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The Party in Chinese Communist Ideology

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  17 February 2009

Extract

As the title indicates, this article deals with the image of the Party in Chinese Communist ideology. Obviously the conception of the Party and its role put forward in theoretical writings cannot be isolated from the reality of the Party, if only because ideology is shaped by practice and serves as a rationalization of practice. But the emphasis here will be on the analysis of statements about the Party, and their evolution over the past three decades.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © The China Quarterly 1969

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References

1 Schram, S., The Political Thought of Mao Tse-tung (revised edition, Penguin Books, 1969), p. 374. The words in italics have been eliminated in the present official edition of Mao's writings.Google Scholar

2 Jen-min jih-pao, 20 December 1949. Emphasis supplied. For a full translation, see Schram, , The Political Thought of Mao Tse-tung, Text X G, pp. 425–428.Google Scholar

3 When I mentioned this work in the first edition of The Political Thought of Mao Tse-tung (New York: Praeger, 1963, pp. 49–50 and note 70, p. 88), I had not yet identified it as part of How to be a Good Communist. Franz Schurmann, who originally called this document to my attention, and who has discussed it in his book Ideology and Organization in Communist China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1966, pp. 54–55) was also unaware of this. The first edition of Part III known to me was published by the Hsin-Hua shu-tien (Chi-chung chih-tien) as a companion volume to the edition of Parts I and II issued by the same publisher in November 1939. This edition is undated, but the lectures must have been delivered during the latter part of 1941. They cannot have been given before June of that year, since they mention the German-Soviet war as having already begun. A hostile reference to them by Yao Wen-yüan (note 27 to “Comments on T'ao Chu's Two Books,” Peking Review, No. 38, 1967, p. 17), which is probably accurate in this respect, gives the date as 1941. I therefore conclude that they were delivered during the second half of that year. I am citing here from the text of the three parts which appears in Liu, Shao-ch'i, Lun Tang (Dairen: Ta-chung shu-tien, 1947), pp. 29–190. Incidentally, this volume is not, and does not even contain, Liu's report on the Party Constitution delivered at the Seventh Congress, which usually goes under the same title of On the Party.Google Scholar

4 In Mao's known writings explicit reference to contradictions between the leaders and the led occurs only in 1957, in the speech on the correct handling of contradictions among the people. For a lengthier discussion of Liu Shao-ch'i's views on this theme in 1941, see Schram, The Political Thought of Mao Tse-tung (revised edition), pp. 94–95.

5 Liu Shao-ch'i, op. cit. p. 135 (emphasis added).

6 Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-tung (Peking: Foreign Languages Press, 1966), p. 255.

7 Liu Shao-ch'i, op. cit. pp. 138–139. Liu also declares that, although the influence of a leader of the Party is great, and that of a simple member very small, it is the Party which decides what the post of each shall be, and promotes people from the ranks if they are capable of playing an important role. Ibid. pp. 141–142.

8 Ibid. pp. 154–155.

9 Ibid. p. 136.

10 Ibid. pp. 147–148.

11 Ibid. pp. 174–176.

12 In a letter dated simply 13 July, and apparently written in 1941, to Comrade Sung Liang, Liu Shao-ch'i deplored the fact that, although the Chinese Communist Party was extremely strong in its organizational work, it was exceedingly weak on the theoretical side. In particular, he complained that little headway had been made in the Sinification of Marxism. (Liu, Shao-ch'i, Lun Tang, pp. 339344.)Google Scholar Mao, too, at about the same time, noted the lack of progress in this domain, despite his appeal of 1938 (see his speech of 5 May 1941, “The Reconstruction of Our Studies,” in Boyd Compton (ed.), Mao's China. Party Reform Documents, 1942–44, Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1952, pp. 59–68). But he did not, like Liu Shao-ch'i, attribute this unhappy situation to the fact that “the number of members of the Chinese Communist Party who can read the works of Marx and Lenin in the original is very limited” (op. cit. p. 344), since this did not leave much place for his own contribution.

13 Translated in Boyd Compton, op. cit. pp. 255–268.

14 Extracts of the most eloquent passages are to be found in Carrère d'Encausse, H. and Schram, S., Marxism and Asia (London: Allen Lane The Penguin Press, 1969), Text IX, 1.Google Scholar

15 As Boyd Compton points out in his introduction to the cheng-feng documents (op. cit. p. xlv), these translated materials are similar to those which were used in other Communist Parties at the time.

16 Selected Works (Peking), Vol. III, pp. 43–45.

17 For the original text, see Chieh-fang jih-pao (Liberation Daily), 4 June 1943; compare Selected Works, III, pp. 117–122.

18 Schram, , The Political Thought of Mao Tse-tung, p. 376.Google Scholar

19 Report of 5 March 1949 to the Second Plenary Session of the Seventh Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party, Selected Works, IV, p. 363.

20 Selected Works, IV, pp. 411–412.

21 See the last paragraph of Chapter II of the Communist Manifesto.

22 Lenin, V. I., Selected Works, Vol. 2 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1967), p. 314.Google Scholar

23 Ibid. p. 285.

24 See paragraph 7 of Mao's “Lun shih ta kuan-hsi,” on “Relations between the Party and Non-Party People and Organizations.” A translation of this hitherto unpublished document will appear in Jerome Ch'en's book, Mao Tse-tung, due to be published this year by Prentice-Hall.

25 See his speech of 31 July 1955 on the agricultural co-operative movement, conveniently available in Selected Readings from the works of Mao Tse-tung (Peking: Foreign Languages Press, 1967), p. 335. For a more extended discussion, see the revised edition of my biography of Mao Tse-tung.

26 Liu made his statement of 1950 in his report on land reform, found in Jen-min jih-pao (People's Daily), 30 June 1950. For the denunciation of his “reactionary theory,” see Peking Review, No. 12, 1968, p. 27.

27 Chung-Kuo nung-ts'un ti she-hui-chu-i kao-ch'ao (Socialist Upsurge in China's Countryside), p. 729; p. 159 of the English translation. (Jen-min ch'u-pan she, Peking: 1956, and Foreign Languages Press).

28 He said, for example: “Whether or not the socialist transformation of our agriculture can keep pace with the rate of advance of industrialization in our country, whether or not the co-operative movement can develop in a healthy fashion …, depends on whether or not the local Party Committees at all levels can quickly and correctly shift the emphasis to this task. … A change of this kind depends first and foremost on the secretaries of the Party committees at various levels. …” Ibid. pp. 1125–1126 of the Chinese edition and pp. 206–207 of the English edition.

29 Jen-min jih-pao (People's Daily), 26 January 1956.

30 See the anti-P'eng materials translated in Current Background, No. 851, pp. 11 and 17.

31 Liu had in fact hailed Mao as “the helmsman of the Chinese nation and of the Chinese people's revolutionary struggle” in the peroration of his report of 14 May 1945 on the revision of the Party constitution.

32 Eighth National Congress of the Communist Party of China, Vol. I (Peking: Foreign Languages Press, 1956), pp. 104–105.

33 Ibid. p. 200.

34 Ibid. p. 98 (emphasis added).

35 Ibid. pp. 213–214.

36 Mao, Tse-tung, On the Correct Handling of Contradictions Among the People (Peking: Foreign Languages Press, 1957), p. 50.Google Scholar

37 He had first expounded this idea, in a somewhat attenuated form, in his unpublished speech of April 1956 on the Ten Great Relations.

38 Selected Works, IV, p. 375.

39 Eighth National Congress, p. 96.

40 See Berstein's, Thomas P. article, “Leadership and Mass Mobilisation in the Soviet and Chinese Collectivisation Campaigns of 1929–30 and 1955–56: a Comparison,” The China Quarterly, No. 31 (July–September, 1967), pp. 147.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

41 See paragraph VII of the resolution.

42 Che-hsüeh yen-chiu, No. 5, 1958, pp. 1–8. Translation in my monograph, La “revolution permanente” en Chine (Paris: Mouton, 1963).

43 Peking Review, No. 29 (17 July 1964), p. 26.

44 Loc cit.

45 Ibid. p. 19.

46 See the extracts translated in The Political Thought of Mao Tse-tung, Text VI C 10, pp. 323–325.

47 Peking Review, No. 21, 1967, p. 9.

48 Jen-min jih-pao, 24 August 1966; translation in Peking Review, No. 37, 1966, pp. 2–21.

49 Loc. cit.

50 Hung ch'i, No. 3, 1967; translation in Peking Review, No. 6, 1967.

51 For a complete translation of the new draft Party Constitution, see The China Quarterly, No. 37 (January–March 1969), pp. 169–173. Extracts in Schram, The Political Thought of Mao Tse-tung, Text VI C 13, pp. 326–330.

52 See Article V.

53 See his report to the Seventeenth Congress of the CPSU.

54 See his Marxism and Questions of Linguistics.