Search results

Shanghai's January Revolution was a highly visible and, by all accounts, crucially important event in China's Cultural Revolution. Its occurrence, along with the subsequent attempt to establish a "commune" form of municipal government, has greatly shaped our understanding both of the goals originally envisaged for the Cultural Revolution by its leaders and of the political positions held by the new corps of Party leaders thrust upward during its course—most notably Chang Ch'un ch'iao. At this interpretive level, the events in Shanghai seem to embody in microcosm the issues and conflicts in Chinese politics during the Cultural Revolution as a whole, while at the same time shaping our conception of what these larger issues and conflicts were. At the more general, theoretical level, however, the events in Shanghai provide us with an unusual opportunity (thanks to Red Guard raids on Party offices) to view the internal workings of the Party organization under a period of stress and to observe unrestrained interest group formation and mass political conflict through the press accounts provided by these unofficial groups themselves. The January Revolution thus provides us with an opportunity to develop better our more abstract, theoretical understanding of the functioning of the Chinese political system and the dynamics of the social system in which it operates. [1]

An enigmatic upheaval -- Mobilizing a nation -- The pace of popular insurgencies -- The implosion of the party-state -- The formation of factions -- The emergence of factional warfare -- The dynamics of regional escalation -- Repression unleashed -- Final observations.

"China Under Mao narrates the rise and fall of the Maoist revolutionary state from 1949 to 1976. Andrew G. Walder argues that Mao's China was defined by two distinctive institutions: a Party apparatus that exercised firm discipline over its members; and a socialist economy modeled after the Soviet Union. Although a large bureaucracy had oversight of this authoritarian system, Mao intervened at every turn. The doctrines and political organization that produced Mao's greatest achievements--victory in the civil war, the creation of China's first modern state, a historic transformation of urban and rural life--also generated his worst failures: the industrial depression and rural famine of the Great Leap Forward and the destruction and stagnation of the Cultural Revolution. Misdiagnosing China's problems as capitalist restoration and prescribing continuing class struggle against imaginary enemies, Mao ruined much of what he had built and created no viable alternative"--Provided by publisher

Based on official Chinese sources as well as intensive interviews with Hong Kong residents formerly employed in mainland factories, Andrew Walder's neo-traditional image of communist society in China will be of interest not only to those concerned with China and other communist countries, but also to students of industrial relations and comparative social science.

With modest income differences and virtually no private wealth four decades ago, China's inequalities of income and wealth are now almost as extreme as in the United States and Russia. Despite unusually high levels of state control over national assets and strong fiscal capacity, redistribution of income and wealth is barely measurable. This puzzling outcome is a by-product of China's highly distinctive political and economic structures, which retain many features of the prior state socialist model. These structures are designed to maintain Communist Party control, enforce the priorities of the central Party-state, and push rapid growth through high levels of investment. They include migration controls coupled with state ownership of land, an enduringly large capital-intensive state sector served by a financial system dominated by state banks, a tax base heavily dependent on the scale of production, a fiscal system that favors central priorities and drives subnational governments into land expropriation and property development, and the near absence of taxes on household property and related income. (China J/GIGA)

AbstractDuring the violent early years of China's Cultural Revolution, the province of Guangxi experienced by far the largest death toll of any comparable region. One explanation for the extreme violence emphasizes a process of collective killings focused on households in rural communities that were long categorized as class enemies by the regime. From this perspective, the high death tolls were generated by a form of collective behavior reminiscent of genocidal intergroup violence in Bosnia, Rwanda, and similar settings. Evidence from investigations conducted in China in the 1980s reveals the extent to which the killings were part of a province-wide suppression of rebel insurgents, carried out by village militia, who also targeted large numbers of noncombatants. Guangxi's death tolls were the product of a counterinsurgency campaign that more closely resembled the massacres of communists and suspected sympathizers coordinated by Indonesia's army in wake of the coup that deposed Sukarno in 1965.

Shanghai's January Revolution was a highly visible and, by all accounts, crucially important event in China's Cultural Revolution. Its occurrence, along with the subsequent attempt to establish a "commune" form of municipal government, has greatly shaped our understanding both of the goals originally envisaged for the Cultural Revolution by its leaders and of the political positions held by the new corps of Party leaders thrust upward during its course—most notably Chang Ch'un ch'iao. At this interpretive level, the events in Shanghai seem to embody in microcosm the issues and conflicts in Chinese politics during the Cultural Revolution as a whole, while at the same time shaping our conception of what these larger issues and conflicts were. At the more general, theoretical level, however, the events in Shanghai provide us with an unusual opportunity (thanks to Red Guard raids on Party offices) to view the internal workings of the Party organization under a period of stress and to observe unrestrained interest group formation and mass political conflict through the press accounts provided by these unofficial groups themselves. The January Revolution thus provides us with an opportunity to develop better our more abstract, theoretical understanding of the functioning of the Chinese political system and the dynamics of the social system in which it operates.