen perpetuated in official versions of the familiar success story, she strives to deliver a "factual account of the city's evolution" (p. 8). This encompasses a thorough reconsideration of Shenzhen's reinvention as SEZ; its purpose and location, neither capitalist enclave nor tabula rasa; the time needed for its development, refuting the notion of an "instant city" founded in 1979; and the various groups and people involved, ranging from Chinese Communist Party leaders, central planners, outside investors, and infrastructure regiments of the People's Liberation Army, to local governments, villagers, and millions of migrants. The four sections in Du's book represent the different scales and foci of [End Page 587] her analysis, proceeding from Shenzhen's National Relevance and Regional History down to the local City Construction and District Transformation levels. In each section the author centers on different (historical) individuals and artifacts entangled with the urban and economic evolution of today's Shenzhen. Drawing on various academic contributions, newspaper articles, local gazetteers, official documents, and her own field research, Du ties the threads of personal histories, experiences, and anecdotes with general developments in the emerging metropolis. Her descriptions are meticulously documented and well-illustrated with relevant maps, photographs, and architectural diagrams. Some readers might wish for a comprehensive theoretical framing of the narratives, including a critical discussion on the sources—as well as their limitations—and a proper bibliography providing easy access to Chinese and Western reference materials alike. Complementing earlier research by Stefan Ai (2014) and Linda Vlassenrood (2016), Du argues that "Shenzhen's growth and development after 1979 should not be attributed solely to the national government's centralized economic policies," but is equally, if not more importantly, rooted in the geography, history, and culture of the Shenzhen region, especially the city's urban form and spatial organization (p. 8). This is a topic she unfolds in her third and fourth sections. Historians of technology, migration, and land use change will be particularly interested in her illuminating sketches of the history of salt and oyster production and the long-term impact of these trades on local infrastructure, architecture, and the natural environment. Du's book also resonates with O'Donnell, Wong, and Bach's (2017) collection on Shenzhen's urban transformation and, more generally, with Peter Herrle, Josefine Fokdal, and Detlev Ipsen's (2015) study on urban(izing) villages in the Pearl River Delta regarding the significance of local negotiations and informal practices alongside national development policies. For planning historians and urban anthropologists, several of Du's observations on the discrepancies between central planning targets and the actual situation may seem prosaic; however, she turns them into a compelling argument against promoting Shenzhen as a "replicable model of city planning and economic development," at home or abroad (p. 9). Du effectively demonstrates that Shenzhen...

Turning the Party State Inside Out: CCP Intra-party Regulations as a Theoretical Challenge

Abstract Scholarship on the Chinese party state commonly treats the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) as a black box: the Party acts in the world, using the law as its tool to achieve its political goals. The study of intra-party regulations turns this anthropomorphic image inside out, requiring scholars to regard the very notion of the Party and rule-based governance as ideologically and theoretically contentious matters. This article maps out—and criticizes—prominent approaches to the study of intra-party regulations and rule-based governance within the CCP. It is certainly possible to explain CCP intra-party regulations through external social theoretical perspectives, such as Ernst Fraenkel’s dual state model. However, such perspectives do not necessarily help one understand the CCP leaders’ and ideologues’ idiosyncratic approach to rule-based governance. Fraenkel’s dual state model, in particular, fails to fully describe the role of rule-based governance in the CCP’s governance project.

How a non-democratic regime maintains its legitimacy over time: A study of changes in Chinese Communist Party legitimacy after 1949

By exploring the operation of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) since its rise to power in 1949, this article demonstrates how a non-democratic regime maintains its legitimacy. While previous studies have shed light on the CCP’s sources of legitimacy, few abundantly and comparatively discuss the different forms of legitimacy and how legitimacy changes over time in a non-democratic state. This study addresses these gaps by analyzing how the CCP’s operational principles change over time, including changes in sources and forms of legitimacy. This study uses different frameworks of legitimacy to facilitate the comparison of changes in legitimacy of different leadership generations, and also demonstrates the specification of legitimacy of the CCP from different perspectives. By comparing the sources and forms of legitimacy of different generations of regime leaders, this study demonstrates that after the death of Mao Zedong in 1976, the CCP regime lacked substantial legitimacy based on political participation, and thus emphasized instrumental legitimacy based on economic development instead. Using process tracing to analyze policy changes, this study argues that different CCP leadership generations employed different sources and forms of legitimacy to maintain regime support.

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

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

Formalism and anti-formalism in the Chinese Communist Party’s governance project

AbstractThis article argues that the governance project of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) oscillates between rule-based formalism and anti-formalist scepticism about rule-based governance. In this dichotomy, anti-formalist arguments support CCP leaders’ efforts to maintain and increase the Party’s influence over the judiciary and other state organs, which is a key justification for the Party’s power. Formalist language, in contrast, supports Party leaders’ attempts to constrain lower-level cadres’ uses of power within the Party. Formalist language is particularly prominent in the writings of Party ideologues on the interpretation of the Party’s internal regulations, including the CCP Constitution. At the same time, Party ideology also provides for various anti-formalist arguments about rule-based governance within and outside the Party. Paradoxical as it may be, the Party leadership seeks to exert rule-transcending political leadership through formal rules. While the focus of this article is on China, it argues that other illiberal regimes may also be studied in terms of similar, potentially incoherent approaches to rule-based governance.

Radical praxis of computing in the PRC: forgotten stories from the maoist to post-Mao era

In his 1937 essay "On Practice (Shijian lun)", Mao Zedong argues for a distinctively Chinese model of communism that merges practise with theory, combining objective experience and subjective knowledge into a coherent dialectical process of praxis. This was, at the time, a radical idea within the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and the global communist movement dominated by Stalinism at its heyday. But it became institutionalized as a guiding principle of CCP, the ruling party of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) since 1949, which has led, among other things, to the establishment of one of the world’s most important computing industries since the 1950s. This article interrogates the idea of “radical praxis” and applies it to the Chinese contexts of the 1950s–2000s in developing a holistic, emic understanding of the computing industry from the Maoist to the Post-Mao era. As such, we aim at reconstructing plural histories of Chinese technology that are longer, less deterministic, and more imaginative than mainstream accounts that would begin, almost always, with Deng Xiaoping’s marketization reforms. Longer, because we trace the radical praxis of Chinese computing back to the 1950s with remarkable continuity. Less deterministic, because it has multiple trajectories full of unforeseeable twists and turns. More imaginative, because praxis is as much about knowing, theorization, and subjectivities as it is about doing, implementation, and embodied struggle. Drawing from policy documents, news archives, memoirs of key CCP leaders as well as secondary materials in both Chinese and English, this article reveals and discusses hidden stories of Maoist radical praxis.

“A Good Communist Style”

This essay focuses on the history and politicization of radio announcers’ vocal delivery in China during the mid-twentieth century. It explores how Chinese Communist Party leaders used internal party debates, national policies, and broadcasting training to construct an ideal Communist voice whose qualities would ostensibly communicate party loyalty and serve as a sonic representation of political authority.

China's Pursuit of Cyberpower

China's Pursuit of Cyberpower Adam Segal (bio) China is one of the most active cyberspace players in the Asia-Pacific, developing and deploying cyber capacities in pursuit of its economic, political, and strategic objectives. Chinese computer network operations are conducted to strengthen the competitiveness of China's economy, accelerate the modernization of the People's Liberation Army (PLA), weaken opponents of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), resist international pressure and foreign ideas, and offset U.S. dominance in conventional military capabilities.1 Beijing is also aggressively supporting the indigenous innovation of emerging technologies that will give it new capabilities in cyberspace, especially 5G, artificial intelligence, and quantum information systems. Although Western governments often dismiss comments from Chinese foreign ministry officials declaring China the world's biggest victim in cyberspace as distractions and diversions, Chinese officials do in fact see their cybersecurity as weak relative to the degree of threat and the capabilities they perceive from potential adversaries, the United States in particular.2 As the July 2019 defense white paper puts it, "Cybersecurity remains a global challenge and poses a severe threat to China."3 Perhaps the clearest evidence that the leadership sees China's situation as precarious is the speed with which it has addressed what it sees as two major sources of weakness: an underdeveloped cybersecurity regulatory framework and widespread dependence on foreign technology in critical networks. Over the last five years, China has rapidly developed new cybersecurity institutions, laws, guidelines, and standards and has moved to replace foreign suppliers with domestic counterparts. [End Page 60] Both Chinese capabilities and vulnerabilities are likely to increase in the next five years. This combination of strengths and weaknesses means that China is primarily a cyberespionage threat to the Asia-Pacific. While the potential for Beijing to use more disruptive or destructive cyberattacks against an adversary in a regional conflict is high, especially against command-and-control systems, CCP leaders are likely cognizant that China is vulnerable to similar attacks. This essay introduces the range of Chinese cyberoperations and the organizational structure that supports and conducts them. It also highlights significant weaknesses in Chinese cyberdefenses, such as an underdeveloped cybersecurity industry and lack of investment and expertise. The essay concludes that the combination of the Chinese economy becoming more reliant on information and communications technologies and the PLA becoming more dependent on digital systems has resulted in Chinese leaders becoming more sensitive to China's vulnerability to cyberattacks. China's Cyberattacks The vast majority of computer attacks originating from China have targeted private-sector companies in an effort to steal intellectual property, trade secrets, and other information that could help China become more economically competitive. President Xi Jinping set a goal for China to become a "world-leading" science and technology power by 2049, and the country has significantly ramped up spending on research and development; expanded enrollment in science, technology, engineering, and mathematic disciplines at universities; and pushed specialized industrial strategies in emerging technologies, such as artificial intelligence, semiconductors, quantum research, and next-generation communication technologies. China has also, however, directed cyber industrial espionage at high-technology and advanced manufacturing companies in the United States, Europe, Japan, and Southeast Asia.4 Hackers have reportedly targeted the negotiation strategies and financial information of firms in the energy, banking, law, and pharmaceutical sectors. In an operation known as Cloud [End Page 61] Hopper, Chinese hackers, allegedly from the Ministry of State Security, breached at least a dozen cloud providers over several years, which allowed them access to data from hundreds of companies.5 The damage this theft inflicted on the victims' economies, or, conversely, how much it helped China's economy, is unknown. The Office of the Director of National Intelligence estimated in November 2015, however, that all cyber-enabled economic espionage, not just Chinese activity, costs the U.S. economy $400 billion per year.6 State-supported hackers also use cyberattacks to steal military secrets to accelerate the PLA's modernization and gather political information on agencies, institutions, and individuals that might have an impact on Beijing's foreign policy or threaten domestic stability. While Andrea and Marco Gilli have argued that the complexity of modern weapon systems makes it...

The Strength of a Weak Organization: The Communist Youth League as a Path to Power in Post-Mao China

AbstractHow can a weak organization be a path to power? The Chinese Communist Youth League (CYL) lacks autonomy and coherence yet it is seen as the cradle for one of the main factions within the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). To understand this tension, I provide a novel account of the role played by the CYL in the recruitment of leading cadres since the 1980s. Against explanations based on factional struggles, I argue that the rise of CYL-affiliated cadres is a by-product of the organization's weakness. As the Party appoints CYL heads, CCP leaders, at various levels and at different points in time, have used the League to accelerate the promotion of their protégés. For years, there has been little incentive for Party bosses to dismantle this promotion path. However, in his bid to consolidate his power, Xi Jinping has weakened this channel so that it may not be used by potential rivals.

The Political Leadership of Mao Zedong

This paper presents an analysis of the former Chinese Communist Party leader Chairman Mao Zedong's political career (reigned 1949-1976), with regards to his success and failures. Mao was one of the most prominent Communist theoreticians who governed a quarter of humankind for a quarter of a century. His political philosophy, particularly his Method of Leadership, focusing on the "masses" is discussed here. The analytical arguments are centered on three phases of his leadership: the rise, the apex, and the fall. In the first phase, the paper attributes his victory before 1949 to his profound understanding of Chinese peasants. In the second phase, it elaborates on his successful method of leadership in the early 1950s. And in the third and last phase, it criticizes his disastrous political movements, particularly the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution, from the late 1950s to the mid-1970s. The study hopes to offer an objective and a balanced view of Chairman Mao, who had a complex personality and was a highly controversial figure in human history. The article also wishes to help readers gain a better understanding of China's top leader in recent history, and how China came to be what it is today.

A Law Unto Itself: Chinese Communist Party Leadership and Yifa zhiguo in the Xi Era

This article explores the political significance of “governing the nation in accordance with the law” 依法治国 ( yifa zhiguo) in the Xi Jinping era. It examines party statements and propaganda about the necessity of exercising party leadership over all key aspects of law-based governance, particularly the politico-legal system. The aim is to understand the strategic need for yifa zhiguo as part of the ideological repertoire of the Xi leadership. The argument is that yifa zhiguo is essentially an ideological and strategic message about power relations under Xi and the capacity of the party to withstand various threats to its credibility and thus ultimately to bring about the nation’s and party’s rejuvenation.

Shifts in Warfare and Party Unity: Explaining China's Changes in Military Strategy

Since 1949, China has adopted nine national military strategies, known as “strategic guidelines.” The strategies adopted in 1956, 1980, and 1993 represent major changes in China's military strategy, or efforts by the People's Liberation Army (PLA) to wage war in a new way. Shifts in the conduct of warfare in the international system offer one explanation for why China, a developing country for most of this period, pursued major change in its military strategy. Such shifts in the conduct of warfare should be especially powerful if a gap exists between a state's current strategy and the requirements of future warfare. The PLA has only been able to change strategy, however, when the Chinese Communist Party leadership is united and agrees on basic policies and the structure of authority. When the party is united, it delegates substantial responsibility for military affairs to the PLA leadership, which changes or adjusts military strategy in response to changes in China's security environment.

Staging Chinese Revolution: Theater, Film, and the Afterlives of Propaganda by Xiaomei Chen

Reviewed by: Staging Chinese Revolution: Theater, Film, and the Afterlives of Propaganda by Xiaomei Chen Rosemary Roberts Staging Chinese Revolution: Theater, Film, and the Afterlives of Propaganda by Xiaomei Chen. New York: Columbia University Press, 2016, Pp. xiv + 363. $60.00 cloth, $59.99 e-book. Xiaomei Chen begins Staging Chinese Revolution with an acknowledgments section that reveals her distinctive positioning as author in relation to her subject matter. Very much in the manner of Ruru Li’s excellent study of Beijing opera performance in modern China, Xiaomei Chen’s book combines the intimate subjective understanding of the insider with the objective and critical eye of the outsider.1 Chen’s acknowledgments, along with personal recollections scattered through the book, locate a crucial part of her own life experience as part of the “big family” of the China Youth Art Theater in Beijing during the 1950s and 1960s, when it was performing many of the “red classic” (hongse jingdian 红色经典) plays under discussion in Chen’s book. This intimate personal knowledge of China’s theater world informs Chen’s central argument: political propaganda in Chinese theater and film has never been just a task imposed from the top down; rather, it has been a complex and fundamentally willing collaboration between Chinese Communist Party (CCP) elites and a performing arts community that was ideologically committed to communist ideals and a socialist society. Playwrights, directors, and performers were not and are not hapless victims of the regime. Instead, they are active participants in the creation of political propaganda that functions through changing political and social environments to support the Party-state. To substantiate her argument, Chen investigates the most extreme forms of communist theater and film propaganda of the post-1949 era: historical narratives of Party leaders and revolutionary music-and-dance epics. Representations of former Party leaders Chen Duxiu 陈独秀, Mao Zedong 毛泽东, and Deng Xiaoping 邓小平 each form the central focus of a single chapter, while a separate chapter discusses the [End Page 204] three major music-and-dance epics, The East Is Red (Dongfang hong 东方红, 1964), The Song of the Chinese Revolution (Zhongguo geming zhi ge 中国革命之歌, 1984), and The Road to Revival (Fuxing zhi lu 复兴之路, 2009). An epilogue briefly considers how the representation of the revolution’s “founding mothers” has dwindled to traditionally gendered “supporting roles” (p. 287). Chen’s introductory chapter begins by locating her research within contemporary propaganda studies and then previews the core chapters listed above. Its most valuable contribution, however, lies in the second half of the chapter, which delves into the contemporaneous beginnings of the CCP and modern Chinese theater during the 1920s to demonstrate that close ideological and often personal links have existed between the two since their inception. Through an analysis of the work of the three “founding fathers” of modern Chinese theater, Tian Han 田汉, Hong Shen 洪深, and Ouyang Yuqian 歐阳玉倩, Chen argues: Tian and his cohorts visualized and staged a socialist blueprint in the leftist literary and dramatic tradition of the Republican period that paved the way for the construction of a socialist canon through his early writings during the first decades of the twentieth century, the war years, and the early years before and after the founding days of the PRC. (p. 30) Further, Chen argues that these three founding fathers trained generations of theater artists in the realist tradition. Their students have, in turn, gone on to participate in the creation of modern and contemporary canons, continually producing theater, film, and TV productions on revolutionary histories and the CCP leadership. Examples of the links between the early generations of Party elites and the theater world are well known. Mao trusted Tian Han to recommend which of two thousand submissions should be chosen as the design for the new national flag, and Zhou Enlai 周恩来 supported the use of Tian’s lyrics for the new national anthem (p. 31). Zhou Enlai himself is also known to have performed in progressive plays as a university student during the May Fourth period, and he personally over-saw the production of The East Is Red in 1964. In an era when theater was the primary vehicle available for spreading the socialist message— a message to which both theater professionals...