By analyzing the lives of Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin, and Mao Zedong through the lens of Robert Jay Lifton's symbolic immortality framework and Terror Management Theory (TMT), this paper explores the psychological underpinnings of totalitarian cruelty. This study suggests that their tremendous violence was an unconscious reaction against ingrained death anxiety, in contrast to standard historiography's emphasis on ideological or strategic causes. Using a comparative psychohistorical perspective, the study shows how a pathological urge for existential transcendence was created by early traumatic experiences with mortality, such as parental loss, physical deformity, and revolutionary survival. These leaders created "immortality projects," such "thousand-year" empires, mummified symbols, and "undecaying" writings, to combat the fear of finitude. According to the study, the mass crimes that followed were defensive actions meant to "annihilate" perceived threats to these existential buffers. In the end, these governments operated as "mortacracies," transforming individual fear into permanent governmental institutions. This study examines the existential roots of political violence in the 20th century and the enduring appeal of the absolute leader as a stand-in for symbolic continuity by examining how these leaders attempted to replace personal identity with an eternal "body politic."

Translation and the making of history: The objectification of Mao Zedong

Abstract Marxism is the fundamental guiding ideology upon which the Communist Party of China (CPC) and the country are founded and thrive. During the revolutionary period, the CPC successfully explored the path of integrating the basic tenets of Marxism with China’s specific realities (the “First Integration”), achieving the theoretical breakthrough of adapting Marxism to the Chinese context: Mao Zedong Thought. After the founding of the People’s Republic of China, the CPC led the people in embarking on the journey of socialist modernization. Since the reform and opening-up, the CPC has continued to advance this integration, constantly enriching and developing the theoretical system of socialism with Chinese characteristics in keeping with the times. Entering the New Era, General Secretary Xi Jinping creatively proposed the “Second Integration”—the integration of the basic tenets of Marxism with China’s fine traditional culture. Together with “the First Integration,” they constitute the “Two Integrations,” a significant theoretical innovation. These two are dialectically unified: the First Integration serves as the logical premise for the Second Integration, while the second completes this logic, elevating “integration” to a new height. As another form of mental emancipation, the Second Integration fosters confidence in China’s history, culture, and civilization. It defines the Chinese civilizational dimension of Xi Jinping Thought on Culture, transforming fine traditional Chinese culture into a valued, structural, and constructive force for the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation. The Two Integrations, especially the Second Integration, represent an original contribution of Xi Jinping Thought on Socialism with Chinese Characteristics for a New Era. It not only opens a new realm for adapting Marxism to the Chinese context and the needs of the times but also provides theoretical guidance for renewing the ancient Chinese civilization with a new mission and creating a new model for human advancement, demonstrating the Communist Party of China’s commitment to its civilizational responsibility for all humanity.

This study aims to examine China's Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) cooperation under the leadership of President Xi Jinping with more than 100 countries in the Indo-Pacific region as a geo-economic order of developmentalism in the Indo-Pacific region to rival the United States (US) with its liberalism. BRI offers developmentalism based on investment-driven economic growth and infrastructure boom. BRI is also a geoeconomic phrase that shows China's geopolitical interest in controlling at least 45 percent of the world economy, whose potential lies along the Silk Road Economic Belt and the Maritime Silk Road. This explanatory research tries to explore further the grand strategy carried out by China in a transformation from the previous leadership era of Mao Zedong, Deng Xiaoping, and Hu Jintao, to Xi Jinping. Then, BRI expanded, as Chinese investment in infrastructure expanded throughout the Indo-Pacific. The data was drawn from a literature study spread across official Chinese government websites (china.gov), journal editors, online media, and e-book provider sites. The findings highlight the declining role of the US in the international world under the leadership of Donald Trump, so that it a strategic opportunity for China to overtake the US. However, the US is no longer the only world hegemon. China is trying to introduce developmentalism as a counter-order to the liberalism that has been promoted by the US.

Conceptualising Security Transition in China: A Theoretical Analysis

Since Xi Jinping entered his third term, various memorials dedicated to the Chinese Communist Party(CCP) and the Communist Revolution throughout China have been regressing from their normal roles and functions. The Xiangshan Revolutionary Memorial Hall near Beijing, as of late 2019, is one such example. An analysis of the various documents, artifacts, and their layout, the museum's founding principles, exhibition content, and intentions revealed several distinct characteristics. First, the Xiangshan Revolutionary Memorial Hall lacks any blueprint for future development, philosophy, or national vision beyond the Communist Party's rule. Second, while Mao Zedong is portrayed as a great revolutionary leader who defeated the “comprador capitalist clique” and ended the “feudal” era, Xi Jinping is presented as a leader who, along with the CCP, must realize the “Chinese Dream”, demonstrating his legitimacy and historical legitimacy. Third, the negative aspects of modern Chinese history and the Chinese Communist Revolution are absent, and only the positive aspects of the CCP are highlighted. In an effort to emphasize the historical inevitability and legitimacy of the planned CCP rule, the uniqueness of the victory of the CCP Revolution, and the necessity of Xi Jinping’s greatness and leadership, too many data and facts are distorted, altered, omitted, or concealed. Fourth, the CCP employs a traditional unification strategy and tactic: anti-Kuomintang, anti-Chiang Kai-shek, anti-Japan, and anti-Americanism are used as political propaganda tools and means to unite and confront the United States by fostering patriotism and nationalism among the Chinese people. The Xiangshan Revolutionary Memorial Hall confirms that the history taught and propagated by the CCP is uniform, excluding or blocking diverse historical interpretations while enforcing the uniqueness and uniformity of historical facts. In other words, the seeds of Xi Jinping’s personality cult are sprouting. This violates the CCP’s principle of “prohibiting personality cults.” How persuasive will such an exhibition filled with distortions and exaggerations, emphasizing the inevitability of the advent of a communist society, the legitimacy of Chinese rule, and the exaltation of Xi Jinping’s greatness be to the people dissatisfied with the CCP’s one-party dictatorship and Xi Jinping’s dictatorship? If the Chinese people repeatedly see this kind of one-sided propaganda and publicity about Xi Jinping, they will ultimately develop hostility toward the Kuomintang, anti-Japanese and anti-American sentiments, and a one-sided belief in China’s greatness. As I have argued many times before, it is regrettable that Xi Jinping’s China is running in a direction that runs counter to the flow of history. It will be interesting to see how the exhibition at the Xiangshan Revolutionary Memorial Hall will change once Xi Jinping steps down from power.

Abstract In the seventeenth century, Chinese philologists rejected imperial orthodoxy and sought to return to the ways of antiquity through textual criticism; they described their approach using a first century phrase: “Seeking Truth from Facts” ( shishi qiushi , 實事求是). Two centuries later, Mao Zedong appropriated this phrase to encapsulate his approach towards revolutionary work, which privileged the first-hand investigation of local socioeconomic conditions. In between these episodes, shishi qiushi was found in automobile advertisements, missionary translations, and on the gates of Confucian academies. Since the 1700s, Chinese intellectuals have found shishi qiushi strangely alluring, and employed the phrase to describe their intellectual and moral commitments. To explain this longevity, this article provides a genealogy of shishi qiushi and argues that the phrase came to be associated with the epistemic values of reflexivity, expertise, and syncretism. These qualities became valued by Chinese intellectuals as they navigated a rapidly changing world.

In every era, talent is a special human resource, directly affecting the breakthrough development of the country, locality and each organization. Therefore, competition for talent is an objective reality; leaders and managers often consider talent as an important strategy and policy to gain development advantages for each country, locality and organization. In fact, this issue can be implemented more conveniently in the private sector associated with the autonomy of each organization; but it is a difficult issue for public sector organizations due to the influence of political and legal factors. In this study, the author analyzes the views on talent of some Eastern politicians, including President Ho Chi Minh - Leader of Vietnam, and Chairman Mao Zedong - Leader of China. Based on the analysis of the content of Ho Chi Minh and Mao Zedong's views on talent, the author builds a theoretical framework for research on the development of talented civil servants, including a 3-scale model in the direction of assessing the correlation of the independent scales/variables "Civil servants’ outstanding capacity" (CSO), "Policy for civil servants’ capacity development" (PCS) and the dependent scale/variable "Developing talented civil servants" (DCS). The author conducts a survey of 510 leaders of 170 local government agencies at the commune level representing three regions of Vietnam, including Lang Son province (North), Nghe An province (Central), Tay Ninh province (South). From the analyzed survey results, the author draws research conclusions and discusses policy issues to develop talented civil servants in Vietnam in the trend of social change with the development of digital technology and digital society today.

This essay examines the development of socialism over the century between the 1848 French Revolution and the Chinese Revolution. Although socialism did not emerge late in history, its most rapid development occurred over the hundred years following 1848. During this period, socialism underwent theoretical refinement under Marxism, witnessed the founding of the first socialist state, and participated in the peoples first experience of governance developments that have exerted profound influence on the present and on probable future trajectories. During the 1848 French Revolution, socialism was not systematic, and socialism was not in the mainstream. There had not yet been any previous successful socialist reforms and revolutions. In China, on the other hand, Mao Zedong and other socialist leaders implemented changes in socialism, which contributed to the victory of the Chinese Socialist Revolution. This paper aims to compare the two revolutions and identify the changes of socialism that could be deduced from these two revolutions.

Abstract Autoregressive language models generate text by predicting the next word from the preceding context. The regularities internalized from specific training data make this mechanism a useful proxy for historically situated readerly expectations, reflecting what earlier linguistic communities would find probable or meaningful. In this article, I pre-train a GPT model (223M parameters) on a broad corpus of Chinese texts ( FineWeb Edu Chinese V2.1 ) and fine-tune it on the collected writings of Mao Zedong (1893–1976) to simulate the evolving linguistic landscape of post-1949 China. Identifying token sequences with the sharpest drops in perplexity – a measure of the model’s surprise – reveals the core phraseology of “Maospeak,” the militant language style that developed from Mao’s writings and pronouncements. A comparative analysis of modern Chinese fiction demonstrates how literature becomes unfamiliar to the fine-tuned model, generating perplexity spikes of increasing magnitude. The findings suggest a mechanism of attentional control: whereas propaganda backgrounds meaning through repetition (cognitive overfitting), literature foregrounds it through deviation (non-anomalous surprise). By visualizing token sequences as perplexity landscapes with peaks and valleys, the article reconceives style as a probabilistic phenomenon and showcases the potential of “cognitive stylometry” for literary theory and close reading .

This study explores how Shi Lifeng’s painting The Puppet Player constructs and communicates political narratives through visual symbolism. Despite the frequent use of Mao Zedong’s imagery in Chinese contemporary art, limited research examines how Lifeng’s visual language functions as a political statement. Using Roland Barthes’ semiotic framework—denotation, connotation, and myth—this qualitative study analyzes color, spatial composition, object symbolism, and figure gestures in the artwork. The analysis reveals that dominant red hues, hierarchical composition, and theatrical staging signify ideological control and social struggle. These visual strategies expose how authority and manipulation are normalized through aesthetic codes. The findings highlight Lifeng’s critical stance toward power structures and his use of design principles to challenge political memory. This research contributes to the discourse of visual communication by demonstrating how semiotic analysis can decode layered meanings in politically charged imagery, offering insights for designers and researchers in understanding symbolism and narrative construction within visual art.

Abstract: "The East Is Red" is a signature Chinese revolutionary song, often referred to as the "anthem of the Cultural Revolution." By examining three key episodes in the song's history, this article traces the evolution of "The East Is Red" from a rural love song to a central part of Chinese revolutionary culture. In this process, the basic components of the song, including its lyrics, melody, and arrangement, have been flexible and subject to constant change, responding to incessantly shifting political circumstances, intended audiences, and media technologies. "The East Is Red" was first created in the 1940s in the Shaanxi–Gansu–Ningxia Border Region, when a group of Communist cultural workers, responding to Mao Zedong's Yan'an Talks, selected, edited, and sanitized local folk songs and added newly composed lyrics. This process reflected a fundamental suspicion of the unmediated sounds of the masses, even though those very sounds had inspired the song in the first place. Later, in 1964, "The East Is Red" was expanded into an eponymous "music and dance epic," an elaborate singing and dance performance created under the personal supervision of Premier Zhou Enlai that charts Chinese revolutionary history. In this version, the song is performed by a large chorus and accompanied by a full orchestra. With this spectacular rendition, Zhou sought to wrest control of the cultural sphere from Jiang Qing and to assert his own authority over the interpretation of Party history, with mixed success. In 1970, China launched its first satellite, Dong Fang Hong 1, which broadcast "The East Is Red" via radio transmission, showcasing the socialist state's scientific and technological capacity. Mass campaigns were organized for people to gather and listen to the satellite broadcast. A distinctive version of the song, performed by a celesta and peppered with noise, marked China's entrance into the space age. Despite its altered form, this version of "The East Is Red" retained much of its original northern Shaanxi flavor, which sonically resisted full state standardization. Taken together, "The East Is Red" has never been a stable musical fixture but rather a malleable set of musical resources subject to editing, adaptation, and interpretation throughout the trajectory of the Chinese revolution. Its transformative journey illustrates the uneasy relationship between culture and politics in China's revolutionary history and, more specifically, the enduring impulse among communist cultural and political elites to harness and dictate the symbolic power that sounds could embody, thereby highlighting the pivotal role of sounds in shaping the contours of revolutionary political culture in modern China.

Leadership entails crafting out ideologies and formulating plans that would foster development and alleviate the problems of the society. President Xi Jinping has proffered a methodology on how to study historical phenomena and its inherent problems. His ideology was built on existing thoughts of two prominent Chinese leaders, Mao Zedong and Deng Xiaoping. This study examines the thoughts and ideas of President Xi with the aim of exposing his blueprints for the economic planning and development of China. Data obtained through typical case sampling and content analysis was used for this study. Certain factors such as economic, political, cultural, social and ecological development were selected for this study. It adopts the theory of historical materialism to comprehend this study. It ascertains that a society’s mode of production will determine its social, political and intellectual development. It argues that the political leadership of a country should engineer the socio-economic development of the citizenry by making full use of the productive forces of the economy. Thus, President Xi has highlighted 14 basic areas in which government should focus to expedite socio-economic development and progress of the nation. This work concludes that the interplay of the productive forces of the economy through the vision of the political leadership of the state can actually champion the required socio-economic development and advancement.

This essay critically examines Mao Zedong’s political, economic, and social contributions to human freedom. It argues that Mao, despite his authoritarian methods and disastrous policies such as the Great Leap Forward, played a decisive role in reshaping Chinese society and expanding collective freedoms. By dismantling feudal hierarchies, redistributing land, advancing gender equality, and promoting literacy, Mao empowered marginalized groups and redefined freedom as collective emancipation rather than individual liberty. His leadership not only transformed China’s internal structures but also inspired anti-colonial and socialist movements globally. Nonetheless, the heavy human cost of his rule and the suppression of civil liberties demand a balanced evaluation of his legacy, which lies between significant achievements and profound failures.

The principle of “Friendship First, Competition Second” was first proposed by Mao Zedong in 1969 and formally established by Zhou Enlai in 1971 as a guiding policy for China’s sports diplomacy. It became an essential strategic tool that helped China break through international isolation during the Cold War. This principle promoted the “Ping-Pong Diplomacy,” facilitated the normalization of Sino–U.S. relations, and created a new paradigm of “sports diplomacy” that enhanced China’s global influence. As a manifestation of Zhou Enlai’s diplomatic wisdom, the principle reshaped the value orientation of competitive sports, provided a unique perspective for understanding the development of the People’s Republic of China, and continues to offer profound insights for building a new type of international relations.

Book Review: Mao Zedong Thought Mao Zedong Thought, by FanxiWang, translated, edited and with an introduction by Gregor Benton; Chicago, IL: Haymarket Books, 2021. Paper $19.60. Pp. viii, 326.

ABSTRACT When authoritarian regime makes a policy U-turn from restrictive to easing measures, how does the propaganda adjust its narratives to avoid ridiculing oneself? Drawing on the policy agenda control framework, this study investigates how Chinese state media deployed nationalistic narratives to cover ‘dynamic zeroing’ and ‘living with the virus’ policies in the news before and after the major policy change. Between January 2020 and March 2023, this study collected 1.24 million Weibo news posts from 832 central and provincial Chinese state media outlets and analyzed the data using document embedding approach. The findings indicate that Chinese propaganda adapted its strategies using nationalistic narratives in different stages of the pandemic in response to specific policy needs. Central and provincial media adhered to the official propagandist role in various extents. By invoking Mao Zedong’s ‘On Protracted War’, this study identifies three guiding principles underlying Chinese propaganda’s effort to navigate the complexities of manipulating public opinion during the period of significant policy change.

Dialectics in its origins is a variety of idealist thought that has acquired special relevance through Marxism, and whose political-ideological value is underlined by Chinese innovative Marxism. This article argues for the unscientific character of the concept of dialectics as a reflection of the development of nature and society, while pointing to its significance as an expression of interests of domination and of the obscurantism through which these interests try to justify or conceal themselves. The view of dialectics as a mere expository procedure is also criticised as a superfluous ornament for the scientific analysis of objective reality. The article begins by addressing some notable characteristics of dialectics in traditional Marxism, mentioning the strong version (with strict laws applicable to facts) and the weak version (that reduces dialectics to emphasising the importance of change). Various approaches to the first chapter of Marx's Capital are discussed, particularly Lenin's exaltation of dialectics, and a number of questions are raised concerning the dialectical view of the commodity. These questions, along with others related to property and enterprises within socialism, are again addressed in relation to Chinese innovative Marxism. Various features of Mao Zedong's dialectical approach are set out. Mao's contributions to dialectics seem to bring a greater realism to traditional Marxist dialectics, despite some ambiguities and vacillations; in recent times these contributions appeared subject to a degree of ideological isolation. The disorienting use of dialectics is illustrated by a number of dialectical games, fictitious but showing some analogy with actual dialectical arguments in the complex ideological landscape between Marxism. Contrary to the general acceptance of a symbiosis between dialectics and socialism, the article emphasises their opposition.

This paper presents a comparative study of ideological and political education in Kyrgyzstan and China, with an emphasis on the theoretical foundations, historical evolution and modern practices in both countries. The study aims to identify the specific approaches to the education of young people, the formation of political consciousness, as well as to assess the influence of cultural, historical and social factors on these processes. The first part of the paper examines the development of ideological and political education in the context of the historical evolution of the political systems of Kyrgyzstan and China. It analyzes the key stages in the formation of educational and upbringing systems, starting from the Soviet period in Kyrgyzstan and the time of Mao Zedong in China, and ending with modern approaches in both countries. The second part examines the main ideas and methods used in the field of ideological and political education within the framework of educational programs. In Kyrgyzstan, the emphasis is on democratic values, civil society and human rights, while in China - on socialist principles, patriotism and collectivism. The analysis of specific educational materials, school and university programs, as well as the role of party organizations and government structures in shaping the worldview of young people is conducted. In conclusion of the study, the author draws conclusions about the similarities and differences in approaches to ideological and political education in both countries, and also assesses the prospects for the development of these practices in the context of globalization and political change.

The aim of this study is to scrutinise the relationship between political ideology and architectural practice by reviewing the design of residential buildings of people’s commune. The article starts from a broad perspective that gleans the relevant commune housing design cases in Architectural Journal [建筑学报] and summarises the overall common design policies in different stages. This is followed by discussions on how the socio-economic conditions, technological status, and ideology of the time specifically influenced architectural design, thereby observing the correlation between form, politics, and reality. In parallel, from a chronological perspective, this work analyses the evolution of rural housing design and summarises the characteristics of rural housing design. The results show that the design and construction of residential buildings had undergone three main changes: first, the neglect of special needs for rural housing in design was adjusted, such as the problem of insufficient production and storage space being addressed by the architectural community; second, new reinforced concrete structures and construction techniques were introduced to the design of dwellings; and third, since the cultural revolution, the construction of rural dwellings returned to a more realistic yet improved approach. This study concludes that, although ideology influenced everything from institutions and spatial planning to daily life during the Mao Zedong era, the physical distance between rural areas and the state provided space for socio-technical experiments in rural China. This was manifested in continuous cycles of trial and error and refinement in political practice, everyday realities, and technical arrangements, ultimately resulting in a hybrid state that incorporated both industrial elements — such as new structures and techniques — and local traditional components. Ultimately, the design of rural commune residential architecture can be understood as embodying a pragmatic form of socialist modernism — mediating between national imperatives and popular needs. This article provides new understanding and assembly of historical references for understanding modernism in Mao’s China.