Communist Cadres Research Articles

The realignment and staffing of the Hungarian Ministry of Foreign Affairs between 1945 and 1950

On March 19, 1944, under the German occupation, Hungary lost its sovereignty. Due to the Second World War and the fighting in Budapest, the building and organization of the Hungarian Ministry of Foreign Affairs were in ruins. After the war, the reorganization of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs began with the employees of the Hungarian Ministry of Foreign Affairs operating between 1920 and 1944. The Ministry followed the previous organizational and operational principle. Diplomats and ministry workers gained their foreign experiences before the war. In parallel with the takeover of power by the communists in Hungary, many diplomats and foreign workers emigrated due to the removal of old specialists and the open takeover of power by the communists. The communist-led Ministry of Foreign Affairs had a huge shortage of staff and specialists, which were replaced on the one hand by communist cadres of working and peasant origin, and on the other hand the Foreign Academy was established whose curriculum consisted of the classics of Marxism-Leninism. In 1950, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs was reorganized, and a horizontal and vertical operating structure was established.

The Great Unity

This essay explores the interconnections between Hòa Hảo religious practices, charity, and reconciliation of ethnic and political conflicts in the contemporary Vietnam-Cambodia borderland by looking at the relationship between Hòa Hảo traditional healers and patients of Kinh and Khmer backgrounds, Cambodian nationals, and retired Vietnamese communist cadres. It argues that the healing practices in a frontier Hòa Hảo herbal clinic have been inclusive and have involved the participation of diverse groups with whom the practitioners were formerly in conflict. The essay shows how the Hòa Hảo continue to build social solidarity in a pluralist borderland region with a more ethnically diverse set of relationships than has been previously recognized.

Cjelovito istraživanje uloge Pašage Mandžića u tuzlanskom procesu / Comprehensive Research of Pašaga Mandžić's Role in the Tuzla Process

The book “Tuzla Processes: 1970s,“ by Prof. Dr. Kadrija Hodžić, professor at the Faculty of Economics, University of Tuzla, presents a comprehensive study of the course of political events related to the role of Pašaga Mandžić in the development of Tuzla and the Tuzla region. It is important to keep in mind that Pašaga Mandžić belongs to the leading communist cadres who organized an uprising against the fascist occupation of the country in Bosnia and Herzegovina in 1941. As a prominent anti-fascist fighter, Pašaga Mandžić will become the commissioner of the First Partisan Strike Battalion, formed in Srednje near Sarajevo, in March 1942. Together with Avdo Humo, Rodoljub Čolaković and Đuro Pucar - Stari, he participated in the preparations for the First, Second and Third Sessions of ZAVNOBIH. At the Third ZAVNOBIH Session in 1945 in Sarajevo, Pašaga Mandžić was elected a member of the first People's Government of Federal Bosnia and Herzegovina. In the post Second World War period, Pašaga Mandžić performed numerous duties, from the president of the Tuzla District to other duties in the republican bodies of Bosnia and Herzegovina. In the early 1970s, at the invitation of the leadership of the League of Communists of the Municipality of Tuzla, Pašaga Mandžić, as a pensioner, came to Tuzla and with his experience contributed to the economic development of his hometown. After the dismissal of Sead Babović, Secretary of the Municipal Committee of SK Tuzla, Pašaga Mandžić with his views on the development of Tuzla's economy comes into dispute and conflict with the current political leadership of Tuzla. The actual showdown between the leadership of the League of Communists of Tuzla and Pašaga Mandžić took place at the Eighth Session of the OKSK Tuzla in 1971. However, that conflict did not have the character of a political affair. Pašaga Mandžić’s deeper conflict with the League of Communists of Bosnia and Herzegovina arose on 26 June 1973, at an extended session of the Central Committee Secretariat, Communist Party of Bosnia and Herzegovina, when Pašaga Mandžić individually raised the question of organizing and leading the uprising in Eastern Bosnia. Pašaga Mandžić 's position was assessed as a form of nationalism dangerous for treating the character of the uprising and the national liberation struggle in Bosnia and Herzegovina. At that time, it was not only the ideological critique of Pašaga Mandžić. Accusations followed against Pašaga Mandžić and a group of people who worked more closely with him in Tuzla than the Central Committee and the State Security Service. The brutal procedure of the State Security Service against the members of the Tuzla group was carried out, and then the court process in Tuzla. There is also a belief that Pašaga Mandžić was protected from prosecution by Josip Broz Tito on the Đuro Pucar’s intercession. Author Prof. Dr. Kadrija Hodžić conducts many years of research on Tuzla processes on an interdisciplinary basis. The results of the research shed light on everything that took place in the Tuzla processes of the 1970s. The whole result of the research enables a new social evaluation of the role of Pašaga Mandžić in the national liberation struggle and socio-economic development of Bosnia and Herzegovina and the hometown of Tuzla after the Second World War. In the coming decades, a reliable critical evaluation of the contribution of the research of Prof. Dr. Kadrija Hodžić establishes complete historical truths about a revolutionary figure such as Pašaga Mandžić.

Leveraging Liminality: The Border Town of Bao'an (Shenzhen) and the Origins of China's Reform and Opening

Located immediately north of Hong Kong, Shenzhen is China's most successful special economic zone (SEZ). Commonly known as the “social laboratory” of reform and opening, Shenzhen was the foremost frontier for the People's Republic of China's adoption of market principles and entrance into the world economy in the late 1970s. This article looks at prototypes of the SEZ in Bao'an County, the precursor to Shenzhen during the Mao era (1949–76). Between 1949 and 1978, Bao'an was a liminal space where state endeavors to establish a socialist economy were challenged by capitalist influences from the adjacent British Crown colony of Hong Kong. To create an enclave of exception to socialism, Communist cadres in Bao'an promoted individualized, duty-free cross-border trade and informal foreign investment schemes as early as 1961. Although beholden to the inward-looking planned economy and stymied by radical leftist campaigns, these local improvisations formed the foundation for the SEZ—the hallmark of Deng Xiaoping's economic statecraft.

The complex relationship between indigeneity and class in South East Asia

ABSTRACT In South East Asia, the relationship between ethnicity and class has been long, complex and at times contradictory. Throughout much of the twentieth century and especially from the 1940s to the 1980s, militant communist revolutionary movements sought to include upland ethnic minorities, citing vicitimization as racialized minorities, poor economic conditions, remote abodes and perceived egalitarian worldviews as the main reasons for targeting them. Mountain-dwelling minorities often made strong guerilla soldiers, and were attracted to the equality across races and ethnicities promised to them by communist cadres. By the late twentieth century, this had broken down, with new ethnicity-based and globalized concepts of indigeneity beginning to circulate, take hold and hybridize. While Indigenous peoples’ movements often have important class-based roots, with both Indigenous and leftist movements having similar emancipatory aspirations, Indigenous movements organize primarily based on ethnicity rather than class. Here, I consider the complex relationships between class and ethnicity/indigeneity as they play out in relation to Free and Prior Informed Consent associated with REDD+ and communal land titling in Laos. Shifts towards increasingly classifying people based on indigeneity are reorienting society, including nature–society relations, but there are also efforts underway to reclassify based on class.

Reforming Bodies and Minds

This article revisits reformatories set up under Nationalist China from 1928–37 to transform former Communists into loyal nationalist subjects. By examining confessions attributed to inmates and scandalous tales of Communists published by reformatories, it argues that these institutions were more than devices to suppress political dissent. Instead, reformatories played productive functions for the Guomindang state. First, reformatories’ in-house magazines conjured up an anticommunist figure of the Communist that combined the excesses of urban capitalism and the residues of China’s “superstitious” sect. Communist cadres, articles written by political converts suggested, were puerile, capricious, and alienated from traditional moral norms. At the same time, the Communist movement was attributed qualities of an evil cult preying on the ignorant and the irrational. Second, by publicizing the overcoming of the sins attributed to Communists, the reformatories created, with contributions by former Communists, a textual economy in which the Chinese populace as a whole turned away from left-wing politics and acquired a new subject position. More than converting individual Communists into “proper” nationalists, reformatories were supposed to bring about, if only in allegorical terms, mass conversion to the sobriety, obedience, hierarchical order, and organic unity that the nation was supposed to entail.

Former Communist party membership and present-day entrepreneurship

After the collapse of communism in Central and Eastern Europe, former party members were particularly likely to start businesses and become entrepreneurs. What remains unclear, however, is whether this entrepreneurial activity was driven by the resources, information, and opportunities provided by former party membership or because individuals with specific individual attributes were more likely to become Communist cadres (self-selection). This study is the first to separate the causal effect of former Communist party membership from self-selection. Using individual-level Life in Transition-III survey data and a control function approach, we find that former Communist party membership has facilitated business set-up but not business longevity in Central and Eastern European countries. We also show that people who joined the former ruling party had fewer of the traits associated with entrepreneurship such as unobservable personality traits, ability, motivation, and entrepreneurial aptitude, and as such were negatively self-selected. We show that former Communist party membership still matters for business practices, business ethics, and the nature of doing business in transition economies.

The Rise of Communism in China

We show that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) experienced significantly faster growth in counties occupied by the Japanese Army than those garrisoned by the Kuomingtang (KMT) during the Sino-Japanese War (c. 1940-45), using the density of middle-to-upper rank Communist cadres (5.4%) and the size of the guerilla base (10.3%) as proxies. The struggle for survival and humiliation caused by wartime sex crimes are the channels through which the CCP ascended to power. We also find that people who live in former Japanese-occupied counties today are significantly more nationalistic and exhibit greater trust in the government than those who reside elsewhere.

Fábricas de comunistas: escuelas de partido y estrategias orgánicas en los años treinta

The article analyses the political schools of communist cadres in the decade of the thirties. The text explores the distinctive features of the Lenin International School (ELI), the presence of Spanish Communist militants in that institution, the policies to promote national schools, and the historical development of the schools of the PCE between 1936-38. Its documentary base is composed of organic informa­tion from the archives of the Communist International (IC) and the Communist Party of Spain (PCE). The conclusions highlight three key elements: the need to locate the object of study in the transnational parameters and in the symbiosis between Stalinist political-cultural canon and nationalization strategies; the core value acquired by the formation of cadres in the communist organic ideal; and the mismatches in this pedagogical work during the Spanish Civil War.

Fábricas de comunistas: escuelas de partido y estrategias orgánicas en los años treinta

The article analyses the political schools of communist cadres in the decade of the thirties. The text explores the distinctive features of the Lenin International School (ELI), the presence of Spanish Communist militants in that institution, the policies to promote national schools, and the historical development of the schools of the PCE between 1936-38. Its documentary base is composed of organic information from the archives of the Communist International (IC) and the Communist Party of Spain (PCE). The conclusions highlight three key elements: the need to locate the object of study in the transnational parameters and in the symbiosis between Stalinist political-cultural canon and nationalization strategies; the core value acquired by the formation of cadres in the communist organic ideal; and the mismatches in this pedagogical work during the Spanish Civil War.

The Brief, Tumultuous History of “Big Democracy” in China’s Factories

This article compares two fateful experiments conducted during the Mao era in China that encouraged freewheeling criticism of Communist cadres: the 1957 Party Rectification campaign and the early upheavals of the Cultural Revolution (1966–1968). Through a content analysis of articles published in the Chinese Communist Party’s flagship newspaper, People’s Daily, we first show that the two movements shared characteristics that made them very similar to each other and remarkably different from all other mass campaigns carried out during the Mao era. We then analyze the differences between the two movements—and their consequences—by investigating how they unfolded in factories, based mainly on interviews with workers and party cadres. We argue that key elements of the strategy Mao pursued during the Cultural Revolution were developed in response to the unmitigated failure of the 1957 campaign and these elements fostered a movement more capable of compelling Communist cadres to face criticism from below. In comparing the two movements, we highlight the evolution of the term “big democracy,” which was uniquely associated with these two episodes, but was deployed very differently in 1966 than it was in 1957.

The cultivation of Communist cadres during the War of Resistance against Japanese Aggression

ABSTRACTDuring the Chinese War of Resistance against Japanese Aggression, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) made great progress in its cultivation of cadres. The favorable environment of the National United Front made it possible for the CCP to successfully train a large number of cadres with intellectual backgrounds while continuously using and promoting those who came from worker or peasant backgrounds. By so doing, the CCP raised the quality of its cadres. The CCP’s cultivation of its cadres during the War of Resistance was a systematic undertaking, with interrelated and mutually reinforcing components of education, training, examination, criticism, and self-criticism. Based on cadre self-consciousness and training, a regularized yet not rigid process of cadre cultivation was established. During the same period, the CCP also launched a rectification campaign (Zhengfeng yundong) to further unify and transform the Party. This important movement also left a deep mark on the cultivation of Communist cadres.

Propaganda, Errichtung von Satellitenstaaten und sowjetischer Kulturimport: Die Hochschule für Sozialwissenschaften A. A. Jdanov und die Schaffung kommunistischer Eliten in Rumänien

Research on the postwar period in Romania has so far avoided the area of communist party schools. As a result, there is no monograph dedicated to these institutes where communist cadres were trained between 1945 and 1989. The higher schools of the communist parties, both political and intellectual institutions, were an international prototype of the communist elite’s training. These schools were reserved for communist party cadres and intellectuals. Regarding the future students’ selection criteria, their social background and seniority in the party were decisive. Furthermore, loyalty towards the party made up for the students’ progress within the institute, while intellectual criteria such as academic performance were only secondary factors. Thus, this project analyzes the accessible information from the documentary funds on the activities of the Section of Propaganda and Agitation. Being subordinated to the Central Committee of Romania’s Communist Party, this section also coordinated the Jdanov school. As a result, the institutional history of the School of Social Sciences „A. A. Jdanov” is reconstructed, outlining also the criteria of the students’ recruitment, selection, promotion and/or exclusion.

Can Communists Laugh?: Recalling Vanishing Leftist Ditties of the Marcos Era

This research note puts into record ditties sung by communist cadres in the 1970s and 1980s that were never part of the melodies approved by the Communist Party of the Philippines. The songs range from those chanted during marches and demonstrations to ballads about love and sexual opportunism inside the movement. Their popularity among those who heard them was a source of pride for their composers and lyricists. They suggested that party life was not all that “grim-and-determined” and that, to slightly alter the famous statement of Mao Zedong, a revolution was no dinner party, but some cadres were able to picnic along the way. Keywords: Communist Party of the Philippines • revolutionary songs • heretical ditties • Marcos era

How Communist Cadres Persuaded Romanian Peasants to Give Up Their Land

The collectivization of agriculture in the Soviet bloc caused millions of peasants to sign away their rights to land and join collective farms. How did Party cadres accomplish this extraordinary change? In this article, drawn from a large collaborative project, the authors present examples from Romania to describe one of the central techniques used: “persuasion work.” The authors focus on how the persuaders sought to create their authority with villagers, peasants’ and cadres’ reciprocal manipulations of kinship and gender, cadres’ disruptions of the accustomed spatial and temporal organization of village life and peasant responses to them, bargaining and negotiations between cadres and villagers, and more overt forms of “persuasive” coercion. Although persuasion was ostensibly about creating an inner state of belief—convincing peasants of the superiority of collective agriculture—the authors argue that it is more appropriately seen as a performative matter, in which peasants learned to perform the consent that was required of them, whether they believed in the virtues of collectivizing or not. Among the reasons was that Romania’s cadres were largely ill prepared for the job and were unable to be very persuasive. Thus, they both relied on force (thereby heightening peasants’ resistance to joining the collectives) and settled for villagers’ pro forma adherence rather than their active conviction.

Cold War Competition and Food Production in China, 1957–1962

Abstract This article examines how Mao’s grand strategy for Cold War competition inflicted a catastrophic agricultural failure in China and victimized tens of millions of Chinese peasants. It argues that Khrushchev’s 1957 boast about the Soviet Union surpassing the United States in key economic areas inspired Mao to launch an industrialization program that would push the People’s Republic past Great Britain in some production categories within fifteen years. Beginning in 1958 Mao imposed unrealistic targets on Chinese grain production to extract funds from agriculture for rapid industrial growth. Maoists placed relentless pressure on communist cadres for ruthless implementation of the Great Leap Forward. Contrary to Maoist plans, China’s grain output in 1959-1960 declined sharply from 1957 levels and rural per capita grain retention decreased dramatically. Throughout China, party cadres’ mismanagement of agricultural production was responsible for the decline in grain output, and the communist state’s excessive requisition of grain caused food shortages for the peasants. But the key factor determining the famine’s uneven impact on the peasantry in the provinces was the degree to which provincial leaders genuinely and energetically embraced Maoist programs. This is illustrated by a close examination of the Great Leap famine in Anhui Province.

Cold War Competition and Food Production in China, 1957-1962

This article examines how Mao's grand strategy for Cold War competition inflicted a catastrophic agricultural failure in China and victimized tens of millions of Chinese peasants. It argues that Khrushchev's 1957 boast about the Soviet Union surpassing the United States in key economic areas inspired Mao to launch an industrialization program that would push the People's Republic past Great Britain in some production categories within fifteen years. Beginning in 1958 Mao imposed unrealistic targets on Chinese grain production to extract funds from agriculture for rapid industrial growth. Maoists placed relentless pressure on communist cadres for ruthless implementation of the Great Leap Forward. Contrary to Maoist plans, China's grain output in 1959-1960 declined sharply from 1957 levels and rural per capita grain retention decreased dramatically. Throughout China, party cadres' mismanagement of agricultural production was responsible for the decline in grain output, and the communist state's excessive requisition of grain caused food shortages for the peasants. But the key factor determining the famine's uneven impact on the peasantry in the provinces was the degree to which provincial leaders genuinely and energetically embraced Maoist programs. This is illustrated by a close examination of the Great Leap famine in Anhui Province.

Editor’s Note

Editor’s Note Christopher A. Reed I would like to take this opportunity to welcome Twentieth-Century China’s new coeditor James (“Jay”) Carter of Saint Joseph’s University in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Jay and I are co-editing volume 34 (2008–09) of the journal; Jay will assume full responsibility for editorship of the November 2009 (35:1) issue. In addition to being a historian of the Republican period, Jay is the incoming president of the Historical Society for Twentieth-Century China (HSTCC, see below). In a related vein, Twentieth-Century China has been privileged to have several new members join our Editorial Board since November 2004 (30:1), my first issue as editor. The board has grown in number (from fifteen editors to seventeen) but also in intellectual and geographic range. This expansion reflects the deepening and broadening of historical scholarship on twentieth-century Chinese history as well as the maturation of this journal. Nearly half (eight) of our current editors have joined since 2005: Geremie R. Barmé, Morris L. Bian, John Fitzgerald, Bryna Goodman, Christian Henriot, Kubo Toru, Susanne Weigelin-Schwiedrzik, and Peter Zarrow. Each brings new scholarly specialties to the efforts of our long-time members to embrace the full range of scholarship on China in the twentieth-century. It is clear from the board’s composition that English-language, Chinese-documentbased scholarship on twentieth-century China must no longer be limited to the native-speaking Anglophone world. With members now hailing from Australia, Austria, France, Japan, Singapore, and Taiwan in addition to the USA, our new board reflects the globalization of modern China historiography as well as the broad range of countries from which the journal typically receives submissions. Readers who are involved with the Historical Society for Twentieth-Century China (HSTCC) already know that, at the 2008 Annual Meeting of the Association for Asian Studies, TCC and HSTCC affiliated with each other. Two years ago, I opened discussions with Keith Schoppa, head of TCC’s Editorial Board and, coincidentally, president of HSTCC’s executive board, about this project. In Atlanta, the HSTCC board voted unanimously to accept my proposal. Both partners are pleased with the outcome of this vote and look forward to future collaborations between TCC and HSTCC. The overlap in the two entities’ names suggests that this pairing might be destiny playing itself out, but to make everything more concrete, HSTCC members are now being offered preferential TCC subscription rates when they renew their membership. See page 111 in this issue and the HSTCC website ( www.towson.edu/hstcc ) for further details. In the current issue, we present three articles and one research note. In “Teaching Baihua: Textbook Publishing and the Production of Vernacular Language and a New Literary Canon in Early Twentieth-Century China,” Robert Culp explores three ways in which textbook publishing influenced the production and spread of China’s modern vernacular language. The article also demonstrates that commercial publishing houses enabled several different types of modern intellectual to play [End Page 2] active roles in producing China’s modern vernacular language. Through their activities, these intellectuals transformed China’s linguistic and print cultures while also creating new identities for themselves in the post-imperial socio-cultural order. Chieko Nakajima’s “Health and Hygiene in Mass Mobilization: Hygiene Campaigns in Shanghai, 1920–1945” examines Shanghai’s hygiene campaigns over a multi-decade period. The author argues that the campaigns connected personal hygiene practices with the larger goal of achieving national strength, and in the end, helped to strengthen the state’s authority, whether Nationalist or Japanese-Occupationist. This study demonstrates that through educational programs as well as various forms of political symbolism, the Nationalist and Japanese-Occupationist states penetrated residents’ everyday lives. Next, Lee S. Zhu’s “Communist Cadres on the Higher Education Front, 1955–1962” argues that Communist cadres in higher education played an important role in fomenting conflict between the Communist Party and academics. Because of their common prejudice against professors, these cadres responded with great reservations to the party center’s first attempts of 1955 and 1956 to integrate the high-level intellectuals into the new political system. From 1958 to 1960, encouraged by the general political environment...

Communist Cadres on the Higher Education Front, 1955–1962

Communist Cadres on the Higher Education Front, 1955–1962

Communist Cadres on the Higher Education Front, 1955–1962

Communist Cadres on the Higher Education Front, 1955–1962