Suchergebnisse

This book, first published in 1980, addresses the questions raised by the death of Mao Zedong and the arrest of the 'Gang of Four'. Was China reverting to a capitalist form of development, and abandoning Mao's policies? Was China's leadership remaining loyal to Mao's strategy but correcting damage done by the 'Gang of Four'? The essays in this book analyse these questions and illustrate differences in interpretation amongst the post-Mao leadership. Individual chapters deal with disagreements over political line, the role of the CCP, economic policy and industrial management, policy towards the rural sector, controversies over the role of art and literature, the nature and function of the education system and the incorporation of China into the international economy.

This book, first published in 1977, sets out two models of administration and participation used in Communist China, one worked out by the CCP during the war against Japan and one imported from the Soviet Union in the 1950s. These models have given rise to different policy positions, studied here, and the models provide a framework within which to examine the nature and structure of the CCP, state structures, the army, rural and urban policy, and the incorporation of national minorities.

The China of the 1980s seems so very different from that of the mid 1960s: the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution is now widely denounced, seemingly both for the mid 1960s' diagnosis of the ills afflicting Chinese society and for the remedies chosen at the time to cure them. Today few would wish to defend the treatment meted out by Red Guards, but a condemnation of past actions is no substitute for an understanding of what happened and why.

As the author sees it, the Cultural Revolution was devised to sweap away bureaucratism. It is his contention that the diagnosis offered by some humanist Marxists in China in respect of bureaucratism is in fact similar to those made by radicals in this country in the mid 1960s. It is suggested that the means offered in the PRC to prevent bureaucratism today evoke ideals from more radical times. (DÜI-Sen)