Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-s2hrs Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-08T07:58:15.427Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Some Aspects of Political Mobilization in China

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 November 2008

L. CH. Schenk-Sandbergen
Affiliation:
University of Amsterdam

Extract

If one wishes to understand something about the political mobilization of Chinese communist society, then it is necessary to concentrate primarily on the aims behind that political mobilization. The ways in which the Chinese try to direct matters so that those aims may be attained, determine the content and character of the mobilization. An analysis which is mainly concerned with such dimensions of the phenomenon ‘political mobilization’ as intensity, globality, tempo, structuring, organization, etc., is not suited to the Chinese situation, simply because these dimensions are to a large extent determined by, and can be explained by, the meaning and content of the underlying values and aims.

Type
Articles
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1973

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1 Johnson, Chalmers, Peasant nationalism and communist power; the emergence of revolutionary China, 1937–1945 (Stanford, 1962; paperback, 1966), pp. 92–3.Google Scholar

2 See the review by Martin Bernal. ‘Was Chinese communism inevitable?’ in The New York Review of Books, 3 December 1970. Here the views of the author named by him, Donald Gillin, are referred to.Google Scholar

3 Hofheinz, Roy Jr, ‘The ecology of Chinese communist success: rural influence patterns 1923–45’, in Barnett, A. Doak (ed.), Chinese communist politics in action (Seattle and London, 1969). In connexion with the relation between the success of Communist influence and relative rent levels, the following quotation must be given (p. 61): ‘That is that within province variations in tenancy may in some cases yield a positive correlation with Communist influence’. He also claims to show that unrest induced by high rent is no more important in explaining the influence of the Communist movement than the pressure which exists through unequal division of land (p. 60).Google Scholar

4 Meisner, Maurice, ‘Utopian goals and ascetic values in communist ideology’, in Journal of Asian Studies, 19701972, p. 102.Google Scholar

5 Quoted from Townsend, James R., Political participation in communist China (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1967), p. 98.Google Scholar

6 See Robinson, J., The cultural revolution in China (Harmondsworth, 1969), p. 12.Google Scholar

7 For this phase-division see Isabel, and Crook, David, The first years of Yangyi commune (London, 1966), Ch. XVII. The conflict between those who want to follow the socialist way, and those who prefer the capitalist road has resulted in the great opposition between Mao Tse-tung and Liu Shao-chi. That this conflict is still in full swing is illustrated by the paragraph in the Peking Review (50, 11 December. 1970, p. 3): ‘The renegade, hidden traitor and scab Liu Shao-chi wildly interfered in and sabotaged Chairman Mao's proletarian revolutionary line in an attempt to lead China's commerce on to the vile road of capitalism’.Google Scholar

8 See Tse-tung, Mao: On the correct handling of contradictions among the people. A speech made on February 27 1957 (Foreign Languages Press: Peking, 1957).Google Scholar

9 Isabel and David Crook, op. cit., p. 209. For further description of these means of mobilization, see Yang, C. K., Chinese communist society: the family and the village (Cambridge, 1965), pp. 204–7;Google ScholarHinton, William, Fanshen; A documentary of revolution in a chinese village (New York, 1966), e.g. p. 278;Google ScholarMyrdal, Jan, Report of a Chinese village (New York, 1965).Google Scholar

10 See Townsend, op. cit., pp. 174–6.Google Scholar

11 For an exposition of the historical development of the ‘mass line’, see Mark Selden, ‘Yenan legacy;“the mass line”’, in A. Doak Barnett, op. cit.Google Scholar

12 See note 9: Hinton, op. cit., p. 259.Google Scholar

13 Townsend, op. cit., Ch. 6.Google Scholar

14 Yu, Frederick C. T., ‘The control of the mind’, in Liu, William T. (ed.), Chinese society under communism, a reader. (New York, 1967), pp. 121–30.Google Scholar

15 For this see Richard Baum, ‘Revolution and reaction in the Chinese countryside; the socialist education movement in cultural revolutionary perspective’, in The China Quarterly No. 38, April/June 1969, pp. 92–120.Google Scholar

16 Baum, op. cit., p. 119. The same idea can be found in Blumer, Giovanni, Die Chinesische kulturrevolution in 1965/67 (Frankfort on Main, 1968), ch. 5.Google Scholar

17 See, for example, Peking Review No. 50, 11 December 1970, p. 19, under the heading ‘A new book by workers’. Revolutionary workers in an engineering factory in Peking have written a handbook with other groups, in which is laid down their acquired practical knowledge. The completion of this handbook is regarded as ‘a victory won by following Chairman Mao's mass-line’.Google Scholar

18 For this, see for example, Thomas P. Bernstein, ‘Leadership and mass mobilisation in the Soviet and Chinese collectivisation campaigns of 1929–30 and 1955–56: a comparison’, in The China Quarterly No. 31, July September 1967, pp. 33–44.Google Scholar

19 Wolf, Eric R., Peasant wars of the twentieth century (New York, 1969), Ch. 3, pp. 103–55.Google Scholar

20 On this body of questions numerous studies can be cited which mostly discuss the policy pursued by the CCP in a specified period: the article by Ilpyong J. Kim, ‘Mass mobilization, policies and techniques developed in the period of the Chinese Soviet Republic’, which appeared in Barnett's reader mentioned above. In addition David and Isabel Crook, op. cit., part 3, esp. pp. 208–20; William Hinton, op. cit., esp. parts III and IV:Google ScholarKuo, Ping-chia, ‘Mao Tse-tung and China's “Poor Peasants” 1927–1957’, in Sakai, Robert K. (ed.) Studies on Asia (1964).Google Scholar For the study of these problems document studies must also be called upon, e.g. Hsiao, Tsa-liang, The land revolution in China 1930–34 (Washington, 1969) (117 documents).Google Scholar

21 Jan Myrdal, op. cit., pp. 145–9, and Geddes, W. R., Peasant life in communist China (Ithaca, N.Y., 1963), p. 35,Google Scholar and references in Freedman, Maurice, ‘Lineage organization’, in Southeastern China (London, 1958), pp. 111, 125;Google Scholar also Freedman, Maurice, Chinese lineage and society (London, 1966), pp. 173–84.Google Scholar

22 David, and Crook, Isabel, Revolution in a Chinese village: Ten Mile Inn (London, 1959), p. 13.Google Scholar

23 Lewis, John, ‘The leadership doctrine of the Chinese communist party: the lesson of the people's commune’, in Asian Survey, October 1963, pp. 457–64.CrossRefGoogle Scholar