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  1. Home
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  3. The Cambridge History of China
  • Cited by 22
  • Volume 15: The People's Republic, Part 2: Revolutions within the Chinese Revolution, 1966–1982
  • Edited by Roderick MacFarquhar, Harvard University, Massachusetts, John K. Fairbank, Harvard University, Massachusetts
Publisher:
Cambridge University Press
Online publication date:
March 2008
Print publication year:
1991
Online ISBN:
9781139054829
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1017/CHOL9780521243377
Subjects:
History after 1945 (General) , East Asian History, History
Series:
The Cambridge History of China
Collection:
Cambridge Histories - Asian History
Information

Book description

Volume 15 of The Cambridge History of China is the second of two volumes dealing with the People's Republic of China since its birth in 1949. The harbingers of the Cultural Revolution were analyzed in Volume 14 and Volume 15 traces a course of events still only partially understood by most Chinese. It begins by analysing the development of Mao's thought since the Communist seizure of power, and, in doing so, attempts to understand why he launched the movement. The contributors grapple with the conflict of evidence between what was said favourably about the Cultural Revolution at the time and the often diametrically opposed retrospective accounts. Volume 15, together with Volume 14, provides the most comprehensive and clearest account of how revolutionary China has developed in response to the upheavals initiated by Mao and Teng Hsiao-p'ing.

Reviews

"No end of questions could be raised about neglected topics, balance of coverage, the quality of writing in several chapters, and much more, but this volume maintains a commendably high standard, especially when one considers the difficulties of writing the recent history of so complex and opaque a society. The entire series stands as a tribute to its major architect, and one of the two general editors, the late John K. Fairbank." The Historian

"Specialists will find much to learn from these essays, which include the latest Western and Japanese scholarship, and undergraduates and graduates will mine them for their term papers. Even in the super-charged world of Chinese research the volume should have a long life." Jonathan Mirsky, New York Review of Books

"...the last two volumes of the Cambridge History of China still constitute the most substantial textbook on the history of communist China." René Goldman, Canadian Journal of History

"...both editors and authors are surely to be congratulated for their achievement. The book is a fitting capstone to a magnificent compilation of knowledge and wisdom concerning modern China, likely to be invaluable to students and scholars for many years to come." Lowell Dittmer, American Historical Review

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Contents

Contents
  • 1 - Mao Tse-tung's thought from 1949 to 1976
    pp 1-104
  • View abstract

    Summary

    Like Lenin, Mao Tse-tung, on coming to power, continued to develop his ideas in a context different from that within which he had operated while in opposition. One important constant in the development of Mao Tse-tung's thought was his concern to adapt Marxism, or Marxism-Leninism, to the economic and social reality of a backward agrarian country, and to the heritage of the Chinese past, which for Mao was no less real. This chapter first quotes a passage about Stalin's propensity to exterminate his critics. Following on from this, Mao developed, under the heading of eliminating counterrevolutionaries, a comparison between China and the Soviet Union as regarded the use and abuse of revolutionary violence. Mao drastically changed his position regarding the nature of the contradictions in Chinese society during the summer of 1957. The consequences of this shift for economic policy have already been explored, and some of its implications in the philosophic domain have also been evoked.
  • 2 - The Chinese state in crisis
    pp 105-217
  • View abstract

    Summary

    This chapter is a history of the first three and a half years of the Cultural Revolution, from its initial stirrings in late 1965 to the convocation of the Ninth National Congress of the Chinese Communist Party in April 1969. These three and a half years encompass several shorter periods. First, there was the growing confrontation between Mao Tse-tung and the Party establishment from the fall of 1965 to the summer of the following year. The second period, from the Eleventh Plenum through the end of 1966, was one in which Mao's assault on the Party establishment spread across the country, with the Red Guards now its major instrument. The Red Guard movement drew on many of the socioeconomic cleavages and grievances, particularly the tension between class background and academic performance as criteria for success in China's educational system. During the third period, from January 1967 until mid-1968, Mao ordered that political power be seized from the discredited Party establishment.
  • 3 - China confronts the Soviet Union: warfare and diplomacy on China's Inner Asian frontiers
    pp 218-302
  • View abstract

    Summary

    This chapter suggests that even with a near absence of foreign relations, in reality China was responding to the combined influence of well-understood domestic and international pressures. Chinese foreign policy during the Cultural Revolution showed what the costs were when the Party elected to run the risk of violating several of the cardinal principles of its own policy and of international systemic behavior. The chapter specifies the foreign policy origins of the Cultural Revolution under three aspects: the broadening, particularly in the mind of Mao Tse-tung, of the issue of ideological revisionism from Sino-Soviet relations to the Chinese domestic political and socioeconomic arena; the alleged delay of the Cultural Revolution necessitated by the American military intervention in Vietnam and the debate over the appropriate Chinese response; and the influence of these and other foreign policy issues on interpersonal relations among top Party leaders. All are textbook examples of the complex intermingling of foreign and domestic factors.
  • 4 - The succession to Mao and the end of Maoism
    pp 303-401
  • View abstract

    Summary

    The Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution was an attempt to shape the future of China. The issues of party building and the reconstruction of state institutions basically were about power. There also seems to have been one issue of policy dividing Mao Tse-tung and Lin Piao, although it is given less attention in Chinese sources: the opening to America. The beneficiaries of the Cultural Revolution were those officials who had risen as a result of the purge of their seniors, as well as through their own ability to manipulate the turbulent politics of the late 1960s and early 1970s. In the immediate aftermath of the fall of Lin Piao, these were principally military figures: Hsu Shih-yu, Ch'en Hsi-lien, Li Te-sheng, and Wang Tung-hsing; but they also included a civilian cadre, Chi Teng-k'uei, who was involved in the post-Lin cleanup and would achieve increasing prominence.
  • 5 - The opening to America
    pp 402-472
  • View abstract

    Summary

    Among the legacies of the era of Mao Tse-tung, the opening to the United States ranks as one of the most important. More than any other foreign policy initiative in Mao's twenty-seven years in power, the Sino-American accommodation reflected the Chairman's determination to establish China's legitimacy among the world's major powers. This chapter first explains the character of foreign policy decision making during the period of 1970s and 1980s, and how it influenced the opportunities for policy change. The opening to America reflected longer-term strategic developments that directly affected Peking's security calculations. Then, it explores some of the connections between Lin Piao's declining fortunes at home and the success of Mao and Chou in building a relationship with the United States. The chapter also reviews the events that prompted China's strategic reassessment in the aftermath of the Cultural Revolution.
  • 6 - China's economic policy and performance
    pp 473-539
  • View abstract

    Summary

    Few really new economic ideas or policies were put forward during the Cultural Revolution decade, 1966-76. China's economic strategy emphasizing machinery and steel was virtually a carbon copy of Stalin's development strategy for Russia in the 1930s. Before turning to China's development strategy in the Cultural Revolution period, one must first deal with the argument that China had no coherent strategy in the period, because the country was in continual chaos. Politics, of course, was frequently chaotic, but the question here is whether politics regularly spilled over into the economy, causing work stoppages and worse. China's basic industrial development strategy was set in the 1st Five-Year Plan, of 1953-57. In terms of sectoral growth strategies, China had made a significant move in the direction of the strategy that had proved so successful among its East Asian neighbors.
  • 7 - Education
    pp 540-593
  • View abstract

    Summary

    Education emerged as both a means and an end during the Cultural Revolution decade. School-system reform was one of the movement's ultimate aims. Because in retrospect the dual nature of education's role was often confused, this chapter distinguishes between the mobilization phase, which launched the movement, and the consolidation phase, aimed at institutionalizing the "revolution in education" thereafter. Initially, as indicated, the Party organization had tried to concentrate the movement on intellectual matters and educational reform. As the movement escalated out of the Party's control, Mao's educational principles provided the basis for the criticism of teachers and of the struggle objects. The question of actually transforming the education system was then thrust into the background as the Red Guards moved out into society to bring down the power holders everywhere. Educational reform itself belonged to the consolidation phase of the movement and thus had to await the dampening of factional conflict.
  • 8 - Creativity and politics
    pp 594-616
  • View abstract

    Summary

    The Cultural Revolution confirmed the close relation between artistic creation and political life, but also showed that variations in the relation were possible. Severe ideological attacks on particular writers and the complete reorganization of the cultural bureaucracy almost suffocated literary life. This chapter describes the political interference in literary life and the changes in the literary system. For political and ideological reasons, including those provided by the Shanghai Forum, the Cultural Revolution was hostile to literary creation. The ideological criticism of Wu Han and Teng T'o appeared to be a political instrument to eliminate the political enemies of Mao Tse-tung and Lin Piao. Because of internal dissent and external pressures, the Cultural Revolution Group never had the authority to give effective guidance to literary and artistic production and, except in the case of the promotion of modern Peking Opera on revolutionary themes, its interference in artistic life led nowhere.
  • 9 - The countryside under communism
    pp 617-681
  • View abstract

    Summary

    The ironies occasioned by a coercive family planning program being carried out alongside a liberalization in the rural economy illustrate how difficult it is to assess how the peasantry may have evaluated the complex historical changes. Traditionally, peasants' ideas and feelings about the meaning of life and the fundamental dictates of morality had been textured, explained, and justified through an elaborate religious system. Patterns of work, community, and cultural life differed sharply between city and countryside. Peasants' evaluations of the changes in their modes of social life may have entailed less of a tension between positive and negative judgments than their evaluations of political and economic life, because the patterns of their social life did not change as drastically as their political economy. The Communists' attempts at socialist transformation were most successful precisely when they built their new organizations for collective agriculture closely around the traditional social ecology of the countryside.
  • 10 - Urban life in the People's Republic
    pp 682-742
  • View abstract

    Summary

    The Chinese Communists attempted to transform urban institutions and social life in fundamental ways. This chapter discusses general trends and impressions about Chinese urban life, with a focus on the larger cities and occasional efforts to note the diversity of reactions of urban groups. The tempo of life in the early years varied. The years through 1952 were ones of novelty and disruption, with campaigns to remake society disturbing orderly work and study routines. In 1957 and then in the ensuing Great Leap Forward the tempo began to change back toward campaign mobilizations once again, and China was plunged into first a political and then an economic crisis. This chapter comments on Cultural Revolution's impact on people's lives and feelings. The Cultural Revolution produced a drastic disruption of urban social order. The legacy of crime and juvenile delinquency spawned by the Cultural Revolution carried over into the post-Mao period, producing continued popular anxieties.
  • 11 - Literature under communism
    pp 743-812
  • View abstract

    Summary

    During China's past three decades, literature under communism has stocked the cultural desert of the Chinese countryside with nourishment of a kind. It has provided heroes, role models, lessons in practical socialism. A number of established poets who had spent the war and postwar years in the Kuomintang-controlled areas of China made attempts, following the establishment of the People's Republic, to bring their work into accord with the new spirit of the age. By an irony of history, precisely the years during which literary creation was most rigidly fettered on the mainland were a time of the most vigorous new activity in Taiwan. The death of Mao and the overthrow of the Gang of Four opened the floodgates to literary creation in all genres. One of the themes of post-Mao writing was the private values of personal life. The proper place of love in socialist life, the damage done by love's denial.
  • 12 - Taiwan under Nationalist rule, 1949–1982
    pp 813-874
  • View abstract

    Summary

    The changes in material conditions and attitudes of the people of Taiwan during the fifty years of Japanese rule affected in important ways the subsequent development of Taiwan under the Nationalists. During the late 1940s and early 1950s the Nationalist government adopted a number of economic, political, and social measures that moderated the strains between mainlanders and Taiwanese. Land reform made a vital contribution to Taiwan's notable economic development, but it was adopted initially as much for political as for economic reasons. During the 1970s Taiwan's ability to survive in a hostile environment was tested more severely than at any time since the late 1940s. It suffered heavy blows to its international position and to its economy. Its ability to surmount these challenges and continue to advance and prosper testified to the soundness of the political and economic systems established in previous decades by Taiwan's governing elite.
  • Bibliographical essays
    pp 889-938
  • View abstract

    Summary

    This bibliography contains a list of reference materials and works related to the history of China. China's central authorities attempted to maintain order during the Cultural Revolution by issuing a series of central directives and by circulating major speeches by national leaders. The available historical materials shed little light on deliberations over foreign policy or on the relationship between domestic and international politics, especially in periods of intense leadership conflict. Research and publications dealing with China's economic reforms of the 1980s is ongoing just as the reforms themselves are ongoing. Work on economic policy and performance during the Cultural Revolution period is also in its infancy. Sources about intellectual life during the Cultural Revolution can be divided into the following categories: Chinese sources published in China, Chinese sources published outside China, sources in English published in China, and sources in English and other languages published outside China.

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