Using a wide variety of previously unavailable sources, Hong Yung Lee offers a theoretical and historical perspective on China's ruling elite, examining their politics and the bureaucratic system in which they participate. He traces the evolution of these cadres from the guerrilla fighters who first joined the communist movement and founded the new regime in 1949 to the technocratic specialists who wield power today. In the revolution, communist leaders built a peasant-based party organization whose members were largely recruited from uneducated poor peasants and hired laborers. Even after they became the founders of a new regime, their rural orientation and revolutionary experiences continued to affect the political process. Lee shows how the requirements of modernization compelled the state to replace the revolutionary cadres with bureaucratic technocrats. Selected from the postliberation generation, the new leaders are more committed to problem-solving than to socialism. Despite uncertainties in the immediate future, this elite transformation signifies an end to modern China's revolutionary era. Lee argues that it seems only a matter of time before China will have a bureaucratic-authoritarian regime led by technocrats possessing a managerial perspective and a pragmatic economic orientation. This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1991.

In From Revolution to Reform, He Li examines political and economic transformation in China and Mexico, from the Mexican and Chinese revolutions at the beginning of the 20th century, to economic reforms and political liberalization in recent decades. Li also explores lessons that other developing countries could learn from the experiences of China and Mexico.

Who will govern China at the dawn of the twenty-first century? What are the social backgrounds and career paths of the new generation of leaders? How do they differ from their predecessors in their responses to perplexing economic and sociopolitical challenges? Drawing upon a wealth of both quantitative and qualitative data on the so-called fourth generation of leaders—those who were young during the Cultural Revolution—Cheng Li sheds valuable light on these key questions. He shows that this group is more diversified than previous generations of CCP leaders in formative experiences, political solidarity, ideological conviction, and occupational background. The author explores the contradictions between political leaders and non-elite peers in the same generation—those approaching middle age who were barred from education during the Mao era and now often are unemployed and disenchanted with the government. The book concludes with the intriguing notion that this generation of leaders may have a better understanding of its peers' needs and concerns and therefore may make the regime more accountable to its people, thus contributing to, rather than opposing, democratic development.

The Chinese Communist Party (CCP), with nearly 90 million members, is the largest ruling political party in the world. Its power and influence reach into every corner of state, society and economy in China. Given the CCP’s omnipresence, in-depth knowledge of how the CCP is organised and managed and how it will likely evolve is of paramount importance and is a basic prerequisite for understanding China’s rise. By bringing together the best scholarship on the CCP, covering areas such as organisation, cadre management, recruitment and training, ideology and propaganda, factions and elites, reform and adaptation, corruption and law, this collection provides a key to open the black box of Chinese politics.

On October 1, 2009, the People's Republic of China (PRC) celebrated the 60th anniversary of its founding. And what an eventful and tumultuous six decades it had been. During that time, under the leadership of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), China was transformed from one of the world's poorest countries into the world's fastest growing major economy, and from a weak state barely able to govern or protect its own territory to a rising power that is challenging the United States for global influence. Over those same years, the PRC also experienced the most deadly famine in human history, caused largely by the actions and inactions of its political leaders. Not long after, there was a collapse of government authority that pushed the country to the brink of (and in some places actually into) civil war and anarchy. Today, China is, for the most part, peaceful, prospering, and proud. This is the China that was on display for the world to see during the Beijing Olympics in 2008. The CCP maintains a firm grip on power through a combination of popular support largely based on its recent record of promoting rapid economic growth and harsh repression of political opposition. Yet, the party and country face serious challenges on many fronts, including a slowing economy, environmental desecration, pervasive corruption, extreme inequalities, and a rising tide of social protest. Politics in China is an authoritative introduction to how the world's most populous nation and rapidly rising global power is governed today. Written by leading China scholars, the book's chapters offers accessible overviews of major periods in China's modern political history from the mid-nineteenth century to the present, key topics in contemporary Chinese politics, and developments in four important areas located on China's geographic periphery: Tibet, Xinjiang, Hong Kong, and Taiwan.

In this book Melanie Manion analyzes the largest bloodless circulation of elites in history--the massive retirement of officials in the People's Republic of China. Beginning in 1978 and continuing through the 1980s, Chinese leaders in Beijing replaced millions of old cadres, including veterans of the communist revolution, with younger generations of better educated and less generalist officials. How were the elders persuaded to retire? Manion shows how a norm of age-based exit from office, historically novel in the Chinese communist setting, was engineered by top policymakers and aided by younger cadres. Manion's research combined a wide variety of sources and methods, many new to the study of Chinese politics. The author examined hundreds of party and government documents, surveyed articles in newspapers and journals, and interviewed officials in charge of supervising cadre retirement policy. She first conducted long exploratory interviews with retired cadres, and then designed questionnaires distributed to hundreds of others for quantitative analysis. Finally, to understand the viewpoints of those with the most to gain, she interviewed younger, employed cadres. The result is a rich portrayal of manipulative leadership in post-Mao China, which reveals the key role of the private interests of all the parties involved. Originally published in 1993. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Considers four major events in modern Chinese history in the perspective of the rapid changes that were shaping the Chinese society, economy, polity, and sense of place in the world in the 1980s, a time when China was making rapid strides toward becoming more integrated with the outside world.

The massive economic transformations and political upheavals that have been sweeping China and the Soviet Union in the final decades of the twentieth century are among the great dramas of our time. Yet the origins of these revolutionary changes are murky and their outcomes unclear. Have we witnessed the demise of an archaic authoritarian order and the rise of pluralism and democracy, or are the tumultuous events of the post-Mao era and the period of perestroika more usefully viewed in light of broader patterns of power and politics in Chinese and Russian history? Considering these questions with a new interpretation of power relations and political processes in China and Russia, Mark Lupher explores the imperial era, the communist period, and the current situation in both countries. Rather than speaking of “reform,” which too often is understood as liberalization along Western lines, his discussion is focused on power restructuring—the ebb and flow of state power; the centralization and decentralization of political and economic power; and the three-way struggles between central rulers, various elites, and nonprivileged groups that drive these processes. Lupher’s power-restructuring analysis is noteworthy in combining broad comparative-historical analysis and conceptualization with a closely focused discussion and reinterpretation of the Chinese Cultural Revolution—the core of his book. By comparing and bringing new light to bear on a series of pivotal episodes in Chinese and Russian history, he furthers our understanding and assessment of processes that will continue to unfold in China, Russia, and the former Soviet republics.

In this edited volume, leading scholars from US and China analyze the challenges and opportunities for China in the 21st century, each emphasizing particular dimensions of politics, economics, political culture, and foreign policy. Issues examined include: social harmony and statecraft , media and political culture, and legality in foreign trade.