Reconstruction and Rectification of the Communist Party in the Shanghai Underground: 1931–34
Recently scholars have shown that Mao's accusations against the Russian Returned Students stemmed from his need to bolster his own legitimacy by discrediting their role in the 1931–34 period. According to the 1945 “Resolution on questions in the history of the Party,” the Returned Students were “doctrinaire sectarians” whose “‘offensive line’ for the Party” and “repeated failures in political work” caused “serious damage to the Party in the White areas.” But closer investigation indicates that in the bastion which they are accused of weakening and decimating, the Returned Students devoted considerable attention to strengthening Party organization, educating cadres and mobilizing mass support. Although factional struggles and aggressive tactics characterized the policies of the Twenty-Eight Bolsheviks in the 1931–34 period, their contributions to the Chinese Communist Party's (CCP) eifort to maintain a viable organization in the cities cannot be ignored. That the urban Party, hurt severely by the Kuomintang (KMT), survived at all can be attributed to efforts that Mao later denigrated.
The Structural Evolution of ‘Criticism and Self-Criticism’
“ Criticism and self-criticism,” or inner-Party struggle as it is sometimes called, has always been a major mechanism of inner-Party decision making and discipline among Chinese political elites, but during the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution it emerged as a form of mass mobilization and education as well. I shall argue here that this came about as a result of political decisions made in the context of a series of non-reversible structural changes in the Chinese system of communications
Italian Influence on the Development of Calvinist Scholasticism
THIS ARTICLE TRIES to show that the rise of Calvinist scholasticism, which was the most important development in Calvinist theology during the second half of the sixteenth century, stemmed largely from several converging Italian influences, particularly from the writings of Peter Martyr Vermigli and Jerome Zanchi. Here Calvinist theology refers not only to the personal thought of John Calvin but also to the teachings of the founders of the Reformed or Calvinist tradition as it spread out from Geneva and Switzerland to France, Germany, England, Scotland, Poland, and the Low Countries. In this context Calvin emerges as the brightest star in a galaxy of Reformed theologians which includes Heinrich Bullinger, Pierre Viret, Theodore Beza and Wolfgang Musculus as well as Martyr, Zanchi and others. These theologians were often more influential than Calvin himself at a given place or time or on a given point of doctrine. Bullinger, Martyr, and Martin Bucer were all more important for spreading Calvinist ideas to Edwardian England than was John Calvin. Early Elizabethan Protestantism looked more to Zurich than to Geneva, as did early Polish Calvinism. German Calvinism owed more to Heidelberg than to Geneva.' These leaders developed their theologies sometimes in mutual dependence, sometimes with surprising independence. By no means was their relation to Calvin simply that of disciple to master, for each gave a personal nuance to his style of Calvinism. Thus the sixteenth century Jesuit Cornelius Schulting states on the opening page of his five volume polemic against Calvin and Peter Martyr that Martyr was clearer and far more learned than Calvin.2 Recently John Bray has pointed out that research in seventeenth century Calvinism leads "to the conclusion that the impact of Calvin upon the Calvinistic movement has been greatly over-rated. It may well be that some of