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.
Regaining Honour and Regaining Legitimacy: Shame, Confession, Obedience and Risk Practices amongst Chinese Communist Officials
As part of its anti-corruption campaigns in China, the Communist Party of China (CCP) provides officials opportunities to redeem themselves and renew their vows of loyalty to the Party and the people they serve. Officials must regain honour through a process of self-confrontation and self-renunciation in compulsory meetings in which they are encouraged to transform their immoral thoughts and behaviours through confessional criticism and self-criticism practices. These meetings facilitate officials’ redemption through a divinized, ritualistic and theatrical process. In the process of confession and penance, officials must expose themselves to a type of ritual martyrdom, which combines elements of shame, a commitment to absolute obedience and exposure to risk. This paper is based on original fieldwork comprising 50 interviews with high-, mid- and low-level officials across China during 2014 and 2015.
Yun Ch’i-ho’s Alienation by Way of Inclusion: A Korean International Student and Christian Reform in the “New” South, 1888–1893
This article explores Yun Ch’i-ho’s studies and social life at Vanderbilt University and Emory College between 1888 and 1893, and the expectations surrounding white Methodists’ investment in his mission to bring Christian and national reform to Korea. Yun’s diary entries document the tensions that existed between late nineteenth-century articulations of white supremacy and, conversely, missionaries’ idealized framing of Christianity as a universally accessible means for uplift, which any race or nation could pursue equally. Yun offers a unique perspective on the era’s global politics of racial identification and on what the alliances and institutional relationships that missionary work necessitated meant personally.