Journal of Modern Chinese History

VOLUME 7 NUMBER 2 DECEMBER 2013

CONTENTS

Special Issue: Chinese Revolutions in the Twentieth Century

Articles

Rocks rolling downhill: The continuity and progress of the Chinese revolutionin the twentieth century

WANG Qisheng

Mass movements and rural governance in communist China: 1945–1976

LI Lifeng

“One Day” and the future: Popular support for the wartime CCP bases asreflected in the call for essays on “One Day in Jizhong”

XU Xiuli

How state enumeration spoiled Mao’s last revolution

WU Yiching

Fighting for the leadership of the Chinese Revolution: KMT delegates’ threevisits to Moscow

LI Yuzhen

Forum: Reflections on Chinese Revolutionary History and itsContemporary Legacy

Introduction

LIU Wennan

Two kinds of time: Thoughts on renaissance and revolution

Arif DIRLIK

Understanding “the Grand Revolution” in modern China

LUO Zhitian

The importance of revolution as an historical topic

Timothy CHEEK

One, two, many revolutions

Peter ZARROW

Revolutions in China: Historical origins and contemporary relevance

YANG Kuisong

Intellectuals and the Chinese Communist Revolution

HUANG Daoxuan

Rocks rolling downhill: The continuity and progress of the Chinese revolution in the twentieth century

WANG Qisheng

Peking University, Beijing

The 1911 Republican Revolution, the Nationalist Revolution, and the Communist Revolution were three interlinked phases in the progressive trajectory of the Chinese Revolution. Each left enough space to allow the next revolution to advance on the basis of the previous one. Much like rocks rolling down a high mountain, the Chinese Revolution gathered unstoppable momentum, increasing in speed and violence. The success of the previous revolution inspired the next one; the unaccomplished mission of the previous one was continued and realized by the next, with increased violence and higher revolutionary demands. All three revolutions successfully overthrew older regimes, yet none of the three were as successful at establishing new political institutions. The weaker revolutionary party, the Kuomintang during the Nationalist Revolution, had difficulty accomplishing the mission of nation building, while the stronger revolutionary party, the Chinese Communist Party, failed at political transformation after the revolution.

Keywords: 1911 Revolution; Nationalist Revolution; Communist Revolution;counterrevolution; Chinese Revolution

Mass movements and rural governance in communist China:1945–1976

LI Lifeng

School of Government, Nanjing University, Nanjing

The mass movement was an unconventional political technique adopted by the Chinese Communist Party. Because it was superior to regular administrative means, it was used extensively for many years after the founding of the People’s Republic of China as a convenient and effective tool of mobilization and governance. The key features of the Chinese Communist mass movement included the mobilized political participation of the broad rural masses, state power’s direct intervention in rural society, class categorization, and class struggle. Continuous mass movements helped the Party-state effectively mobilize the rural masses and implement rural governance, but the results of the mobilization and governance were poorly institutionalized and had to be maintained by new and incessant movements. Subsequently, unsolvable tensions appeared between the dynamics of social transformation and the norms of social governance.

Keywords: mass movement; rural governance; Chinese Communist revolution; mobilizational participation; Land Reform movement

“One Day” and the future: Popular support for the wartime CCP bases as reflected in the call for essays on “One Day in Jizhong”

XU Xiuli

Institute of Modern History, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, Beijing

In 1941, the Jizhong Anti-Japanese Base, the Chinese Communist Party’s base in Central Hebei, issued a call for essays on the topic of “One Day in Jizhong” and subsequently received over 50,000 submissions. The collection of the essays selected and published shows that the populace in the base area developed a sense of participation and power sharing through various cultural events sponsored by the Chinese Communist Party authorities. In addition, the people felt that they were not only equal to each other but also empowered in the new social relationships created in the Communist bases. Thus, the populace came to identify with the Party and to share a common goal with it. New interests, new sentiments, and a new identity developing among the populace not only influenced the outcome of the Civil War, but also had an important impact on culture and politics after the Communists came to power nationally, although these influences were not entirely positive. This episode in the Jizhong Base demonstrates that researchers have to take into consideration what initiatives the peasants took when explaining why peasants supported the Chinese Communist Party. It turns out that the sense of equality and the cultural immersion were important factors contributing to their support for the Party.

Keywords: the Jizhong Anti-Japanese Base; call for essays; political participation; sense of equality; peasant mobilization

How state enumeration spoiled Mao’s last revolution

WU Yiching

University of Toronto, Toronto

The Cultural Revolution arguably was all about class and class struggle, which were enduring motifs throughout the Mao era. But what did class really mean, and how do we situate Mao’s “continuous revolution” in its historical context? Many scholars have argued that Mao’s project of continuous revolution, that is, the Cultural Revolution, was an active attempt to tackle the problem of the bureaucratic institutionalization of the Chinese Revolution and above all to forestall the rise of a new socialist ruling elite. This new-class interpretation of late Maoism and the Cultural Revolution is flawed in two crucial aspects. First of all, it overlooks the manifold ambiguities and incoherencies of the late Maoist ideology of class; and second, it fails to fully comprehend the political and ideological consequences of such ambiguities and fragmentariness as amplified by the specific historical and institutional context in which they were pragmatically received and enacted. This paper begins with a brief discussion of the contradictions and ambiguities of the Maoist discourse of class. It then examines the political and ideological consequences of such ambiguities by focusing on the ramifications of the institutional codification of class in post-1949 China. Artificially constructing and perpetuating a social field of antagonism that had largely ceased to exist by the 1960s, the discourse of the state-imposed class-status system was superimposed upon an emergent language of class critical of bureaucratic inequalities, an inchoate language which became assimilated into the existing class discourse based on a rigid classification of prerevolutionary sociopolitical distinctions. This entanglement of disparate forms of class analysis and practice had profound consequences during the Cultural Revolution, as discourses about old and new class adversaries—each with distinct structures of antagonism and developmental dynamics—became hopelessly confused.

Keywords: Cultural Revolution; Maoism; class; state; ideology

Fighting for the leadership of the Chinese Revolution: KMT delegates’ three visits to Moscow

LI Yuzhen

Institute of Modern History, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, Beijing

Between 1923 and 1927, the KMT dispatched three delegations to negotiate with the Comintern, the first led by Chiang Kai-shek, the second led by Hu Hanmin, and the third led by Shao Lizi. During his visit, Chiang Kai-shek talked with the Comintern about the KMT’s interpretation of Sun Yat-sen’s Three Principles of the People in its First National Congress proclamation and reached an agreement regarding Soviet Russia’s aid to the KMT in building a party-army, yet Moscow’s Outer Mongolia policy had a negative impact on Chiang’s future relationship with the Soviet Russia. Hu Hanmin’s mission was to seek Comintern advice on how to draft the KMT platform for its Second National Congress and to apply for KMT membership in the Comintern, or to win a status at least equal to that of the CCP. However, what he achieved was only the acceptance of the KMT as a sympathizer instead of a Comintern member. The delegation led by Shao Lizi aimed at transmitting Chiang Kai-shek’s assertions that the KMT must hold exclusive leading authority in China’s National Revolution and that the CCP should not strive for leadership or attempt to build its own army. The three delegations’ negotiations with the Comintern all focused on whether China should implement the Three Principles of the People or Soviet-style Communism and on which party should lead the Chinese revolution.

Keywords: KMT (Kuomintang); Comintern; Three Principles of the People;Communism; Chiang Kai-shek; Hu Hanmin; Shao Lizi