Factions in Chinese Military Politics

1973 ◽  
Vol 56 ◽  
pp. 667-699 ◽  
Author(s):  
William L. Parish
Keyword(s):  
Interest Groups ◽  
Cultural Revolution ◽  
Internal Conflict ◽  
Chinese Society ◽  
Internal Conflicts ◽  
Chinese Studies ◽  
Chinese Military ◽  
Military Politics ◽  
The Military ◽  
The Cultural Revolution

In Chinese Studies, three themes have acquired new emphasis since the Cultural Revolution: first, the view that China is not a simple monolithic state but one with diversified interest groups and potential internal conflict. Second, the influence of the military throughout society and the extent to which its particular interests and internal conflicts shape the nature of government and society. Third, the fact that bureaucratism, though attacked in the Cultural Revolution, is likely to continue shaping Chinese society and to be a perennial threat to revolutionary ideals. This article touches on each of these themes – first, by an analysis of personal loyalty groups during the Cultural Revolution and the Lin Piao affair and, second, by an account of the changing nature of Chinese bureaucracies and of how these changes impinge on factional politics.

Factions in Chinese Military Politics

1973 ◽  
Vol 53 ◽  
pp. 667-699 ◽  
Author(s):  
William L. Parish
Keyword(s):  
Interest Groups ◽  
Cultural Revolution ◽  
Internal Conflict ◽  
Chinese Society ◽  
Internal Conflicts ◽  
Chinese Studies ◽  
Chinese Military ◽  
Military Politics ◽  
The Military ◽  
The Cultural Revolution

In Chinese Studies, three themes have acquired new emphasis since the Cultural Revolution: first, the view that China is not a simple monolithic state but one with diversified interest groups and potential internal conflict. Second, the influence of the military throughout society and the extent to which its particular interests and internal conflicts shape the nature of government and society. Third, the fact that bureaucratism, though attacked in the Cultural Revolution, is likely to continue shaping Chinese society and to be a perennial threat to revolutionary ideals. This article touches on each of these themes – first, by an analysis of personal loyalty groups during the Cultural Revolution and the Lin Piao affair and, second, by an account of the changing nature of Chinese bureaucracies and of how these changes impinge on factional politics.

Statistics and the Field Army Loyalty System

1974 ◽  
Vol 57 ◽  
pp. 146-148 ◽  
Author(s):  
William W. Whitson
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Revolution ◽  
Domestic Politics ◽  
Statistical Evidence ◽  
Chinese Politics ◽  
Previous Issue ◽  
Chinese Military ◽  
Military Politics ◽  
The Military ◽  
The Cultural Revolution

Although many readers would probably interpret William Parish's article in the previous issue of The China Quarterly (“Factions in Chinese Military Politics,” CQ, No. 56, pp. 667–699) as an attack on my 1969 assessment of the historic role of the Field Army in post-1950 Chinese politics, I am nevertheless sincerely grateful to him for keeping the dialogue about “loyalty systems” alive. Indeed, I am struck by the irony of our respective positions. He seems to argue that, while the Field Army loyalty system apparently (according to my statistics) had little demonstrable impact on elite assignments before the Cultural Revolution, the same system apparently (according to his statistics) helps clarify factional behaviour within the PLA during and after the Cultural Revolution. The irony of this is doubled since the statistical evidence which I now have available argues that “the old boy net” of the Field Armies actually had a diminishing impact on the domestic politics of China in the late 1960s. By then the Military Region as a geo-political unit had replaced the Field Army as a temporary focus of individual and collective PLA loyalties.

The Statistical Evidence for Yang Ch'eng-wu's Manipulation of the Military Elite

1974 ◽  
Vol 57 ◽  
pp. 148-155
Author(s):  
David S. G. Goodman
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Revolution ◽  
Secretary General ◽  
Vice Chairman ◽  
Provincial Level ◽  
Chief Of Staff ◽  
Chinese Military ◽  
Military Politics ◽  
Military Posts ◽  
The Military ◽  
Formal Establishment

William Parish in “Factions in Chinese Military Politics,” ( The China Quarterly, No. 56, p. 667) argues that military factions only assumed political importance during the Cultural Revolution. Part of this argument is based on the claim that Yang Ch'eng-wu, when acting chief of staff and secretary-general of the Central Committee's Military Affairs Committee, attempted to influence the appointment of PLA cadres to provincial revolutionary committees in favour of the 5th Field Army. This influence, he demonstrates, by considering the distribution of PLA cadres with known Field Army affiliations on two groups of provincial revolutionary committees: those formed before and those formed after 8 March 1968 – the date of Yang's last public appearance. Parish argues that a significantly greater proportion of military cadres with a 5th Field Army background were appointed to those Provincial Revolutionary Committees formed before 8 March 1968, than one would have expected given the distribution of such cadres in military posts in 1966. Since he had previously argued that military appointments before 1967 were made without reference to Field Army affiliations, he concludes that Yang was engaged in factional politics. However, Parish's account of Yang Ch'engwu's activities is very much open to question on the grounds that the available evidence suggests that most military appointments to the leading positions (i.e. chairman or vice-chairman) on Provincial-level Revolutionary Committees were determined well before the formal establishment of these institutions and before Yang's dismissal.

Civil Adoption in Contemporary Chinese Law: A Contract to Care

1989 ◽  
Vol 23 (2) ◽  
pp. 373-410 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael J. E. Palmer
Keyword(s):  
Legal System ◽  
Cultural Revolution ◽  
Social Life ◽  
Public Awareness ◽  
Chinese Society ◽  
Chinese Law ◽  
Norms And Values ◽  
Legal Structures ◽  
The Law ◽  
The Cultural Revolution

An outstanding feature of the far-reaching plans for development which China has been earnestly promoting under the general rubric of the ‘four modernizations’ is the post-Mao leadership's determined effort to revive and thoroughly institutionalize a meaningful and formal legal system. There is an obvious and sharp distinction between the policies towards law pursued during the period between the mid-1950s and the mid-1970s and the more recent attempts to fashion a pivotal role for law in Chinese society. Throughout much of the course of socialist rule China's leaders have been concerned not with promoting effective legal institutions but, rather, with the direct insertion of extrinsic political norms and values into the law. During the Cultural Revolution many important legal structures ceased to function. In contrast, in the years since 1978 an important aspect of the rigorous political reaction to the uncertainty and conflict of the Cultural Revolution has been unequivocal support for the establishment of a sound legal system. The leadership now believes that systematic and regulated law-making, public awareness of the law, and proper application of the rules should be integral elements in the administration of justice in the PRC. The hope is that this approach will prevent the recurrence of arbitrary political rule, curb reliance on ‘connections’ or guanxi in bureaucratic conduct, promote economic growth and generally encourage the development of a more predictable and orderly social life.

scholarly journals Developments in Chinese psychiatry

1988 ◽  
Vol 12 (10) ◽  
pp. 437-439
Author(s):  
G. M. G. McClure
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Revolution ◽  
Sharp Contrast ◽  
The Political ◽  
Chinese Society ◽  
Political Constraints ◽  
Previous Decade ◽  
The Cultural Revolution

During a recent visit to China, which included meetings with psychiatrists in Beijing, Shanghai, Xian and Hohot, I noted that many of the political constraints of the Cultural Revolution on psychiatry had been removed. Clearly, Chinese society was still strongly influenced by Marxist doctrine, but there was greater academic and clinical freedom for the reinstated professionals who had previously been considered ‘elitist’. Western textbooks and journals were available, and the very fact that Chinese psychiatrists were able to communicate freely with me was in sharp contrast to the enforced isolation of the previous decade.

Ideology and Cosmology: Maoist Discussion on Physics and the Cultural Revolution

2006 ◽  
Vol 40 (1) ◽  
pp. 109-149 ◽  
Author(s):  
YINGHONG CHENG
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Revolution ◽  
Chinese Society ◽  
Cultural Perspectives ◽  
Fortieth Anniversary ◽  
Political Economic ◽  
The Cultural Revolution

The Cultural Revolution has reached its fortieth anniversary (1966–2006), but many questions about it remain unanswered or the answers themselves are controversial. Among the questions, why Mao and Maoist ideologists went such an extreme in seeking their political goals, and how they would justify the chaos and disasters the Chinese society suffered from 1966 to 1976, are perhaps the most fundamental one. To answer this question, Mao and China scholars have provided interpretations from political, economic, social, and cultural perspectives.

From the “Great Union of the Popular Masses” to the “Great Alliance”

1972 ◽  
Vol 49 ◽  
pp. 88-105 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stuart R. Schram
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Revolution ◽  
Chinese Society ◽  
May Fourth Movement ◽  
Fourth Movement ◽  
May Fourth ◽  
The May Fourth Movement ◽  
The Cultural Revolution

The main purpose of this article is to serve as an introduction to the foregoing translation of Mao Tse-tung's essay, “The Great Union of the Popular Masses,” written during the summer of 1919. As suggested by the title, however, while focusing primarily on Mao Tse-tung's thought at the time of the May Fourth Movement, I have chosen to develop also certain parallels with the ideas he has put forward more recently, especially during the Cultural Revolution. That there are elements of continuity between these two epochs has been recognized by everyone from the very beginning of the Cultural Revolution. Indeed, Mao himself not only stressed these links, but, for a time at least, sought to exaggerate them. The Cultural Revolution was (among many other things) an attempt to re-create, for the benefit of today's youth, an experience analogous to that of Mao's generation of young Chinese half a century ago. None the less, the juxtaposition, for purposes of analysis, of two such episodes widely separated in time may at first glance appear somewhat arbitrary. Such an approach can, in my view, be justified by the fact that the Mao Tse-tung of 1919 had not yet seriously begun to assimilate Marxism, whereas the Mao Tse-tung of the Cultural Revolution had already moved beyond Marxism to conceptions not altogether compatible with the logic of Marxism or of Leninism. The intervening years, during which he mastered, applied and then to some extent discarded the principles of revolution developed by Lenin and Stalin are, of course, vitally important to an understanding of the genesis and present significance of his thought. But by looking directly from 1919 to 1969, and leaping over the intervening period, one can perhaps see the problem in a perspective which reveals points that would otherwise be obscured. In particular, one can note the persistence of traits and ideas not derived from Marxism, and which therefore belong to an earlier and deeper stratum of Mao's thinking and feeling about the problems of Chinese society.

Chinese Opera after the Cultural Revolution (1970–72)

1973 ◽  
Vol 55 ◽  
pp. 478-510 ◽  
Author(s):  
Colin Mackerras
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Revolution ◽  
Chinese Society ◽  
Cultural Activity ◽  
Chinese Opera ◽  
The Arts ◽  
Party Congress ◽  
The Cultural Revolution

The theatrical life of the Chinese in recent years has closely reflected the evolution of Chinese society as a whole since the Cultural Revolution. Although the ninth Party Congress in April 1969 confirmed the success of the Maoist line established in the Cultural Revolution, deciding exactly how to apply that ideological system has not always been easy. Debate has continued in all sections of the community, and is reflected very clearly in the newspapers and media. Amid these debates enough concrete decisions have been reached to begin new cultural activity, largely suspended while the issues were being thrashed out during the Cultural Revolution, and with the passing of time the pace of the revival in the arts has quickened. The resurgence is based on Maoist theory, and it may conseqeuntly be useful to begin with a discussion of how the Chinese are formulating their ideas on what the theatre is all about.

"Aesthetic Craze" in China — Its Cause and Significance

1997 ◽  
Vol 7 (3) ◽  
pp. 27-35
Author(s):  
Jianping Gao ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Revolution ◽  
Western Culture ◽  
Chinese Society ◽  
Liberation Movement ◽  
The World ◽  
Artistic Theory ◽  
The Cultural Revolution

From 1978 to 1985 there was a craze for aesthetics in China. This was anticipated by a "great aesthetics discussion" between 1956 and 1962, but its cause lay more in its significance for Chinese society immediately after the Cultural Revolution. It played an important part in the ideological liberation movement, which transformed the minds of the Chinese; it encouraged the spread of Western ideas in China, and it broke up the ossified Zhdanovist system in Uterary and artistic theory, making the Chinese reflect on their own tradition, recognize Western culture and thus try to develop an aesthetics of both China and the world.

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