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"Walder, Andrew G"
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Agents of disorder : inside China's Cultural Revolution
Agents of Disorder is the first book to shed a clarifying light on the pattern of rebellion and repression that swept across China during the tumultuous first years of China's Cultural Revolution. Among its novel discoveries is the crucial role played by supposed \"forces of order\" in the collapse of the state and the subsequent intensification of collective violence. Internal rebellions by party-state cadres were crucial in the collapse of the state in early 1967, and the intervention of army units nationwide, instead of stabilizing the situation, accelerated the slide into factional warfare. Also notable is the finding that the vast majority of the estimated 1.6 million who died during these upheavals, and the close to 25 million estimated to have directly suffered political persecution, were victims not of the violent upheavals, but of the repression that re-established political order.-- Provided by publisher
Book
Civil war in Guangxi : the Cultural Revolution on China's southern periphery
Guangxi, a region on China's southern border with Vietnam, has a large population of ethnic minorities and a history of rebellion and intergroup conflict. In the summer of 1968, during the high tide of the Cultural Revolution, it became notorious as the site of the most severe and extensive violence observed anywhere in China during that period of upheaval. Several cities saw urban combat resembling civil war, while waves of mass killings in rural communities generated enormous death tolls. More than one hundred thousand died in a few short months. These events have been chronicled in sensational accounts that include horrific descriptions of gruesome murders, sexual violence, and even cannibalism. Only recently have scholars tried to explain why Guangxi was so much more violent than other regions. With evidence from a vast collection of classified materials compiled during an investigation by the Chinese government in the 1980s, this book reconsiders explanations that draw parallels with ethnic cleansing in Rwanda, Bosnia, and other settings. It reveals mass killings as the byproduct of an intense top-down mobilization of rural militia against a stubborn factional insurgency, resembling brutal counterinsurgency campaigns in a variety of settings. Moving methodically through the evidence, Andrew Walder provides a groundbreaking new analysis of one the most shocking chapters of the Cultural Revolution.
eBook
Revolution, Reform, and Status Inheritance: Urban China, 1949–1996
Do regime change and market reform disrupt patterns of intergenerational mobility? China's political trajectory is distinctive from that of other communist regimes in two ways. During its first three decades, the regime enforced unusually restrictive barriers to elite status inheritance. And during the subsequent market transition, unlike most of its counterparts, the Communist Party survived intact. Data from a multigeneration survey suggest that despite their obvious exclusion from the party and related administrative careers in the Mao era, certain prerevolution elites transmitted one type of elite status to their offspring to a surprising degree. Party elites, in contrast, were hit hard by radical Maoism but recovered quickly afterward, and their offspring inherited elite status at much higher rates.
Journal Article
Political Sociology and Social Movements
Until the 1970s, the study of social movements was firmly within a diverse sociological tradition that explored the relationship between social structure and political behavior, and was preoccupied with explaining variation in the political orientation of movements: their ideologies, aims, motivations, or propensities for violence. Subsequently, a breakaway tradition redefined the central problem, radically narrowing the scope of interest to the process of mobilization—how social groups, whoever they are and whatever their aims, marshal resources, recruit adherents, and navigate political environments in order to grow and succeed. Critics would later insist that the construction of meaning, the formation of collective identities, and the stimulation and amplification of emotions play vital and neglected roles in mobilization, but these alternatives did not challenge the narrowed construction of the problem itself. The resulting subfield has largely abandoned the quest to explain variation in the political orientation of movements. Researchers in related fields—on revolution, unions, and ethnic mobilization—have retained an interest in explaining political orientation, although they often view it primarily as a by-product of mobilization. Reviving theories about the impact of social structure on movement political orientation will require integrating insights from research on related but widely scattered subjects.
Journal Article
Social stratification in transitional economies: property rights and the structure of markets
In transitions from state socialism, property rights are re-allocated to organizations and groups, creating new markets and new forms of economic enterprise that reshape the stratification order. A generation of research has estimated individual-level outcomes with income equations and mobility models, relying on broad assumptions about economic change. We redirect attention to the process of economic change that structures emerging markets. The process varies across market sectors, depending on the entity that is granted rights formerly exercised by state organs, and on the combination of rights they are granted. The transformation of three sectors in China—agriculture, steel manufacturing, and real estate—shows how different allocations of property rights alter the stratification order in strikingly different ways. Historical analysis of the evolution of markets and enterprises integrates insights from economic sociology into research on social stratification, providing a structural perspective on transitions from state socialism.
Journal Article
The Dynamics of Collapse in an Authoritarian Regime
Theories of rebellion and revolution neglect short-run processes within state structures that can undermine their internal cohesion. These processes are evident in the rapid unraveling of the Chinese state early in the Cultural Revolution. Portrayed in past accounts as a culmination of student and worker insurgencies, an early 1967 wave of power seizures was in fact accelerated by an internal rebellion of bureaucrats against their own superiors. These led to the widespread collapse of local governments, diverting the course of the Cultural Revolution and forcing intervention by the armed forces. An event-history analysis of the diffusion of power seizures across a hierarchy of 2,215 government jurisdictions portrays a top-down cascade that spread deeply into rural regions with few students and workers and little popular protest. The internal rebellions were generated endogenously by events during the course of these upheavals, as individual officials reacted to shifting circumstances that threatened their positions.
Journal Article
Local Governments as Industrial Firms: An Organizational Analysis of China's Transitional Economy
Despite widespread skepticism about government ownership in transitional economies, China's rapid industrial growth has been led by public enterprises. Kornai's theory of soft budbet constraints, born of the failure of earlier Hungarian reforms, fosters such skepticism-but it assumes as fixed organizational characteristics that in fact vary widely across government jurisdictions. Local governments with smaller industrial bases have clearer financial incentives and constraints, fewer nonfinancial interests in enterprises, and a greater capacity to monitor them. In China's vast public sector, the fastest growth in output and productivity has occurred where government ownership rights are clearest and most easily enforced, which enables officials to manage public industry as a diversified market-oriented firm.
Journal Article
Generating a Violent Insurgency: China’s Factional Warfare of 1967–19681
The origins of the armed warfare between rebel alliances that spread across China in the late 1960s have long been obscure. This historical puzzle poses two distinct but interrelated questions: first, how and why did rebel factions form, and second, why did armed warfare follow? The authors develop a theory of political orientations as a product of contingent interactions among rebel groups and military units after the collapse of local governments and derive testable implications for the emergence of factional conflict across regions and over time. The authors then extend the theory to link levels of violence to the duration of time that conflicts remained unresolved in localities under military control, implying that violence intensified over time as the anticipated costs of defeat escalated. Both implications are tested with a national data set of 17,319 political events extracted from 2,246 city and county annals.
Journal Article
Anatomy of a Regional Civil War: Guangxi, China, 1967–1968
During the violent early years of China’s Cultural Revolution, the province of Guangxi experienced by far the largest death toll of any comparable region. One explanation for the extreme violence emphasizes a process of collective killings focused on households in rural communities that were long categorized as class enemies by the regime. From this perspective, the high death tolls were generated by a form of collective behavior reminiscent of genocidal intergroup violence in Bosnia, Rwanda, and similar settings. Evidence from investigations conducted in China in the 1980s reveals the extent to which the killings were part of a province-wide suppression of rebel insurgents, carried out by village militia, who also targeted large numbers of noncombatants. Guangxi’s death tolls were the product of a counterinsurgency campaign that more closely resembled the massacres of communists and suspected sympathizers coordinated by Indonesia’s army in wake of the coup that deposed Sukarno in 1965.
Journal Article