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Some Recent Books on the Rise of Chinese Communism

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 January 2017

Abstract

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Review Article
Copyright
Copyright © Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies. 1963

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References

1 The New York Times, Jan. 22, 1961, Section E, p. 11.

2 Tso-liang Hsiao, Power Relations within the Chinese Communist Movement, 1930- 1934: A Study of Documents (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1961). For an interesting discussion of one aspect of this book see the review by Benjamin Schwartz, The China Quarterly, No. 12 (Oct.-Dec, 1962), pp. 231-34. A reply by Hsiao may be found in ibid., No. 15 (July-Sept., 1963), pp. 160-64.

3 See the review by Howard L. Boorman, Political Science Quarterly, LXXVII, No. 4 (Dec, 1962), 617-18.

4 In this connection it should be noted that a second revised edition of Harold R. Isaacs’ The Tragedy of the Chinese Revolution has been published (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1961). The only significant change from the first revised edition (1951) is the substitution of his chapter on the 1928-34 period—which was part of the original (1938) book but was dropped in 1951—for the 1951 concluding chapter, “The Blind Alley of Totalitarianism.“

5 Robert C. North and Xenia J. Eudin, M. N. Roy's Mission to China: The Communist- Kuomintang Split of 1927 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1963). See also John P. Haithcox, “The Roy-Lenin Debate on Colonial Policy: A New Interpretation,” The Journal of Asian Studies, XXIII, No. 1 (Nov., 1963), 93-101.

6 See North, “M. N. Roy and the Fifth Congress of the Chinese Communist Party,” The China Quarterly, No. 8 (Oct.-Dec, 1961), pp. 184-95.

7 Howard L. Boorman, “From Shanghai to Peking: The Politics of a Revolution,” The Journal of Asian Studies, XXIII, No. 1 (Nov., 1963), 113-19.

8 Shao Chuan Leng and Norman D. Palmer, Sun Yat-sen and Communism (New York: Praeger, 1961).

9 See, for example, Robert K. Murray, Red Scare: A Study in National Hysteria, 1919-1920 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1955). Also, note the reaction of the U.S. Minister to China, Paul S. Reinsch, to Sun's plans for the Chinese economy. The International Development of China (2nd ed.; New York and London: Putnam's, 1929), Appendix II, pp. 251-56. For example, he cautioned Sun “not to disturb the entire balance of society by too sudden changes” (p. 255).

10 C. T. Hsia, A History of Modern Chinese Fiction, 1917-1957 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1961), p. 503.

11 Chow Tse-tsung, The May Fourth Movement: Intellectual Revolution in Modern China (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1960). Two important review articles are Mary C. Wright, “The Pre-Revolutionary Intellectuals of China and Russia,” The China Quarterly, No. 6 (Apr.-June, 1961), pp. 175-79, and Joseph R. Levenson, “The Day Confucius Died,” The Journal of Asian Studies, XX, No. 2 (Feb., 1961), 221-26. Dr. Chow has prepared a companion volume, Research Guide to the May Fourth Movement, which has just been published by Harvard University Press (1963).

12 One noteworthy exception is of course Li Ta-chao, whose articles, “The Victory of Bolshevism” and “The Victory of the Masses,” were published in 1918. Li's enthusiasm subsided quickly if only temporarily.

13 Donald W. Treadgold, “Russia and the Far East,” in Russian Foreign Policy: Essays i?i Historical Perspective, ed. Ivo J. Lederer (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1962), p. 553. The absence of “barriers to choosing the Communist path” (p. 552) deserves particularly close attention.

14 Chow Tse-tsung, op. cit., p. 255. The words are Chiang Monlin's. See also Chow, op. cit., p. 361: “to most of the Chinese intellectuals, under the circumstances in the few years following the May Fourth Incident, direct, organized activities and mass demonstrations appeared to be the best possible way to promote genuine democracy in China….”

15 J. A. Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy (New York and London: Harper, 1942), p. 328.

16 Chow, op. cit., p. 239.

17 Hu Shih, The Chinese Renaissance (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1934), pp. ix-x.

18 Benjamin Schwartz, “Ch'en Tu-hsiu and the Acceptance of the Modern West,” Journal of the History of Ideas, XII, No. 1 (Jan., 1951), p. 64.

19 Wright, op. cit., pp. 178-79. Cf. her reference to the attempt by nineteenth-century Chinese leaders to use “European counterparts of the Confucian ethic” as the basis of a new foreign policy. The Last Stand of Chinese Conservatism (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1957), p. 224. Was there an attempt, in both the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, to find similar counterparts in order to modernize in other respects?

20 Lifton, Robert Jay, Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism: A Study of “Brainwashing” in China (New York: Norton, 1961), p. 373 Google Scholar. Joseph R. Levenson has analyzed the emotional pull tradition exerted on modern intellectuals in a number of brilliant writings. See, for example, his Confucian China and Its Modern Fate: The Problem of Intellectual Continuity (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1958). One is reminded of Emerson's observation that a man “is the prisoner of thoughts; ideas, which in words he rejects, tyrannize over him There are no walls like the invisible ones of an idea.“

21 Chalmers A. Johnson, Peasant Nationalism and Communist Power: The Emergence of Revolutionary China, 1937-1945 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1962). Readers of this journal will be particularly interested in the comparisons Johnson makes between China and Yugoslavia, pp. 156-75 and passim.

22 John Wilson Lewis, Leadership in Communist China (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1963).

23 C. K. Yang, A Chinese Village in Early Communist Transition and The Chinese Family in the Communist Revolution (Cambridge, Mass.: Technology Press, M.I.T., 1959).

24 Events moved so rapidly that Lu Hsiin, who from 1918-25 was in the front ranks of the attack upon tradition (Chow, op. cit.﹜ pp. 308-11), could be reviled in 1928 as an anachronism (Hsia, op. cit., pp. 49-50).

25 Yang's village was in south China where, for example, “familism and clannism … were most fully developed and well maintained” (A Chinese Village, p. 81).

26 Cyril E. Black, “Political Modernization in Russia and China,” in Unity and Contradiction, ed. Kurt London (New York: Praeger, 1962), pp. 3-18.

27 In addition to C. K. Yang, of course, Mary C. Wright has given us good reason to question whether the Kuomintang government favored “a program of thoroughgoing modernization” or “advocated a social revolution in d e p t h “ as suggested by Black, op. cit., pp. 14-15. See The Last Stand of Chinese Conservatism, pp. 300-312.

28 A. M. Halpern, “Contemporary China as a Problem for Political Science,” World Politics, XV, No. 4 (Apr., 1963), 376.