Communist China 1955-1959


Book Description

The years 1955-1959 in Communist China included striking fluctuations and successes for Mao Tse-tung's Party, and the working out of the first Five-Year Plan for economic and agricultural development. This newly integrated picture of five crucial years pioneers the use of documentation for dealing with Communist China.










China's Road to Disaster


Book Description

This text analyzes the dramatic shifts in Chinese Communist Party economic policy during the mid to late 1950s which eventually resulted in 30 to 45 million deaths through starvation as a result of the failed policies of the Great Leap Forward. Teiwes examines both the substance and the process of economic policy-making in that period, explaining how the rational policies of opposing rash advance in 1956-57 gave way to the fanciful policies of the Great Leap, and assessing responsibility for the failure to adjust adequately those policies even as signs of disaster began to reach higher level decision makers. In telling this story, Teiwes focuses on key participants in the process throughout both "rational" and "utopian" phases - Mao, other top leaders, central economic bureaucracies and local party leaders. The analysis rejects both of the existing influential explanations in the field, the long dominant power politics approach focusing on alleged clashes within the top leadership, and David Bachman's recent institutional interpretation of the origins of the Great Leap. Instead, this study presents a detailed picture of an exceptionally Mao-dominated process, where no other actor challenged his position, where the boldest step any actor took was to try and influence his preferences, and where the system in effect became paralyzed while Mao kept changing signals as disaster unfolded.




Tibet in Agony


Book Description

In 1959 the Dalai Lama emerged in India, where he set up his government in exile. Soon after he left Lhasa the Chinese People's Liberation Army pummeled the city in the "Battle of Lhasa." The Tibetans were forced to capitulate, putting Mao in a position to impose Communist rule over Tibet




Afterlives of Chinese Communism


Book Description

Afterlives of Chinese Communism comprises essays from over fifty world- renowned scholars in the China field, from various disciplines and continents. It provides an indispensable guide for understanding how the Mao era continues to shape Chinese politics today. Each chapter discusses a concept or practice from the Mao period, what it attempted to do, and what has become of it since. The authors respond to the legacy of Maoism from numerous perspectives to consider what lessons Chinese communism can offer today, and whether there is a future for the egalitarian politics that it once promised.




China in Revolution


Book Description

Originally published in the early 1970s, The Yenan Way in Revolutionary China has proved to be one of the most significant and enduring books published in the field. In this new critical edition of that seminal work, Mark Selden revisits the central themes therein and reconsiders them in light of major new theoretical and documentary understandings of the Chinese communist revolution.




Liu Shaoqi and the Chinese Cultural Revolution


Book Description

By addressing the issues that decimated China's monolithic elite in the late 1960s, this text illuminates not only the life and fate of Liu Shaoqi, but also the policy-making process of a revolutionary state facing the diverting exigencies of economic modernization and political development.




Communist China and Tibet


Book Description

The signing in Peking on May 27, I95I, of the I7-point Agreement on Measures for the Peaceful Liberation of Tibet marked the end of Tibet's latest forty-year interlude of de facto independence and formalized an arrangement which, although in some respects differing from the earlier relationship between China and Tibet, in principle but reimposed the former's traditional suzerainty over the latter~ Since then, the course and pattern of relations between the Central Government and the so-called Local Government of Tibet have undergone aseries of drastic reappraisals and readjustments, culmi and the flight of the Dalai Lama to nating in the rebellion of I959 India. These events, together with the recent degeneration of the Sino-Indian border dispute into a fuIl-fledged military confrontation, have served to dramatize the importance of Tibet from the point of view of global strategy and world diplomacy. Long before that, however, indeed ever since Tibet's occupation by the Chinese Red armies and the region's effective submission to Peking's authority, the Tibetan question had already assumed the status of a major political problem and that for a variety of good reasons, internal as weIl as international. From the vantage-point of domestic politics, the Tibetan issue was from the very start, and still is now, of prime significance on at least three counts.




From Leninist Discipline to Socialist Legalism


Book Description

This is the first full-length study in English of Peng Zhen (1902-97), a revolutionary comrade of Mao Zedong and Deng Xiaoping, and an influential legal policymaker in China during both men’s regimes. As one of the chief architects of PRC law and legal institutions during the 1950s and again in the 1980s, Peng left an indelible mark on the present legal system of China. This book analyzes the evolution of Peng’s legal views from his days as a revolutionary in the 1930s and 1940s, through his participation in Communist rule during the 1950s, to his conflicts with Mao and his purge in 1966, and finally to his rehabilitation and resumption of legal reform activities in the 1980s and 1990s. Initially, Peng embraced Leninist notions of law and political authority. These ideas gradually evolved so that in the 1980s Peng advocated increased reliance on formal rules and procedures as mechanisms of governance.