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.     

Afghanistan since the revolution

Buddhism under Mao. By Holmes Welch. Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 1972. Pp. 666. Illus.     

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.     

Economics,imperialism and restorative revolution

Abstract

Disbelief, incomprehension and anger were common reactions to U.S. policy during the political crisis which ended in the break-up of Pakistan. President Nixon incurred wide and bi-partisan criticism in the American Congress and the press for supporting the Pakistani military government despite the latter's brutal suppression of the popular movement for autonomy in East Pakistan. No one seemed to discern any rationale—moral, political, or economic—for this policy. It is noteworthy that instead of dissipating the accusations of its favoritism to Islamabad, the White House helped reinforce the impression of its support for the junta, thus risking rising Congressional criticism and lampooning by liberal cartoonists, columnists, and editors.     

Militarism and social revolution in Africa

Militarism and Social Revolution in the Third World by Miles D. Wolpin Allanheld, Osmun and Co., Totowa (New Jersey), 1981. ix plus 260 pp. including tables, figures, bibliography and index. $19,95.     

A Triptych in honour of the cultural revolution

Abstract

Here are three valuable books which sincerely try to understand the Cultural Revolution and make it understandable to Westerners. They avoid theoretical juggling as well as picturesqueness for its own sake. None of these books takes for granted what a certain rhetorical type of Chinese propaganda states with overflowing phraseology, nor do they indulge in the kind of trifling questions characteristic of many Western commentators, such as: Is Chou En-lai losing ground? Is there a rift between the Secretariat and the Politburo? A rebirth of regionalism? and so on. The authors' most obvious concession to Western “bourgeois-educated” readers is that they try to avoid jargonistic Marxism, and to explain even the doctrinal grounds of the Cultural Revolution with plain words; but maybe it could be argued. that they only apply Chairman Mao's teachings in opposition to the “eight-legged essay style.” As for the “socialist-educated” reader, I should add that the authors also escape flatulent psychoanalysis and sociology.     

A past: a revolution in public ethics

This piece is about those elements of British nineteenth-century deep culture which have to do with the production of subordination, compliance, and acquiescence. It is about perceptions of deviance. The purpose of this work is to provide some support for a suggestion about attribution of the replacement of the dominant British public ethic concerning treatment of deviance during the nineteenth century (1780-1914). Until then deviant persons had been, by and large, subject to policies and customs of exclusion and excision. These practices were replaced by new mechanisms of relegation and subordination, arrangements which lent themselves readily to institutionalisation and subsequent centralised control under a rubric of inclusion in humanity. The social, legal, and administrative mechanisms of exclusion increasingly came under attack for their inhumanity, and a climate of favour grew in Britain for a public ethic of inclusion. This principle, once it got hold, asserted into public life the beliefs which ended such practices of exclusion as slavery, public execution, transportation to the colonies, the inhuman treatment of lunatics and the dispatch of "savages". In order to support the suggestion, it will be necessary to establish that evangelicals placed themselves in the public domain as moral experts, that evangelicals expertly labelled deviant persons and groups, that evangelical publicities and structures energised in the main the revolution in the treatment of deviance without threat to power relations, and that the beginnings of national institutions of labelling are to be found in this revolution of ideas.     

不一样的“革命”——曾朴译《九十三年》

曾朴不仅是晚清知名小说家，也是近现代文学史上一位重要的文学翻译家。1912年辛亥革命后，曾朴从法语翻译了雨果的名作《九十三年》，并将其题为“法国革命外史”，刊载于《时报》。曾朴于此时翻译《九十三年》，虽然明显地包含着应合中国革命时局的动机，但作品高扬人性的主题却超越了单纯的政治革命，表达了“诗人”的革命理想。译者曾朴的“诗人”身份以及他对作品的细致解读又使他进一步阐发了作品“不失其赤子之心”的人道主题，因此使这部小说在当时显示出一种“不合时宜”的思考革命的理路。     

The Young Turk revolution: comparisons and connections

This article consists of a comparative analysis on the one hand, and an attempt to trace influences and connections, on the other. In the comparative part, it seeks to determine the place of the Ottoman constitutional revolution of July 1908 in the global wave of revolutions in the decade before the First World War. It accepts that there is a high degree of similarity in the liberal constitutionalist ideology of the revolutionary movements, but emphasizes the differences in the social bases of the revolutionary movements. In the part on connections, the influences on the Young Turks' ideology, organisation and revolutionary methodology are traced, as well as the influence they exerted on other revolutionary movements.