Why did the Chinese Communist Party state collapse so rapidly during the Cultural Revolution? Consulting over 2,000 local annals chronicling some 34,000 revolutionary episodes across China, Andrew ...Walder offers a new answer, showing how the army, brought in to quiet brewing rebellions, escalated the violence that took nearly 1.6 million lives.
Shanghai’s January Revolution was a highly visible and, by all accounts, crucially important event in China’s Cultural Revolution. Its occurrence, along with the subsequent attempt to establish a ...“commune” form of municipal government, has greatly shaped our understanding both of the goals originally envisaged for the Cultural Revolution by its leaders and of the political positions held by the new corps of Party leaders thrust upward during its course—most notably Chang Ch’un ch’iao. At this interpretive level, the events in Shanghai seem to embody in microcosm the issues and conflicts in Chinese politics during the Cultural Revolution as a whole, while at the same time shaping our conception of what these larger issues and conflicts were. At the more general, theoretical level, however, the events in Shanghai provide us with an unusual opportunity (thanks to Red Guard raids on Party offices) to view the internal workings of the Party organization under a period of stress and to observe unrestrained interest group formation and mass political conflict through the press accounts provided by these unofficial groups themselves. The January Revolution thus provides us with an opportunity to develop better our more abstract, theoretical understanding of the functioning of the Chinese political system and the dynamics of the social system in which it operates. 1
China's Communist Party seized power in 1949 after a long guerrilla insurgency followed by full-scale war, but the revolution was just beginning. Andrew Walder narrates the rise and fall of the ...Maoist state from 1949 to 1976--an epoch of startling accomplishments and disastrous failures, steered by many forces but dominated above all by Mao Zedong.
Over the past decade, the ownership and control of China's corporate sector has finally begun to depart fundamentally from patterns typical in the socialist past. Students of corporate governance ...have watched these changes with an intense curiosity about their impact on firm performance. Students of comparative economic institutions have examined them for hints of a new variety of Asian capitalism and have sought to anticipate China's international competitiveness and impact. But these changes potentially will create a new corporate elite with greater compensation, personal wealth, and independence from government agencies than ever before. This transformation of China's political economy may eventually alter the Chinese state itself, although the extent and nature of this change are still far from clear. The key questions of interest are the social origins of the new elite, the scale of the economic assets they control, and especially their continuing relationships with party and government agencies. The answers will vary decisively by sector, four of which are described here: a state-owned sector, a privatized sector, a transactional sector, and an entrepreneurial sector. The evolving mix of these sectors will determine the future contours of the Chinese corporate economy.
Do regime change and market reform disrupt patterns of intergenerational mobility? China's political trajectory is distinctive from that of other communist regimes in two ways. During its first three ...decades, the regime enforced unusually restrictive barriers to elite status inheritance. And during the subsequent market transition, unlike most of its counterparts, the Communist Party survived intact. Data from a multigeneration survey suggest that despite their obvious exclusion from the party and related administrative careers in the Mao era, certain prerevolution elites transmitted one type of elite status to their offspring to a surprising degree. Party elites, in contrast, were hit hard by radical Maoism but recovered quickly afterward, and their offspring inherited elite status at much higher rates.
Command economies gave Communist-era elites administrative control and material privilege but severely restricted money income and private wealth. Markets and privatization have injected new value ...into public assets and create unprecedented opportunities for elite insiders. These opportunities depend on the extent of regime change and barriers to asset appropriation. Regime change varies from the survival of the entire party hierarchy to its rapid collapse and defeat in competitive elections. Barriers to asset appropriation vary with the extent, pace, and form of privatization, and the concentration and liquidity of assets. Different combinations of such circumstances jointly affect the extent to which prior elites obtain ownership or control of privatized assets, use political office to extract larger incomes, move into salaried elite occupations, or fall out of the elite altogether. Regime change and barriers to asset appropriation affect change at the national level, but outcomes vary across economic sectors because of characteristics of organizations, elite positions, and assets. This elementary theory serves to integrate varied findings from recent research on Central Europe, China, and Russia, and yields predictions for other regions. PUBLICATION ABSTRACT
Despite widespread skepticism about government ownership in transitional economies, China's rapid industrial growth has been led by public enterprises. Kornai's theory of soft budbet constraints, ...born of the failure of earlier Hungarian reforms, fosters such skepticism-but it assumes as fixed organizational characteristics that in fact vary widely across government jurisdictions. Local governments with smaller industrial bases have clearer financial incentives and constraints, fewer nonfinancial interests in enterprises, and a greater capacity to monitor them. In China's vast public sector, the fastest growth in output and productivity has occurred where government ownership rights are clearest and most easily enforced, which enables officials to manage public industry as a diversified market-oriented firm.
Until the 1970s, the study of social movements was firmly within a diverse sociological tradition that explored the relationship between social structure and political behavior, and was preoccupied ...with explaining variation in the political orientation of movements: their ideologies, aims, motivations, or propensities for violence. Subsequently, a breakaway tradition redefined the central problem, radically narrowing the scope of interest to the process of mobilization—how social groups, whoever they are and whatever their aims, marshal resources, recruit adherents, and navigate political environments in order to grow and succeed. Critics would later insist that the construction of meaning, the formation of collective identities, and the stimulation and amplification of emotions play vital and neglected roles in mobilization, but these alternatives did not challenge the narrowed construction of the problem itself. The resulting subfield has largely abandoned the quest to explain variation in the political orientation of movements. Researchers in related fields—on revolution, unions, and ethnic mobilization—have retained an interest in explaining political orientation, although they often view it primarily as a by-product of mobilization. Reviving theories about the impact of social structure on movement political orientation will require integrating insights from research on related but widely scattered subjects.
Following a brief review of EDM and its use on advanced aerospace alloys including workpiece integrity constraints, data are presented after machining Ti–6Al–4V and Inconel 718. Roughing and ...finishing (multiple trim cut) strategies were employed on two high specification machines with pulse generators designed to provide minimum workpiece integrity damage. Results include productivity, 3D topographic maps of workpiece surfaces, microstructural and microhardness depth profile data. Average recast thickness was <11
μm, several trim passes showing no apparent recast or damage. Similarly, no significant change in workpiece microhardness variation was observed with cracking confined to the recast layer.
Fractured Rebellion is the first full-length account of the evolution of China's Red Guard Movement in Beijing, the nation's capital, from its beginnings in 1966 to its forcible suppression in 1968. ...Andrew Walder combines historical narrative with sociological analysis as he explores the radical student movement's crippling factionalism, devastating social impact, and ultimate failure.
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