This book examines two language issues in Japan today which have arisen from significant developments in the social environment over the last three decades and have pointed to a need for a change in language policy. One is the increase in the number of migrants needing opportunities to learn Japanese as a second language (JSL), the other is the influence of electronic technologies on the way Japanese is written. Immigration-induced demographic changes confront long-cherished notions of national monolingualism, and technological advances in electronic text production have led to textual practices with ramifications for script use and for literacy in general. My central concern is to show whether and how language policy authorities in Japan are moving to accommodate these social and cultural changes. Both the integration of immigrants and new practices affecting literacy are important to the social fabric; it is essential, therefore, that expectations about language in these areas are clear and that policy addresses the realities of the present rather than harking back to an earlier social context.

In one of these two areas, a national policy already exists; in the other, it does not. In one of these areas, the national policy has been revised to acknowledge change; in the other, no national-level policy has yet been developed. In the area of kanji policy, deeply rooted in Japanese language ideology and important to ethnic mainstream Japanese citizens as it is, the widespread uptake of electronic text production has been viewed as necessitating a revision of the List of Characters for General Use, which has just been expanded to acknowledge that larger numbers of kanji are now routinely used than was the case when writing by hand alone. In the second, more contentious area, that of providing JSL instruction for migrants to Japan at a national rather than local level, no policy currently exists, in large part because such a move goes against deep-seated national language ideologies of monoethnicity and monolingualism. It is only very recently that the national government – in contrast to local governments, which have been active in this area for years – has begun to make sporadic provision for language training in certain clearly defined areas relating to employment.

As the prospect of Deng Xiaoping's passing loomed in 1995, there were considerable grounds for skepticism that the pace and scale of change that China had witnessed since he launched the reform era in 1978 would continue. In China's still partially reformed economy, Beijing had yet to transform the sagging state-owned industries – a project begun in 1984 – nor had it secured the legal foundations of the fast-growing private sector in its broader political economy. The PRC was emerging as a major player in world trade, yet it remained outside the newly established World Trade Organization (WTO) system, despite a major push by Beijing to join in 1994.

Introduction

By the time the Twelfth Party Congress met in September 1982, China's new leaders had done much to overcome the post-Mao crisis of confidence. They had repudiated Mao's Cultural Revolution, renounced his economic theories, and reinstated his purged opponents. But acknowledging past mistakes was one thing; charting a viable course for the future was quite another. Although members of the reform coalition forged by Deng Xiaoping could agree among themselves, in principle, on the need for economic reform and opening up to the outside world, they differed over just how far and how fast to move toward revamping the basic ideology and institutions of Chinese socialism. Most important, they differed over precisely how much “bourgeois liberalization,” if any, could be countenanced in a society that continued to call itself Marxist–Leninist.

Tiananmen shook the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) to its core. The charge leveled against former general secretary Zhao Ziyang was that “[a]t the critical juncture involving the life and death of the Party and state, he made the mistake of supporting turmoil and splitting the Party, and he bears unshirkable responsibility for the formation and development of the turmoil. The nature and consequences of his mistakes are very serious.” The issues the Party faced, however, ran far deeper than even this charge suggested. Tiananmen threw open a whole series of questions that had been simmering just below the surface for years.

Introduction

The Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution was an attempt to shape the future of China. Its method was to change the nature of the Chinese people. It was to be a “great revolution that touches people to their very souls.” The masses were to liberate themselves by class struggle against the main target, “those within the Party who are in authority and are taking the capitalist road,” These so-called Soviet-style revisionists were alleged to be seeking to corrupt the masses by using old ideas to restore capitalism. By transforming the ideological realm – education, literature, the arts – and embracing Mao Zedong Thought, the Chinese people were to inoculate themselves against poisonous contagion.

An overview

The year 1958 began with the Chinese Communist leaders optimistic about their ability to lead the country up the path of rapid economic development and social progress. To be sure, not all Politburo members agreed on the best methods to use to accomplish these great tasks, but overall confidence was high and the degree of underlying unity clearly sufficient to enable the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) to act in a consistent and decisive manner. Seven years later, deep fissures had rent this leadership to the point where Mao Zedong himself stood on the verge of launching a devastating attack against many of the colleagues with whom he had worked for more than three decades. That attack would, in turn, launch China into a decade so tumultuous that even in the early 1980s leaders in Beijing would look back to the eve of the 1958–65 era wistfully as the time when the Party's power, prestige, and unity had reached pinnacles. The eight years between 1958 and 1965 were a period of major transition in the Chinese revolution.

Sixty years is a long life-span for a revolutionary regime to survive and remain vigorous. The celebration in 2009 of the 60th anniversary of the Chinese communist conquest of power and the creation of the People's Republic of China (PRC) was in stark contrast to the fate of its erstwhile Soviet “elder brother.” Despite suffering terrible human tragedies and political upheavals – notably, the great famine of 1959–61 and the Cultural Revolution of 1966–76 – the PRC had emerged as a powerful and dynamic country. The purpose of this volume is to chronicle how that came about. The purpose of this introduction is to proffer a hypothesis, based on that chronicle, to explain the Chinese success.

The aim of this book is to provide a comprehensive account of sixty years of the politics of the People's Republic of China, 1949 to 2009. The first four chapters, covering the years of the Mao era and its immediate aftermath, 1949–1982, are drawn from Volumes 14 and 15 of the Cambridge History of China (CHOC). The fifth and sixth were commissioned for the first and second editions of this book to cover the Deng Xiaoping era. The seventh chapter was commissioned for this third edition to cover the final years of this cycle of Cathay.

The chapters drawn from CHOC were part of an integrated schema that included chapters on economics, education, culture, society, and foreign policy, but since “politics took command” of everything in Mao's China, these chapters on politics touch on those other topics as well.

The Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, which by official Chinese reckoning lasted from the beginning of 1966 to the death of Mao Zedong some ten years later, was one of the most extraordinary events of this century. The images of the Cultural Revolution remain vivid: the young Red Guards, in military uniform, filling the vast Tiananmen Square in Beijing, many weeping in rapture at the sight of their Great Helmsman standing atop the Gate of Heavenly Peace; veteran Communist officials, wearing dunce caps and placards defiling them as “monsters” and “freaks,” herded in the backs of open-bed trucks, and driven through the streets of major cities by youth only one-third their age; the wall posters, often many sheets of newsprint in size, filled with vitriolic condemnations of the “revisionist” or “counterrevolutionary” acts of senior leaders. The little red book carried by the Red Guards – a plastic-bound volume containing selected quotations from Chairman Mao – remains a symbol of the revolt of the young against adult authority.

An overview

When the People's Republic of China (PRC) was formally established on 1 October 1949 the nation's new leaders faced daunting problems. Society and polity were fragmented, public order and morale had decayed, a war-torn economy suffered from severe inflation and unemployment, and China's fundamental economic and military backwardness created monumental impediments to the elite's goals of national wealth and power. Yet by 1957 the leaders of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) could look back on the period since 1949 with considerable satisfaction. A strong centralized state had been established after decades of disunity, China's national pride and international prestige had grown significantly as a result of fighting the world's greatest power to a stalemate in Korea, the country had taken major steps on the road to industrialization and achieved an impressive rate of economic growth, the living standards of its people had made noticeable if modest progress, and the nation's social system had been transformed according to Marxist precepts in relatively smooth fashion.