Talking Politics Guide to ... The Chinese Communist Party
TALKING POLITICS
Catherine Carr
4.7 • 2.5K Ratings
🗓️ 4 August 2019
⏱️ 29 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
We talk to historian of China Hans van de Ven about the origins of the CCP and its extraordinary rise to power. How has it managed to adapt to the changes of the last forty years and what lessons will be drawn as it approaches its one hundredth birthday?
Talking Points:
The Chinese Communist Party is an incredible success story. A group of students met in Shanghai; 30 years later, they were running a vast country.
- A lot of luck was involved. If the Japanese hadn’t invaded, they never would have gone anywhere.
The CCP didn’t become a Maoist party until the Second World War.
- Communist parties are supposed to thrive in cities, but Mao turned his attention to the countryside.
- Mao was a great tactician of violence. He was heavily influenced by Clausewitz.
- Mao was also able to draw in both the youth and the intellectuals.
The West tends to see Mao’s death as the decisive shift, but Mao himself allowed new people to come to the fore, including Deng Xiaoping.
- Tiannamen was an existential threat to the Party, and it extended far beyond Beijing.
The Party is still the dominant institution in Chinese life. Although Chinese life is more pluralistic under market reform, the Party still calls the final shots.
- China has always been highly commercialized. Viewing reform as “Westernization” may not be the best approach.
A key element of the Chinese political tradition is a direct connection between the highest and the lowest rungs of society. New technology makes this easier.
- The leadership is extremely concerned with what people are thinking.
As the 100th anniversary of the Party approaches, the leadership faces a dilemma: taking the history of the Party seriously could threaten its present legitimacy.
- How do you explain all of the suffering? You can’t just ignore it.
Further Learning:
- Hans’ book, China at War: Triumph and Tragedy in the Emergence of the New China
- ChinaFile
- A guide to China from the Council on Foreign Relations
Recommended Reading:
- A Critical Introduction to Mao Zedong, Timothy Cheek, ed (CUP, 2010)
- Mao's Little Red Book: A Global History, Alastair Cook (CUP, 2014)
Red Flags: Why Xi's China is in Jeopardy, George Magnus (Yale, 2018)
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello my name is David Ronserman and this is Talking Politics. Today's Talking Politics |
| 0:09.3 | guide is with Hans van der Ven, historian of modern China, and we're going to be talking |
| 0:14.0 | about the Chinese Communist Party. It's past, it's present, and it's possible future. |
| 0:26.0 | Talking Politics is brought to you in partnership with the London Review of Books. As politics |
| 0:30.7 | speeds up, slow down with a subscription to the LRB where Brexit and Trump are only part |
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| 0:43.3 | at a special rate at lrb.co.uk forward slash talking. |
| 0:53.4 | You could say the origin story of the Chinese Communist Party is just this incredible success |
| 0:58.0 | story, essentially, more or less from nowhere within about 20 years to be governing a vast |
| 1:04.6 | empire. How do they do it? It is an incredible story. I think |
| 1:08.7 | first of all, many, you have a group of young kids, students in the 20s, there were two |
| 1:13.8 | older figures, but they were sort of not that relevant for a very long time. They meet |
| 1:18.9 | in Shanghai from across China, some have been in Paris, but that was sort of coincidental. |
| 1:24.6 | And as you say, 30 years later, they run this vast country and then take it on and make |
| 1:29.6 | it into a superpower. So it is an amazing story. How did they do it? I think the first thing |
| 1:36.2 | in communism, of course, this is history driving all this and the outcome is inevitable, |
| 1:40.6 | but that's clearly not the case. I think one of the problems for Chinese Communist |
| 1:45.0 | Party now to admit is that a lot of luck was involved, a real great amount of luck. |
| 1:51.6 | They could have been destroyed in the 20s when the KMT shoot at them in 1927, Dwight |
| 1:58.2 | Terror, that perched, they could have been destroyed then. In the 1930s, you have mounted |
| 2:02.8 | along setting up this communist base in the Jiangxi Soviet beautiful country, very poor, |
| 2:08.9 | the nationalist again, surround them and nearly killed them, gone along March, which is |
... |
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