Mao Tse-tung and Secret Societies

It used to be a truism that 20th-century China witnessed one of the great peasant revolutions of world history. The Chinese Communist Party built a popular base in the countryside, and eventually a massive army of peasant soldiers surrounded the cities and drove the urban-based Kuomintang from the Mainland. In the comparative literature, the Chinese revolution was classified as a peasant revolution, and a number of important studies sought to explain the social origins of that phenomenon.

Deconstructing the Construction of the Party-State: Gulin County in the Shaan-Gan-Ning Border Region

Esherick¹

1994

Stuart Reynolds Schram, 1924–2012

MacFarquhar¹

2012

Stuart Schram, polymath and polyglot, the greatest Western expert on Mao Zedong's life and thought, died peacefully in Brittany early in the morning of 8 July 2012 at the age of 88. During his lifetime he had studied a wide range of subjects and countries before finally settling into what readers of this journal would consider his major field in his thirties. Stuart was born in Excelsior, Minnesota on 27 February 1924, the son of a dentist and a company financial officer who divorced when their son was quite young. Stuart's anger that they never spoke to each other thereafter persisted well into manhood, indicating the emotional scar the divorce caused him. Though much of his adult life was spent in great cities-New York, Paris, Londonhe never lost his taste for fishing the lakes of his native state. After he married again in 1972, he and his French wife Marie-Annick (née Lancelot) would spend about three weeks there most summers in a log cabin. Stuart used to fish with his father and later, when their only child Arthur was old enough, he delighted in teaching him the ways of the woods and how to fish. In his youth, Stuart also developed a passion for music. He studied the piano and always regretted having given it up when he was 17. As a father, he was very involved in Arthur studying the violin, and always took him to his lessons; Harold Kahn, the emeritus Stanford Qing historian, believes that he "put a violin in the baby's hands as an affirmation of his pride and expectations"! David Shambaugh, Stuart's junior colleague at SOAS, recalls Arthur being asked to perform for dinner guests at a young age at the Schram's London residence. Stuart would listen to classical music when working, opera being his particular love and Maria Callas his favourite diva. In his later years in the US, every Saturday afternoon he listened to the live broadcasts from the Metropolitan Opera. He also liked listening to recordings of the speeches of Winston Churchill, often with tears in his eyes; if he had a hero it was apparently Churchill, not Mao. As one might expect, Stuart was a great reader. He was a Jane Austen fan and made a point of reading all Shakespeare's plays each year. But he leavened his diet with detective novels, mostly classics of an older generation: Raymond * I am very grateful to David Shambaugh for soliciting memories of Stuart Schram from his former colleagues at SOAS and in France, and his keenness that Stuart's SOAS years should be portrayed in the round; and to him and Nancy Hearst for editorial suggestions.

The Rise of a Chinese House Church: The Organizational Weapon

Koesel¹

2013

This article investigates the similarities between the organizational innovation of one underground Protestant house church in China and the rise of early communist parties. Much like the spread of communism, the organizational tactics of the church are designed to protect it in a hostile political environment. The different levels are insulated from each other, with limited knowledge of the members above and below. In this way, if anyone is raided by the authorities, the others can continue to function with little interruption. Thus, the highly touted “organizational weapon” developed by the Bolsheviks and recycled, for example, by the Chinese Communist Party in their struggle for power, has resurfaced many years later. However, this time it has been adopted by a religious “vanguard.”