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The Use and Abuse of Ideology in the Study of Contemporary China

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  17 February 2009

Frederic Wakeman Jr
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Type
Review Article
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The China Quarterly , Volume 61 , March 1975 , pp. 127 - 152
Copyright
Copyright © The China Quarterly 1975

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References

1. Oakeshott, Michael, Rationalism in Politics (New York: Basic Book Publications, 1962), p. 116.Google Scholar

2. Dr Solomon indicates that his model is in part inspired by Pye, Lucian, Aspects of Political Development (Boston: Little, Brown, 1966).Google Scholar

3. Bendix, Reinhard, Embattled Reason: Essays on Social Knowledge (New York: Oxford University Press, 1970), p. 154.Google Scholar

4. As Bendix points out (ibid.), followers demand some sign of their leader's efficacy, while the leader himself becomes impatient with his believers' lack of faith. The locus classieux for this statement is Weber, Max's The Theory of Social and Economic Organization (New York: Free Press of Glencoe, 1964), p. 360Google Scholar: “If proof of his charismatic qualification fails him for long, the leader endowed with charisma tends to think his god or his magical or heroic powers have deserted him. If he is for long unsuccessful, above all if his leadership fails to benefit his followers, it is likely that his charismatic authority will disappear. This is the genuine charismatic meaning of the ‘gift of grace.’” There are, however, some recent anthropological studies which suggest that efficacy does not have that great an effect upon leadership, and that charismatic authority is better viewed as a charismatic “relationship” in which the followers project their own aspirations upon the leader. See Worsley, Peter, The Trumpet Shall Sound: A Study of “Cargo” Cults in Melanesia, 2nd ed., (New York: MacGibbon & Kee, 1968), pp. ix–lxix.Google Scholar

5. Solomon and Sullivan also disagree with the interpretation that Ch'en Tu-hsiu “converted” to Communism because he had lost his faith in New Culture values like democracy and science. Unlike Schwartz, Benjamin I., in Chinese Communism and the Rise of Mao (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1951), p. 23Google Scholar, Solomon and Sullivan argue that Ch'en's adoption of Marxism was “organically linked to previous patterns of thought” (p. 148)Google Scholar. Ch'en did not abandon science by becoming a Marxist. Rather, he believed that Marxism-Leninism was a more scientific way of seeing the world than other ideological views.

6. Jerome Ch'en correctly points out that the concept of the “comprador bourgeoisie” was also derived from Stalin's theory of the two sections (the revolutionary versus the compromising) of the Chinese bourgeoisie.

7. Ch'en shows how Mao's own policies changed during the course of this period, beginning with the confiscation of all land in Chingkangshan in 1928, then only public and landlords' land in Hsing-kuo county in 1929, and finally ending with concessions to the rich peasants in February 1930. To Wang Ming this seemed an infringement of the Marxist class standpoint and led to the anti-rich peasant line of 1931, which Mao followed by organizing a “red terror.” By 1935, however, Wang Ming had come to argue that the rich peasant was to be left alone, and the earlier Maoist strategy of concessions was adopted.

8. Solomon thus accepts Chalmers Johnson's peasant nationalism thesis for the Chinese revolution. See Johnson, Chalmers, Peasant Nationalism and Communist Power: The Emergence of Revolutionary China, 1937–1945 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1962).Google Scholar

9. The notion of social conciliation, based upon Confucian humaneness (e.g. the imperial government's willingness to forgive and “redeem” peasant rebels), also affected the debate on peasant movements in Chinese history. Some historians then argued that by following a “policy of concession” (jang-pu cheng-ts'e), the “feudal ruling classes” implemented partial reforms and kept peasant movements from becoming genuine revolutionary movements.

10. This campaign has also been carefully analysed in Munro, Donald, “The Yang Hsien-chen affair,” The China Quarterly (CQ), No. 22 (1965), pp. 75–82.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

11. Deborinism is also analysed in Wakeman, Frederic Jr, History and Will: Philosophical Perspectives of Mao Tse-tung's Thought (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973), pp. 223–28.Google Scholar

12. Franz Schurmann, H., Ideology and Organization, p. 58.Google Scholar

13. Ibid. p. 60

14. Marx, Karl and Engels, Frederick, Selected Correspondence (Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, n.d.), p. 272.Google Scholar

15. Marx, Karl, The Class Struggle in France, 1848–1850 (New York: International Publishing Co., 1964), pp. 44–45.Google Scholar

16. Professor Lee perceptively notes that many foreign observers applauded the rehabilitation of experts after the Great Leap Forward because it accorded with their own conception of proper management. “Probably because these arguments point to the reality of change-producing activity in modern industrial societies, Western observers tend to regard the aftermath of the Great Leap Forward as a stage of relative rationality in Party economic policy, in contrast to the irrationality of Maoist policies in the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution” (p. 308).Google Scholar

17. Van Ness, Peter, Revolution and Chinese Foreign Policy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1970).Google Scholar

18. This model, as Philip Bridgham points out, was developed at length in Halpern, A. M., “The foreign policy uses of the Chinese revolutionary model,” CQ, No. 7 (1961), pp. 1–16.Google Scholar

19. An example of this is the burning of the Anshan Steel Company's operational plans, provided by Soviet technicians, even before the Chinese had drafted their own plans.

20. “During the transitional period we may employ every possible means that contributes to the mobilization of the productive enthusiasm of the peasants. We should not say that such and such a means is the best and only one” (p. 288).Google Scholar

21. Tse-tung, Mao, “Speech at the Tenth Plenum,” Peking Review, No. 39 (1962), p. 17.Google Scholar

22. “The thought of Mao Tse-tung… united the universal truths of Marxism-Leninism with the practice of revolution and construction in China and creatively developed Marxism-Leninism.” (Jen-min jih-pao, 3 08 1964).Google Scholar

23. Schurmann does later subtly analyse the division of labour in China. Here, however, he does ndt concern himself with the forms of production as a cultural or elite determinant. This can lead to an unquestioning acceptance of “natural” human relationships and drives, e.g. the organization and use of power, individual instincts, and so forth. That may be contrasted with Marx's historicism. Marx attacked the “bourgeois theory of individuality” which “presupposes precisely production on the basis of exchange values” for a universal theory of human behaviour. Marx believed instead that “universally developed individuals, whose social relationships are subject, in their own communal relationships, to their own collective control, are the product not of nature but of history.” Marx, Karl, The Grundrisse (New York: Free Press of Glencoe, 1971), pp. 70–71.Google Scholar

24. Power, as the precondition of organization, is not presented as a political instinct but rather as a social condition. Schurmann thus reminds one more of Orwell or Zamiatin than Hobbes or Hsun-tzu. One might also point out that his discussion of wealth overlooks the difference between property and possession. Obviously, the latter is an important criterion of elite status in the People's Republic of China, even when possession of state property is only temporary. For instance, the wall posters written by HsUeh Pao-jen in Peking on 13 June 1974 bitterly attacked the leaders of the Municipal Revolutionary Committee for watching special screenings of films and moving about the city in great fleets of cars. The leaders do not own the films or the cars, but they do possess special access to them. This form of “wealth” is certainly regarded as a “capitalist” class attribute by anti-revisionists in China today.

25. It is interesting to compare this notion of a harmonious social system with Joseph Levenson's theory that social health is a product of dialectical tensions. The Nietzschean derivation of this theory is explored in Wakeman, Frederic Jr, “The sources of Joseph Levenson's theory of bureaucratic-monarchic tension,”Google Scholar in Maurice Meisner and Rhoads Murphey (eds.), The Thought of Joseph Levenson (forthcoming).

26. Schunnann does not pursue the structuralist consequences of this distinction between values and norms. Smelser, Neil, in Theory of Collective Behaviour (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1962)Google Scholar, for instance, uses the dichotomy to show how revolutionary ideology is characterized by a discrepancy between values and reality. Other sociologists have used a slightly different Parsonian distinction between evaluative criticism (“that person is a bad landlord because he charges too much rent”) and normative criticism (“all landlords are bad because they live off the labour of others”) to explain political consciousness. Evaluative criticism corresponds to role performance, or the organizational side of Schumann's dichotomy. Normative criticism corresponds to something not in Schurmann's scheme: radical social criticism.

27. Legitimacy, as somewhat ambiguously defined by Weber, in The Theory of Social and Economic Organization, p. 324 ff.Google Scholar, was of three sorts: traditional, charismatic and rational. When Chinese social policies correspond most closely to western management techniques, then legitimacy is described by western social scientists in rational terms. During mobilization campaigns like the Great Leap Forward or the Cultural Revolution, charismatic functions are ascribed to “pure ideology.”

28. Since ideology has been substituted for ethos, then a functional regulator has been substituted for values. Schumann fully realizes this implication of his argument when he states that China has no unifying culture of its own.

29. According to Mao Tse-tung, “laws” like the unity of opposites are certainly universal and unchanging. But theory is not eternally constant. “Truth” lies beyond Marxist theory. As Mao argued in his On Practice, “Marxism-Leninism has in no way summed up all knowledge of truth, but is ceaselessly opening up, through practice, the road to the knowledge of truth.” Shih-chien lun hsueh-hsi wen-hsuan (A Selection of Writings on the Study of “On Practice”) (Hankow, 1951), p. 12.Google Scholar

30. To illustrate the functional role of morality in business administration, Schurmann cites Barnard, Chester, The Functions of the Executive (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1938).Google Scholar

31. Schumann's thesis that the American intervention in Vietnam was a major cause of the Cultural Revolution is spelled out in the New York Review of Books, 20 10 1966Google Scholar. He now holds Russian imperialism largely responsible for the Pi-Lin p'i-K'ung campaign. See Milton, David, Milton, Nancy and Schur-mann, Franz, “In the shadow of war: China's new cultural revolution,” Ramparts (05 1974)Google Scholar. Another critique of Schumann's approach which makes this point is to be found in Hammond, Ed, “Che fare?”Google Scholar (forthcoming).

32. The belief that there is a systematic conflict between Maoist theory and reality is also criticized in an unpublished paper by Starr, John Bryan, “On the possibility of a pragmatic ideology: epistemological principles of John Dewey and Mao Tse-tung,” (read at the Faculty Seminar on Comparative Communism, University of California, Berkeley, on 28 03 1974).Google Scholar

33. Merton, Robert K., Social Theory and Social Structure (New York: Free Press of Glencoe, 1957), p. 421.Google Scholar

34. Burke, Kenneth, Permanence and Change (New York, 1965), p. 223Google Scholar. It was from Burke that Clifford Geertz derived his understanding of ideology as a set of meanings which draw much of their symbolic significance at a given level from incongruity at another level of meaning. This likens ideology to metaphor, which derives its power “from an interplay between the discordant meanings it symbolically coerces into a unitary conceptual framework and from the degree to which that coercion is successful in overcoming the psychic resistance such semantic tension inevitably generates in anyone in a position to perceive it” Geertz, Clifford, “Ideology as a cultural system,”Google Scholar in Apter, David, Ideology and Discontent (New York: Free Press of Glencoe, 1964), p. 59Google Scholar. The notion of psychic resistance is fundamental to Mao Tse-tung's theory of a revolutionary will. See Wakeman, , History and Will, pp. 202–203.Google Scholar

35. Tse-tung, Mao, Selected Works (Peking: Foreign Languages Press, 1961), Vol. 1, p. 336.Google Scholar

36. Ideology and Politics, pp. 243 and 286.Google Scholar

37. Granisci, Antonio, The Modern Prince and Other Writings (New York, 1970), p. 66.Google Scholar

38. Ibid. p. 67.

39. These characteristics of ideological politics are taken from Putnam, Robert D., “Studying elite political culture: the case of ‘ideology,’” American Political Science Review (09 1971), p. 657.Google Scholar