Organizer: Patricia Stranahan, Committee on Scholarly Communication with China
Chair: Michael Schoenhals, Stockholm University
Discussant: Bruce Dickson, George Washington University
We are currently enjoying a period of lively scholarly interest in the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). As new materials appear and research opportunities open up, scholars are shedding fresh light on diverse aspects of what is now generally regarded as the various revolutions that comprise the Chinese Revolution. Both western and Chinese scholars are abandoning what Elizabeth Perry terms the "orthodox mold" of historical analysis (i.e., history recounted within the context of the rural revolutions or the Central Committee) to offer important insights on the Party that go beyond Maoism, rural revolution, class struggle and the military quest for political power. These researchers have moved away from the Maoist juggernaut to consider the CCP as, in the words of Joseph Esherick, "a social construct of considerable internal complexity." What they are finding is a constantly evolving organization: a Party which changed as circumstances required. This panel builds upon that idea by examining what went into creating the organization we now know as the CCP and how that organization changed given the historical situation.
While previous AAS panels have explored various aspects of the rural revolutions, inner-Party intrigue and policy conflict, none to date have addressed the changing concept of the Party itself. This panel brings together scholars from four continents to examine how the organization responded to, in Kenneth Jowitt's terms, "political uncertainties" by shaping its policies and practices to correspond to the "sociocultural milieu." All three papers utilize recently opened archival material and inner-Party documents to present different, yet interrelated, pictures of the evolution of the CCP. First, Hans van de Ven explores the CCP as a military unit arguing that the revolutionary war was neither the outcome of underlying social and economic developments nor simply a civil war. Rather, he contends, it was the product of general conceptualizations of violence and change that developed in the late 19th century as well as the practices that typify a modern military. Secondly, Patricia Stranahan examines the CCP as an organization maintaining that the Party was not a structural monolith but, instead, a diverse and complex medley of local units who often survived by restructuring their own organizations and the goals of those structures to correspond to the demands of the local environment. Finally, Timothy Cheek focuses on the articulation of "dang" in the Yan'an Rectification Movement arguing that the CCP ideologues around Mao successfully presented the Party as the legitimate occupant of the public ("gong") sphere but that within that successful conception of the Party three strains of thought and activity resided in uneasy combination.
The Militarization of the CCP in the Early 1930s
Han van de Ven, Cambridge University
In What is to be done? Lenin pictured the Communist Party as an organization that copied many features of the modern military. The Leninist party did not, of course, possess any weapons but, like an army, discipline and the maintenance of a chain of command were sacrosanct. The Politburo functioned as a general staff which developed strategy by surveying the strengths and weaknesses of the enemy and itself and assessing the features of the historical situation. In like manner, Party cadres and regular members operated in a manner that resembled the officers and regular soldiers of the army while values and attitudes associated with the army and warfare shaped Party culture. To the Communists, revolution was a cathartic act of violence in which its forces overcame bourgeois or feudal opponents that were blocking the realization of a modern, progressive, and communitarian socialist order.
This paper discusses the background of communist organizations and communist revolution as they developed out of the ideas about struggle and the effectiveness of military-like organizations which emerged in the late 19th century and gained popularity in the early part of this century. It also explores the CCP's creation of a revolutionary mass army in the Jiangxi Soviet. As the CCP became a militarized organization, discipline, hierarchy, and functional specification became more important. Military expertise became valued as a means to rise through the Party ranks while propaganda increasingly emphasized guerrilla attitudes. The militarization of the CCP contributed to making the CCP into an effective organization that was capable of conquering China. After 1949 the Party's military background remained important, first in the 1950s when the CCP militarized much of society and the economy and, of course, during the Cultural Revolution when the creation of a revolutionary culture was thought of in highly militaristic terms.
Bending in the Wind: Adapting the Organization in Shanghai, 1927-1941
Patricia Stranahan, Committee on Scholarly Communication with China
Through an analysis of the Shanghai Party organization from the aftermath of the April 12, 1927 Coup to the outbreak of the Pacific War, this paper examines how one local Party unit overcame extraordinary odds and survived because it redefined its organization to comply with local conditions. By championing issues that delineated people's lives and manipulating those concerns in a way that conformed to the Party's short- and long-term goals, members of the Shanghai Party were able to remain true to the Party's revolutionary interests while, at the same time, becoming a key player in the city's political life.
The Shanghai Party is a particularly good example of the panel's theme of "constantly evolving organization." From an unwieldy and rigid bureaucracy oblivious to the needs of the Party's rank and file under Qu Qiubai, the Party organization was transformed into an efficient Leninist unit capable of local-level initiative under the Internationalists. That recreation gave the city's Party unit the flexibility and independence to survive not only the White Terror of the early 1930s but also the break with the Central Committee after it evacuated to the Jiangxi Soviet. Alone and facing extinction, the Shanghai Party utilized its new organizational flexibility to break away from the Stalinist-Comintern bureaucratic model and go through its own process of sinification. Through a multi-class united front, the city's Party unit joined with patriotic citizens from all social strata in the anti-Japanese fervor that pervaded the city from the mid-1930s on. The prudent change from an organization based on revolutionary radicalism to one founded on patriotic moderation meant the difference between life and death for the local Party. That the local Party organization in Shanghai made the revolution uniquely its own just as Mao put his stamp on the rural revolutions, once again, underlines the inherent differences in the Chinese Revolution as a whole.
The Rectified Party as a "Charismatic Impersonal Institution" in Yan'an
Timothy Cheek, Colorado College
For all the excellent studies on the development and operation of the CCP, one simple question has been relatively neglected: what, in fact, is "dang"? We know it is the Chinese term for "party" as in "political party" and that in context it can stand for the CCP or KMT, the two Leninist-style parties that dominate modern Chinese history. With the profound questioning of the role and purpose of the CCP in China today, it would seem worthwhile to ask how the "dang" became a major actor in Chinese politics; how did it become a category of the polity; and how it has been conceived by its various proponents at various important points in China's revolution.
This paper seeks to address these questions by focusing on the reorganization and ideological justifications of the rectified CCP in Yan'an during the Rectification Campaign (1941-1945). It will identify key concepts presented in three important policy documents analyzing the Party and its workability, authored by designated Party representatives at three levels of authority and directed at three levels of audience. It will then relate these concepts to the social and political history of the "dang" in Yan'an. All three documents purport to describe the same thing: progress in Party building during the 1942-1943 phases of Rectification. Yet, they reflect powerfully different language, logic, and goals. In particular, they promote visions of mobilization, discipline, and inquisition that are not fully compatible, but which "worked" at the time.
This detailed comparison of three versions of Rectification from the 1940s tests Kenneth Jowitt's conception of the Leninist Party as a "charismatic impersonal institution" which combines the oil of charismatic authority with the water of institutional authority. A brief review of the development of the concept "dang" itself and the range of similar political groupings in the early 20th century helps clarify the role of the Yan'an "dang" as the occupant of both the public ("gong") and the state ("guan") spheres of the Chinese polity. It will thus be argued that the rectified "dang" incorporated "civil society" within its organization and controlled a "directed public sphere" through its propaganda system.