2018: Editorial Board Statement on Passing of Zhang Kai

Nobel laureate and dissident writer Liu Xiaobo died on 13 July in a Chinese hospital. He was the courageous voice of modernization and democracy in China. But his voice was silenced by the government and not heard by most of the Chinese people. Xiaobo dedicated the Nobel prize to 'the martyrs of Tiananmen square'. His poetry expresses his courage and conviction and will keep his voice alive.

1979

This is my doctoral thesis from September 1979, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Department of Political Science. I am now working on an update and expansion for possible publication. You will note that there are some typos in the thesis, i.e., reference to "New York" magazine, when it should be "New Youth" magazine.

Paper prepared for presentation at Asian Studies Association of Australia (ASAA), Fourth National Conference, Monash University, May 10-14, 1982.

This article provides a general introduction to the movement in China with a focus on the period of 1931 to 1945. It is one part, though a significant part, of the larger story of Chinese Trotskyism in preparation for possible publication. Simply stated, this is the story of growth, repression, and division. It is the story of fifteen years of attack from all sides, along with isolation and internal disputes of a theoretical-political and sometimes personal nature. No period better reflects the tragic experience of this movement than the Anti-Japanese War and World War Two.

Leon Trotsky on China, 1978

This is a publisher-requested translation from the Chinese written especially for this 1978 book. Translation by Joseph Thomas Miller and Hui-fang Li (Miller).

ANU Press eBooks, 2023

Politics and Religion, 2012

1997

Youth, they say, is wasted on the young.

The 19 th Century was not kind to the Chinese and was filled with many natural disasters and wars alongside the Qing's transformation into a semi-colonial state. The Chinese masses responded to the instability first with mass rebellions, such as that of the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom. These revolts forced some economic and military reforms in the Qing that stabilized the state to some extent. Many fled the country as coolies or as students educated in European universities. The students came back as radicals, inspiring revolutions, and protests across the weakening Qing domain. This led to the Chinese Revolutionary Movement that had the characteristics of millenarianism, nationalism, prejudice, and the somewhat symbolic leadership of Sun Yat-sen. These characteristics are mentioned commonly in many works on the Movement such as Wong's The Origins of An Heroic Image, Rhoads' Manchus and Han, and Kuang-sheng Liao's Antiforeignism and Modernization in China 1860-1980, but none connect all of them together; their true connection lies within racial class warfare. The Qing could be regarded as the most successful dynasty to have ever ruled China because it was during this period that China ruled the most territory and had the highest population in its history. The First Opium War exposed problems, triggering millenarian peasant Jalics 2 rebellions such as the Taiping, Dungan, and Red Turban revolts. Crushing these rebellions required foreign assistance, reformist bureaucrats, and industrialization in what became known as The Self-strengthening Movement. Over the course of decades, bureaucrats like Li Hong Zhang created new artillery arsenals, a naval dockyard at Fuzhou, and the China Merchants' Steamship Navigation Company that competed with foreign steamships for coastal trade 1. These reforms made the state more effective and more prosperous, but nothing fundamentally changed, setting the stage for the Chinese Revolutionary Movement. There are many works on the Chinese Revolutionary Movement focusing on race and class in China as well as the image of Sun Yat-sen. Wong articulates the constructed image of Sun Yat-sen in his The Origins of An Heroic Image, leading to me using it to explain how Sun was perceived in the wake of his famous detainment. Rhoads' Manchus and Han notably defines how unequal the Qing system was for the Han, welcoming the comparison between it and the segregated American South. Rhoads' understanding of the Han's racial status and material conditions led me to coin the phrase racial class warfare. Millward took the ideas of this unequal system and showed how it affected the Hui in Beyond the Pass. To me, it is important to understand the development of anti-Manchuism by beginning with the unequal Qing system and then focusing on the Han response to it. Now, this paper will attempt to elaborate briefly on the context of Chinese Racial Class Warfare. The Chinese have often been the dominant race or ethnicity in dynastic times, but the Qing separated themselves by making the Manchu dominant. The Manchus were the rulers in a social sense and in an economic sense, leaving their non-Manchu subjects destitute and resentful. This paper will attempt to investigate racial class warfare by looking at the unequal Qing system, 1 Jack Gray. Rebellions and Revolutions: China From the 1800s to the 1980s (Oxford: Oxford University Press), 118 Jalics 3 the activities and writings of Sun and his comrades, and the 19 th century religious beliefs of the Chinese people to argue for the connection of Sun's image, anti-Manchuism, nationalism, and millenarianism through racial class warfare. Racial class warfare meant that the Han, and in some sense the Hui, confronted both the racial inferiority and the economic inequality that came from Qing rule. This paper will begin with analyzing Sun as the Avatar of Racial Grievances since he is often known as the Movement's symbolic leader and was one of its most copious writers. This paper will also continue to use Sun's western name instead of his other names since he cultivated his western fame as Sun Yat-sen. Sun as the Avatar of Racial Grievances The end of the First Sino-Japanese War exposed the Qing's inability to protect the population, leading to the loss of Taiwan and not having Korea as a vassal. This loss of territory and confidence led to new calls for reform, such as when the doctor Sun Yat-sen wrote to the official Li Hong Zhang in 1894 that "it is urgent that the agricultural sciences be promoted and that and that planting, and husbandry be constantly improved so as to speed up growth and multiply production." 2 Sun's origins from an agricultural family made him familiar with the hardships of Chinese agricultural life. His father had to work multiple jobs to supplement their meager farmland 3. Since Sun's plea to Li failed, he was led to help organize the First Guangzhou Uprising, one of his first instances of anti-Manchu action. The First Guangzhou Uprising was an insurrection that established many of the precedents for anti-Qing insurrections for the next 17 years. The plan was for intellectuals and secret societies to come together and take over a major city before spreading the revolution. Part of this plan was the smuggling of arms into Canton and the assassination or kidnapping of the Jalics 4 governor and many other officials 4. The insurrection capitalized on unpaid soldiers and vast outrage against the incompetency and inequities of the Qing Dynasty, channeling anti-Manchu rage into what they hoped would be a mass uprising. Most of the Cantonese contingent of the Qing army was dismissed at the end of the First Sino-Japanese War, funneling many discontent soldiers into the Uprising 5. Sun, Yang Quyun, Lu Haodong, and other intellectuals in the conspiracy believed in founding a Chinese Republic and removing colonial governments from China. Tensions ran high as protestors confronted the police near Canton's guildhall, leading to arrests and more direct action while new taxes squeezed the people dry 6. Yang oversaw fundraising, raising thousands from dedicated revolutionaries who sold their houses and from a secretive Hong Kong merchant, collecting around HK$20,000 in total 7. Nonetheless, local law enforcement disrupted the insurrection and arrested many of the revolutionaries, who were subsequently executed. More would have been arrested had many of the conspirators' papers not been burned and many weapons not been hidden 8. Anti-Manchu resentment had failed to trigger a mass uprising. Sun and Yang Chu Yun fled abroad as even their home of Hong Kong banned them. The historian John Fairbank notably described Hong Kong as "opposed to being a base for antimainland troublemakers" 9. The colonial governments in China had fought hard to get favorable trade relationships with China and were not going to give them up for a movement that had lost hard. Anti-Manchu action was being deliberately restrained by foreigners, creating resentment

HU FENG A MARXIST INTELLECTUAL IN A COMMUNIST STATE, 1930 -1955, 2020

A study of Hu Feng as a literary critic and a case study on how intellectual work can respond to political pressure. In this book, Ruth Y. Y. Hung provides a study of Hu Feng (1902–1985) as a critic, writer, and editor within the context of the People's Republic of China's political ascendancy. A member of the Japanese Communist Party and the Chinese Communist Party, Hu rose to fame in the 1940s and became a representative persecuted intellectual soon after 1949. "The Hu Feng Case" of 1955—more than a decade before the Cultural Revolution—was a significant, large-scale campaign of intellectual persecution. Hung examines Hu's work as a literary critic in this context, and examines the intricate historical and sociopolitical forces against which intellectuals in his milieu in twentieth-century China adopted Marxism as a measure of their critical position. She demonstrates how this first generation of modern Chinese literary critics practiced criticism, examining the skills and arguments they used to negotiate their institutional and ideological relations with state-party power. This exceptional case of intellectual engagement offers broader insight on critical literature's humanistic aims and methods in the context of intellectual globalization and changing political climates.