Ideological Campaigns Research Articles

Regime Change in North Korea?: Economic Reform and Political Opportunity Structures

IntroductionThe issue of regime change in North Korea began to draw international attention after the fall of the communist regimes in the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. Many analysts predicted that North Korea would have followed Poland and Czechoslovakia in their abandoning of communism. However, North Korea has successfully kept its political system intact. Throughout the 1990s, North Korea intensified its ideological campaign to prevent unhealthy bourgeois culture and ideology from infiltrating the society and contaminating the youth and intellectuals.However, since the U.S. military action in Iraq in 2003, policy discussions on preemptive strikes and regime change in North Korea have been abounding in Washington. In the aftermath of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, the Bush administration in its 2002 National Security Strategy unveiled that one of its main security schemes would include preemptive strike strategy. Washington's aim was to destroy any threats from terrorists and rogue states before they could ever reach U.S. borders, with or without the support from the international community.Although the act of war can be clearly viewed as one of the pathways to regime change as witnessed in Iraq, in the case of North Korea, such an option seems to remain only remote possibility. Rather than through war, many argue that North Korea's regime change could be brought about through an implosion. Recent North Korean efforts to liberalize its economy through experiments with bold economic reforms have led some analysts to assert that its civil society may eventually experience ascendance, or even exercise similar kind of power against its state as witnessed in Eastern Europe.The purpose of this article is to analyze the prospects for regime change through civil society mobilization in North Korea. It offers an analysis of North Korean exceptionalism in regard to its economic crisis and economic development theories of regime change. It argues that several components of political opportunity structures salient to North Korea work as constraints on regime change, which could be triggered by either economic crisis or economic development. The article first examines existing theoretical frameworks for regime change, probing the theses that both economic crisis and economic reform give rise to political pluralism, activate civil society, and thus lead to regime change. This section is followed by an analysis of the changes in North Korea's economic policies. The article then explores the relevance of political opportunity structures in accounting for regime change in North Korea. Finally, it offers an assessment of prospects for activation of North Korea's civil society and regime change.Theoretical Frameworks for Regime ChangeRegime denotes more permanent forms of political structures than government and refers to a government or sequence of governments in which power remains essentially in the hands of the same social group.1 The governments formed within particular regime embody common set of norms and procedures, and, on this account, change of government does not necessarily involve change in regime.2 Regime change pursues fundamental alteration of the norms and principles, while change within regime involves alterations of rules and decision-making procedures, but not of norms or principles.3 North Korea experienced change of government when Kim Jong Il came into power after the death of his father, Kim Il Sung. However, the regime remained in place, as the junior Kim adhered to the fundamental norms and values of his father's government. Therefore, any efforts to change the North Korean regime should involve attempts to destroy the fundamental values and structures of Kim's government, and alter the governing principles and norms, including the socialist values and the Juche (self-reliance) ideology.The structuralist perspective of regime change views economic constraints as the principal explanatory variable of regime collapse. …

The Paradox of North Korea's Ideological Radicalism: Shaky Social Basis of Strengthening Ideological Campaigns

IntroductionNorth Korea, the most isolated state in the world, regards itself as a dynasty and embraces a unique ruling ideology. The North defines itself as a Kim Il-Sung nation: the leader is worshipped as a deity and political power has been passed from the regime's founding leader (Kim Il-Sung) to his son (Kim Jong-Il). The political leader has absolute power over the entire society.Events that occur in the country often make no sense to outsiders. Indeed, North Korea's policies often seem hopelessly backward. Nevertheless, the regime has persisted, even under the devastating economic crisis of the 1990s.What, then, is actually happening in North Korea? Can the regime continue to survive in the future? Although it is difficult to evaluate the country's internal dynamics, due mainly to a lack of accurate information, this paper will show that signs of potential change have emerged within the Pyongyang regime. In particular, we will examine a seemingly paradoxical link between ideological change, stepped-up propaganda campaigns, and the shaky social foundation of state-society relations.Contemporary North Korea may be characterized ideologically as a social institutionalization of Juche ideology, which then shifted to the far-right Songun Jungchi (Military-first politics) and Kangsong Daekook (Strong and Prosperous State). Politically, it relies on a single stratum of leadership and rigid social management and control. The Juche ideology launched by Kim Il-Sung has long penetrated into every aspect of North Korean life, primarily via the bombardment of propaganda campaigns. The ideology has further radicalized into militarism during Kim Jong-Il's era, driving the country into a retrogressed garrison state.North Korea is a totalitarian state that intervenes and exerts control down to the family unit. There is no room for freedom or openness in the society. Despite the North's recent attempt to revamp its economy, a series of economic development plans have failed to achieve their goals.When comparing the Kim Jong-Il regime with that of his father, the main differences involve the ruling ideology and state-society relations. This paper focuses on the relationship between the ideological radicalization of the regime under Kim Jong-Il and the weakening of the regime's legitimacy. To put it differently, we are inter- ested in examining a puzzle: Specifically, why has this ideological radicalization, designed to bolster popular support for the leader and his policies, ironically weakened Kim's political legitimacy?North Korea had built a unique nation-state, separate from the former Soviet bloc and founded on its own ruling ideology. The North distanced itself from other socialist regimes during the collapse of the Soviet Union by focusing on the strength of that ideology. However, signs of a crumbling regime are emerging, with the weakening of ideology towards the garrison state and the far-right nationalism, on one hand, and the failure of the regime's ability to provide goods to its people, on the other.North Korea's Ruling Ideology and Its MetamorphosisThe polity of North Korea is based on Juche ideology. The origin of Juche doctrine is historically associated with the consolidation of Kim Il-Sung's regime. Since the Kim Il-Sung era, the Juche doctrine has become deeply institutionalized, has exerted a very distinctive form of influence on society, and has pervaded every level of North Korean life. Thus, to understand the country's behavior, Juche ideology must be elaborated in detail.The Juche idea emerged as a reaction to external and internal ideological disputes surrounding the Soviet Union and China, particularly the de-Stalinization of the Soviet Union after Stalin's death. Kim Il-Sung rejected de-Stalinization, mainly because his own ideological rhetoric and, thus, political legitimacy, were based on Stalinism. Meanwhile, North Korea increased its autonomy from Chinese intervention and Chinese influence on its domestic politics. …

Ideology, Telos, and the “Communist Vanguard” from Mao Zedong to Hu Jintao

This work discusses why Marxist vanguard parties require ideology in their struggle to gain and maintain political power. Despite being considered theoretically inconsistent with classical Marxism and western vernacular, I chart etymologically how “ideology” came to China and proliferated during the Mao era as a positively framed term via, in all likelihood, Japanese renderings of Leninism. After discussing ideological challenges under Deng Xiaoping and Jiang Zemin, I explore whether Hu Jintao’s scientific development and harmony concepts might be understood as ideological campaigns which—by synthesizing Maoist and Dengist approaches to ideology—effectively address what otherwise be referred to as the Party’s telos problem, and thus resolve in part the threat to the Party’s vanguard claim.

De-Stalinization as a Local Agenda Dissolving the Labour Camps on the Kolyma

The political, economic and social changes accompanying the departure from the GULAG radically affected the North-East of the Soviet Union, the Kolyma- or Magadan-region. Until 1953, the local camp system did not only have a combined economic and punitive function (through the exploitation of the great resources of the area, especially gold, by means of forced labour), it also served as the basic structure for ruling the area. Therefore, the release of the biggest part of the regional camp-population (from 169.000 prisoners in March 1953 to 24.000 at the end of 1956) must be understood as the most distinctive mark of the changes which turned an isolated region, kept as a secret and militarily ruled area by the Ministry of the Interior (MVD), into a regular Soviet periphery. The changes were motivated by the decline of Berija and his MVD, as well as by enormous economic and social problems which had drawn the attention of the Politburo to the region. In December 1953, the extraordinary status of the area was replaced by a normal civilian administrative form, the Magadanskaja oblast'. This was the starting point for the establishment of the usual structures of Soviet- and Party-organisations, which eventually allowed the Communist party to win a power struggle against the former leaders of the area, the MVD-officers. In the course of these changes, the area was integrated into the bureaucratic framework of the Soviet system, creating a civilian economic and social infrastructure. The rule of the new elite was orientated towards bargaining-processes which involved institutions and experts focusing on a more stable exploitation of the local gold. Many thousands of free workers and mobilized members of the Party's youth organisation, the Komsomol, were called to replace the forced labourers. They were subject to a broad ideological campaign emphasizing the young oblast'as their new home. Nevertheless, their living conditions were poor, social tensions and crime rates high. Therefore, the De-Stalinization of the Kolyma region meant the appropriation of an almost inaccessible area, the formation of a regular periphery, as well as the adjustment to a Soviet system, which was itself undergoing dramatic changes.

“Nauseating” Displays of Loyalty: Monitoring the Factional Bargain through Ideological Campaigns in China

Autocrats, as factional patrons, only find out the true loyalty of clients during a serious political challenge, when they are least able to enforce the factional bargain. In autocracies with norms against cults of personalities, public, exaggerated praises may constitute an alternative way for clients to signal loyalty credibly. By suffering the social cost of being despised by others, sycophants credibly signal their affinity to a particular leader, thus deterring factional rivals from recruiting them into an alternative coalition. This article develops a measure of such “nauseating” displays of loyalty in China through content analysis of provincial newspapers between 2000 and 2004. OLS and PCSE estimations are used to inquire whether provincial faction members were more likely to echo an ideological campaign launched by their patron. Further analysis explores whether faction members in rich and poor localities echoed the campaign in different ways. The findings suggest that ideological campaigns function as radars that allow senior leaders to discern the loyalty of faction members.

Journalists as Commentatorson European Politics

■ Questions of media performance seem to be inherently linked to any proposed solutions to Europe's perceived `democratic deficit'. This article addresses a specific part of this story: the attempts by journalists from the national press to commentate politically on European affairs, and their self-perceptions about the opportunities and constraints facing them. The article's main enquiry is whether commentating on Europe is different from commentating on national affairs. A model was constructed to assess types of political advocacy. The empirical study is based on interviews with a sample of journalists with four different roles, and from four different types of newspaper, from seven European countries. The main finding is that to the extent that they take on an advocacy role at all with regard to Europe, journalists see themselves as adopting an educational mode of raising public awareness, more than a political `partisan' or `ideological campaign' mode. Such findings are then discussed in relation to the broader issue of media performance over Europe. ■

A NOTE ON NEGATIVE ELECTORAL ADVERTISING: DENIGRATING CHARACTER VS. PORTRAYING EXTREMISM

ABSTRACTIn this expository note, we extend the model of Harrington and Hess (1996) by incorporating valence advertising. There is a two‐candidate electoral contest. Candidates inherit a certain position indicating their ideological platform in an unidimensional policy space. They also inherit a certain valence index which is a comprehensive term for personal traits that are desirable to all voters such as integrity. The candidates can subsequently influence these using negative advertising with regard to both ideological and valence factors. We find that when the available resources are sufficiently small and certain reasonable assumptions are fulfilled, the candidate with the higher initial valence index will run a relatively personal campaign while the candidate with the lower initial valence index will run an ideological campaign.

Communism versus Zionism: The Comintern, Yishuvism, and the Palestine Communist Party

This article discusses how the official communist position on the Zionist project in Palestine went from hostile condemnation in the early 1920s to wary support after World War II. In so doing, it focuses on the ideological struggle between the traditional party line and ““Yishuvism,”” a theory that sought to reconcile Zionist and communist ideas, as it played out in the two bodies most closely involved in shaping Comintern policy on Palestine (the Palestine Communist Party and the Communist Party of Great Britain). In following the tortured justifications for evolving positions, the author identifies the key actors shaping the debate and turning points impacting it, especially the 1936––39 Arab Revolt, Britain's 1939 White Paper, and the wartime fight against fascism. The author contends that an important reason for the USSR's post-war about-face on Palestine was the success of the Yishuvist ideological campaign.

Attitudes towards Entrepreneurship in Singapore: The Role of the State in Cultural Transition

AbstractIn 2001, due to Singapore's low level of entrepreneurship, the state introduced an economic policy known as the Technopreneurship 21 programme. Along with many economic incentives and structural changes, the state has also embarked upon an ideological campaign to create a more pro-entrepreneurial society. This study focuses on examining the attitudes of undergraduates towards entrepreneurship as a means of understanding the Singapore state's ability to 'change' mindsets. It finds that although the respondents still feel that Singapore is currently still un-entrepreneurial, they are very positive for the future. Indeed, the undergraduates even felt that the best way for Singapore to become pro-entrepreneurial was for more state intervention. This paper concludes that because of the capacity and capability of the highly interventionist Singapore government, it is a key agent in the process of cultural transition in Singapore.

Afro-Cuban religiosity, revolution, and national identity

Afro-Cuban religions - especially the practice of santeria, based on West African traditions - are an essential aspect of contemporary Cuban identity, Christine Ayorinde argues, and their existence has forced the current revolutionary state into bizarre and contradictory positions. Ayorinde's bold assertion confounds official pronouncements about the irrelevance of religion in a modern socialist state. The revolutionary leadership has acknowledged the centrality of Cuba's African heritage, while upholding the idea of a nationhood that transcends racial difference. Ayorinde proposes that the conflict between the desire to recognize the country's African roots and the offical commitment to a secular state has created a complex, often paradoxical situation. Despite an ideological campaign to create a new, rational society, African-derived religions are emerging today for the first time from a position of marginality. Cuba now is beset with a sense of disorientation as well as a return to old habits and patterns, including racial inequality. Based mostly inside Cuba, Ayorinde's research includes interviews and conversations with individual Cubans, including practitioners of Afro-Cuban religions from different ethnic backgrounds. Ayorinde also interviewed both religious and atheist commentators on Afro-Cuban religions and culture, including academics, journalists, party officials, and members of governmental and nongovernmental institutions, many at the forefront of efforts to give santeria greater recognition as a central component of the national culture. In addition, the book offers a fresh historical overview of changing religious forms and attitudes in Cuba, examining the encounter with European culture and the Roman Catholic Church, religious practice among slaves in the 19th century, the concept of racial fraternity articulated by Cuban patriot Jose Marti, and the witchcraft scares of the early decades of the 20th century, when religious practices were associated with criminality. Its emphasis on the period since 1959 and on the current decade places it on the cutting edge of studies that examine contemporary Cuban culture.

The Decline and Fall of the Lettered City: Latin America in the Cold War (review)

Reviewed by: The Decline and Fall of the Lettered City: Latin America in the Cold War Scott Pollard Franco, Jean . 2002. The Decline and Fall of the Lettered City: Latin America in the Cold War. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. $52.00 hc. $22.95 sc. 352 pp. In The Sociology of Music, Theodore Adorno paints a dour picture of advanced capitalism's deleterious effect on music (e.g., the imposition of a culture industry which subverted creative genius and privileged repetition and replication), yet he consistently demonstrates a faith in the avant-garde to escape the ravages of capitalism and arrogate a space for creativity and exploration. In The Decline and Fall of the Lettered City: Latin America in the Cold War, Jean Franco writes a similar kind of cultural history for Latin America since the Cold War. The book is framed by a pessimistic evaluation of the lose-lose [End Page 196] effects of the Cold War for Latin America, yet throughout the book Franco consistently turns to exemplary cultural figures, texts, art, and film to demonstrate how a creative work or an aesthetic practice was able to escape the pitched ideological battles of the Cold War, find its own voice, and preserve a Latin American particularity in the face of homogenizing global forces. Admitting, at best grudgingly, some sense of hope in the face of an otherwise grim analysis of Latin American society since the 1950s, Franco finds continued evidence of an "exuberant creativity" in Latin America that can liberate itself from imposed ideological boundaries, adapt and master foreign imports to its own ends, and successfully assert its inexorable difference in a globalized economy. In the initial chapters, Franco lays out how binary Cold War ideologies invaded Latin America to its detriment. Seen as a prize by the United States and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, Latin America became a battleground in the struggle of the two superpowers, and it lost: economically, culturally, and as a continent of autonomous nations. In Franco's judgment, neither of these imported political economies adapted to the particularities of the cultures, peoples, nations, and social milieus of the continent, and the poor fit resulted in inevitable and multifarious failures. Communism has not defeated poverty in Latin America nor met the needs of its marginalized communities. The Zapatista Revolution imagines Mexico as a multicultural society, but how can such a fight for freedom and autonomy be won when the revolution has been marketed as entertainment? The United States' ideological intervention was grounded in the duality of universalism (i.e., the preeminence of European culture) and the Soviet threat to that preeminence. Through the propaganda films of the Office of Inter-American Affairs, Disney, print media (Encounters, Cuadernos, Mundo Nuevo), and the recruitment and use of conservative Latin American intellectuals (e.g., Emir Rodriguez Monegal, Octavio Paz, Salvador de Madariaga), the United States pursued an ideological campaign in Latin America that used universalism as code for an attack on Latin American particularity, which was inevitably linked with Soviet ideals (e.g., class struggle). Correlatively, Franco looks at the failures and mismatches of Marxism in Latin America, focusing on the disjunction between austere Marxist political practice and the "exuberance and excess of the aesthetic" (3). She uses the Mexican writers José Revueltas and Elena Poniatowska to exemplify literature's critique of the failures of Marxism in Latin America, and then she turns to the Chilean Pablo Neruda to explore how poetry and Marxist practice could co-exist. Franco makes clear her own political preference here: The sins of the application of Marxism in Latin America can be corrected, while there is no corrective for United States imperialism. [End Page 197] In the following chapters, Franco plots a causal arc from the failed socioeconomic policies of the Cold War in Latin America to the resultant dictatorships and military interventions to contemporary neo-liberalism. At each stage of that arc, she investigates the consequent implosions for Latin American culture, delineating the internalized products of these changes (e.g., dictatorship, torture, death) and then against their backdrop analyzing the function of literature and art as revelatory if ephemerally liberating counter-narratives. Although Franco takes on conventional themes...

A Theory of Global Capitalism: Production, Class, and State in a Transnational World (review)

Reviewed by: A Theory of Global Capitalism: Production, Class, and State in a Transnational World Michael R. Smith William I. Robinson , A Theory of Global Capitalism: Production, Class, and State in a Transnational World. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004, xvi, 200 pp. This is a Marxist interpretation of globalization. Its argument goes as follows. The history of world capitalism should be broken into periods: the age of discovery and conquest; the competitive capitalism of the industrial revolution and the creation of the modern nation state; monopoly capitalism and the development of a 'system' of nation states; and now a transnational phase of capitalism that is still emerging. This latter phase — globalization — dates from the beginning of the 1970s. Capital and labour have, of course, been moving across frontiers for centuries. What justifies the creation of a distinct post 1970 phase? To answer this question Robinson distinguishes between 'extensive' and 'intensive' enlargement of world capitalism. The former involves extending the geography of world capitalism. The latter involves the commodification of broader spheres of life, as when not just production but also services like healthcare and education are turned over to the market. The collapse of the Soviet Bloc marked the near completion of the process of extensive enlargement. Within societies, the rapid growth of direct foreign investment since the 1960s disrupted traditional modes of life by increasing the penetration of markets. This was 'intensive' enlargement. This change is qualitative because the (near) completion of extensive enlargement and the substantial advance in intensive enlargement allows the supersession of the nation state and its replacement with a global economy. A global economy implies a global capitalist class: "the unprecedented concentration and centralization of worldwide economic management, control, and decision-making power in transnational capital and its agents" (11). Capital, then, has been liberated from the nation-state. But the nation-state was the vehicle through which limits were imposed on the excesses of capitalism — limits embodied in Fordism and the welfare programs that went with it. So a transnational capitalist class is able to engage in unrestrained, socially damaging, accumulation. The result is subcontracting and outsourcing, each of which tends to casualize employment globally. Labour "is increasingly only a naked commodity, no longer embedded in relations of reciprocity rooted in social and political communities" (75). There is, then, an increasingly self-conscious transnational bourgeoisie. Its pursuit of its global interests takes concrete institutional form in projects of economic integration like the World Trade Organization and regional trading blocs (the European Union, NAFTA). Its actions result in "mass social dislocations, plummeting living conditions, growing inequalities, and the rise in absolute and relative poverty levels" (53). At the same time, the transnational capitalist class conducts "prolonged ideological campaigns aimed at legitimating the dismantling of welfare and developmental states and at disseminating a global [End Page 382] capitalist ideology of consumerism and individualism" (83). The flip side of dislocation is, then, a quest for hegemony. Robinson goes on to argue that the globalizing project is being carried forward by a 'transnational state', rendering the nation-state increasingly obsolescent "as a practical unit of the global economy" (89). He kindly cautions the reader that his discussion of this issue is "theoretically complex" and expresses the hope "that the careful reader will be able to grasp my underlying logic, and enjoy the reward of the insights that I am convinced this perspective offers" (88). In true Marxist fashion, global capitalism is, of course, internally contradictory. Robinson lists four current crises through which the contradictions manifest themselves: overproduction or underconsumption; social polarization on a global scale; a crisis of state legitimacy; and an ecological crisis — and elaborates on the first three of them. The book finishes with a discussion of possible forms of resistance to the transnational capital class's globalizing project. Frankly, this book depresses me. I had tended to think that Marxism as a serious form of analysis and as a political project was falling into disuse, collapsing under the implausibility of its analysis and the viciousness to which attempts to apply its precepts seem, pretty much uniformly, to have led. True, there are Marxists scattered across social science departments. But they tend to be aging...

Revisiting the Link Between Electoral Competition and Policy Extremism in the U.S. Congress

Prominent theories of American political parties imply that higher levels of competition cause lawmakers to be more responsive to the center of public opinion, but there is little empirical evidence to support this assertion. Furthermore, many studies have found that competition causes lawmakers to be less responsive to public opinion as a whole and more responsive to their own partisans. Parties and candidates pursue a “mobilization” rather than “moderation” strategy supposedly because competitive constituencies are inherently heterogeneous, which then creates a context for more ideological campaigns and a more partisan policymaking environment. An analysis of U.S. Senate roll call votes between 1989 and 2000 reveals that legislators from more marginal states are less responsive to the ideological center than legislators from safe states. Furthermore, there is no evidence of a relationship between constituency diversity and electoral competition or that greater partisanship is the result of greater diversity.

Agrarian Populism as an Ideological Discourse of Interwar Europe

Europe of the interwar years witnessed the rise of agrarian populism in several countries. In a sense, something in the “spirit of the age” paved the way for the rise of agrarian ideologies throughout the world. The impact of the Great Depression also played a role in the rise of this phenomenon, since urbanization, industrialization, and liberalism increasingly were seen as responsible for this global economic catastrophe. Turkey of the 1930s and afterward witnessed the rise of such a populism, with an emphasis on the cult of the peasant as one of the most important intellectual motifs of cultural and political discourse. As a matter of fact, agrarian populism, or the so-calledköycülük(peasantism), as it was referred to in Turkish, was one of the most important constituent elements of Kemalist populism from the early 1930s through the end of World War II. In this period, the state devised cultural and practical projects for an ideological campaign emphasizing the significance of improving the social and economic conditions of the peasantry. For this reason, in the Turkish press, many wrote aboutköycülük,and official and semiofficial state institutions such as People’s Houses organized peasantist (köycü) activities throughout the country. The impact of such an intellectual campaign could be seen in some of the most important undertakings of the single-party regime, such as the establishment of the Village Institutes and the land-reform attempts.

The Cost of Cost Analysis: Changing Agendas in Poverty Research

When President Clinton signed into law the 1996 Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act, repealing the 60-year-old entitlement to government assistance for jobless and low-income Americans, many liberals expressed a profound sense of betrayal. Yet as Alice O'Connor's remarkable study shows, Clinton's move should hardly have surprised policy makers, of the left or right. O'Connor's work traces the evolution of dominant theories about the causes and solutions to poverty in America, which she labels "poverty knowledge." Though not inevitable, welfare repeal rested on long-standing liberal assumptions, which had narrowed the scope of research into poverty and sought to remove the taint of ideology from poverty studies. By the 1990s, O'Connor argues, social scientists' claims to scientific objectivity left Democratic policy makers without a political strategy to combat the conservatives' explicitly ideological campaign against the welfare state. How the development of poverty knowledge led, sometimes circuitously and often unintentionally, to a Democratic president signing the Republican-sponsored welfare repeal legislation is the subject of O'Connor's book.

"Scholar from the West": Giulio Aleni S.J. (1582-1649) and the Dialogue between Christianity and China, and: The Bible in China: The History of the Union Version or The Culmination of Protestant Missionary Bible Translation in China (review)

Reviewed by: "Scholar from the West": Giulio Aleni S.J. (1582-1649) and the Dialogue between Christianity and China, and: The Bible in China: The History of the Union Version or The Culmination of Protestant Missionary Bible Translation in China Franklin J. Woo (bio) Tiziana Lippiello and Roman Malek, editors. "Scholar from the West": Giulio Aleni S. J. (1582-1649) and the Dialogue between Christianity and China. Monumenta Serica Monograph Series, 42. Brescia and Sankt Augustin: Jointly published by the Fondazione Civilta Bresciana and the Monumenta Serica Institute, 1997. xxvi, 671 pp. DM 120.00, isbn 3-8050-0386-2. Jost Oliver Zetzsche . The Bible in China: The History of the Union Version or The Culmination of Protestant Missionary Bible Translation in China. Monumenta Serica Monograph Series, 45. Sankt Augustin: Published by the Monumenta Serica Institute, 1999. 456 pp. DM 90.00, isbn 3-8050-0433-8. To try to draw one coherent theme out of these two books, one a collection of essays on a seventeenth-century Italian priest and the other a monograph on Protestant bible translation in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, is a daunting task. Nevertheless, I will attempt to review them together, running the risk of oversimplification and reductionism. Both volumes deal with religious history (one on the Roman Catholic Jesuits and the other on the evolution of Protestant bible translation), covering, respectively, periods that are about three centuries apart. One outstanding commonality is that they both focus on the work of Western missionaries in China in the changing contexts of Western world hegemony.1 This review looks at both from the perspective of today's postrevolutionary China. It is now more than two decades since China resumed the pursuit of its modernization agenda with the economic reforms of the late 1970s, following periodic interruptions caused by the ideological campaigns of almost thirty years up until the death of Mao Zedong in 1976. With the opening of the People's Republic to the world, primarily for international trade and much-needed technology for modernization, valuable contacts with outside counterparts have indeed been established by almost every sector of Chinese society. This resumption of modernization is of significance to many aspects of the cultural life of China, including the arts, academia, and religion. Today, in the nation as a whole and in the Christian churches, both Roman Catholic and Protestant, there is a sense of hard-won Chinese self-identity and independence. Against a background of openness and increasing contacts with the rest of the world there is an awareness of the need for vigilance against any resumption of the Western domination and manipulation of the past. [End Page 441] That Christianity in China today is firmly under Chinese leadership and that there is great promise for a new intercultural interaction and transmission of ideas in this age of the information revolution were well attested to by scholars at an international conference held in San Francisco in October 1999: "Christianity and China: Burdened Past, Hopeful Future." The general sentiment regarding the relative autonomy of the Church in China today was captured in these words by historian Jessie G. Lutz: The history of Protestant [and Roman Catholic] Christianity in China was more than the story of heroic efforts by Western missionaries and resistance by Chinese, for Chinese Christians themselves had played a crucial role in propagating and interpreting Christianity. . . . The history of Protestant [and Roman Catholic] Christianity in China is being rewritten from a new perspective, this time with greater attention to the Chinese side of the story.2 In this context, these two volumes are of value not only for their historical interest, but for the lessons they have to teach about both religious and cultural interaction—or "dialogue," as the subtitle of the first book has it. Whether any cultural exchange is meaningful and fruitful depends on the attendant attitudes of the parties involved, and the attitudes toward China of the missionary personalities described in these two books span the entire spectrum of positive and negative. Cultural Sensitivity of the Jesuits Scholar from the West is about Giulio Aleni (1582-1649), an Italian priest who was part of the second generation of Jesuits in China...

How the “Iron Minister” Kaganovich Failed to Discipline Ukrainian Historians: A Stalinist Ideological Campaign Reconsidered

In late February 1947, Stalin's trusted troubleshooter Lazar' Kaganovich arrived in Kiev as the Ukrainian Communist Party's new first secretary. Having served consecutively as the Soviet People's Commissar of Railroad Transport, Heavy Industry, and Construction Materials, the notoriously heavy-handed Kaganovich had earned the epithet of zheleznyi narkom (“iron minister”). His tenure at the head of the Ukrainian party organization in March–December 1947 was marked by intensified coercive intervention in the economy and ideological purges in culture and scholarship. In Ukraine, Kaganovich's brief rule is remembered primarily for his relentless attacks on the alleged remnants of “Ukrainian bourgeois nationalism.” In the works of post-Soviet Ukrainian historians, the 1947 crusade against “nationalism” appears as a comprehensive campaign masterminded by Stalin, planned by his envoy Kaganovich, faithfully implemented by the servile republican functionaries, and submissively endured by the terrorized Ukrainian intellectuals. Clearly, modern Ukrainian historians have adopted the traditional Western concept of Stalinism as a successful totalitarian dictatorship, in which society was no more than a passive object of an all-powerful state.

Physics, Genetics and the Zhdanovshchina

THE PURPOSE OF THIS ARTICLE is to clarify the process whereby the campaign which became known as the Zhdanovshchina proceeded to enmesh the natural and life sciences, having initially focused primarily on literature and the arts. The victory of Lysenko's Michurinist biology over 'formal' genetics following the August 1948 session of the Lenin All-union Academy of Agricultural Sciences (VASKhNIL) has generally been seen as marking the extension of the Zhdanovshchina to the natural and life sciences which hitherto had not been subjected to direct intrusions of the kind experienced in other spheres of cultural and academic life. In the aftermath of the August session, conferences or meetings designed to assess the ideological credentials of most scientific disciplines were organised; however, the physics conference scheduled for early 1949 did not take place. This has been attributed to the personal intervention of Stalin, who, it is claimed, was alerted to the damaging consequences such a conference might have for the then well-advanced atomic bomb project. Physics has thus been widely seen as having been saved by the bomb from a process involving the imposition of the Lysenko model on other scientific disciplines. It is on the questions raised by the preparations for this conference concerning the impact and coherence of the ideological campaign in science that this article will initially concentrate. Physics and genetics will then be compared to assess the relative significance of disciplinary and policy differences in explaining the divergent experiences of physicists and geneticists during the late Stalin period. This comparison will also be used to clarify the process whereby the Zhdanovshchina encompassed science more generally at this time.

The Fight to Preserve Universal Social Programs: A Canadian Perspective on the Great Capitalist Restoration

In 1987, Robert Gilpin spoke about the crisis of national welfare capitalism in a non-welfare international capitalist world [1987, 60-64]. That crisis is only in part a logical consequence of the integration of global markets. It is also a result of a relentless and successful campaign to shape the ideas of the people of the world. Karl Polanyi had already spoken in 1945 of a situation similar to the current one, where groups are pushing that which is faing ... and may even be perverting the to make it serve their aims [1957, 28]. Today's perversion of the trend has reached epic proportions. My objective in this paper is twofold: to chronicle the undermining of universal social programs, health care among them, that were virtually a defining characteristic of Canada among the countries of the Western Hemisphere and to reflect on the fortunes to date of the counter-movement to preserve those programs. For years, many Americans pointed to the Canadian universal health care system as a model to be adapted for their country. Now it appears that the reverse is more likely to be the case. The deficit reduction mania and the attack on the active state, both part of a concerted ideological campaign, offer the real prospect that an American-style medical system may take root in Canada. Sharing a border with the foremost proponent of free markets has its political consequences. The Great Capitalist Restoration in the United States spread very quickly to Canada. In 1970, Kari Polanyi Levitt wrote The Silent Surrender: The Multinational Corporation in Canada to call attention to the threat to Canada posed by the influx of mainly American firms:

ITALIAN IDENTITY: CATHOLIC RESPONSES TO SECULARIST DEFINITIONS, c.1910–48

In united Italy, assertions by Catholic militants about their nation's true identity have been bound up with polemic against secularist forces and with claims about the position due to the Church in Italian society. They have insisted that Italy's authentic traditions are Catholic and that her true greatness resides in her being the heart of Christian civilization. Hostile or threatening ideologies, e.g. idealist philosophy and Communism, have been stigmatized as alien to Italian tradition. In the face of Fascism, with which the ‘Catholic world's’ relations were ambivalent, there was a major ideological campaign to assert a Catholic definition of the keyword romanità. The way in which Catholic theoreticians have defined the ‘nation’ in organicist terms have been linked to strategies of ideological defence against state forms, whether liberal or Fascist, perceived to be overweening.