Party Cause Research Articles

The New Number One Counter-Revolutionary inside the Party: Academic Biography as Mass Criticism

that Mao authored atrocities and suffering and that he bullied and murdered party members and others to advance his own or the Party's cause. But the CCP's rise to power, Mao's success in establishing and retaining leadership over the other party leaders, and his skillful turning of Soviet aid to his own ends cannot be explained by the authors' one-dimensional formulation. Their view of Mao is not much less prejudiced and distorted than Beijing's official line, though it lies at the other end of the spectrum. Some of the authors' most important claims for the period up to 1949 are controverted by the evidence. Others, such as the large-scale aid the CCP received from the Soviet Union or the cultivation of opium in the Yan'an years, have already been noted by other scholars. The book's biggest problem is its one sidedness and improper use of sources. As a result, we feel it does not represent a reliable contribution to our understanding of Mao or of twentieth-century China.

Voting in the House or Wooing the Voters at Home: Labour MPs and the 2001 General Election Campaign

Part of Labour's strategy for winning a second full term of government at the 2001 general election in the UK involved encouraging its MPs, especially those holding marginal seats, to spend considerable time in their constituencies in the preceding years, contacting voters and promoting the party's cause. Given the size of its majority in 1997, it was able to afford for many MPs to be absent from divisions in the House of Commons. This article looks at the voting records of Labour MPs who stood for re-election in 2001 during the two preceding parliamentary sessions. It reports that backbench MPs representing marginal constituencies were much more likely to be absent from the House during the last session prior to the election. Those absences were also apparently related to their performance at the election: the more often they absented themselves from parliamentary votes in that session (compared to the previous session) the better their performance at the 2001 election relative to national trends.

Popular journalism with Chinese characteristics

This paper is an interpretative attempt to explore the rise of what the author calls 'popular journalism with Chinese characteristics'. Inspired by the concept of 'popular journalism' discussed in numerous European works, the author uses this term for a new kind of market-driven, readership-oriented journalism that has emerged in the People's Republic of China along with the country's shift from the Soviet-style planned economy to a 'socialist market economy'. Like popular journalism of the Western brand, 'popular journalism with Chinese characteristics' caters to reader interest and needs. Nevertheless, it is government-bound, and has to follow the Chinese Communist Party's political line and policies. For this reason, its role in politics is limited to promoting the Party's cause. Popular journalism with Chinese characteristics is an unintended social consequence in the reform era, not a result of a planned move for political reforms. Despite that, no student of Chinese affairs can afford to make light of its influence on Chinese society even though such influence is often imperceptible.-

Sleeping with the enemy: A dynamic model of declining political commitment in state socialism

In recent decades communist elites in virtually every socialist state embarked on strategies of reform that progressively weakened their authority. In Eastern Europe, the reform policy of the Hungarian state during the 1970s reflected official acceptance of the market-like informal economy. Rather than suppressing the shadow second economy, Kadar initiated reforms that sought to make official and legal the market activities of households. In China, economic reforms launched by post-Mao party leaders led to the emergence of markets both within and outside the boundaries of the state socialist redistributive economy. The state attempted to specify a new structure of property rights, institute legal and regulatory reforms, and create new economic institutions required for a hybrid mixed economy. As in Hungary, however, the spread of market transactions was broadly speaking corrosive of the legitimacy of the communist party. After more than a decade of reform, today the Chinese communist elite fitfully await the consequences of what they sense is a deepening crisis in the party's legitimacy. Both in Eastern Europe and in China, the combined effects of myriad market-like transactions highlighted the failures of central planning and contributed to the erosion of party legitimacy; in Eastern Europe they paved the way for regime change.2 Although perestroika accomplished little in reforming the Soviet economy, Soviet citizens too came to rely increasingly on the market-like informal second economy as their source of consumer goods and services.3 Although little progress was achieved under Gorbachev in instituting a market economy, high-level talks and public airing of plans for a rapid transition to a market economy contributed to the collapse of the Soviet planned economy. The failed coup of August 1991 reflected the extent of defection and the erosion of commitment to the party's cause within the Soviet elite. It was not so much the breadth of popular resistance as the failure of will on the part of conspirators that caused the coup's speedy collapse.