Julia C. Strauss

The Past in the Present: Historical and Rhetorical Lineages in China’s Relations with Africa

Chinas official rhetoric on its relations with Africa is important; it frames, legitimates and renders comprehensible its foreign policy in this ever-important area of the world. This article explores the following puzzle: why Chinas rhetoric on its involvement with Africa has retained substantial continuities with the Maoist past, when virtually every other aspect of Maoism has been officially repudiated. Despite the burgeoning layers of complexity in Chinas increasing involvement in Africa, a set of surprisingly long-lived principles of non-interference, mutuality, friendship, non-conditional aid and analogous suffering at the hands of imperialism from the early 1960s to the present continue to be propagated. Newer notions of complementarity and international division of labour are beginning to come in, but the older rhetoric still dominates official discourse, at least in part because it continues to appeal to domestic Chinese audiences.

Paternalist Terror: The Campaign to Suppress Counterrevolutionaries and Regime Consolidation in the PeopleÕs Republic of China, 1950-1953

It has long been recognized that great social-political revolutions have tended to be marked by three common experiences: (1) the ironic completion of the state building project of the ancient regime through strengthening of the state and its bureaucracy; (2) external warfare; and (3) the deployment of revolutionary terror, often initially restricted to obvious enemies of the new order, then expanding to larger groups in society and eventually consuming much of the revolutionary elite itself. Through investigation into the Campaign to Suppress Counterrevolutionaries (1950-1953), this essay concentrates on the linkages between these three elements, focusing particularly on the complex interaction between state building, state sponsored terror, and state paternalism in the early consolidation of the PeopleOs Republic of China.

The Evolution of Republican Government

The topic of government and administration in the Republican period (1911–9) has attracted periodic bursts of scholarly attention in the first three decades of the post–1950 period. Some of these works focused on the weakness of political institutions in the early Republic,1 several were sympathetic to the state–building efforts of the Kuomintang (KMT),2 and the remainder were overtly or covertly negative in their assessment of Republican, particularly KMT, government.3 Whether sympathetic to Republican–era government or not, this scholarship was largely informed by a constellation of three factors: the deep Cold War era divisions between left and right in the United States as to how the spread of Communism in Asia should be accounted for and dealt with, the lack of research access in China itself, and, perhaps most important, what might be called the prismatic event of 1949, when the Republican government was militarily defeated in the civil war, driven into exile on a small island, and replaced with a self–consciously revolutionary government which vigorously attempted to recreate and transform state and society. It is little wonder that this abrupt terminus of the Republican period slanted many of the questions implicitly posed in post–1949 scholarship towards explaining the Republics demise on mainland China. At best, the efforts and strategies of the Kuomintang were considered to have long–term promise until seriously undercut by the Japanese invasion in July 1937; at worst, the entire Republican period was relegated to the status of a transitional period that gave way before the inevitable primacy of bottom–up revolution.

Morality, Coercion and State Building by Campaign in the Early PRC: Regime Consolidation and After, 1949–1956

The early to mid-1950s are conventionally viewed as a time when China broke sharply with the past and experienced a “golden age” of successful policy implementation and widespread support from the population. This article shows that the period should be seen as neither “golden age” nor precursor for disaster. Rather it should be seen as a period when the Chinese Communist Partys key mechanisms of state reintegration and instruction of the population – the political campaign and “stirring up” via public accusation sessions – were widely disseminated throughout China, with variable results. The campaigns for land reform and the suppression of counter-revolutionaries show that levels of coercion and violence were extremely high in the early 1950s, and the campaign to clean out revolutionaries in 1955 and after suggests some of the limits of mobilizational campaigns.

Introduction: China, Africa and Internationalization

The changes in both the scale and the visibility of Chinas dealings in Africa in the last decade have been astonishing. Trade, particularly in imports of natural resources to China and exports of Chinese merchandise to Africa, has grown exponentially since 2001. Lucrative deals have been signed with a range of African governments. A Chinese merchant presence in African cities and town is increasingly visible. And China now has a high diplomatic profile in Africa, not least as a guarantor and protector to important individual states such as Sudan. These quickly moving developments have occasioned a first wave of comment, excitement and reflection. Yet much of what has been published to date has been broad brush overview, policy analysis or opinion piece.1 Academic work based on primary research has been relatively scarce.

Framing and Claiming: Contemporary Globalization and “Going Out” in China's Rhetoric towards Latin America

Chinas increasing, and increasingly visible, engagement in Latin America has led to a variety of analyses, many based on either international relations notions of realism or international political economy precepts of trade. Rather than seeing Chinas rhetoric on its relations with Latin America as fluff that conceals a harder reality, this article takes rhetoric seriously as a device of “framing and claiming”: a way in which political elites in China interpret the fast-changing developing world and Chinas place in it. The article explores how political elites have understood the sources of Chinas own domestic development and then projected those notions on to other parts of the developing world, through earlier “fractal” logics of development whereby each state repeats one model of development in its own way and a currently dominant “division of labour” logic that posits one integrated model of development whereby complementarity and comparative advantage hold sway. The article concludes with a comparison of Chinas relations with Peru and Brazil, suggesting that Chinas bilateral relations with Brazil indicate a newer, emerging rhetoric of global partnership based on equality.

Creating 'Virtuous and Talented' Officials for the Twentieth Century: Discourse and Practice in Xinzheng China

‘It must be considered that there is nothing more difficult to carry out, nor more doubtful of success, nor more dangerous to handle, than to initiate a new order of things.’ Machiavelli, The Prince Central Xinzheng Reform and the Twentieth-Century Chinese State The effort of the Qing dynasty to transform itself and forge a new set of relationships with society in its last decade has been one of the less explored areas in the scholarship on modern China. Although this set of radical initiatives, collectively known as the xinzheng (‘New Policy’) reforms attracted a good deal of commentary from its contemporaries, until recently it has been relatively understudied. There are two reasons for this neglect. First, conventional periodization has divided historical turf between Qing historians (for the Qing dynasty 1644–1911), Republican historians (for the period between 1911 and 1949 ) and political scientists (who cover 1949 to the present). Second, since the dramatic narrative for the first three-quarters of the twentieth century has been largely understood as a process of ever more radical forms of revolutionary change, scholars have understandably been more taken with exploring the antecedents of revolution and/or locally based studies of elite transformation than they have been with exploring a case of seemingly bona fide failure.The central government-initiated xinzheng reform period (1902–1911) has thus borne the full brunt of a Whiggish interpretation of history; too late to command the attention of most Qing historians, too early for the majority of Republican historians, at best a prologue for the real revolution to come, and at worst an abortive failure.

Gender, Agency and Social Change

The pace and extent of changes in China’s economy, society, politics and cultural life in the past 20 years have fostered a spectacular expansion of scholarly interest in gender and gender difference in modern and contemporary China.1 Across the disciplines of the social sciences and humanities, students now have easy access to research publications on gender differences in practices and expectations of marriage, parenting and family life, education, labour and employment, migration and politics. Indeed, it is through the critical study of gender in social and cultural organization and practice that a good deal of conventional wisdom about the Chinese state, society and economy is coming under review. For example, in this volume, both Shannon May and Ellen Judd suggest that the familiar phenomenon of China’s “empty villages,” devoid of able-bodied young men and women, is empirically contentious. This volume is the result of a fortuitous convergence between an editorial suggestion to The China Quarterly to run a special issue on gender and an international conference on gender studies in Shanghai in 2009, jointly sponsored by Michigan and Fudan 复旦Universities. Initially structured around papers presented at the conference, it also brings together work from other scholars to reveal some of the ways in which gender operates across diverse fields of inquiry as one of the main axes of social organization and cultural practice. In its themes and analytical interpretations, it offers examples of some of the new directions recent scholarship on gender in China has taken in recent years. This is no longer principally inspired by the purpose of making women visible or filling in the gaps of a history that is still far from complete, though these aims continue to inflect

Introduction: In Search of PRC History

In a perhaps apocryphal exchange in 1972, when, Henry Kissinger asked Zhou Enlai what he thought the outcome of the French revolution had been, Zhou responded that it was too early to say. This remark has taken on a life of its own precisely because it rings so true. The big, messy, contested phenomena that are revolutions inspire passionate reactions – both for and against – and each generation has a strong tendency to filter its perception of a given revolution through the political, social and epistemological concerns of its own time. This offers both paradox and opportunity. At present, the great politicalsocial revolutions are largely out of favour. Their animating grand ideologies, teleological imperatives, frank human rights abuses and consequent historical narratives have become historically and epistemologically at least suspect if not downright discredited in a post-Cold War world of globalization and market triumphalism. However, now is an enormously vibrant time for the study of the history of the Peoples Republic of China (PRC) in its phase of active revolution between 1949 and 1976. In addition to the collection here, there are two other edited volumes on PRC history that have either recently been published or are due to be published in the near future.

The First Chinese Democracy: Political Life in the Republic of China on Taiwan . By Linda Chao and Ramon H. Myers. Baltimore, Md.: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998. xiv, 372 pp.

The political transformation of Taiwan from authoritarian regime based on martial law into a democracy based on a constitution created in mainland China and revised to suit Taiwans unique circumstances is one of the great political sagas of the 20th century. Defeated on the China mainland, the Kuomintang underwent reform and established a new polity on Taiwan that allowed for four patterns of political development. First, since 1950 the Kuomintang has engaged in a top-down, guided democratic process and gradually tolerated an opposition-driven, bottom-up democratization process. Second, a significant number of politicians in the Kuomintang and opposition internalized ideological-cultural adjustments that meshed with the practice of democracy. Third, local party elections, which were then institutionalized by the mid 1990s. Finally increased commitment to democracy and pressure from the opposition made it possible for a majority of politicians to restrain extremists and amend the constitution in order to practice democracy. These four patterns of political change reflect a complex political process of behavioural and institutional change in which the key requisites for democracy - a responsible opposition, a political culture compatible with democracy, competing political parties participating in free elections, and respect for a constitution - now exist in Taiwan. As long as an extreme minority who endorse Taiwan nationalism remains committed to playing by the rules of democracy, and as long as the Peoples Republic of China does not try to destroy Taiwans democracy, there is a high probability that the first Chinese democracy can survive.