Kirjahaku

A leading scholar of China's modern political development examines the changing relationship between the Chinese people and the state. Correcting the conventional view of China as having instituted extraordinary economic changes but having experienced few political reforms in the post-Mao period, Merle Goldman details efforts by individuals and groups to assert their political rights. China's move to the market and opening to the outside world have loosened party controls over everyday life and led to the emergence of ideological diversity. Starting in the 1980s, multi-candidate elections for local officials were held, and term limits were introduced for communist party leaders. Establishment intellectuals who have broken away from party patronage have openly criticized government policies. Those intellectuals outside the party structures, because of their participation in the Cultural Revolution or the 1989 Tiananmen Square demonstrations, have organized petitions, published independent critiques, formed independent groups, and even called for a new political system. Despite the party's repeated attempts to suppress these efforts, awareness about political rights has been spreading among the general population. Goldman emphasizes that these changes do not guarantee movement toward democracy, but she sees them as significant and genuine advances in the assertion of political rights in China.

Suppression and thaw have marked the course of communism in China. Merle Goldman traces that shifting pattern over the last decades of Mao’s regime, linking it to the unique role of the intellectual in government. Her engrossing account of the relations between the intellectuals and the governing elites provides a map of understanding to some recent events in the turbulent history of the People’s Republic.

In modern China, literature has been regarded as a vehicle of political and idea logical dissent, a concept that has persisted under communism. This study exhaustively analyzes the conflict between the Chinese Communist party and the intellectuals, particularly the writers, in the crucial decades of the 1940's and 1950's. By singling out individual writers as egregious examples, party leaders, through a series of thought-control campaigns, have tried to mold intellectuals along orthodox doctrinal lines. But these same leaders, holding to the paradoxical conviction that personal initiative and creativity are necessary catalysts in the effort to construct a Communist state, have not wanted to stifle these qualities altogether. The result has been a pattern of permissiveness and pressure, as illustrated by the ill-fated "Hundred Flowers" movement and the subsequent return to a policy of harsh regimentation. In depicting the views, feelings, frustrations, and tragic fates of many individual intellectuals in the confrontation with an oppressive party bureaucracy, the author reveals, in an unprecedented way, the nature of the authoritarian society that has evolved in Communist China. Her study convincingly demonstrates that totalitarian rule has not guaranteed the subservience of the Chinese intelligentsia and, even more important, that the alienated, critical intellectual remains a significant and vital force.

The West’s leading authority on the role of intellectuals in contemporary China presents a percipient account of the efforts at political reform in the Deng Xiaoping era. Merle Goldman describes a group of highly placed intellectuals who, with the patronage of Deng Xiaoping’s designated successors Hu Yaobang and then Zhao Ziyang, attempted to reshape both China’s Marxist–Leninist ideology and its political system.

Political Rights in Post-Mao China provides an engaging overview of political changes in China in the later decades of the twentieth century and early years of the twenty-first century, highlighting the growing rights consciousness movement among China's citizens. Professor Goldman explains how demands for Party reform and the increasingly organized struggle for democracy and political rights have spread from their beginnings among China's urban intellectuals to mass demonstrations held by workers, farmers, and the growing middle class. China's moves toward a free market economy have provided these various groups with access to new technologies--including the Internet and cell phones--that help organize their political protests. This book is invaluable to anyone wishing to understand the political dynamics of reform-era China and will appeal to teachers and students of many disciplines--including anthropology, Asian studies, geography, government, history, philosophy, political science, religion, and sociology.