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, obedience and risk practices amongst Chinese communist officials
Abstract 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.
China's developmental experience
man wisely does not disguise them as shallow certainties. He is content to set them forth as possibilities. But if these things are possible, what else may be? Where do the limits of possibility lie? We read, for example, in the Little Red Book: "You can't solve a problem? Well, get down and investigate the present facts and its past history! When you have investigated the problem thoroughly, you will know how to solve it." Is is not possible to identify, in such efforts to "demythify" politics, the pragmatic strain in Mao's May Fourth inheritance, with its faith in gradual reform and the accomplishments of successor generations? How can one distinguish between what may have been decisive, and what remained peripheral? Perhaps one cannot. Perhaps one can only test certain possibilities, as Professor Wakeman does with great skill, against both the record of Mao's professed beliefs and the history of his leadership, arguing that if Mao departs from positions we would expect him to defend, he may in fact be speaking from positions we did not realize he occupies. Wakeman's case for his particular assessment of the possibilities is in the end impressively persuasive. Among the men to whom this book is dedicated is Joseph R. Levenson, whose student Wakeman was, and whose influence is felt throughout. Wakeman's language has sometimes the familiar incisive thrust, though it lacks the quality of surprise, the brilliant polish and the convoluted self-consciousness that made Levenson such a troublesome joy to read. The intellectual virtuosity of Wakeman's performance is distinctly Levensonian: the rapid shifts of focus, the range of reference, the revealing juxtaposition of disparate fragments and themes. And as in Levenson, we are always made aware of dialectical tensions as the dynamic force impelling men to think and act. In another, and more arguable way, Wakeman on Mao reminds us of Levenson on Liang Ch'i-ch'ao. Levenson's Liang was the mind of modern China: his irresolution the disease of a generation, his confusion the burden of an age. Similarly, Wakeman's Mao is the Chinese revolution: his genius its excellence, his will its driving force. Events recede; hunger and hope, pain and perplexity alike diminish, subsumed within Necessity; history becomes History. One wonders, at times, what has happened to the people, the swarming and diverse multitudes, transmuted thus into the Maoist masses, for whom he waits alone at the quiet center of his calculated chaos, Incarnate and Incontrovertible Will. Yet in a final and crucial way, Wakeman succeeds where Levenson, I think, did not, or did not try. Much of Levenson's effort, or its effect, is to demonstrate that Liang Ch'i-ch'ao was more than a paradox—he was an intellectual impossibility. Professor Wakeman, on the contrary, establishes with patient sensitivity the coherence of Mao's vision of reality and his effort to act upon it. Among many other things, Wakeman has accomplished the most difficult task confronting the intellectual historian: he has made his subject believable. This is one of those rare books that not only contributes to a field, but helps to define its purposes and its standards.