Chinese leaders are increasingly mobilizing historical narratives as part of a broader trend that challenges Francis Fukuyama’s thesis of the end of history. China’s monumental history as an ancient ...civilization is used to revise the communist party’s ideology and to buttress foreign policy ambitions and infrastructural investments—including the ‘belt and road initiative’ and territorial claims in the South China Sea. This more assertive approach to China’s immediate neighbourhood resonates with the official reiteration of imperial tropes and concepts of Confucian philosophy, yet assertions that Beijing wants to reanimate the tribute system remain contested. While using historical narratives to legitimize foreign policy is not new, we are witnessing an unprecedented ‘return of history’ as a global social force. By revisiting Fukuyama’s claims, I develop the notion of ‘historical statecraft’ and apply it to China’s ‘belt and road initiative’. The Chinese case is exemplary for the importance of ideational factors in understanding the recent structural changes often described as the weakening of the West. This article examines in what ways China’s historical statecraft is challenging western narratives, what controversies emerge as China articulates its identity as a re-emerging ancient Great Power—one which expects global audiences to acknowledge the value of its cultural norms—and whether the Chinese approach to the use of the past for construing alternative political imaginaries contributes to a peaceful reconstruction of global order.
En las próximas páginas se estudiará la evolución de las relaciones entre los comunistas ibéricos a lo largo de su historia: cómo fue percibido el PCP y cómo esa percepción influyó a los miles de ...comunistas que tras 1968 desarrollaron una disidencia leninista. La estrategia desarrollada por los comunistas lusos durante la Revolución de los Claveles constituyó un ejemplo a seguir particularmente importante para aquellos militantes críticos con la línea oficial del PCE. A través de fuentes orales y hemerográficas, este artículo analiza cómo el referente portugués funcionó a modo de mito movilizador para este sector de los comunistas españoles.
Throughout the Cold War, Bulgaria was a close ally of the Soviet Union. After the Cold War ended and the Soviet Union disintegrated, evidence emerged that Todor Zhivkov, the long-time leader of the ...Bulgarian Communist Party, had proposed that Bulgaria officially join the USSR as the “sixteenth Soviet republic.” However, these offers, which would have entailed the sacrifice of national sovereignty, are best understood as tactical maneuvers. Zhivkov used the tactic not just once, but at least three times. Nonetheless, it is highly unlikely that he ever intended for Bulgaria to be fully incorporated into the Soviet Union. Instead, he used Bulgarian national sovereignty as a bargaining chip during negotiations for financial and economic support to strengthen his personal rule.
In 2017–18, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) changed its domestic security strategy in Xinjiang, escalating the use of mass detention, ideological re-education, and pressure on Uyghur diaspora ...networks. Commonly proposed explanations for this shift focus on domestic factors: ethnic unrest, minority policy, and regional leadership. The CCP's strategy changes in Xinjiang, however, were also likely catalyzed by changing perceptions of the threat posed by Uyghur contact with transnational Islamic militant groups in Southeast Asia and the Middle East, and a corresponding increase in perceived domestic vulnerability. This threat shifted from theoretical risk to operational reality in 2014–16, and occurred alongside a revised assessment that China's Muslim population was more vulnerable to infiltration by jihadist networks than previously believed. Belief in the need to preventively inoculate an entire population from “infection” by these networks explains the timing of the change in repressive strategy, shift toward collective detention, heavy use of re-education, and attention paid to the Uyghur diaspora. It therefore helps explain specific aspects of the timing and nature of the CCP's strategy changes in Xinjiang. These findings have implications for the study of the connections between counterterrorism and domestic repression, as well as for authoritarian preventive repression and Chinese security policy at home and abroad.
This article highlights the key motivations behind China's plan to launch the digital yuan and reviews the potential impacts on China and abroad. The article analyzes the digital yuan's benefits to ...consumers, such as a reliable low-risk, low cost, and high-efficiency payment solution and the potential to promote financial inclusion. It compares the digital yuan with its most prominent competitors. Also discussed is how the digital yuan is expected to provide the Chinese Communist Party with a new powerful tool to monitor and control its economy and people. The article provides a critical evaluation of the potential of the digital yuan's internationalization. This article also provides a perspective on the digital yuan to set global standards for the development of national digital currencies.
This paper tests the proposition that politicians and their affiliated firms (i.e., firms operating in their province) temporarily suppress negative information in response to political incentives. ...We examine the stock price behavior of Chinese listed firms around two visible political events—meetings of the National Congress of the Chinese Communist Party and promotions of high-level provincial politicians—that are expected to asymmetrically increase the costs of releasing bad news. The costs create an incentive for local politicians and their affiliated firms to temporarily restrict the flow of negative information about the companies. The result will be fewer stock price crashes for the affiliated firms during these event windows, followed by an increase in crashes after the event. Consistent with these predictions, we find that the affiliated firms experience a reduction (an increase) in negative stock return skewness before (after) the event. These effects are strongest in the three-month period directly preceding the event, among firms that are more politically connected, and when the province is dominated by faction politics and cronyism. Additional tests document a significant reduction in published newspaper articles about affected firms in advance of these political events, suggestive of a link between our observed stock price behavior and temporary shifts in the listed firms' information environment.
After the establishment of the Communist Party of China, it attached great importance to the collection of various information and established a number of information channels, including Xinhua News ...Agency's Neibu Cankao. Since 1958, under the leadership of the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party, the Neibu Cankao has changed its reporting policy of only reflecting the shortcomings and problems in domestic work and has changed it to reflect certain shortcomings in the work of local regions under the premise of affirming the achievements. At the same time, the jurisdiction of the branches of Xinhua News Agency has also been transferred from the headquarters to the party committees in local regions, resulting in severe clogging of the information channel of the Neibu Cankao. Even so, The Neibu Cankao still tried every means to reflect the actual situation, but it did not receive positive feedback from the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party.
How is populism distributed over the political spectrum? Are right-wing parties more populist than left-wing parties? Based on the analysis of 32 parties in five Western European countries between ...1989 and 2008, we show that radical parties on both the left and the right are inclined to employ a populist discourse. This is a striking finding, because populism in Western Europe has typically been associated with the radical right; only some particular radical left parties have been labeled populist as well. This article suggests that the contemporary radical left in Western Europe is generally populist. Our explanation is that many contemporary radical left parties are not traditionally communist or socialist (anymore). They do not focus on the ‘proletariat’, but glorify a more general category: the ‘good people’. Moreover, they do not reject the system of liberal democracy as such, but only criticize the political and/or economic elites within that system.
Konflikt und Kooperation Beyrau, D.; Eichwede, W.; Kunštát, M.
Osteuropa (Stuttgart),
01/2020, Letnik:
70, Številka:
6
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Jan Křen gehörte zu jenen ostmitteleuropäischen Denkern, die mit der Macht der Ohnmächtigen die Spaltung Europas überwanden. Sein Metier war die historische Wahrheit. Er beschäftigte sich mit dem ...bürgerlichen Widerstand gegen den Nationalsozialismus, den es nach der herrschenden Doktrin der Kommunistischen Partei nicht gab. Er arbeitete über die Vertreibung der Deutschen aus der Tschechoslowakei, die als unausweichlich zu rechtfertigen er sich weigerte. Und er stemmte sich gegen deterministische Geschichtsbilder, die die Zerstörung einer über Jahrhunderte währenden Gemeinschaft von Tschechen und Deutschen in Mitteleuropa als unausweichlich präsentierten. Jan Křen ist im April 2020 im Alter von 89 Jahren in Prag gestorben.
Jan Křen was among the eastern-central European thinkers who overcame the division of Europe with the power of the powerless. His main interest was historical truth. He studied civilian resistance against National Socialism, which according to the ruling doctrine of the Communist Party did not even exist. One topics of his research was the expulsion of the Germans from Czechoslovakia, which he refused to justify as being a matter of necessity. And he refused to conform to deterministic portrayals of history that presented the destruction of the centuries-old community of Czechs and Germans in central Europe as being a matter of inevitability. Jan Křen died in April 2020 in Prague, aged 89.
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