Peter R. Moody

Clausewitz and the Fading Dialectic of War

American strategic theorists used to urge that the United States adopt a Clausewitzian point of view on international conflict, that we treat war as something undertaken to serve the larger aims of policy, with the conduct of war subordinated to the larger considerations of policy. Under contemporary conditions, however, this notion of warfare is not appropriate. The experience of warfare since the time of Clausewitz shows that his distinction between war in the abstract and war in the concrete is not any kind of dialectical unity; rather, political war and total war (the concrete manifestation of Clausewitzs war in the abstract) are two distinct phenomena, and our technological and ideological positions discourage political war. War is no longer an instrument of state policy, a means whereby those who rule the state attain their values; instead, it is increasingly the fact or possibility of war which determines the values of the state.

Rational Choice Analysis In Classical Chinese Political Thought: The Han Feizi

Area specialists and others have criticized the rational choice approach to political analysis as culture-bound, reflecting a modern western ethnocentric perspective. A study of the Han Feizi, the main text of the classic Chinese Legalist school, shows that the approach applies in cultural contexts greatly different from the contemporary west, and that it can be used to analyze not simply democratic politics but also the politics of despotism. The Han Feizi also makes clear, however, that rationality cannot be understood in the abstract, but only in the context of what the text calls the shi (roughly, “circumstances”). The more useful forms of political analysis are not restricted to a reconstruction of what is rational, but trace out the characteristics of the shi—the political, historical, cultural, and psychological context conditioning action and defining, at least in part, what constitutes rationality.

Trends in the Study of Chinese Political Culture

A systematic concern with political culture has its heritage in the Enlightenment and 19th-century sociology, if not ancient times, but came to the fore in political science with the post-Second World War behavioural revolution and the emergence of new states whose formal institutions were similar to Western models but whose politics did not follow the Western pattern. The mainstream political science version of political culture was associated with structure-functionalism and modernization theory; a premise was that technological change could help generate modernizing mentalities, while traditional mentalities could inhibit modernizing technical change. Modernization theory went out of fashion in the late 1960s for a variety of ideological, intellectual and empirical reasons, and the political cultural approach fell from favour along with it. More recently, it seems, scholars have returned to an interest in culture, and some even place culture at the heart of emerging political cleavages.

The Romance of the Three Kingdoms and Popular Chinese Political Thought

In recent years, scholars have been increasingly applying “behavioral” approaches to the study of Chinese politics. One interesting strain of this is the work of Lucian Pye and Richard Solomon, who stress the study of Chinese “political culture” analyzed mainly in terms of an “authority crisis.” Solomons explication is the more detailed and elaborate. Part of his thesis is that harmony and peace are “basic and enduring political values in the Confucian tradition,” and therefore “questions of the handling of social conflict constitute a major area of tension in the Chinese political culture.” The Chinese hopes for order and believes that this comes about only through strong authority; without such authority there is luan , “chaos.” But the means required to exercise authority create resentment, and resentment becomes the basis for more luan .

Killing the Chicken to Scare the Monkey: Some Notes on State Terror in the People’s Republic of China

The classic role of the state is to protect those subject to it, from criminals at home, enemies abroad, and as much as possible from threats beyond individual control. The state should of course, protect its subjects from acts of terror. But the state exercises coercive power, and in some circumstances itself engages in terror, both against outsiders and against its own people. Intuitively, state terror would seem to be one feature of illiberal, non-democratic states, of which China is one (although liberal democracies are probably not totally guiltless either).

Book review: Mao’s China and the Sino-Soviet Split: Ideological Dilemma

kleptocracy. At the end of the book, Wedeman makes an innovative comparison between China and the Gilded Age during which the United States experienced widespread economic growth. Research on how the United States moved out of the low equilibrium of corruption in the Progressive Era that followed may shed more light on the Chinese case. Wedeman’s book should be enlightening to scholars engaged in China studies and research on corruption. His elaboration of arguments, comparisons, and case studies is impressive and concise. He also builds his research on extant studies carried out by other prominent scholars on corruption in China, which provide rich material for further research. His arguments are persuasive and backed by a creative use and interpretation of data on corruption. At the same time, the book is highly readable and should prove useful to the general public interested in China and the relationship between corruption and economic growth.

The Kuomintang and the Communist Party of China: Some Recent Relations

The policy of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) toward Taiwan has been shaped by the Chinese Communist Party’s (CPC) rivalry with the Chinese Nationalist Party (Kuomintang; KMT), each party claiming to represent the legitimate government of all of China. The Taiwan issue was seen as an unresolved question from an ongoing civil war. This is reflected not merely in threats to liberate Taiwan but in the conciliatory approaches as well. For example, the one country, two systems policy was frequently couched in the context of forming a “third united front,” this time for the unification of China. This particular approach once corresponded with the KMT’s own definition of the situation, but with Taiwan’s political development it had become anachronistic even before the KMT’s loss of the presidency in 2000. But with the KMT out of power, radicalism fading on the Mainland, and the hostility of the Taiwan government to notions of Chinese nationalism, the two parties may be coming once again to share common ground. The anomalies of the situation provoke speculation: Had the CPC been willing publicly to assert in a more timely fashion the line toward Taiwan that it currently takes, there may have been progress, if not toward unification, at least for a stable and enduring peace between the two sides. And the KMT’s own future, if it has one, may be better served in the context of some sort of Greater China, rather than on Taiwan alone—although this would require considerably more progress toward democratization on the Mainland.

The Evolution of China’s National Interest: Implications for Taiwan

Ever since its founding, the People’s Republic of China (PRC) has claimed sovereignty over its “sacred territory,” Taiwan. American acknowledgment of this claim, however ambiguously expressed,1 has been a condition for normal relations with the PRC. The assertion of sovereignty over Taiwan is treated as a core Chinese national interest; sovereignty over Taiwan is one aspect of the officially defined Chinese national identity.

Book Review: Collective Democracy: Political and Legal Reform in China

Chih-yu Shih, author of numerous thoughtful and provocative works on politics in mainland China and Taiwan, argues that democratic development in China is often measured by western criteria involving commitments to individualism and private property. Such indicators based on normative and empirical western ways of thinking about democracy misunderstand Chinese developments, which Shih proposes are evolving into a “collectivist” version of democracy. The first several chapters discuss whether China may be moving from a rule by law (itself a replacement of the Maoist rule by movement and Party policy) to a genuine rule of law. These fit a little uncomfortably into the general theme of the book: although no doubt all cultures value predictability in government and mechanisms to limit the arbitrary exercise of power, the rule of law is articulated in western terms and Shihs discussion of it keeps pretty close to the western concept. The rule of law is a necessary condition for a stable and authentic democracy, and is also probably more easily attained in China than democracy and more directly beneficial to the general population. The later chapters are more directly on the point, focusing on differences between Chinese and western conceptions. One section discusses how elections to the various levels of people’s congress are becoming more competitive and the congresses themselves more potent, especially in supervision over policy. Further chapters explore the modish topic of village elections. The argument of this work deserves more extensive discussion than is possible here. Shih gives very useful insights, based both on careful documentary analysis and personal interviews, into Chinese politics, especially “micropolitics.” The book is less persuasive as a contribution to democratic theory. Much of what Shih identifies as an emerging Chinese democracy is an extrapolation of the old Maoist “mass line”: from the people, to the people. If we think of democracy not as an abstract, finished “thing” but as a process—democratization—what Shih describes is more democratic than what had come before. But, to revert to the abstract reification, it is not democracy, Chinese or otherwise. “Collective democracy” is presented more as a technique for making communist party control more effective and palatable than as a means of choosing rulers and holding them accountable. Shih quotes with approval a “scholar” who celebrates Party leadership over the village electoral process as a way to prevent “religious forces, surname groups, etc.” from being able to “sneak in” and “mislead” villagers (p. 312). But should religious forces or whatnot emerge victorious in a free and fair election, it may or may not be proper policy for superior authority to keep them from taking power; but it is not democratic.

Book Reviews : Franz Michael, Carl Linden, Jan Pryblya, Jurgen Domes, China and the Crisis of Marxism-Leninism (Boulder, Colorado: Westview Press, 1990), x, 213 pp. Cloth

(80+%) population (p. 3). Hindu nationalism, he maintains, is exemplified by the Jana Sangh as it provided a &dquo;burning vision of an India which ... would be transformed into an organic Hindu nation&dquo; (p. 4). This is precisely the formula which the BJP consciously developed after the 1984 debacle. Unfortunately, despite the 1990 publication date, the author essentially ends his narrative and analysis in 1967 prior to the surge of Hindu fundamentalism and/or nationalism which explodes in the late 1980s. Thus, his major conclusion regarding the Jana Sangh tactical strategy of the 1950s and 1960s seems to be questionable from the perspective of the 1980s and 1990s. Graham, emphasizes the Jana Sangh’s electoral high point of 1967, suggesting that it could have been even more successful if it had been a &dquo;moderate, more open and more democratic&dquo; party (p. 258). In his short, six page conclusion, he argues that as the Congress Party moved left, the Jana Sangh should have occupied the vacant space; a rightist Congress analogue. Instead of militant Hindu nationalism, the party &dquo;ignored the chance of appealing to the moderate sector of Hindu traditionalist opinion&dquo; and attracting groups opposed to the economic policies of the Congress Party (pp. 254-254). This is precisely what the BJP attempted until the election debacle of 1984. Hiizdutva, Hindu nationalism in a more extremist form, replaced moderation as the BJP’s guiding electoral strategy with major dividends in movement, party and electoral terms in 1989-91. Thus, it returned to the ideology often emphasized by the Jana Sangh and formulated as early as 1924 by Savarkar. Hindu nationality, in this formulation, links culture to territory, and India as &dquo;both fatherland and holyland&dquo; in Hindu religious and racial terms (pp. 44-45). Whether a Hindu nationalist strategy is in India’s best interests is another matter. Deteriorating Hindu-Muslim relations, high levels of social and political violence, and increased tension with Pakistan can be cited as part of the costs. But as regards party building and electoral fortunes which are the major foci of this volume, avowedly nationalist Hindu parties have not been able to compete as other than minor competitors when playing by the rules established by the major parties. Nevertheless, this is a carefully researched and documented volume which provides a near definitive study. In separate chapters it examines the doctrinal predecessors of the Jana Sangh, its leadership and organization, its development as a Hindu