WHEN WAL-MART WIMPED OUT

Abstract

This article offers one China analyst's perspective on a variety of questions related to the unionization of all sixty-six Wal-Mart outlets in China. Why did China force Wal-Mart to unionize? If, as Marx, paraphrasing Hegel, wrote, “all great world-historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice,” is Mao making his comeback? Or if, as Marx immediately continued in his own right, “He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce,” is Hu Jintao playing Louis Bonaparte to Mao's Napoleon? Is the Chinese state acting out of a new level of confidence that it can now challenge the world's most prepossessing corporate giants in order to make good on its communist commitments? Is it running scared in the face of a working class that has at last managed to score a victory? Or is it actually strengthening its power through time-honored tactics of mass organizational control that have not really changed despite the new market context? Are China's workers being protected, empowered, or co-opted and subjected to new forms of state control? And why did one of the world's most militantly antiunion corporations go along? Did they have a choice? Did they fear China's state-run union federation? And finally, what does all this portend for the future of labor relations in China?     

Class conflict in Chinese socialism,by Richard Curt Kraus. New York: Columbia University Press, 1981, $22.50

Abstract

One notion of a bureaucratic class in a socialist society has been put forward by Milovan Djilas. According to Djilas, although under socialism there is no longer private ownership of the means of production, a small group of people in the government bureaucracy exercise effective economic control and can use this control to extract a surplus. The bureaucracy which gains control of society's economic surplus maintains the alienated condition of the working class and becomes a ruling class in Marxian terms. In Class Conflict in Chinese Socialism, Richard Kraus’ thesis is that Mao Zedong was aware of, and actively opposed, the beginnings of such a class in modem China. Kraus traces the evolution of Mao's theory of class to show the richness of Mao's theory and to document the influence which that theory had on post-1949 China. Kraus does not adhere strictly to Djilas’ definition of a bureaucratic class, however, nor does he explicitly develop one of his own. Rather, he lacks rigor in his use of such terms as “class” and “class struggle,” making his analysis unclear and the evidence for his thesis weak.     

Abolishing Illiteracy and Upgrading Culture: Adult Education and Revolutionary Hegemony in Socialist Laos

ABSTRACT

This article examines the monopolisation of political space by the Lao People’s Revolutionary Party, before and after 1975. Together with coercive measures, the Marxist-Leninist regime consolidated rule by establishing and disseminating new concepts of state power, social responsibility and socialist subjectivity, which formed the basis of a radical form of revolutionary hegemony. The Party propagated a new rhetoric of rule through mandated activities including village meetings, co-operatives and a much expanded but poor-quality mass education system. This article examines the system of adult education, where the Party sought to eradicate illiteracy and “upgrade culture” among economically productive 15 to 45-year-olds. Motivated by both politics and pedagogy, the Party imported this system from the Democratic Republic of Vietnam in the 1960s before institutionalising it after 1975. The resulting organisational structure fanned the rhetoric of rule across the national territory in an extensive manner that reached the illiterate “masses” in large numbers. Even where the programme encountered material shortages and apathy, mandated participation in adult education propagated the vocabulary and grammatical structure of socialist Laos, providing a codebook for how to participate in socialist society.     

Mao,Stalin, and Kim il sung: An interpretive essay

To secure Soviet interests in Manchuria after the Yalta agreement on the Far East had been invalidated by the Kuomintang’s defeat, Stalin was forced to welcome the PRC into the “socialist camp.” In attempting to eliminate Mao’s foreign policy alternatives, he was assisted by an unwitting United States, where Truman was under fire for “losing” China. Data which has recently become available shows that Stalin cemented his accord with Mao by urging him to lead revolution in Asia. Mao’s heroic self-image and need to prove to Stalin that he was not “another Tito,” caused him to overrule his Politburo and plunge China into the Korean War, thereby assuring its isolation and lasting dependence on the Soviets. The author has long been a student of relations among socialist states; a few interviews in Beijing with Mao Zedong’s personal interpreters and a multitude of newly declassified documents have inspired him to reconstruct the Stalin-Mao-Kim relationship during the formative years of the PRC.     

China's industrial revolution: Politics,planning and management, 1949 to the present,by Stephen Andors

Abstract

The study of Chinese industrial development has come a long way since the 1969 publication of Barry Richman's Industrial Society in Communist China (New York: Random House, 1969). Richman recognized that China had begun to “organize conscientiously and vigorously for industrial progress since the beginning of the 1950's.” Unlike some of his predecessors, he did not explain China's industrial growth in terms of mass coercion or swarms of “blue ants” instead, he warned the reader that “in order to understand more fully how Chinese management and Chinese organization function, it is essential to have an understanding of Chinese ideology.” His examples of the use of ideology-e.g., the study of Mao's On Contradiction to help resolve a problem of cost vs. quality in bicycle production-were refreshingly concrete and useful.     

“Saint Jack”

Abstract

Billed as “a Casablanca for the 1970s,” Peter Bogdanovich's Saint Jack immediately evokes the Bogart classic. Ben Gazzara plays an American expatriate living in Singapore, involved fairly lucratively and with a definite panache in the business of pimping for a stable of Asian beauties. As with Rick, the hero of Casablanca, Jack's background and how he got where he's at are initially obscure. He tells us that he's an Italo-American from Buffalo, and we later leam that he came to Singapore as a seaman, liked the place, and stayed to establish his procurer's street mini-empire. There is, to be sure, the Bogart touch. I have not seen enough of Gazzara's character acting to know if this is his stock in trade, but if it is, then Bogdanovich has selected him shrewdly for the lead role. If it is not, then surely Gazzara has made a studied effort at reproducing the smart-mouthed, straight-from-the-shoulder, tough-guy with-a-heart-of-gold character which made Bogart famous. Unlike Casablanca's major protagonist, however, there is no secret past which catches up with Saint Jack, no reappearance of an old lover whose arrival on the scene peels back the covers from a beshrouded past. All we ever know about Jack is that, for all his gregariousness, his free hand with cash, and seemingly genuine endearment to a host of Chinese acquaintances, he is a loner, a “nowhere man” who abhors commitments, especially to the women he attracts.     

In Matters of war and socialism,Anthony Barnett would shame and honor Kampuchea too much

Abstract

In an article on “Inter-Communist Conflicts and Vietnam” published in the current issue of Marxism Today, Anthony Barnett attempts to put the wars in Southeast Asia into historical and socialist perspective. He begins by stressing the already existing pattern of conflict in the socialist world. He notes in particular, the history of differences between neighboring communist states, the division of Marxist-Leninist movements resulting from the Sino-Soviet split and the sustained efforts of imperialist powers to exploit and to deepen these conflicts. The same conflicts, he argues, now find expression in Southeast Asia. In fact, the recent successful completion of the Vietnamese revolutionary war and the rise of other communist governments in China's hinterland might be promoting a trilateral conflict situation of a type already observed elsewhere. After the second World War, the indigenous, self-sustaining communist revolution in Yugoslavia successfully resisted efforts made by the older, larger communist power, the USSR, to force it to join its Eastern European bloc. Part of the Soviet pressure took the form of aggravating difficult bilateral relations between Yugoslavia and its neighbor Albania. The pattern of aspirations and hostilities in today's Southeast Asia is not, Anthony asserts, appreciably different:     

Appendix: Lim Li-suat

Abstract

In his “Comments on Cham Population Figures,” Michael Vickery criticizes my 1988 article “Orphans of Genocide: The Cham Muslims of Kampuchea under Pol Pot.” “Kiernan has tinkered with the statistics in a tendentious manner in an attempt to prove the case for genocide,” he claims. Vickery accuses me of making “propaganda” and using “doctored evidence” to support it, of failing to make “honest use” of data, and of “fiddling with statistics to prove a particular political case, which cannot be made.”     

Analyzing China's socialist revolution

Abstract

Recent trends in “China scholarship” include two dominant sets of goals and foci in examining China's socialist revolution. Exponents of the more traditional view, represented here by Lucian Pye's Mao Tse-tung, seek to explain it away as a pathological deviation from “normality” in social development. The extremism of Pye's book makes it almost a caricature of the worst in the first trend. By the same token this extremism makes the prejudices and assumptions on which this trend is based easier to perceive than would be the case with other more subtle works. The less traditional and less frequently published view, represented here by Nee and Peck's China's Uninterrupted Revolution attempts to comprehend the Chinese Revolution, historically and philosophically, as a meaningful process directed at increasing human liberation.     

Fighting Imaginary Wars

Abstract

“The abuse of greatness,” muses Shakespeare's Brutus, “is when it disjoins remorse from power.” (Julius Caesar, II, i) By remorse he means pity or compunction, and he hits exactly at the failure of imagination that marked and finally defeated America in Indochina. This failure, however, is scarcely recognized by either political leaders or the American public.     

Revolutionary Discourse in Mao's China,by David E. Apter and Tony Saich

Abstract

As early as Edgar Snow's pioneering Red Star over China (1937), Yan'an was seen as the “defining moment” of the Chinese Communists' rise to power. Beginning in 1935, Mao Zedong set his personal imprint on the party as he successfully guided it from the disaster of the Long March to the “Congress of Victors” in 1945. This set the stage for the final showdown with Chiang Kai-shek and the hapless Nationalists in the civil war of 1946-49. With the victory of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in 1949, the experiences of Yan'an became the blueprint for the reconstruction of China along the lines first laid out in that remote and impoverished town in the northeast.     

再论“两个必然”和“两个决不会”的关系

我国的革命是分两步走的,第一步是新民主主义革命,第二步是社会主义革命。社会主义革命是以社会主义改造的和平方式进行的,要正确认识和总结我国社会主义改造的历史过程和历史经验。马克思讲的"两个必然"和"两个决不会"原理是紧密相连、不可分割的。"两个必然"原理揭示了资本主义必然被社会主义所代替的规律,"两个决不会"原理说明了在什么样的条件下社会主义才能代替资本主义。马克思、恩格斯始终没有提出过落后国家可能首先取得社会主义革命胜利的思想。他们虽然设想俄国农村公社有可能不经过资本主义发展阶段而直接实现社会主义,但那是以西欧无产阶级革命首先取得胜利为先决条件的。列宁虽然提出了社会主义革命可能在一国或几国首先发生并取得胜利的思想,但他并不认为这是社会主义革命的一般规律,并且认为十月革命的胜利是在特定历史条件下取得的。     

“Seoul will become a sea of fire…”

Abstract

Seoul, 19 March 1994: People watching the evening news are terrified. The network stations repeatedly show Park Yong Soo, the North Korean representative at the eighth working-level meeting between North and South Korea at Panmunjom, retorting angrily to Song Yong Dae, his South Korean counterpart. “Seoul is not far from here,” he declares, “If there is a war, it will become a sea of fire.” The next day disturbing headlines splash across the morning and evening newspapers: “Seoul will become a sea of fire.”     

Introduction to dalit poems

Abstract

The word dalit in Marathi, the language spoken by 50 million people in the state of Maharashtra in Western India, means “downtrodden,” “ground down,” or “depressed.” A caste-less word which ex-Untouchables have chosen for the new school of literature they have created, it includes all those who have suffered from the religio-social system. Short stories by ex-Untouchables began to appear in the 1950s, but the great swelling of creativity — poetry, novels, short stories, plays — appeared only in the late 1960s. The school is acknowledged by the Marathi literary establishment as a new and important development in the long history of Marathi literature. It represents a new voice, and its themes are protest, grievance, pride — and often revolution.     

The Revolution and its Discontents: Grenadian Newspapers and Attempts to Shape Public Opinion during Political Transition

Abstract

What role did the newspaper play in attempting to influence public opinion in the early stages of the Grenada Revolution and what are the terms in which printed discourses on the revolution were conceptualised? The Grenada Revolution was a discursive political process where branding and narration were necessary elements in securing the revolution’s authority and legitimacy. This paper argues that Cuba functioned as a metonym through which the revolution was translated in Grenadian periodicals. Even before the coup of 13 March 1979 Grenadian media represented the New Jewel Movement—the revolutionary party—as Cuban-inspired and socialist. In order to examine how socialism in general, and the socialist character of the People’s Revolutionary Government (PRG) in particular, was narrated, a comparison is staged between two newspapers—the government-run Free West Indian and the privately owned The Torchlight. Competing discourses on Cuban communism are analysed for the ways in which they stood-in for the Grenadian people’s hopes, aspirations and anxieties in the midst of radical political change. Issues including race, gender equality, property ownership, freedom of religious practice and freedom of travel are examined in relation to capitalism and socialism, and the PRG’s efforts to maintain narrative authority of the revolution.     

Surrejoinder

Abstract

Boardman now says that my critique of mainstream quantitative studies of Chinese foreign policy is “perfectly justified,” yet he continues to argue in the same old unjustifiable manner. He continues the quest for timeless, placeless truths which all can agree to, a quest which both Marx and Weber long ago pointed out was impossible in a world of conflictful social relations where perception cannot be divorced from social perspective. The data does not gather itself, pattern itself or explain itself.     

The politics of China's peasant revolution

Abstract

Efforts to explain the success of the Chinese Communist revolution have preoccupied more than a few American historians and political scientists in recent years. Most of these scholars, following the trail blazed by George Taylor's The Struggle for North China, have focused attention on the War of Resistance period (1937–1945) in search of the factors responsible for the phenomenal growth in Communist power. Chalmers Johnson, with his famous thesis of “peasant nationalism,” emphasizes the importance of the Japanese invasion for rural mobilization in China. Mark Selden, by contrast, identifies the Communist Party's positive wartime policies—the “Yenan Way”—as the key to revolutionary victory. Carl Dorris, while agreeing with much of Selden's explanation, locates the source of these successful wartime policies not in the capital of Yenan, but in the guerrilla bases of North China, especially Jin-Cha-Ji.     

Imperialism and Chinese nationalism: Germany in Shantung,By John F. Schrecker

Abstract

Professor Schrecker's book is basically a defense of Qing foreign policy during the 1895-1911 period. He demonstrates a concern of nationalism in late Qing with protecting the legal sovereignty of the Chinese state by showing how turn-of-the-century governors Yuan Shi-kai, Zhou Fu, and Yang Shi-xiang labored to defend the territorial integrity of Shandong [Shantung] province against German imperialism. The book's strength lies in Schrecker's conceptual analysis of Chinese foreign policy and its intellectual roots in the late nineteenth century. He argues cogently and with originality that in their concern for defending “sovereignty,” officials like Yuan Shi-kai combined the militant conservative qing-i school of the 1880s with the internationalist approach after 1895 of radical reformers like Kang You-wei. But Schrecker also argues that Qing foreign policy succeeded in stopping German imperialism in Shandong by 1911 and in terms of the empire as a whole that “in the last decade of the dynasty the Chinese government made considerably more progress in its struggle against imperialism than has generally been believed.” (p. 254) In such judgments about the success of late Qing foreign policy, he betrays the bias of what Bulletin readers have come to know as the Harvard school of apologetics for Western and Japanese imperialism. Schrecker deserves credit for drawing attention to the nationalist posture which the late Qing took after 1901 but he goes too far in his defense of the dynasty and the “progress” actually made against Western and Japanese imperialism.     

The gap between the natural and social sciences sometimes leaves the public poorly informed

Abstract

In his book On Human Nature, sociobiologist Edward O. Wilson expresses many of the frustrations of natural scientists, complaining that the intellectual community has failed to recognize the importance of their contributions. He attributes this partly to the natural scientists' lack of literary ability and laments that even those who “step outside scientific materialism to participate in the [dominant] culture” have almost never been able “to close the gap between the two worlds of discourse.” But he directs his main criticism at those who work in the social sciences. He argues that they control the cultural establishment and that their reflections “are devoid of the idioms of chemistry and biology, as though humankind were still in some sense a numinous spectator of physical reality.”     

K. A. Wittfogel's Marxist studies on China (1926–1939)

Abstract

K. A. Wittfogel is one of the most controversial figures in the field of modern Chinese studies. In the early 1950s he established himself as the leading figure in the academic section of the Cold War. Highlights of his “fight for the Free World” were the publication of “Oriental Despotism” in 1958 and the controversy with Benjamin Schwartz over the “Legend of Maoism” in the opening issue of China Quarterly in 1960. Wittfogel was a renegade, given to apocalyptic battle-cries against real or supposed “communist” studies and theories. He claimed to be the only one in his field who by personal experience knew the communist strategies and tactics and their subversive intentions.