Michael Schoenhals

Review of New Perspectives on the Chinese Communist Revolution

This edition of Politics in the New South takes the remarkable story of the transformation of southern politics in the twentieth century up through the virtual triumph of southern Republicanism in the mid-1990s. The book explores not only the fundamental changes that have occurred - in party politics, political leadership, voting rights and black participation - but also the strong continuities in the political culture of the South despite a reversal of party allegiances. There is no richer or more readable introduction to the politics of the South - a region that shows us important aspects of both our past and our future.

Demonizing Discourse in Mao Zedong's China: People vs Non-People

Abstract This article examines the use of demonising rhetoric by the Chinese Communist Party during the first decades of the People’s Republic after 1949. It chronicles the rise, flourishing, and ultimate post‐Mao demise of a political discourse predicated on an ‘essential’ distinction between people and non‐people. With the help of illustrations lifted from public and until recently classified sources, it sheds light on the strategic reasoning behind official as well as popular deployment of dysphemisms like ‘ox‐monster’ and ‘snake‐demon’. Noting the extremes to which demonisation was taken during the Cultural Revolution, when some party leaders were made to self‐criticise for mis‐speaking of class enemies as actual human beings, it hints at the role that the trauma of Mao’s final decade in power played in problematising the people vs. non‐people distinction and finally discarding it altogether as incompatible with the needs of political reform.

“Why Don't We Arm the Left?” Mao's Culpability for the Cultural Revolution's “Great Chaos” of 1967

This article sets out to describe and explain the events that led, in the summer of 1967, to political chaos and near civil war in many parts of China. It links the violence on the ground to statements and policies formulated at the highest levels of the CCP and sets out to show how and why Mao Zedong himself must bear direct personal responsibility for what stands out as one of the darkest chapters in the history of the PRC. Common assumptions about the involvement of senior CCP figures other than Mao, including Lin Biao and Zhou Enlai, are reassessed. Misimpressions that have influenced non-Chinese scholarship on the period are corrected and evasions and obfuscations on the part of establishment historians in China today are pinpointed.

Political Movements, Change and Stability: The Chinese Communist Party in Power

Actually we could have picked a different name, such as the Chinese Peoples Party, the Revolutionary Party, the Liberation Party – any of these would have been OK. But no matter what, our intention remains to resolve the “property” ( chan ) issue. What are we fighting for? What is our goal all about? Getting “property” – not private property, but public property. For everybody to get rich, for everybody to lead a good life. Thats why there has to be a revolution.

Mass Dictatorship and Modernity

Abstract in Undetermined Mass Dictatorship and Modernity is the second volume in the ‘mass dictatorship’ series launched by Hanyang Universitys Research Institute of Comparative History and Culture and published by Palgrave. As a transnational academic research venture, the volume interrogates mass dictatorship in a broad historical context by focusing on the formation of modernity through interactions of the centre and periphery, of the empire and colony, and of democracy and dictatorship on a global scale.

Out-Sourcing the Inquisition: "Mass Dictatorship" in China's Cultural Revolution

Abstract This paper looks at an important yet little known component of what Chinese Communist Party Chairman Mao Zedong designated the ‘dictatorship of the masses’ – the outsourcing by the supreme state leadership of selected surveillance, inquisitorial and other violent tasks to what in a different political system would have been regarded as simply members of the public and/or non‐governmental organizations. Making use of rare archival records, the paper documents the activities in the summer of 1967 of a group of eager and enthusiastic Beijing university students tasked by the highest authority with substantiating a case of alleged treachery by Mao’s nemesis and top‐priority target of his Cultural Revolution, the PRC President Liu Shaoqi. Rather than merely build a single‐strand narrative around this example of mass dictatorship in action and set out to prove the complicity of members of China’s public in state‐sanctioned atrocity, the paper attempts to transcend such simple dichotomizing ‘perpetrators vs victims’ explanatory schemes by choosing a trope that allows for multiple and alternative readings of history

The Central Case Examination Group, 1966–79

One of many things that Joseph V. Stalin and Mao Zedong had in common, according to Chinese official perceptions, was that late in life they “committed almost identical errors.” Both men supposedly “ignored the socialist democratic and legal systems and destroyed the democratic life inside the party....” Western historians may be prepared to go along with the substance of this assessment, allowing for minor qualifications and the use of a different terminology. Closer scrutiny of what took place in the Soviet Union during the Great Purge and in China during the “Great Cultural Revolution,” however, does point to some interesting differences. These differences, as Stuart R. Schram has suggested, lay not so much in the amount of extreme violence the leaders of the two Communist countries sanctioned, but in their preferences for different “modes” of violence.

Nebulous Nexus : Modernity and Perlustration in Maoist China

In the minds of a likely majority of non-native speakers of the English language(s), I believe the word ‘nexus’ carried until fairly recently no particular significance. When Anton Kaes wrote in an essay on modernity in 1993 that the film M ‘narrativises the nexus between warlike mobilisation, surveillance, and social control’, his use of it is unlikely to have triggered any particular shared associations, one way or the other, with his readers in Sweden, Korea, or Germany.1 Alas, what a difference a few years can make! After Colin Powell in his speech to the United Nations Security Council on 6 February 2003 had lectured the world on what he insisted on calling a lethal combination of a ‘nexus of Iraq and terror’ and a ‘nexus of poisons and terror’, a whole cluster of new associations came to surround the word here, there, and everywhere.2 Rereading Kaes today (or discovering his claim quoted verbatim and in full in a footnote in Peter Holquist’s 1997 seminal article ‘Bolshevik Surveillance in Its Pan-European Context’),3 it is impossible to break completely the hold since laid upon the imagination by the language of the ‘terror nexus’, ‘deadly nexus’, ‘nexus of rogue states’, ‘nexus of global politics’, ‘fascist-Islamist nexus’, ‘empire-terrorism-human rights nexus’, ‘nexus of religion and nationalism’, and so on and so forth.

Recruiting Agents in Industry and Trade—Lifting the Veil on Early People's Republic of China Operational Work

This paper concerns the operational activities of the public security organs of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) during the immediate post-1949 period of regime consolidation. The main part of the paper is a case-study of a 1950 pilot scheme to recruit agents in critical sectors of industry and trade in the city of Yingkou in Northeast China, a scheme in due course subsumed under a nationwide programme with a similar focus. In the years to follow, the operational recruitment of agents would become one of the PRC’s arguably most important operational responses to the twin Cold War threats of economic espionage and—above all—sabotage. The paper’s findings suggest, with respect to operational activities, that in order to represent and explain more fully, in Leopold von Ranke’s words, ‘how things really were’, social and political historians may well want to shift their focus away from successive highly public Maoist ‘mass movements’ and look instead at what transpired out of the public eye in the interregnum of ordinary times that such movements punctuated. If and when they do, they will discover significant, yet hitherto largely unexplored, similarities between the work of the early PRC public security organs and their counterparts in the Soviet Union and other (former) socialist states. (Less)

Sex in Big-Character Posters from China’s Cultural Revolution: Gendering the Class Enemy

The medium of the ‘big-character poster’, as described by the Beijing publishers of Mao Zedong’s Works in the epigraph above, may be thought of as a 1960s Chinese equivalent of the political blogosphere of the twenty-first century. Permitting a curious blend of superficial freedom and openness to coexist happily with stifling political correctness, it gave impetus to a campaign that brought down many a corrupt politician as well as traumatised and victimised no small number of innocent ‘masses’. One way in which it did this was by not shying away from sex and gender, topics of considerable sensitivity hitherto taboo in Chinese Communist Party (CCP) political discourse. In this chapter, I attempt to illustrate this particular aspect of mass dictatorship in China by commenting on some recurring themes of gender and the male ‘class enemy’ and of sexuality and the revolutionary (or counter-revolutionary) woman.