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Western Concepts and China's Historical Experience

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LiftonRobert J., Revolutionary Immortality: Mao Tse-tung and the Chinese Cultural Revolution.New York, Random House, 1968, 178 pp. $1.95.
PyeLucian, The Spirit of Chinese Politics: A Psychocultural Study of the Authority Crisis in Political Development.Cambridge, M.I.T. Press, 1968, 255 pp. $2.90.
TownsendJames R., Political Participation in Communist China.Berkeley, University of California Press, 1967, 233 pp. $5.50.

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 July 2011

Tang Tsou
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Extract

The massive effort in the United States to develop the study of the Chinese Communist regime and movement began in the wake of the postwar upsurge in the development of the social sciences, particularly in the field of comparative politics. Inevitably, it has come under the controlling influence of the exciting intellectual ferment in these disciplines. With the publication of Chalmers Johnson's Peasant Nationalism and Communist Power (1962) and Franz Schurmann's Ideology and Organization in Communist China (1966), the study of contemporary China can be said to have begun its drive to maturity.

Type
Review Article
Information
World Politics , Volume 21 , Issue 4 , July 1969 , pp. 655 - 691
Copyright
Copyright © Trustees of Princeton University 1969

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References

1 Sartori, Giovanni, “Functionalism in a Comparative Perspective,” Chapter XVIII of a manuscript to be published, pp. 148Google Scholar and 150.

2 Dahl, Robert A., “A Critique of the Ruling Elite Model,” American Political Science Review, LII (June 1958), p. 467Google Scholar.

3 FitzGerald, C. P., Revolution in China (New York 1952), pp. 12–16Google Scholar. FitzGerald explains this one exception in terms of an alliance between scholars and peasants to drive out the Mongol rulers.

4 Political Power: U.S.A.-U.S.S.R. (New York 1967Google Scholar).

5 Sartori.

6 Verba, Sidney, “Some Dilemmas in Comparative Research,” World Politics, xx (October 1967), 114Google Scholar.

7 The more fundamental and more difficult problem of integration versus uniformity can be dealt with in the same fashion. In all political systems, the processes of both integration and “homogenization” are at work. In the democratic West, integration of the various functional groups is achieved partly by the general acceptance of certain basic principles of “right” and “wrong” and the “rules of the game” guiding the struggle for power and material resources: in other words, uniformity at this highest level combined with diversity at other levels. In few other political systems are the leaders more determined to establish uniformity in all spheres of life than in Maoist China. Yet even Mao and the Maoists must seek the integration (in their own terminology, chieh-ho) of the different groups.

8 It is immaterial here whether or not we regard Fascist Italy as a totalitarian system.

9 For a more detailed discussion of these ideas, see Tsou, Tang, “Revolution, Reintegration, and Crisis in China,” in Ho, Ping-ti and Tsou, Tang, eds., Chinds Heritage and the Communist Political System (Chicago 1968), 288Google Scholar–91.

10 Remarks by Ezra Vogel, at the National Seminar on Communist China, held at Ann Arbor, Michigan, on May 5 and 6, 1967.

11 Lifton has explored these problems methodically in his Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism (New York 1961Google Scholar).

12 For a fuller discussion of these ideas, see Tsou, Tang, “The Cultural Revolution and the Chinese Political System,” China Quarterly, No. 38 (April-June 1968Google Scholar).