The Communist Party Of China And Marxism 1921 1985

Examining the interaction between the Communist Party of China (CCP) and specific social categories (including peasants, workers, the middle classes, and the dominant class), with a focus on class and class discourse, this volume analyses the CCP’s impact on social change in China between 1921 and 1978. By exploring the CCP’s evolving discourse of class, this book demonstrates that, while class has retained its centrality, its meaning has been re-articulated from an ideological-political tool to a less meaningful signifier, though always used instrumentality. By examining the impact of the CCP’s policies and discourse surrounding class, it also reveals how its own policies since 1921 have shaped the CCP’s current (2021) perspectives on class and stratification. This volume, through an analysis of economic, political, and cultural inequalities in Chinese society even after 1949, also reveals the emergence of a diverse and often overlooked middle class in Chinese society during the 1950s. Delivering a detailed analysis of how the CCP has developed its practical approaches to class and mobilization, this study will be of interest to students and scholars of Chinese politics, Chinese history, Asian politics, and Asian studies.

Scholars have long held that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) was a centralized, Leninist organization from its founding in 1921. In a departure from that view, From Friend to Comrade demonstrates how the CCP began as a group of study societies, only gradually evolving into a mass Marxist-Leninist party by 1927. Using party documents that have only recently become available, as well as the writings of a wide range of Chinese communists, Hans J. van de Ven analyzes the party's difficulty in building a cohesive organization firmly rooted in Chinese society. Van de Ven identifies four stages in the emergence of the CCP. The first, of 1920 and 1921, saw the formation of a range of Chinese communist organizations. The author points out the localized nature of these organizations, as well as their origins in the world of study societies and the continuing influence of traditional elite norms of political action. The second stage, from 1921 to 1923, demonstrates the nebulous distribution of authority in the early CCP, the inability of CCP leaders to bring all Chinese communists into the party, and the party's failure to establish durable mass organizations. From 1923 to 1925, in the face of a crisis for survival, Chinese communists for the first time began to refashion the CCP using Leninist organization concepts. However, van de Ven shows, it was only between 1925 and 1927 that the CCP became larger than life in the eyes of its own membership, with a party culture based on Marxism-Leninism. Only then had the CCP become a mass party, active throughout southern China and in all major urban centers. While past scholarship has emphasized the influence of the October Revolution and Soviet communism on the CCP, van de Ven stresses the thinking and actions of Chinese communists themselves, placing their struggle in the context of China's political history and highly complex society.

This lively history of China's Nationalist revolution tells the story of a small group of Chinese patriots headed by Sun Yat-sen until his death in 1925. They mobilised men, money, and propaganda to create a provincial base from which they launched a revolutionary military campaign to unify the country, end imperialist privilege, and bring the Kuomintang to power. Soviet Russia induced the fledgling Chinese Communist Party to join the effort, and sent money, arms, military and political experts to guide the revolution. But there was a fatal flaw in this co-operation, and when the fighting was over, the remnant Communist Party had been driven underground, the Russian experts had been expelled, and a faction-riven Nationalist Party led by Chiang Kai-shek could claim to be China's new government. This study of a key period in China's history, reprinted from Volume 12 of The Cambridge History of China, is solidly based in Chinese, Russian, and Western languages sources.

What does a Dutchman have to do with the rise of the Chinese Communist Party? Finding Allies and Making Revolution by Tony Saich reveals how Henk Sneevliet (alias Maring), arriving as Lenin’s choice for China work, provided the communists with two of their most enduring legacies: the idea of a Leninist party and the tactic of the united front. Sneevliet strived to instill discipline and structure for the left-leaning intellectuals searching for a solution to China’s humiliation. He was not an easy man and clashed with the Chinese comrades and his masters in Moscow. This new analysis is based on Sneevliet’s diaries and reports, together with contemporary materials from key Chinese figures, and important documents held in the Comintern’s China archive.

Fr Laszlo Ladany, SJ, published only one book in his lifetime (The Communist Party of China and Marxism, 1921-1985: A Self-Portrait), but became widely known and respected as the doyen of 'China-watchers' through his editorship of China News Analysis in Hong Kong in 1953-82. On his death in 1990 he left this survey, simply expressed but revealing on every page the depth of his knowledge of the Chinese people and of Chinese and comparative legal history, one of his own earlier special subjects of study. His ultimate concern is to illustrate the antipathy of Mao Tse-tung to law, even in a form renewed according to Marxist doctrine, and to age-old customary Chinese concepts of acceptable behaviour: this created a mental and spiritual void in a whole generation of Chinese with possibly irreversible and certainly unpredictable consequences. The book is a deeply thought-provoking introduction to the study of Chinese history, politics and culture. Two distinguished German sinologists, Professor Jurgen Domes and Dr Marie-Luise Nath, have, between them, edited the work and provided short opening and concluding sections.