Worse Than a Monolith: Disorganization and Rivalry within Asian Communist Alliances and U.S. Containment Challenges, 1949–69

Abstract

This article makes the counterintuitive argument that in the first two decades of the Cold War the communist alliance in East Asia was easiest for the United States and its allies to contain through coercive diplomacy during the period in which the communist alliance was most cohesive and unified under Soviet leadership (1954–57). With a focus on the Korean War and two Indochina Wars, this article shows how internal problems in the communist alliance significantly complicated the containment of communism. In the formative years of the East Asian communist alliances (1950–53), the alliance’s lack of organization and cohesion made it more difficult for anti-communist forces in the region to deter communist expansion and to control escalation of wars once they started. Between 1958–69, internal rivalry for leadership in the communist alliance made containment of the alliance particularly difficult for the United States and its allies. Until the Chinese and Soviet communists actually turned their guns on each other in early 1969, the Sino-Soviet rivalry for leadership of the international communist movement in the 1960s only served to increase the expansionist fervor of the communist movement as a whole, make peace agreements with anti-communist forces in the region more difficult, and maximize the amount of military assistance local revolutionaries, like Ho Chi Minh, received from both Moscow and Beijing.     

Totalitarianism: An outdated paradigm for post-Mao China?

China’s considerable changes since the early 1980s suggest the need to assess the nature of the post-Mao reform and change. Many scholars on China in recent years have not thought totalitarianism to be a useful term anymore. The article attempts to assess the validity of the totalitarian model, investigate and analyze the major changes in post-Mao China, and evalaute the significance of the changes and the nature of the post-Mao reform, so as to determine whether the post-Mao regime can still be described as totalitarian or has been transformed into something else. The article demonstrates that the dynamic core and essential features of the Chinese communist regime have not fundamentally changed. China has just repeated the “dynastic cycle” of communist totalitarianism from Mao’s regime to Deng’s regime, though Deng’s regime has many differences from Mao’s at the operative level. The paradigm of totalitarianism, rather than outmoded, is still useful and applicable to the study of the Chinese communist regime.     

Policy statements of the 1969 National Conference

Abstract

On the 9th of April 1975, eight innocent men were hanged by the government of South Korea, for a crime none of them had understood, much less committed: the crime of belonging to an alleged communist conspiratorial group whose existence has never been proven, the so-called People's Revolutionary Party (PRP). The government wanted their lives, so it would seem, because “communists” were hard to come by and because, in this absence of tangible demonstration of a communist conspiracy, domestic repression had become increasingly indefensible. Indeed, the only thing the eight seemed to have in common is that they were all obscure men of humble backgrounds, apparently with few friends, certainly none with any social or political connections. Just before their executions, an American scholar-missionary told a Congressional panel, following a painstaking investigation of the case:     

The Soviet Military Administration and East German Elections, Autumn 1946

Even before the capitulation of Germany in 1945 the Soviet Union had begun to make preparations for a step-by-step communist seizure of power in the territories it controlled. This paper shows that the elections in the Soviet Occupation Zone (SBZ) in autumn 1946 were part of this radical change. Unpublished Russian documents provide evidence that Soviet military authorities had planned almost every detail of this campaign to ensure that the Socialist Unity Party of German (SED) headed the poll — and this was even more evident after the crushing defeat of the communists in Hungary and Austria in 1945. In any case the Soviets were determined that such defeat should not happen again due to Stalin's postwar plans to establish a predominantly communist Germany.     

Recognising the People's Republic of China: A Reappraisal of Australian Foreign Policy During the First Menzies Ministry 1950–51

The attitude of the early Menzies Government towards the recognition of the People's Republic of China has not been well understood in the literature on Australia's international relations. The early Menzies regime has been taken by some scholars to be implacably opposed to communism, including Chinese communism, by others to have ceased to consider recognition because of the Korean War and by a third contingent to have been responsive to United States pressure not to recognise the Chinese communist government. A perusal of the foreign policy documents of the period of the first Menzies ministry reveals that both Menzies and Spender were giving favourable consideration to recognising the People's Republic of China during late 1950 and early 1951 and that none of these three views were decisive in preventing recognition. The question for Menzies and Spender was not whether to recognise but when to recognise and the actions of the Chinese communists themselves, in particular their attitude to British recognition, created the greatest impediment to recognition by Australia at that time.     

How America mocked the ceasefire: Vietnam since the paris agreement

Abstract

The Chinese Communist Party (CCP)'s human rights violations before and after 1949 have included torture, prison labor, repression of autonomous worker unions, suppression of ethnic collective rights, religious persecution, forced sterilization, and unethical medical violations of human organ transplants. These violations have been concretely documented by China scholars, Chinese dissident organizations, foreign governments, and international human rights nongovernmental organizations (NGOs). While international attention often focuses on the violations of civil and political liberties (such as the unlawful detention of China's small, but increasingly vocal, dissident community), violations of economic, social, and cultural human rights have also been clearly documented. Such documentation explodes the myth, believed by Chinese and foreign observers alike, that China under communist rule has succeeded with economic and social rights while “lagging” behind in political and civil rights.     

Military coups in the people’s republic of China: Failure,fabrication, or fancy?

The most blatant and dramatic type of political act by soldiers is the coup d’etat. Scholars of civil-military relations often argue that communist states are virtually immune to coups because of effective mechanisms of party control over the army. In the case of the People’s Republic of china (PRC), many scholars contend that there have been no successful military coups, although some assert there has been at least one abortive attempt—by Minister of Defense Lin Biao in 1971. Chinese sources have reported many botched coup plots and some sinologists have accepted there as fact and/or labeled various events in PRC history as military coups.     

Leathernecks in North China, 1945

Abstract

The decisive phase of the Chinese Civil War is said to have begun during the summer of 1946, hardly a year after the Japanese surrender and about six months after General George Marshall went to China to assist the Kuomintang and the communists in negotiating toward a peaceful settlement of their conflict. The failure of the Marshall Mission and the subsequent communist victory is often seen as America’s failure–the failure of liberal democracy to provide an alternative to communism and revolution and the failure of the American war aim–to establish lasting peace and stability in Asia. But even before Marshall’s arrival in China, the united States had actively intervened on behalf of the Kuomintang and undermined possibilities for a negotiated political settlement in China.     

The May fourth movement

Abstract

Extract

The May Fourth (1919) Movement, by all accounts, is one of the watershed marks in modern Chinese history. Within the space of a few years, Chinese nationalism burst upon the scene with unprecedented force and rapidity, transforming the Chinese political landscape for the rest of the twentieth century. This surge of nationalism was accompanied by iconoclastic rejection of nearly all aspects of traditional Chinese culture. This “totalistic iconoclasm,” to use the phrase of Lin Yü-sheng, was widespread, to be sure, only among the relatively educated elite members of society. Nevertheless, coming simultaneously with the rise of nationalism, the extent of such hostility to Chinese tradition is more surprising than its limitations. As with May Fourth Chinese nationalism, May Fourth antitraditionalism was to become a dominant, perhaps even decisive, theme in the Chinese communist revolution. As Lucien Bianco has observed, the May Fourth Movement represented a spiritual revolution experienced by the future leaders of the Communist Party, who would try after 1949 to impart that same revolution to the rest of the Chinese people.     

Putting the Chinese State in its Place: A March from Passive Revolution to Hegemony

The Chinese party-state has been depicted in three major forms by the existing studies – the authoritarian state, developmental state and corporatist state. These depictions, however, only offer a partial understanding of the Chinese party-state and have failed to grasp its totality. Drawing upon the theoretical insights of Antonio Gramsci, this article contends that Chinese economic reform inaugurated in 1978 has been a top-down passive revolution and that, after three decades of reform, the role of the Chinese state has been changing from steering the country’s passive revolution to establishing capitalist hegemony. However, it should be noted that although the Chinese state has been undergoing a hegemonic transformation, capitalist hegemony has not been unambiguously established in the country. Some workers have given consent to the ruling class’s leadership, but a segment of workers has been able to transgress hegemony to formulate a radical critique of capitalists and the state. The transition to hegemony in China is a chaotic and tumultuous process of class struggles between the ruling class and the working class.     

En Route to Revolution: The Communists and the Free Officers—Honeymoon and Separation

Organized communism had already emerged in Egypt shortly after the Bolshevik revolution in Russia. Afterwards, it was characterized by internal splits and rivalries, which were followed by constant persecutions by the authorities. Nevertheless, revolutionary platforms presented by communists gradually seeped into government policy and thinking, noticeably after the July 1952 revolution. This study sheds new light on the causes for the formation of the complex relations between Egypt’s military regime and the communist movement. The intimate working relations and clandestine cooperation between the Free Officers and the largest communist organization, the Democratic Movement for National Liberation, proved to be constructive and, more importantly, successful, following the military takeover of 23 July. However, the Officers–Communists honeymoon was ephemeral and the ad-hoc alliance disintegrated shortly thereafter. Based on untapped exclusive first-hand sources drawn from a variety of archives, including Egyptian and Russian, this article provides a new narrative to the origins of one of the most studied subjects in the modern history of the Middle East—the Egyptian July 1952 revolution.     

THREATENING HISTORIES

This article contributes to recent scholarship on modern Vietnamese historiography by examining the ways in which twentieth-century historians have manipulated their representations of collective actions during the French colonial period. Following studies by Patricia Pelley, Christoph Giebel, Peter Zinoman, and others, the author offers a critical reading of narrative accounts of the period between the late nineteenth century and the late 1930s. The article is inspired by Prasenjit Duara's work on modern Chinese historiography, in which he showed how early twentieth-century Chinese historians viewed their history through the simplifying lens of the nation-state. Here the author argues that most post–1954 communist historians in Viet Nam were influenced by similar impulses, leading them to construct a highly teleological account of this period, obscuring its true complexity. The author uses case studies of the representations of secret societies, ethnic minority groups, and new religious movements to demonstrate how this obscuring has worked, while suggesting alternate readings of the collective actions by these groups that place them outside of a convenient teleology leading directly to the triumph of the Communist Party. The author argues that the complex histories of these groups were a challenge to the Marxist dialectic and were thus regarded as a threat to the narrative. As such, modern historians had to reimagine or even erase these complexities for political purposes. The author concludes by suggesting that historians must continue to probe these types of collectivities as complex actors in a complicated historical landscape, rather than accepting them as part of a linear narrative.     

THE ANTI-CORRUPTION STRUGGLE IN XI JINPING’S CHINA: AN ALTERNATIVE POLITICAL NARRATIVE

The fact that the extensive anti-corruption struggle that has consumed China since 2013 is highly political is widely accepted and understood. But the question is precisely what political strategy it is directed at – that of bolstering the position of the current supreme leader, Xi Jinping. Or for the preservation of the Party itself. There is a huge difference between these. The first simply means in effect the replacement of one corruptible elite by another. The second means a titanic struggle to change the Chinese communist party culture of power, and to make it enduring and sustainable.     

Legitimation of the Lao People’s Revolutionary Party: Socialism,Chintanakan Mai (New Thinking) and Reform

ABSTRACT

To date, scholars of authoritarianism have paid much attention to the use of democratic institutions in dictatorships to mitigate threats from both internal and external ruling elites, to co-opt and divide opposition and to solve commitment problems among the ruling elite. However, there have been no in-depth studies of legitimacy in an authoritarian regime. In communist states, opposition and dissent are addressed not through co-optation but exclusion. By contrast, communist parties attach great value for their survival to obtaining legitimacy from the masses. This article argues that the Lao People’s Revolutionary Party (LPRP) has endeavoured to acquire legitimacy since the foundation of the regime through a dialogical configuration of economic reform and socialist ideology. Economic reform and ideological legitimisation always go together, interacting with each other: economic reform requires ideological modification, and ideology defines the framework of reform. In Laos, this paradoxical configuration is necessary for the LPRP to maintain legitimacy while concurrently pursuing an ideal of socialism and reality of economic reform. In making this argument, this article reassesses the nature and significance of chintanakan mai (new thinking), which was not a formal reform policy, as often assumed, but a temporary slogan for promoting economic reforms.     

Australia and the Baltic States, 1919–1945

Praised by international organizations, Estonia and Slovenia have long been considered among the most successful post-communist states. Estonia quickly transformed itself into one of the most liberal economies in the world, whereas Slovenia opted for a social justice-oriented market economy. Still, the roots of their success coincide in that consensus played a crucial role. We argue that the public sphere was never as repressed in Estonia and Slovenia during the communist period as it was elsewhere. Distinct national identities continued to be formed and re-formed by intellectuals during the decades of communist rule, who assumed roles as political leaders when the transition started. Consensus based on these national identities legitimized reform policies for the entire decade of the 1990s.     

Truth without reconciliation: An appraisal of the enquete commission on the SED dictatorship in Germany

One of the many difficult decisions confronting countries in transition is whether and how to reckon with the undemocratic past. Among post‐communist cases, transition justice has been pursued most vigorously in Germany. In this case, the accession of the GDR to the FRG in 1990 provided institutional, personnel and financial advantages. One of the tools for reckoning with the past has been the Investigatory Commission on the Working‐Through of the History and Consequences of the SED Dictatorship in Germany. This article examines the aims, structure and outcomes of the commission and considers its contribution to promoting inner unity in the new Germany.     

A Convergence of Political Interests: Isi Leibler,the Communist Party of Australia and Soviet Anti‐Semitism, 1964‐66

During the period from 1964 to 1966, the Communist Party of Australia (CPA) moved from a position of denying the existence of anti‐Semitism in the Soviet Union to voicing open public criticisms of Soviet policies towards its Jewish minority. These criticisms were unprecedented for an official Communist Party, and had considerable influence on the international communist movement. This paper explores the negotiations between Jewish community leader Isi Leibler and the CPA which induced these criticisms. It is argued that Leibler negotiated with the CPA on two fronts: official dialogue with the elected Sydney‐based CPA leadership, and unofficial private discussions — which can arguably be termed secret collusion — with other senior CPA officials in Melbourne. These unofficial discussions seem to have been crucial in shifting the CPA from its traditional position.     

The Relations of the Central Asian Republics of Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan with Israel

Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan became independent upon the breakup of the Soviet Union. Neither of these republics developed strong nationalist identities and it has been the task of their former communist leaders who are still in power to develop such identities while suppressing internal divisions. Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan have had a history of tolerance toward their respective Jewish populations, from which many have immigrated to Israel (and the United States) in recent years to unite with family or for economic reasons. Those republics view Israel Diaspora Jews as a source of investment and technological know-how as well as an avenue for better relations with the United States. Conversely, Israel, while considering Russian sensitivities in its relations with Central Asia, values the region as a market for Israeli products, a source for hydrocarbon resources and a way to counteract Iran as well as to seek a more favourable attitude in disputes with the Arabs.     

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.     

“And Poland is filed away with Samothrace”: Australian Responses to Poland's June 1956 Crisis

The suppression of Poznan June 1956 workers’ rebellion (Poznanski Czerwiec) by Polish authorities prompted immediate Australia‐wide demonstrations and protests by Polish émigrés who were supported by friends and allies in the Catholic Church and the Australian anti‐communist movement. Nation‐wide demonstrations in Australia and subsequent approaches by émigré Poles and supporters required a disinterested Australian government to develop a position on Poznan June events. Pressure on the Australian government for a response, potentially disruptive to its foreign policies, was applied only by elements within the Australian political scene that posed little threat to its future. Poznan June ‘56's effect on Australia takes place within the particular nature of Australian domestic politics where the June events were used to fan the flames of bitter rivalry within the labour movement by a strident anti‐communist faction seeking to restructure the Australian Labor Party in a manner consistent with its ideological predilections. In taking up the anti‐communist cause of the Polish émigrés, the Australian anti‐communist leadership claimed a moral high‐ground, but lacked sufficient commitment to use their considerable parliamentary advantage to pressure the Australian government to adopt a more muscular position towards Poland's government.