Taking Power analyzes the causes behind some three dozen revolutions in the Third World between 1910 and the present. It advances a theory that seeks to integrate the political, economic, and cultural factors that brought these revolutions about, and links structural theorizing with original ideas on culture and agency. It attempts to explain why so few revolutions have succeeded, while so many have failed. The book is divided into chapters that treat particular sets of revolutions including the great social revolutions of Mexico 1910, China 1949, Cuba 1959, Iran 1979, and Nicaragua 1979, the anticolonial revolutions in Algeria, Vietnam, Angola, Mozambique, and Zimbabwe from the 1940s to the 1970s, and the failed revolutionary attempts in El Salvador, Peru, and elsewhere. It closes with speculation about the future of revolutions in an age of globalization, with special attention to Chiapas, the post-September 11 world, and the global justice movement.

Taking Power: On the Origins of Third World Revolutions

The Chinese Communist Revolution of 1949 introduced a major historical disjunction in Chinese society, in its political-economic structure, in its social organization and institutions, in cultural and discursive practices, and therefore in the way that power operates through them. This article will explore some of the ways in which the reordering of power relations, operating through the state apparatus in the new society (in urban contexts), exhibits some key features of modernity, while at the same time it also represents an extension of power mechanisms already present in the Chinese cultural repertoire. The Chinese socialist state did not arise ex nihilo, nor merely with the introduction of Western, Japanese, and Russian Marxism. Chinese civilization has had a long tradition of the centralized state, going back at least as far as the establishment of its first unified empire in 221 B.C. out of the breakdown of Zhou dynasty feudalism. Yet never before, even in the history of a society that was one of the original models for the "Asiatic mode of production," did the state assume so much responsibility for administering not only economic production and distribution, but also social reproduction and the government of everyday life, as with the discourse and practice of state socialism. How is this new, or renewed, state power exercised in society? Several forms of power have been proposed for socialism: exploitation, despotism, totalitarianism. Arguments that socialism is a form of state capitalism imply that there is a continuation of capitalist exploitation by a new ruling class of bureaucrats who extract surplus labor. That exploitation is the dominant mode of power in state socialist societies has been easily demolished by critics who point out that societies where there is an absence of private property, a radical reduction of market mechanisms, "a dissolution of the institutional separation between economy and state," and an underemphasis on economic rationality can hardly be described as capitalist (Feher, Heller, and Markus 1983:22-37). In the case of China, countless ideological campaigns and political study sessions for laborers and cadres alike, and policies of permanent and overemployment of labor in industry certainly did not contribute to productive efficiency and profit maximization so highly valued by capitalist rationality. Despotism (Oriental, bureaucratic) has also been featured as the hallmark of power in socialism. This is the thesis that socialism amounts to an "Asiatic res

The Modernity of Power in the Chinese Socialist Order

Few political parties have the opportunity to make a fresh start in a new location. An organization is rarely able to leave the environment in which its lessons are learned and apply them in a new one. However, the Chinese Kuomintang (KMT) encountered this situation after its defeat on the Chinese mainland and retreat to Taiwan. From 1950 to 1952, the KMT underwent a thorough organizational restructuring. The result was a renewal of its Leninist origins from the previous reorganization in 1924. During 1950–52, the KMT created a network of Party cells throughout the government, military and society to which each Party member had to belong. The principles of democratic centralism, ideology as guide to policy, hierarchical authority, and Party authority over the government bureaucracy and the military were reasserted.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/654239.pdf

The Lessons of Defeat: The Reorganization of the Kuomintang on Taiwan, 1950–52

To many Chinese, Nationalist rule marked the beginning of a new era, when China would again be unified and strong, when there would be economic plenty for all, and when they would no longer feel shame at being Chinese. In September 1927, representatives of the Nanking and Hankow governments and of the Western Hills faction formed a 'Central Special Committee' which established a new, supposedly unified, Nationalist government at Nanking. This new government was no more stable than its predecessors. The two most powerful leaders in the Nationalist movement, Chiang Kai-shek and Wang Ching-wei, had been excluded from it. Under Chiang's aegis, the Nationalist government in Nanking was transformed into a military dictatorship. The Kuomintang membership by 1927 had become intolerably disparate, and Chiang Kai-shek accordingly began to screen out many of the members that to him appeared to be undesirables. In the process, he fundamentally altered the character of the Nationalist movement.

Nationalist China during the Nanking decade, 1927–1937

The Ideology of Fascism: The Rationale of Totalitarianism@@@European Fascism

The Blue Shirts during the 1930s became one of the most influential and feared political movements in China. To both contemporaries and historians, however, the Blue Shirt movement has been a shadowy force, known mostly through hearsay, with little solid information regarding its doctrine or its activities. Now, on the basis of memoirs, interviews, and especially Japanese intelligence reports of the 1930s, a rough picture of this secret organization can be pieced together. And the image that emerges is not simply a terrorist organization, but a political faction that reflected the concerns and ideals of many Chinese during the troubled Nanking decade. This study will, it is hoped, not only provide an insight into the nature of Kuomintang rule, but will shed light on a previously unexamined species of the political genus, fascism.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/652110.pdf

Fascism in Kuomintang China: The Blue Shirts

“To tell the truth, never, in China or abroad, has there been a revolutionary party as decrepit (tuitang) and degenerate (fubai) as we [the Guomindang] are today; nor one as lacking spirit, lacking discipline, and even more, lacking standards of right and wrong as we are today. This kind of party should long ago have been destroyed and swept away!”1

Lloyd E. Eastman

Papers

Fascism in Kuomintang China: The Blue Shirts

Who Lost China? Chiang Kai-shek Testifies

Fascism and Modern China: A Rejoinder

Hsiang-Ya Journal. By Ruth Altman Greene. [Hamden, Connecticut: Archon Books. 1977. 171 pp. $10.00.]

Chinese Communism in 1927: City vs. Countryside . By Hsiao Tsoliang. [Hong Kong: The Chinese University of Hong Kong, 1970. 197 pp. U.S. $7.50.]