The Chinese Communist movement stemmed from nationalism and assumed the left wing in the Chinese national revolution. The CCP (Chinese Communist Party) was organized in the wake of the May Fourth Movement which had kindled a great fervor of patriotism, particularly among the intellectual youths. Only as nationalists first and Communists second, were the Communists willing to join the KMT (Kuomintang) as individuals in order to take an active part in the national revolution. In a span of five years, the KMT-CCP alliance had contributed to the consolidation of the revolutionary base in Kwangtung and the spread of revolution to the north. In the course of the national revolution, the CCP enjoyed a spectacular growth from a group of about 70 intellectuals in 1921, when the party was founded, to a mass party of over 50,000 members in 1927, when die Pei-fa (Northern Expedition) swept the whole of South China.

This essay examines the crisis of solidarity affecting workers who protest labor precarity under South Korea's capitalist democracy. Once considered foundational to the struggle for national democratization, the dramatic protests of aggrieved workers are frequently depicted as out of place and out of sync. Drawing upon ethnographic research on workers’ protest repertoires, this essay challenges prevailing explanations and instead argues that heightened forms of drama, ritual, and suffering in workers’ protests enact a willful politics of refusal. Moving beyond resistance as an all-encompassing frame, the labor of refusal foregrounds ways of being and becoming that are not rooted in the contractual fallacies of liberal capitalist democracy, but in the spaces of solidarity produced by social movement networks and grassroots communities of care. The labor of refusal may not always generate robust solidarity, but it challenges the structures of organized abandonment that treat workers as disposable under neoliberal capitalist rule.

The author reconstructs the religious idea and ritual that lie behind the “Songs of the Dead.” The three songs attributed to Empress Saimei in the Nihonshoki (nos. 119–121) are interpreted as sung by a dead person's spirit sailing to the nether world. They must have been handed down by the Asobi-be—shamans who appeased dead emperors' spirits—because these and other funeral songs in the Kojiki use similar verse forms. The Ryō no Shūge says that the Asobi-be's services involved two persons called Negi and Yoshi. Negi appeased the spirit who possessed Yoshi; the empress's songs must originally have been sung by Yoshi. The ritual behind the “Songs of the Dead” also helps us to understand the origins of Nō, especially of mugen nō, and to perceive the connection between Nō and the development of Kabuki in the early seventeenth century.