Abstract: This essay examines Chinese and American scholarly exchange during the 1980s and 1990s, following the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976) and the establishment of US-China diplomatic relations (1979). The essay focuses on one of the period's leading academic figures—Professor Zhang Zhongli of the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences (SASS)—who worked with American scholar Sherman Cochran to organize international research conferences in China and the United States. The scholarly exchange resulting from these conferences contributed to the opening of important archives such as the Shanghai Municipal Archives. The collaboration between Zhang and Cochran also led to the creation of a new archive funded by the Luce Foundation, the Center for Research Materials in Chinese Business History, at SASS. Today, as the Chinese Communist Party once again has tightened ideological control over China's academic institutions, it is time to reconsider how Sino-American scholarly collaboration was successfully achieved in the late twentieth century.

ABSTRACT Nearly 18,000 people enlisted in international volunteers’ units in the Red Army during the Russian Civil War. With many of them being former prisoners of war and foreign workers, the technical and political integration of these recruits required a great deal of effort from the young Red Army. To do this, it relied on foreigners, among them convinced communists, apostles of the world revolution, but also former prisoners of war. The Central Federation of Foreign Groups under the Central Committee of the Russian Communist Party (Bolshevik) took charge of the political training of these new recruits and dispatched political commissars and agitators to the internationalist units. This article looks back at the activities of this Central Federation both to grasp this international volunteer movement in favour of Bolshevik Russia and to explore the origins of the political commissar’s role in the making of the Red Army.

ABSTRACT Since at least 2021, Chinese Communist Party (CCP) leaders have adopted a national security concept they call ‘total war’. In the CCP’s usage, total war is national mobilization to develop civilian institutional advantages that convert into warfighting capabilities, and it is implemented on the national level by the integrated national strategic system and capabilities (INSS&C). Leading CCP and PLA strategists also make clear that total war is intended to defeat the ‘strong enemy’ of the United States in long-term competition or, if necessary, military conflict. Total war has been elevated to the highest levels of China’s security policies and public documents, including the National Security Strategy for 2021–2025 and a 2024 update to the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) military strategic guidelines.

The article is dedicated to the 1987 celebration in the Kurgan Region of the 100th anniversary of the birth of Civil War hero and division commander Nikolai Tomin (1886-1924). The research aims to identify the characteristic features and internal contradictions of the Late Soviet commemoration model, using this regional anniversary as a case study. Based on unpublished documents from the State Archive of Socio-Political History of the Kurgan Region (GASPIKO) and regional periodicals, the study reconstructs the institutional mechanisms of the jubilee campaign, analyzes the forms of visualization and ritualization of memory, and determines the reasons for the failure of the attempt to revive the revolutionary myth. The scientific novelty lies in the introduction of previously unpublished archival documents from the regional and district committees of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union into scholarly circulation, as well as the application of the memory studies methodological framework to the analysis of a regional campaign during the Perestroika era. The study establishes that by the late 1980s, the command-administrative model of memory management had lost its ability to generate a live response in society. A gap was identified between the scale of organizational efforts and the actual impact on public consciousness, which was undergoing a profound transformation under the influence of Glasnost policy. The study concludes that the 1987 jubilee campaign was one of the final acts of Soviet monumental propaganda in the Kurgan Region, exposing the fundamental contradiction between the state monopoly on memory and the erosion of official ideological legitimacy.

Red Culture is a unique spiritual symbol and valuable ideological resource formed by the Chinese people under the leadership of the Communist Party of China in the great practice. Its inherent progressiveness, revolutionary nature, practicality, people-oriented nature, and national character are highly aligned with the fundamental task of fostering virtue and nurturing talents in higher education. The systematic integration of red culture into college students' ideological and political education has multi-dimensional value connotations. On the basis of defining the core concept of red culture, this paper expounds its value from the four dimensions of political guidance, educational efficiency, cultural soul-casting and psychological empowerment, and based on this, constructs a progressive practice path system of "core element foundation–method innovation–field expansion", and finally realizes the organic unity of value guidance, knowledge transfer, ability cultivation and personality modeling.

With the rapid development of generative artificial intelligence, Large Language Models (LLMs) are being increasingly applied in the field of machine translation. However, their performance in high-difficulty domains such as political text translation still requires systematic evaluation. Using the Report to the 20th National Congress of the Communist Party of China (CPC) as the research corpus, this study selects four mainstream LLMs—DeepSeek, Doubao, ChatGPT, and Gemini—as research subjects. Taking the official Japanese version translated by the Institute of Party History and Literature of the CPC Central Committee as the reference text, this study quantitatively evaluates the Chinese-to-Japanese translation results of each model using two automated evaluation metrics: BLEU (Bilingual Evaluation Understudy) and TER (Translation Edit Rate), supplemented by qualitative analysis through case comparisons. The results indicate that Gemini performed best across both BLEU and TER metrics, with its translations approaching human standards in terms of structural restoration, terminology handling, and stylistic conformity. ChatGPT and DeepSeek showed moderate overall performance, with differences that were not statistically significant. Doubao performed the worst in both metrics, with primary issues concentrated in the inappropriate use of honorifics (Keigo) and the mistranslation of specific technical terms. The conclusions of this paper provide empirical evidence for the application of generative AI in professional translation and offer references for the optimization of models for political text translation in the future.

In the context of a deeply digitized media environment, the communication logic of revolutionary sites is shifting from "venue exhibition" to a composite model of "platform connection—scene expansion—interactive participation". Guangdong, with its comprehensive revolutionary site resource system, mature urban media conditions, and large youth population, provides a typical sample for observing how digital media reshapes the communication of Red culture. Based on spatial production theory, the spatialization of media research, and the perspective of youth cultural communication, this paper analyzes the specific mechanisms through which digital media promotes the spatial reproduction of revolutionary sites and the construction of youth identity. This analysis is combined with public cases such as the Guangdong Red Map, Online Red Exhibition Hall, the WeChat mini-program "Check-in Guangdong Red", the AR metaverse project of the Memorial of the Site of the Third National Congress of the Communist Party of China (CPC), the Shaoguan Long March Digital Experience Base, the immersive stage play themed on the Whampoa Military Academy, and the "Heroic Flowers Blooming in a Heroic City" campaign. The study concludes that digital media is not merely adding a technological shell to physical sites; rather, through digital mapping, scene reconstruction, interactive participation, and community diffusion, it transforms the way Red culture enters the life world of youth, turning revolutionary sites from mere "destinations" into "public cultural interfaces accessible at any time." However, concurrently, there are issues such as technological showboating overshadowing historical interpretation, unbalanced regional platform construction, and data evaluations overly biased toward traffic metrics while neglecting deep-seated identity. The digital communication of Guangdong revolutionary sites should adhere to a content-based approach, youth co-creation, cross-platform synergy, and ethical governance, enhancing ideological depth, historical richness, and value-guiding power while increasing visibility.

ABSTRACT Since the 1990s, China has strengthened the Communist Party of China’s leadership over local People’s Congresses through a dual-appointment system, under which Party secretaries also serve as chairpersons of People’s Congresses. This article argues that this system enhances Party influence over legislative decision-making while further reducing institutional constraints, enabling local Party secretaries to pursue career-oriented agendas such as borrowing for infrastructure to boost economic growth. Under a growth-first development paradigm, this arrangement has fueled the rapid expansion of local government debt. Overall, these findings offer a political economy explanation for the dynamics of local government debt in China, and underscore the importance of stronger legal and institutional constraints on the dual-appointment system to mitigate local fiscal risks.

ABSTRACT Intergenerational transmission processes shape political behaviour. However, it is unclear if parental party affiliation during communism is associated with children’s voting behavior during the post-Soviet era. I use the case of post-Soviet elections in 2000, 2003, and 2004 in Russia to understand how family political party membership during the Soviet Union period is associated with children’s voting and political behaviour after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Leveraging insights from the national representative survey, I find that parental membership in the Communist Party before 1991 is associated with greater voter turnout among young Russian adults. I further show that these relationships persist only if a respondent’s family did not experience an economic shock (job loss or salary reduction) during economic instability in the 1990s. These results suggest the family’s pivotal role in the reproduction of political behaviours in the post-Soviet Russia, a context distinguished by wide political and economic transformations.

ABSTRACT Amid the third wave of global democratization in the 1980s, China strengthened the Communist Party Congress, where its decentralized structure enabled provincial deputies to coordinate dissenting votes. Using a new method to uncover previously classified party congress voting records (1945–2017), we find that dissenting votes systematically targeted non-local candidates imposed by Beijing. During China's province-led economic takeoff in the 1980s and 1990s, dissenting votes were hundreds of times more frequent than in the Soviet Union or in China today. We conclude that Chinese politics was most democratic and decentralized at the onset of its economic miracle. We suggest that a limited democratic experiment by an authoritarian regime might leave an enduring legacy.

This article focuses on the management experience of Plant no. 743, which was subordinate to the People’s Commissariat of Mortar Weapons, in the production of ammunition, mines of various calibres, aerial bombs, 82 mm mortars, as well as spare parts for the textile industry and agricultural machinery, from 1943 to 1944. During this period, the factory faced constant challenges in terms of obtaining metal supplies, special packaging, and transportation for the export of its finished products. The regional committee of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks) provided great assistance in resolving these issues, and it persistently appealed to the Council of People’s Commissars of the USSR and the State Defence Committee for appropriate assistance. He also sought out the necessary resources within the region in order to ensure the smooth operation of the enterprise during this period. In 1944, while maintaining the planned production of ammunition, Plant no. 743 was redirected by the State Defence Committee to produce spare parts for the textile industry and agricultural machinery in Ivanovo Region. This was a necessary measure due to the urgent demand for these parts in these sectors of the national economy. The implementation of this task was also closely monitored by the regional committee of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks) and other regulatory bodies. In general, the set of managerial actions taken to assist Plant no. 743 contributed to its successful production of ammunition and mortars during the period studied in the article. When working on the article, the authors relied on documents from the Russian State Archive of Social and Political History, as well as from the State Archive of Ivanovo Region. Most of these documents have been introduced into scientific circulation for the first time.

This article examines the experience of Chuvash Committee of International Red Aid during the period of Chuvashia’s incorporation into Nizhny Novgorod land (since 1932, into Gorky one); it identifies the most important areas of work, and evaluates its effectiveness. The sources include research and materials from the State Archive of Contemporary History of Chuvash Republic, periodicals, and other literature. The article covers the participation of members of the Chuvash ASSR International Red Aid in charitable and socio-political campaigns, with the most important international events noted. The participation of Gorky regional Committee of International Red Aid in an international competition with Paris Red Aid organisation is described. The authors determine the sentiments and wishes of members of the Chuvash Autonomous Republican Committee of International Red Aid; patronage correspondence with political prisoners of capitalist countries is examined. Guiding documents sent from the Soviet Central Committee of International Red Aid are identified and analysed. The conclusions cited include the amorphous leadership and the slow growth rate of International Red Aid membership in Chuvashia. The activities of Chuvash Committee of International Red Aid were conducted in accordance with the instructions of a higher authority – Nizhny Novgorod (since 1932, Gorky) local committee of International Red Aid. This work was carried out in line with the policies of the leading Communist Party. The positive impact of International Red Aid structures on activating the social movement, as well as their significant contribution to the development of Soviet society, are noted.

The coming of the Soviet war scare in 1927 obliged all communist parties to spring to the defence of the world’s first socialist state. Kick-started by Britain’s severance of diplomatic relations in May, clear emphasis was placed from the very beginning on the role the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) would play in combating a supposed British-led invasion of Soviet Russia. This article argues that the CPGB exhibited a distinctly sluggish approach to the war scare. Focus on the Russian war threat throughout 1927 was mitigated by the attention paid towards ongoing British intervention in China. Furthermore, though expected to welcome an ‘imperialist’ conflict as an opportunity to subvert the armed forces, thus creating a revolutionary situation, many British communists gained the Comintern’s ire in refusing to adopt such a strategy. The war scare, waging in ever greater force after 1927, came to be subsumed into the wider tenets of ‘class against class’. As such, this article argues that the tensions that engulfed the CPGB in the years between 1928 and 1929 over this new political doctrine included an anti-militarist dimension, with internal dissension over the war scare a key feature in the Comintern’s decision to remove much of the CPGB’s leadership by the end of 1929.

During the War of Resistance Against Japan (1937-1945), China faced severe public health crises amid military and political upheaval, making hygiene and epidemic prevention critical to safeguarding public health and national survival. While the Communist Party of China (CPC) newspapers' role in wartime political culture is recognized, systematic research on how their hygiene discourse shaped national identity is scarce. This study adopted qualitative discourse analysis of 586 hygiene-related reports from New China Daily (1937-1941) and Liberation Daily (1941-1945), sourced from databases such as the National Newspaper Index, to explore their identity-construction mechanisms. It found that the newspapers adopted three interrelated strategies: popularizing scientific hygiene knowledge to reshape public perceptions, politicizing health campaigns to turn private practices into patriotic obligations, and embedding hygiene into daily life via education and institutions to consolidate collective consciousness. These narratives not only mobilized public support for the war but also localized Foucault's biopolitics and Douglas's purity and danger theory, redefining hygiene as a patriotic duty and collective resistance, illustrating how public health discourse shapes collective identity and drives public health practice in crises and broadening Western theories' applicability in the Chinese context.

ABSTRACT In the early 1960s, ghost-drama performances鬼戏 sprang up in the countryside across China, stimulating religious activities. In response, the Chinese Communist Party Central Political Bureau accepted the Ministry of Culture party committee’s proposal and prohibited all forms of ghost plays across China. Under the draconian suppression, ghost drama continued to perform clandestinely in certain rural areas. Why did ghost drama that had once been stymied in the 1950s suddenly mushroom in the 1960s? This paper addresses this puzzle. Previous literature on ghost dramas relied solely on historical documentation; scholars treated them as a genre of Chinese dramas and therefore examined them from a literary perspective. By contrast, this study explores ghost-drama performances in rural areas through ethnography. My fieldwork finds that ghost drama was an exorcistic ritual designed to tackle the spirits of people who died unnaturally. As a great number of people died in the Great Famine (1959–1961), survivors of this disaster drew on this ritual to make the victims rest in peace and bring order to the chaotic society. So, ghost-drama performances revived in the aftermath of the Famine. Subsuming this case within religious studies in modern China, I argue that the disaster and religion relation provides a new perspective on religious revivals in China.

This study employs a Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) method to explore how People’s Daily, the official newspaper of Communist Party of China (CPC), constructs ideological narratives in 43 front-page headline news covering China’s aerospace achievements from 2003 to 2023. Drawing on Fairclough’s and van Dijk’s frameworks, the research examines lexical choices and rhetorical strategies that frame aerospace advancements within China’s state ideology. Findings reveal the systematic use of nationalistic vocabulary, collectivist pronouns, verb expressions with neat parallelism, and emotive language to link technological success in China’s aerospace with political legitimacy. Rhetorical devices such as syntactic parallelism, metaphor, and presupposition reinforce narratives of national unity of Chinese and the historical destiny to develop aerospace. The discourse naturalizes CPC’s leadership and positions readers into a shared identity cantered on technological pride, and demonstrates how state media functions ideologically to shape public consciousness of building their nation and legitimize the legitimacy of the Party in power. This research enhances our understanding that technology-focused news coverage also serves a symbolic function in shaping China’s political narrative.

The relevance of the article is due to the spatial turn in the humanities which has fundamentally reoriented scholarly understandings of spatial marginality, moving away from economic and geographical determinism to conceptualizing it as a complex product of cultural and symbolic construction. The aim of the article is to identify and analyze the discursive mechanisms of constructing spatial marginality using the example of Inner Mongolia, China, as a complex, historically changing phenomenon. The stated goal predetermines the tasks: 1) to identify the mechanisms of discursive construction of Inner Mongolia as the Borderland in the imperial period; 2) to analyze the transformation of the Province mode in the republican period; 3) to trace how, after 1949, the Periphery and Province modes became dominant, conditioned by the logic of socialist construction; 4) to formulate the concept of integrative marginality as a hybrid regime of territory. The research materials include a corpus of official narratives of the Chinese authorities (government documents, legal acts, policy directives, and political rhetoric), as well as a wide pool of foreign and Russian works on the history of the integration of Inner Mongolia. Methodologically, the study utilizes a critical discourse analysis of official state narratives spanning three distinct historical-political formations — the Qing Empire (since 1636), the Republic of China, and the contemporary People's Republic of China — as well as a decomposition method based on the adapted version of Vladimir Kagansky's cultural landscape matrices model. The result of the study and its key empirical and theoretical contribution is the development of an original four-modal analytical model of spatial marginality and the formulation of its central theoretical concept integrative marginality, describing a sustainable reproduction of the subordinate status of Inner Mongolia through its gradual incorporation within the “homogenous” Chinese Nation. The study concludes that during the imperial period, marginality was constructed primarily through the Borderland mode, based on a Sino-centric perception of the region as a dangerous Other. During the republican period, the crisis of central authority led to a fierce struggle to define the Province mode, making the region a field of clashing external interests. With the establishment of the Communist Party of China (CPC), the logic of dual—economic and cultural-political — integration became dominant. The current stage is characterized by the formation of a hybrid regime of integrative marginality, where the full administrative-economic inclusion of the region is combined with the persistent reproduction of its symbolic subordination through the combination and fusion of all four modes.

The economic benefits generated by rural tourism serve as a vital driver for regional economic development. In recent years, China has progressively established and refined tourism regulations to facilitate the development and preservation of rural tourism resources, thereby safeguarding the growth of the rural tourism economy. The Report to the 19th National Congress of the Communist Party of China emphasized the implementation of the Rural Revitalization Strategy, charting a course for the future of rural areas and creating unprecedented opportunities for the development of rural tourism. Under these circumstances, the advancement of rural tourism must adhere to the principles of environmental sustainability and green development, foster an environment conducive to urban-rural integration, leverage the advantages of digital technologies in the new era, and highlight distinctive regional features. By identifying effective development pathways amid existing challenges, rural tourism can thus become a significant force in driving rural revitalization.

General Secretary Xi Jinping emphasized that “Throughout the history of world economic development, an obvious track is from the land to the ocean, and move toward the world, be prosperity through the ocean”. Marine aquaculture and fisheries, as core components of the marine economy and critical aquatic food production systems, play a pivotal role in ensuring food security, promoting coastal livelihoods, and advancing ecological civilization. Against the backdrop of China’s convergence with the two centenary goals, the Fourth Plenary Session of the 19th Central Committee of the Communist Party of China highlighted the importance of high-quality development and the new development philosophy, which provides a fundamental framework for the transformation of marine aquaculture and fisheries. This thematic review focuses on marine aquaculture and capture fisheries, linking the new development philosophy (innovation, coordination, greenness, openness, sharing) to aquatic food system sustainability. By analyzing the current status, structural changes, and key constraints of China’s marine aquaculture and fisheries (including technological bottlenecks, ecological pressures, regional imbalances, and livelihood challenges), and drawing on international experiences from leading aquaculture regions, this paper proposes targeted pathways for sustainable development. The study aims to bridge policy goals with practical applications in aquaculture and fisheries science, providing insights for researchers, managers, and policymakers both in China and globally.

The paper analyzes the evolution and development of the theoretical thinking of the Communist Party of Vietnam on the industrialization and modernization of agriculture and rural areas from the post-Doi moi (Renovation) period to the present, with particular emphasis on the new perspectives affirmed at the 13th National Party Congress. Based on theoretical research methods, including the systematic synthesis and analysis of Party documents and resolutions across successive Party Congresses, combined with comparisons to international experience, the study clarifies the shift from small-scale agricultural production to large-scale commodity production associated with multi-value agribusiness development. The systematization of this theoretical foundation contributes to affirming the soundness of the Party’s development orientation in the new context.