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On “Liberation”

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 December 2009

Roderick MacFarquhar
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Extract

When the editor asked me along with other ex-editors to offer some thoughts on the occasion of The China Quarterly's 50th anniversary, I was at a loss. At the celebration which David Shambaugh held for the 35th anniversary in 1995, I wrote fairly extensively about the founding and early development of the journal (No.143, pp. 692–96) and did not have much to add. So I made the suggestion that I should reprise a special feature of the first China Quarterly. For that founding issue, I solicited a number of senior Sinologues to give their appraisal of the PRC on the occasion of its tenth anniversary. Could I, now senior, be given a similar opportunity to look back at the founding of the PRC on the occasion of its 60th anniversary? This article is the consequence of the editor's kind agreement.

Type
Editorial Reflections on the Occasion of the 50th Anniversary of The China Quarterly
Information
The China Quarterly , Volume 200 , December 2009 , pp. 891 - 894
Copyright
Copyright © The China Quarterly 2009

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References

1 Namely Howard L. Boorman, C.P. Fitzgerald, G.F. Hudson, Stuart Kirby, Michael Lindsay, Benjamin Schwartz, H. Arthur Steiner, Guy Wint, Karl A. Wittfogel, Choh-ming Li and Robert C. North.

2 Longer versions of this article were delivered in conferences in Hong Kong and Shanghai and in a speech at Claremont McKenna College earlier this year.

3 Opening address to the First Plenum of the CPPCC, 21 September 1949; Selected Works of Mao Tse-tung, Vol. V (Beijing, FLP, 1977), p. 16.

4 See Cochran, Sherman, “Capitalists Choosing Communist China: The Liu Family of Shanghai, 1948–56,” in Brown, Jeremy and Pickowicz, Paul G. (eds.), Dilemmas of Victory: The Early Years of the People's Republic of China (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007), p. 370Google Scholar.

5 For a discussion of the Chinese situation in which Mao gave birth to “New Democracy,” see the introduction to Schram, Stuart R. (ed.), Mao's Road to Power: Revolutionary Writings 1912–1949, Vol. VII: New Democracy, 1939–1941 (Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 2005)Google Scholar, pp. xxxvii-lxxxii. For the United Front, see Van Slyke, Lyman P., Enemies and Friends: The United Front in Chinese Communist History (Stanford University Press, 1967)Google Scholar.

6 Schram, Mao's Road to Power, p. 333.

7 Ibid., pp. 338–39.

8 Ibid., pp. 342–43.

9 Ibid., p. 343.

10 Selected Works of Mao Tse-tung, Vol. IV (Beijing: FLP, 1961), pp. 367, 368.

11 Selected Works of Liu Shaoqi, Vol. I (Beijing: FLP, 1984), p. 428.

12 Yunhui, Lin, Zhonghua renmin gongheguo shi, Vol. 2: Xiang shehuizhuiyi guodu, 1953–55 (History of the People's Republic of China: The Transition to Socialism, 1953–55) (Hong Kong: Chinese University Press, 2009), pp. 11Google Scholar, 50–51.

13 Ibid., p. 6.

14 Ibid., p. 12. During the Cultural Revolution, all the alleged sins and errors of Liu were lumped together as the Liu Shaoqi line.

15 This view was shared by Professor Lin Yunhui, Ibid., pp. 6–8.

16 Selected Works of Mao Tse-tung, Vol. V, p. 93.

17 Lin Yunhui, History of the People's Republic of China, p. 12

18 Selected Works of Mao Tse-tung, Vol. V, p. 184.

19 “Chengji weida, wenti bu shao, qiantu guangming,” Mao Zedong sixiang wan sui (Long Live Mao Zedong Thought), 1967, p. 261.