From Marxism to nationalism: The Chinese Communist Party's discursive shift in the post-Mao era

The Chinese Communist Party's dramatic shift from Mao Zedong's Chinese Revolution to Xi Jinping's Chinese Dream remains under-examined and even misunderstood or mispresented despite its enormous impact on every aspect of national life in the People's Republic of China. There is a clear need for in-depth analysis of the extent to which the CCP has departed from the philosophical foundation of Marxism and Maoism, abandoned socialism and communism, inverted its long tradition of iconoclasm, transformed its own identity and altered its subject position. Part of the CCP's philosophical departure from Marxism and Maoism is its increasing conversion to nationalism. The new nationalism underpinning the Chinese Dream, in particular, operates against the grain of Marxism and Maoism, and vice versa, and is logically irreconcilable with the latter – so much so that the CCP cannot be nationalists and Marxists, Maoists or communists at the same time. The contradictory logics between nationalism and Marxism can be best seen from their respective conceptions of permanence and change, the unity and conflict of opposites, and conceptions of, and approaches to, tradition and the past, which have had major ramifications in political-cultural change in post-Mao China, especially in Xi's New Era.     

To reject or not to reject nationalism: debating Marx and Engels' struggles with nationalism, 1840s–1880s

The relationship between Marxism and nationalism has been tumultuous. While theoretically attempting to reject nationalism as a transient product of capitalism, Marxism has in practice oftentimes exploited its appeal and utilized its extensive institutional repertoire. To a large extent, the difficult dialogue between the two ideological constellations can be traced back to Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels who neglected to leave a definitive statement on the nationality question. The article traces the evolution of Marxism's conceptualization of the nationality question – a slow shift from an outright rejection of nationalism to an acceptance of its progressive features, complexity, varieties and influences. It re-evaluates Marx and Engels' views on the nationality question, from its outright denial to limited acceptance and application. After identifying factors that shaped their perception of the nationality question, the study offers an analysis of the evolution of these attitudes from the 1840s to the 1860s. The objective is to show how Marx and Engels' theoretical dogmatism was tainted by their desire for activism. Their views were not inflexible but rather evolved in response to changing circumstances in the mid 19th century.     

The Chinese and Japanese communist parties: three decades of discord and reconciliation, 1966–1998

This article depicts a painful period in the relations between the Chinese and Japanese communist parties. Using a case study of relations between a ruling Chinese communist party and a non-ruling Japanese communist party, the article covers negotiations and communiqué between the JCP leader Miyamoto and CCP leadership in 1966 that was overruled by Mao Zedong on the issue of Soviet “revisionism” and revolutionary line for the JCP. It discusses the resulting breakdown of negotiations and CCP’s efforts to splinter the Japanese party by setting up a pro-Beijing Japanese communist group. The article analyzes the obstacles to normalization, and the reasons why the leadership of the two parties decided to compromise and reach normalization in 1998 after 30 years of acrimony.     

The making of Maoist model in post-Mao era: The myth of Nanjie village

Bucking the general trend of privatization in China, the model village of Nanjie has cultivated the image of a “small zone of communism,” a modern-day commune that practices extreme measures of egalitarianism. Such an image is promoted by some Party leaders at the center as well as local cadres, and bolstered by the spectacular display of the village's wealth. With the aid of fieldwork data, our research examines the claims of “success,” “egalitarianism,” and the attribution of “success” to “egalitarianism.” We find that the village's early rise to prosperity took place before the celebrated Maoist practices were introduced, and that its later rapid development was an artifact of politically awarded state loans. We then examine the “actually existing Maoism” by uncovering the capitalist labor relations between the local villagers and the hired laborers, and the political inequality among the village's own legal residents. We conclude by examining the political processes that gave rise to this star village in the post-Mao era.     

The thought of Deng Xiaoping

One of the abiding curiosities in the 20th century has been the success of Marxist revolutions in underdeveloped societies. In the case of China, not only did Marxism—Leninism provide little assistance to the communist party on economic development, the problem was compounded by the disastrous ideas of Mao Zedong which, by the time of his death, brought the economy to the brink of ruin. It was Deng Xiaoping who provided the ideological roadmap and legitimation for the reform and modernization of the Chinese economy. By returning to classical Marxism's emphasis on productive forces, Deng managed to transform Marxism into a developmental nationalist ideology. In so doing, Deng paved the way for the current resurgence of nationalism in the People's Republic.     

RECALLING BITTERNESS: HISTORIOGRAPHY,MEMORY, AND MYTH IN MAOIST CHINA

Abstract

For Mao Zedong and the Chinese Communist Party, the socialist transformation after 1949 was not only a political and administrative construction, but also a process of transforming the consciousness of the people and rewriting history. To fight lukewarm attitudes and “backward thoughts” among the peasants, as well as their resistance to rural socialist transformation and collectivization of production and their private lives, Mao decided that politicizing the memory of the laboring class and reenacting class struggle would play a significant role in ideological indoctrination and perpetuating revolution. Beginning in the 1950s, the Party made use of grassroots historical writing, oral articulation, and exhibition to tease out the experiences and memories of individuals, families, and communities, with the purpose of legitimizing the rule of the CCP. The cultural movement of recalling the past combined grassroots histories, semi-fictional family sagas, and public oral presentations, as well as political rituals such as eating “recalling-bitterness meals” to educate the masses, particularly the young. Eventually, Mao’s emphasis on class struggle became the sole guiding principle of historical writings, which were largely fictionalized, and recalling bitterness and contrasting the past with the present became a solid part of PRC political culture, shaping the people’s political imagination of the old society and their way of narrating personal experience. This article also demonstrates people’s suspicion of and resistance to the state’s manipulation of memory and ritualization of historical education, as well as the ongoing contestation between forgetting, remembering, and representation in China today.     

Mainstreaming of Racist Anti-Roma Discourses in the Media in Hungary

The article focuses on the rise and spread of racist language in public debate in Hungary. It investigates how radical right discourses—that is, the relegitimating of the racist idea of “Gypsy crime”—have been transmitted by the mainstream media thus contributing to the decline of a short-lived political correctness in Hungary. The analysis explores how racism has become more and more accepted and how the mainstream has embraced the radical right's propositions, turning them into a “digestible” rhetoric while “breaking the taboos” of antiracism.     

Lyotard: after and with Marx,within and against capital

This article examines Lyotard's thought by means of a review of his conceptions of Marx and capital. Lyotard is taken to hold ambiguous views on both Marx and capital throughout his career. These ambiguities reflect his development of a post-Marxist standpoint. The ambiguous character of Lyotard's reading of Marx and capital is heightened by the fact that the ways in which they are formulated vary in the course of his career. In criticizing Marx, Lyotard tends to assume an absolutist form of Marxism that abstracts from the variety of ways in which Marx can and has been interpreted. Likewise, Lyotard tends to misrecognize how he retains aspects of Marx's critique of capital, and hence does not explore the critical connections between his own standpoint and that of Marx.     

The Chinese Revolution and the Communist International*

Abstract

This article is an intervention in some controversies concerning the role of the Communist International in and outside China. It seeks to tackle the inappropriate denial of its guidance and aid to the Chinese Revolution. In doing so, this paper makes several arguments. First, it argues that the Communist International provided the Chinese Revolution with valuable guidance, support and assistance. These contributed tremendously to the Communist Party of China’s birth, development, consolidation and maturation and advanced its theoretical self-consciousness. Second, while the Communist International gave its guidance in the sincere hope that the Chinese Revolution would benefit from correct theories and advanced experiences, it absolutised the theoretical conceptions of the classical Marxists and the Russian experience. This led to mistakes or misjudgments that deserve an accurate evaluation. Third, the Communist International was itself conducting theoretical exploration, and was generally able to adjust its own theories and change its strategies. Fourth, for all the Communist International’s guidance, the universal tenets of Marxism had to be integrated with the concrete practice of the Chinese Revolution, and it was the ability of Chinese communists to Sinicise Marxism–Leninism in what amounted to a theoretical revolution under Mao Zedong’s leadership that accounts for the revolution’s ultimate victory.     

Westminster constitutions in the South Pacific: A “policy transfer” approach

Constitutional crises in Fiji and Solomon Islands and donor concerns about “good governance” raise older questions about the appropriateness of introduced constitutions to local conditions. This article analyses the process of transfer of “Westminster” constitutions in island states of the Pacific. It considers the factors that facilitated or constrained transfer into and within the region. It also considers cases where alternatives to Westminster were considered but rejected by the local leaders. The article concludes that Westminster has been spread by replication, almost irrespective of underlying social and political conditions.     

Marx’s critical political economy, ‘Marxist economics’ and actually occurring revolutions against capitalism

Abstract

Most revolutions against capitalism have occurred in ‘backward’ and Third World societies, and they have divided and disarrayed Marxisms in the West. One key reason, this paper argues, is intellectual. When, long ago, Marxists surrendered to the bourgeois challenge to Marx – neoclassical economics – developing, in place of Marx’s critical political economy, a ‘Marxist economics’, they lost touch with Marx’s analysis of capitalism as contradictory value production. That analysis could illuminate how capitalism’s contradictions drive its imperialist expansionism and how and why resistance to it must, equally necessarily, take national forms. As a result, major currents of Marxism in the West either have paid attention to imperialism and anti-imperialist resistance but without Marx’s analysis of capitalism as contradictory value production or have insisted that their (mistaken) conception of Marx’s analysis implies that capitalism has no necessary connection with imperialism. Neither tradition can actually develop Marxism to comprehend the actual historical record of revolutions since Marx’s time. Neither can inform new mobilisations against capitalism, whether in or outside its homelands. It is high time we return to Marx’s analysis of capitalism as value production and develop it.     

Why does terrorism terrorize?

Abstract

Attempting to lay bare the psychological roots of terrorism, the author alludes to the views of such rebels against the status quo as Marx, Engels, Bakunin, and Kropotkin and examines in greater detail the myths and beliefs current in ancient times, in the Middle Ages, and even in the modern period that were instrumental in instilling fear and terror into the minds of men. It is held, for instance, that such countercultures and aberrations as the drug culture, the Weathermen, the Manson Family, and the Symbionese Liberation Army seem to be clear manifestations of the excitement and fear that assault individuals in the name of political ideals. The author offers a “model of terroristic resonance,” based on the public perception of a terrorist as being uncaring, vengeance‐oriented, and single‐minded in his aggressivity; also perceived in terrorists is a sense of randomness and unpredictability, infusing in their victims an extreme anxiety and an awesome sense of the uncanny, the effect of which may be likened to an irresistible impulse from the id assaulting the personification of the social representative of the superego. Modern‐day terrorists, it is claimed, carry on an ancient messianic and prophetic tradition of horror that is being visited upon man because of his violation of absolutist values.     

The Empty Heaven of Democracy

Going through a protracted period of transition since the end of the Cold War, the world order in the making is neither what was nor what it is yet to become. It is in “the middle of the future.” To get our bearings in this uncertain transition, we explore the two grand post‐Cold War narratives—“The End of History” as posited by Francis Fukuyama and “The Clash of Civilizations” posited by the late Samuel Huntington. Mikhail Gorbachev looks back at his policies that brought the old order to collapse. The British philosopher John Gray critiques the supposed “universality” of liberalism and, with Homi Bhabha, sees a world of hybrid identities and localized cultures. The Singaporean theorist Kishore Mahbubani peels away the “veneer” of Western dominance. Amartya Sen, the economist and Nobel laureate, assesses whether democratic India or autocratic China is better at building “human capacity” in their societies.     

When Galileo Meets Allah

Going through a protracted period of transition since the end of the Cold War, the world order in the making is neither what was nor what it is yet to become. It is in “the middle of the future.” To get our bearings in this uncertain transition, we explore the two grand post‐Cold War narratives—“The End of History” as posited by Francis Fukuyama and “The Clash of Civilizations” posited by the late Samuel Huntington. Mikhail Gorbachev looks back at his policies that brought the old order to collapse. The British philosopher John Gray critiques the supposed “universality” of liberalism and, with Homi Bhabha, sees a world of hybrid identities and localized cultures. The Singaporean theorist Kishore Mahbubani peels away the “veneer” of Western dominance. Amartya Sen, the economist and Nobel laureate, assesses whether democratic India or autocratic China is better at building “human capacity” in their societies.     

The “End of History” 20 Years Later

Going through a protracted period of transition since the end of the Cold War, the world order in the making is neither what was nor what it is yet to become. It is in “the middle of the future.” To get our bearings in this uncertain transition, we explore the two grand post‐Cold War narratives—“The End of History” as posited by Francis Fukuyama and “The Clash of Civilizations” posited by the late Samuel Huntington. Mikhail Gorbachev looks back at his policies that brought the old order to collapse. The British philosopher John Gray critiques the supposed “universality” of liberalism and, with Homi Bhabha, sees a world of hybrid identities and localized cultures. The Singaporean theorist Kishore Mahbubani peels away the “veneer” of Western dominance. Amartya Sen, the economist and Nobel laureate, assesses whether democratic India or autocratic China is better at building “human capacity” in their societies.     

Perestroika 20 Years Later

Going through a protracted period of transition since the end of the Cold War, the world order in the making is neither what was nor what it is yet to become. It is in “the middle of the future.” To get our bearings in this uncertain transition, we explore the two grand post‐Cold War narratives—“The End of History” as posited by Francis Fukuyama and “The Clash of Civilizations” posited by the late Samuel Huntington. Mikhail Gorbachev looks back at his policies that brought the old order to collapse. The British philosopher John Gray critiques the supposed “universality” of liberalism and, with Homi Bhabha, sees a world of hybrid identities and localized cultures. The Singaporean theorist Kishore Mahbubani peels away the “veneer” of Western dominance. Amartya Sen, the economist and Nobel laureate, assesses whether democratic India or autocratic China is better at building “human capacity” in their societies.     

No Shortcuts to the “End of History”

Going through a protracted period of transition since the end of the Cold War, the world order in the making is neither what was nor what it is yet to become. It is in “the middle of the future.” To get our bearings in this uncertain transition, we explore the two grand post‐Cold War narratives—“The End of History” as posited by Francis Fukuyama and “The Clash of Civilizations” posited by the late Samuel Huntington. Mikhail Gorbachev looks back at his policies that brought the old order to collapse. The British philosopher John Gray critiques the supposed “universality” of liberalism and, with Homi Bhabha, sees a world of hybrid identities and localized cultures. The Singaporean theorist Kishore Mahbubani peels away the “veneer” of Western dominance. Amartya Sen, the economist and Nobel laureate, assesses whether democratic India or autocratic China is better at building “human capacity” in their societies.     

Modus Vivendi: Liberalism for the Coming Middle Ages

Going through a protracted period of transition since the end of the Cold War, the world order in the making is neither what was nor what it is yet to become. It is in “the middle of the future.” To get our bearings in this uncertain transition, we explore the two grand post‐Cold War narratives—“The End of History” as posited by Francis Fukuyama and “The Clash of Civilizations” posited by the late Samuel Huntington. Mikhail Gorbachev looks back at his policies that brought the old order to collapse. The British philosopher John Gray critiques the supposed “universality” of liberalism and, with Homi Bhabha, sees a world of hybrid identities and localized cultures. The Singaporean theorist Kishore Mahbubani peels away the “veneer” of Western dominance. Amartya Sen, the economist and Nobel laureate, assesses whether democratic India or autocratic China is better at building “human capacity” in their societies.     

Can India Learn from China?

Going through a protracted period of transition since the end of the Cold War, the world order in the making is neither what was nor what it is yet to become. It is in “the middle of the future.” To get our bearings in this uncertain transition, we explore the two grand post‐Cold War narratives—“The End of History” as posited by Francis Fukuyama and “The Clash of Civilizations” posited by the late Samuel Huntington. Mikhail Gorbachev looks back at his policies that brought the old order to collapse. The British philosopher John Gray critiques the supposed “universality” of liberalism and, with Homi Bhabha, sees a world of hybrid identities and localized cultures. The Singaporean theorist Kishore Mahbubani peels away the “veneer” of Western dominance. Amartya Sen, the economist and Nobel laureate, assesses whether democratic India or autocratic China is better at building “human capacity” in their societies.