The disintegration of the Soviet bloc after 1989 marked the beginning of the end of the revolutionary socialist movement that originated in the nineteenth century and was consolidated by the twentieth-century Communist regimes. The end of the ideological confrontations of the cold war brought proclamations both of the ‘end of history’ as well as of a new ‘clash of civilizations’. These two opposing theses together declared the end of twentieth-century politics: national liberation, land reform, class struggle, state and revolution have all apparently become anachronisms. In parallel with this, the power of capital overwhelmed the obstacles that the socialist movement had played so large a part in constructing, and began to reorganize all social and political forms. In the present conditions of financialized monopoly capitalism, the most salient project for capital is to erode any substantive differences among political forms so as to realize its project of ‘globalization’. In twenty-first century capitalism, whether characterized by single-party or parliamentary multiparty systems, ideological conflicts have been muted or eliminated. Even the socialist and capitalist systems themselves are no longer seen as mutually irreconcilable. These diverse formations can apparently all be contained and tamed within an increasingly homogenous capitalism, in which the division of the international order into ‘three worlds’ has also increasingly lost its political significance. Meanwhile, anti-capitalist movements, symbolized by Occupy Wall Street, however loud and visible, have been weak in reality. Trapped by the prevailing media, most such movements pay no attention to the legacy of fierce political struggle of the last century.
All of this applies to China as well, where many show disdain for the political innovations of the revolution almost seven decades on. This is hardly surprising given that the Communist revolutions of East Asia have fallen into ambiguous betrayal, almost buried in the shadows of the market. But Marx’s spectre of the communist revolutionary movement has by no means entirely disappeared. And it is significant that it has most often taken a Maoist shape, as could be seen from the spectacle of parties and movements of which revolutionary violence remained a feature, and which have led or promoted a protracted people’s war in Peru, Colombia, the Philippines, Turkey, and the entire South Asian region. Very differently from the protest movements in the developed countries, the Maoist movements did not hesitate to declare their roots in the twentieth-century revolutionary movement they sought to continue, especially the Chinese revolution. In the capitalist peripheries, questions of land, national liberation, democratic revolution and economic growth still form the basic agenda. Especially in South Asia, the Maoist movement’s deployment of the twentieth century’s basic political vocabulary of anti-imperialism and anti-feudalism appears still valid and effective, as the caste system, land relations, national independence and other issues continue to be central concerns.
Like the revolutionary movements of the twentieth century, contemporary Maoist movements have combined peaceful protest, armed struggle, relations with the workers and peasants, and ‘the line struggle’ through practice and theoretical debate, striving to achieve political unity and forge a new political subject through a dynamic process of division and integration. These features hardly find any equivalent in the contemporary social movements centred in urban middle classes. Such movements are often short-lived, fragmented, and based on immediate interests and mainstream values. The lack of a process of remolding the subject (or of self-negation in order to form a new self) makes it impossible for social struggle to be sustained. The scale, longevity, intensity and political innovation of the Maoist movement distinguishes it from the various Occupy movements in the west.
Calling this persistence of Maoist practice a ‘spectacle’ is deliberate, intended to contrast it with both the spectacular collapse of most Communist parties or their degeneration through an embrace of neoliberal globalization, as well as the spectacle of protest movements like Occupy. The ‘spectacle’ of Maoist movements also offers a sharp contrast to the overwhelming focus of contemporary scholarship on globalization, the rise of Chinese capitalism, financial crises, etc. Even the more critical currents leave little, if any, space for the possibility of overcoming capitalism through revolutionary means. As such, old categories, from class to nation, autonomism to internationalism, become the subjects of negative reflection and deconstruction. In the context of contemporary thinking, we can hardly find traces of the Maoist movement; or else it is no more than a synonym of terrorism. We have become accustomed to observing our world through the lens of the ‘end of history’, even for many people who firmly reject such a theory. This is why it is especially important to insist on asking whether Maoism as movement and party still bears lessons for people engaged in various forms of struggle.
People’s war was an innovation particular to the Chinese Revolution, unlike political phenomena elsewhere of parties, party politics, and governments, which originated in nineteenth-century Europe and twentieth-century Russia. Without understanding people’s war, one cannot comprehend the uniqueness of the Chinese revolution or grasp the deep differences between revolutionary ‘party construction’ and other forms of party politics. Without understanding people’s war, one also cannot understand the historical implications of such distinctive political concepts produced in twentieth-century China as the mass line and the united front.
The party described its articulation in the Chinese Communist revolution as ‘new democratic’. In specifying its basic tasks as that of overthrowing imperialist powers and ‘feudal’ relations, the revolution was simultaneously national and social in nature, lifting up an oppressed nation and its toiling masses, building momentum and gaining strength from the rural margins, encircling the cities from the countryside and seizing state power through a people’s war. The revolution paved the way for China’s subsequent modern industrial and social development, contravening the supposedly universal paradigm of capitalist development. Meanwhile, the Chinese revolution was also ‘part of the world revolution’ as Mao noted in 1940 in On New Democracy. Its world-historical significance lay in its transformative and emancipatory effects on China and its immense influence on the third world. The ‘New China’ signified it was possible to make a break with the old world.
The Chinese Communist party, founded in 1921, was left with the tasks that the republican revolution of 1911 had been unable to accomplish. The tragic defeat of the communists in 1927, when the counterrevolutionary force within the Kuomintang party (KMT) slaughtered workers and communist sympathizers, compelled a major shift in revolutionary strategy. Since the working class only constituted a tiny minority of the population, with the majority being peasants, revolutionary workers and intellectuals in the urban centres began to move to the countryside. A new theory of a staged revolution accompanied this, involving a differentiation between minimum and maximum party programmes: the first step towards socialism and communism would be land redistribution. There was also a change from conceiving a political movement centred around a vanguard party to organizing a people’s war based on the close intertwining of party and army, with both seen as based in the people. And starting around 1930, the Chinese revolution began running local governments in its base areas. All three – party, army, and local government – were seen as closely linked in the process of state building even before securing national power.
In 1925-26, the KMT adopted the policy of allying with the Soviet Union and the CCP, and the two parties cooperated to promote peasant and workers’ movements. The Peasant Movement Training Institute at Guangzhou led by Mao Zedong was only one of a dozen of similar institutes to train peasant activists. During the period of the Northern Expedition, the KMT focused on two goals: constructing a political army for the party free of the influence of the old warlords, and building peasants’ and workers’ movements in cooperation with the CCP. Thus the notions of a politicized army for the party, and of resisting armed counterrevolution with armed revolution, were initially formulated not by the CCP but rather the early KMT, still under the influence of the Comintern. But critically, the transformation of the CCP would not have been possible without the concept of people’s war, which was developed only after it was betrayed by the KMT and its activity in the cities was brutally suppressed in 1927.
The CCP was initially composed of petty bourgeois intellectuals who were even less connected with the peasants and workers than the KMT. This was worlds apart from what emerged later in the Jiangxi Soviet period (1931-34). Likewise, the urban uprisings and workers’ struggles led by Qu Qiubai, Li Lisan and Wang Ming among others after Chiang Kai-shek’s all-out attack on the CCP in 1927 differed markedly from the strategy of ‘encircling the cities from the countryside’ later deployed during the people’s war. The party’s unification with the army, the ‘red political power’ of the soviet governments it established in the base areas, and the peasant masses through the agrarian revolution, as well as its relationship with other parties, social classes and their political representatives, all took shape through the people’s war, which created a type of political party that differed from all political parties of the past. This party also created a class subject different from all working-class parties of the past, a class subject structured by a membership composed mainly of peasants.
Mao’s famous ‘Sanwan reorganization’ of the Red Army in 1927 was centred on the project of making ‘party branches within the regiment’ and setting up ‘soldiers’ committees’ oriented toward creating equality between officers and soldiers. The reorganization facilitated an organic, integral relationship between the party, army and masses. The joining of two armies that had participated in the Nanchang and Autumn Harvest Uprisings and created the Jiangxi Soviet Revolutionary Base Area in 1928 was a milestone for the people’s war. Within the base areas, party politics morphed into a mass movement through the military struggle for land reform. While the army implemented land reform, the party (or at least the rural soviets under the guidance of the party) administered economic life and promoted cultural and ideological activities among the people. This complex intertwining of the party, army, government and peasant movement facilitated the creation of a completely new revolutionary political subject: ‘the people’ (renmin). Forging the peasantry into a revolutionary political subject required a continual process of politicization. Since the interests of the peasants lay in land redistribution, they could not be expected to devote themselves to a project of ultimately abolishing private property, the ultimate political goal of the communists. Precisely because of this, the emergence of a new political subject would be impossible without integrating the party, army, soviets and masses into a coherent unity. With the peasants as its main constituent and the worker-peasant alliance as its foundation, the emergence of this new revolutionary subject facilitated the transformation of all forms of politics (including local governments, the party, peasant associations, and labor unions). People’s war, therefore, was not a purely military concept, but also a profoundly political one, which fundamentally reconceived party representation in modern politics.
One of the crucial achievements of the people’s war was the establishment of ‘red regimes’, most often in the form of independent soviet governments in the border regions between provinces, which became organizational centres of daily life. While they took what they could from foreign and Chinese historical experiences, this form of government differed from the conventional bourgeois state: it was the political expression of a class that had acquired self-consciousness through continuous political and military mobilization.
In his well-known article ‘Why is it that the red regime can exist in China?’ Mao pointed out that China was neither an imperialist country nor one ruled directly by imperialism; it was an internally unevenly developed country divided by warlords, dependent on different imperialist powers that thus controlled the country indirectly. But this situation also weakened class domination, and produced external conditions for the survival of red regimes in rural China. Frustrated by the failure of the Great Revolution (1924-27), the CCP attempted to establish red regimes in the war zones, based on the integration of the party, the army, the government and mass politics. The CCP and its local governments developed further during the War of Resistance against Japan, in which military struggle, the mass line and the united front became the guarantees of success. Later, during the Civil War in the late 1940s, anti-Japanese guerrilla warfare evolved into large-scale armed conflict, even as the war of position continued.
In the course of organizing this people’s war, the CCP and the base area governments not only attended to military issues but also questions of social organization. The party created the concept of the mass line with several principles in mind. First, serving the needs of the largest number of people would be the starting point and ultimate goal of party work. Second, only if the border region government solved the people’s problems, improved their lives and won their trust could it mobilize the broad masses to join the Red Army, support the revolutionary war and defeat the Encirclement Campaigns launched by the KMT. Thus people’s war was not only an effective military tactic to defeat the enemy, but also dealt out of necessity with crucial issues that immediately affected people’s lives, including land ownership, labour issues, gender equality, daily necessities, education, trade and money and finance. The interpenetration of the military and ordinary social life was thus a core component of people’s war. Mao repeatedly reminded CCP members that they must stay with the people, mobilize them, care for them, sincerely work for their interests, and solve problems they encountered in daily life, such as housing, rice and salt, clothing and childbirth, in order to win the support of those who would risk their lives on the battlefield.1
The mass line was the basic strategy of people’s war. It was a party policy as well as a way to reconstruct the party: without the party organization, it would not be possible to define the masses; while if the party did not mix with and learn from the masses, it would become a cumbersome structure riding on the backs of the people. In the vast countryside, this peasant-based party acquired its political and discursive position through its movements and campaigns. In this sense, it was the party and its mass line under the conditions of people’s war that created the self-consciousness of a class, and thus created a class in the political sense. Only a party that had reconstructed itself through people’s war could have created a proletarian class composed primarily of peasants. It was this unprecedented people’s war that consolidated military struggle, land revolution, base area development and the construction of a revolutionary state, through political strategies including military struggle, the mass line and the united front. With its class politics based on the alliance of workers and peasants as well as the united front of national liberation, the CCP eventually overtook the KMT, which had moved away from the peasant movement and revolutionary politics.
Party politics took its modern shape in nineteenth-century Europe. In China, this was a most important political innovation of the twentieth century, although distinctively shaped by the people’s war and its political aftermath.
There were four prerequisites for the formation of modern Chinese party politics. Firstly, the conditions of the early Republican era rendered crucial the formation of a new national politics. The party politics of the 1911 Revolution attempted to emulate the multi-party parliamentary system developed within the framework of European constitutional politics. But faced with the challenges of secessionism, monarchical restoration, and the crisis of republicanism, the revolutionaries and many political elites moved away from their original political objective. Secondly, during the First World War, many political parties in the West participated in nationalist war mobilization. Consequently, reflection on traditional modes of party politics peaked among European intellectuals after the war, forming part of the intellectual atmosphere in which Chinese party politics was reconstructed. Thirdly, the eruption of the Russian Revolution during the war led some Chinese revolutionaries to believe that Bolshevism could overcome the limits of bourgeois party politics. Lastly, modern Chinese revolutionary parties (including the KMT before 1927) gradually formed the political practice of people’s war, a new type of politics that transcended traditional political parties and their representative relations.
In other words, the crisis of party politics gave birth to the party system that was the political nucleus of this revolutionary century. This new model of political party, influenced by Leninism and the Russian revolution, bore the dual features of ‘super political party’ (chaoji zhengdang) and ‘supra party’ (chaozhengdang). The term ‘super political party’ refers to the fact that although the KMT and the CCP both had to adopt some of the elements of party politics, neither intended to limit themselves to working within competitive parliamentary structures. Instead, both aimed to become the hegemonic or ‘leading’ party. That these organizations also had a ‘supra party’ orientation means that the form of political representation they articulated differed from that in conventional parliamentary systems, and was much more similar to the Bolshevik party, with an element of the Gramscian ‘modern prince’ in representing both the people and the future.
In both Western multiparty systems and the Chinese system of multiparty cooperation under one party rule, the representativeness of political parties has become increasingly obscure. In the case of China, the representativeness of the party has diminished alongside the lucidity of such traditional categories as the proletariat, the worker-peasant alliance, and the united front.2 The most severe symptom of what might be called this ‘rupture of representativeness’ is the ‘statification’ of the party, or the integration of the party into the framework of state. As both its function and form of organization become ever more assimilated with the state apparatus, the party has been deprived of the independent essence needed for political organization and mobilization. This process implies the end of the mass line, which had engendered the political dynamism of the CCP.
Two interrelated forms of the statification of the party can be identified: first, the bureaucratization of the party beginning in the early days of the People’s Republic, which was one of the pivotal reasons for the Cultural Revolution; and second, the marriage of the party and capital through the corporatization of the government which accompanied market reforms. The ‘rupture of representativeness’ manifests itself most intensely in the incongruity between the party’s claim to general representation transcending the old class categories, and its increasing distance from the people, especially those from lower social strata. There are of course still policies protective of workers and peasants; however, one can barely discern any organic connection between party politics and the politics of workers and peasants.
The detachment of the political system from society has happened not only in the socialist or post-socialist countries, but also in Western party systems and other systems based on these. Just as in China the relationship between the party and its class basis becomes ever more vague, the distinction between left and right among Western political parties has become blurred. Unlike in the nineteenth century and in the early twentieth century, it is hard to find political movements with clear agendas in today’s party politics. The fracturing of representativeness has so intensified that one might even conclude that the party politics, which flourished in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, has either disappeared completely or persists only in limited areas. Conventional party politics either is transforming, or has already transformed, into a state-party politics, with parties serving as a structure of state power. If one investigates whether it is political parties that control the state, or conversely the logic of the state that dictates to parties, the latter may be a better answer.
The boundary between party and state is vanishing, and the outcome of their assimilation is the dissolution of political representativeness, which in turn renders ever more asymmetrical the power relations in the political sphere. Rather than balancing or reducing inequalities in the socioeconomic sphere, this conflation of party and state actually provides an effective institutional support for this. The fracture of representativeness allows the rhetoric of politicians to degenerate into a performance aimed at grabbing power, while techno-bureaucrats strive for higher political positions. In the Western multi-party or dual party structure, the role of political parties is fundamentally social mobilization pivoting on elections that take place every four or five years. In these contexts, the party is more like a state apparatus for the rotation of leaders.
The super political party in China was originally sustained by rigorous organization, straightforward value orientation, and mass movements characterized by vigorous interaction between theory and practice. However, today the CCP has almost been reduced to an administrative organization. The party has become a component of the management apparatus, with its function of mobilization and supervision being increasingly identical with the state mechanism, as its bureaucratic form intensifies and its political distinctiveness diminishes. Additionally, the crisis of representativeness afflicts ruling parties as well as non-ruling parties the world over. In present day China, any representativeness of the eight small ‘democratic parties’ has also become unprecedentedly elusive.
The waning of the representativeness of those public institutions that mediate between state and political society (parliament in the West and the National People’s Congress and the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference in China) echoes the statification of parties. In parliamentary democracy, seats in the parliament usually reflect party constituencies. But with the decline of distinctions between political parties, the connection between parliament and society is gradually severed. In theory, the notion of proportional representation in the People’s Congress of China seems more removed from the reality of party politics than in party-centred parliamentary systems. In practice, the Chinese model needs to be buttressed by politics based in the mass line, the decline of which will undermine the process of selecting people’s deputies and the role of the Congress in China’s political life. The People’s Congress has been rightly criticized for the fact that the percentage of worker and peasant deputies in the body is radically disproportionate to the broader makeup of Chinese society.
The consequence of the crisis of representative politics has been depoliticization. As party politics has degenerated into the politics of state-party or state-parties, is ‘post-party politics’ possible? ‘Post-party politics’ refers not to any politics after political parties disappear, but to the fact that they have taken on new roles in the context of depoliticization. The idea of ‘post-political parties’ indicates that although parties still act as leading political entities, they have lost their earlier representativeness and original logic of identity. At the same time, political form remains stable, as major political institutions are still based on the principle of party representation. Precisely because of this, the fracture of representativeness is the main symptom of today’s political crisis.
The reality of ‘post-party politics’ implies the necessity to devise a new practice beyond the framework of party politics. The key issues are how to reconstruct representativeness, at what level, and whether we should think differently about representation altogether. In the political practice of twentieth-century China, elements of ‘post-party politics’ were present, but only as the practice of a ‘super-political party’ in the people’s war, based on the mass line and the united front. These practices attempted to transcend conventional representative relations. Today’s party politics in China is also generated by the degradation of a ‘super-party’ into a state-party system. In order to overcome the crisis of representation, we need to reconstruct representativeness and to explore new paths of post-party politics. Two dimensions of ‘post-party politics’ need to be tackled: a re-examination of the principles of representative politics in twentieth-century China, and an exploration of the conditions and possibilities of ‘post-party politics’.
Such re-examination and exploration may yield important lessons for contemporary social movements. The Occupy movement did not only have a huge impact in the United States, but also inspired anti-capitalist movements in other regions. However, these movements have several obvious weaknesses. First, with the end of the twentieth-century socialist movements, contemporary movements are deeply skeptical about the organizational morphology of political parties. This has resulted in their lack of real leadership, clear political programme and accompanying short-term strategy. Moreover, due to their inability to link protests with long-term social experimentation, the Occupy movements have not nurtured a coherent new political subject: the ‘we’ is only a temporarily aggregated group and not a sustainable political process. This is one of the differences between the mass movement in the conditions of people’s war and the mass movements of today. Still, we cannot use the former case to denigrate the latter, nor should we use the latter to negate the former, since the foundational historical situations are different in each case.
However, can we learn something from the mass movements of the previous era? In the discursive context of the Chinese revolution, Mao’s basic slogan was ‘from the masses, to the masses’. In fact, ‘to the masses’ was an idea of the Comintern, which called on the revolutionaries, especially the elite elements (professors, doctors, lawyers, teachers, etc.) to join the mass movements. But ‘from the masses’ was a product of the people’s war. The masses did not emerge spontaneously, but were rather organized as a politically meaningful category of subjective agency (recall the principles of Sanwan Reorganization: only when the soldiers formed their own soldiers’ committees could the party find its masses in the army). The formation of the masses is the formation of the ‘we’ – not as an old, spontaneous existence, but as a brand new subject. The ‘mass line’ did not only change the masses, but also the elites joining in the mass movement. Together they formed the new ‘we’.
Today, the political logic of the twentieth century has receded. The intellectuals mostly look at the stratification of Chinese society and its politics in a positivist manner, forgetting that class politics in twentieth-century China had elements of a supra-representative politics. In the struggle between the KMT and the CCP, and in the war of resistance against the Japanese, the united front, armed struggle, party construction, and so on became the CCP’s political assets. The mass line, summarized as ‘all for the masses, all relies on the masses; from the masses and to the masses’, was the main pathway through which the politics of this ‘supra-’ and ‘super-’ political party was constructed. Apart from the Soviet tradition, the project of state building in the base areas in preparation for the future national power also borrowed from western representation systems, including the election of representatives and the very narrative of representativeness itself (not only of the CCP but of the other democratic parties). However, obviously this political praxis contained supra- or post-political party elements as well. The supra-party aspect of party politics can also be interpreted as a feature of supra-representativeness: it encapsulates the relationship between politics and culture, and between political party and masses.
The experience of the Chinese revolution was based on praxis, correcting its mistakes through theoretical debates and political struggle, and consequently creating the premises for new strategies and new practice. When theoretical debates were more active, the political realm was more lively and innovations in political structure more dynamic. Mao’s conceptions of principal and secondary contradictions, the principal and secondary aspects of a contradiction, the transformation of a contradiction, the epistemology of split of one into two, and so on – all intrinsically related to the military strategy of the people’s war – were indicative of the kind of space for debate and reflection, which opened the possibility of new politics and strategies.
Highlighting the role of such theoretical and political struggles does not obviate the need for criticisms of excessive and arbitrary violence. Political persecution is the end of theoretical struggle and party line debate, and is therefore the end of inner-party competitive practice. Today, the suppression of political debate is also the end of politics. Many publications in today’s China which pretend to be conclusive about violence in history ignore the necessity of theoretical struggle over the party line, seeming to forget that shutting down the political arena results in the absence of any self-corrective mechanism in politics. This kind of research is the product of the politics of depoliticization.
The statification of political parties also marks the end of an era of mass line politics. In the context of globalization and market conditions, returning to the question of the mass line is not so much about lamenting a historical episode as about undertaking a new quest for a possible and uncertain future. The one sure thing is that some foundational concepts for understanding the construction of modern states and power systems – from sovereignty to citizenship, class to labour, etc. – need to be redefined in accordance with changed global socio-economic conditions. For example, in the Chinese discursive context, are the concepts of the working class or the worker-peasant alliance necessary to reestablish representativeness? In the conditions of a financialized capitalism, the developed countries are experiencing a process of de-industrialization. If the working class as a revolutionary class is radically shrinking or has even disappeared, what is the new political subject? In China and many other non-Western countries, large-scale industrialization has produced a massive working class constituted to a large extent by migrant workers. The re-emergence of classes is a hugely important phenomenon of contemporary Chinese society. The reuse of the language of class is inevitable. However, the expansion and restructuring of the working class is a process that is almost coextensive with the decline of working-class politics.
Not only is the newborn working-class politics very far from reaching the depth and scale of that of the earlier era, it also will most likely not repeat the twentieth-century experience. We can discern at least two features of present day working-class politics: one is the missing link between working-class politics and party politics, the other is the relative instability of loosely organized workers in a fluid production system. These features distinguish today’s workers not only from the working class during the period of socialist industrialization, but also from the earlier period of working-class formation. If the ‘rupture of representativeness’ is the expression of a disjuncture between political and social forms, then what political form could be organically linked with current social forms?
Reconstructing representativeness is inevitably and directly a matter of solving the problem of the reemergence of social classes and class conflicts. However, capitalist globalization and the deepening of statification of political parties mean that this task is not simply about reconstructing a class-based party. Rather, it is about forming a more autonomous social sphere of politics (including trade unions, peasant associations, and other social groupings broadly considered political organizations), and especially an active labour politics aimed at transforming the relations of production. The rural-urban divide and its transformation, regional disparities, rising tensions in class relations, and the destruction of the eco-environmental system by the prevailing modes of production and consumption all demonstrate the contradictions of contemporary capitalism. As such, rural construction, environmental protection, a changed growth model, the pursuit of ethnic equality and cultural diversity, and reversing the degradation of the working class should all be the driving forces of a needed politics of equality.
New political and economic realities mean that we cannot simply return to the political models of the nineteenth or twentieth century. However, ideological debate and organizational construction on the basis of an open politics remain indispensable. Even if those organizations which call themselves political parties still exist, their political meaning has changed significantly. How to make broad social forces participate in political processes more directly is a necessary question that should guide our search for a new political framework. This is also a basic precondition for the CCP to practice the mass line in a different style. Repoliticization cannot rely on old party politics, but must embrace the practice of a ‘post-party politics’. Such a politics does not negate any function of political organizations, but will emphasize their openness, looseness, and non-bureaucratic nature. The mass line and mass politics are sources of political vitality, cornerstones against right-wing populism, and the bases of the process of repoliticization and the creation of universality. This is the perspective in which the Chinese Communist revolution still makes immediate sense.
This essay draws on the chapter on the Korean War in my book China’s Twentieth Century, London: Verso, 2016 as well as my earlier essay on ‘The Crisis of Representativeness and Post-party Politics’, Modern China, 40(March), 2014, pp. 214-39.
1Mao Tse-tung, ‘Be Concerned with the Well-Being of the Masses, Pay Attention to Methods of Work’, Selected Works of Mao Tse-tung, Vol. I, Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 1965, pp. 147-52.
2The ‘decline of representation’, which suggests the detachment between political system and social form, is an issue that I have discussed on various occasions. In ‘Depoliticized Politics, the Multiple Components of Hegemony, and the Eclipse of the Sixties’ I discuss the question of depoliticized politics. See Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, 7.4(December), 2006, pp. 683-700. In ‘The Decline of Representation: Another Inquiry on “Equality of What”’, Beijing Cultural Review, 5(October), 2011, pp. 66-81 and 6(December), 2011, pp. 98-113, I explore the different types of equality crisis and its relationship with the crisis of representativeness.