This chapter tracks the importance and resilience of CPC ideology by examining the development of Mao Zedong Thought from his early Communist writings (1927–1940) through to Yan’an Rectification (1942–1945) and then during his reign as Supreme Leader (1949–1976). It then explores Mao Zedong Thought’s importance for the CPC today. CPC leaders since Mao’s death have invoked, and continue to invoke, Mao Zedong Thought for legitimation and to exhibit continuity despite shifts away from the ideology and practice of the Mao era. Mao Zedong Thought thus fulfills a legitimative need rather than a social one; CPC leaders must acknowledge, and often reference, Mao Zedong Thought to project continuity even if the ruptures since Mao’s death have resulted in an un-Maoist Party-state.

What held the textual community of the People’s Republic together? This chapter explores how literary acts by individuals across a spectrum of influence, from Mao Zedong to Xu Chengmiao, created meaning and connection out of the imagery of the Hundred Flowers. Despite his leadership of the Leninist state mechanism, in early 1957 Mao joined in what had been dismissed as “language games” with his own extended allegory and metaphor that borrowed more from writers like Ai Qing than from Party formulism. This chapter argues that Mao’s creative appropriation of the imagery of the Hundred Flowers enabled him to speak to a broad audience that included the Soviet leadership, Party conservatives, and literati across the political spectrum. The creative circulation of the Hundred Flowers enacted a resurrection of literary communities with roots in dynastic China. Finally, we turn to the writers Guo Xiaochuan, Xiao Jun, and Xu Chengmiao to observe how personal literary practice connected writers to the growing national movement and how the movement of a literary trope created a national community.

This chapter explores the interactions of high-level Chinese and North Korean leaders. It argues that the actions of Chinese and North Korean leaders – especially Mao Zedong and Kim Il Sung – were critical to building political order in the PRC and the DPRK. It shows how the utterances and actions of these leaders were particularly influential in shaping popular emotions and establishing the legitimacy of the PRC and DPRK.

From the summer of 1957 and throughout the Mao era, “poisonous weed” was a label to be avoided at all costs. Having fallen for the flowers in early 1957, Xu Chengmiao would find himself labeled a “poisonous weed” by the end of the year. As with the Hundred Flowers, the advent of this pernicious botanical label has its own history. This chapter explores how “poisonous weeds” entered the Chinese garden, the role of the Soviet Union in the Chinese Arcadian turn, and how lionized writers such as Guo Moruo gave an endogenous spin to writing that celebrated an idyllic rural life. This then deepened the creative engagement with the Hundred Flowers as it traveled back to the Soviets and into internal circulars. It also studies how the circulation of the Hundred Flowers helped Mao navigate the fallout from Khrushchev’s “secret speech,” and what happened after the chairman stepped into the garden with his own take on the flowers.

In this chapter, I survey major historical cases to examine different paradigms under which a disciplinary action against a Politburo member could be launched and how these paradigms were observed, abandoned, or changed over time. I find two prominent paradigms. One is a highly ideologized model developed during the Yan’an Rectification Campaign in 1941-1942. This model enables the winning party to conduct a purge of its adversaries with broad scope and impact, while reinforcing Party unity. It also has several disadvantages, including heightened social disruption, excessive purging, and the exposure of divisions in the Party leadership. The other is the de-ideologized corruption model. The paradigm shift was spurred by the political crisis of 1989, attributed at least in part to the exposure of an ideological split at the Party Center. Another reason for the shift was the introduction of the age-limit norm, which provided an alternative mechanism to facilitate peaceful exits of Politburo members in a regular and predictable manner. Under Xi Jinping's rule, the utility of the corruption model has been maximized. At the same time, the resulting power shakeup led to widespread political resentment, which, in turn, triggered the politicization of the corruption model.

The crises over the offshore islands along China’s south and southeast coast in the 1950s momentarily brought America closer to war with the Chinese Communist Party, while putting the relationship between Taipei and Washington to a serious test. These isles were embedded in the unfinished civil war between Mao Zedong and Chiang Kai-shek, and were resolved in part by the United States asserting its interests vis-à-vis its new treaty ally. But ironically, the crises also provided an opportunity for secret communications and ultimately a kind of détente between the two supposedly deadly enemies across the Taiwan Strait, which proved surprisingly long-lived. As this chapter elucidates, the result of the crises over the Taiwan Straits was a surprising outcome: After intense offshore island crises the conflict essentially died down; shelling was ritualistic and both sides effectively restrained themselves in a way that led to a sort of long peace.

Irregular war, like war, remains an enduring feature of security studies both as they relate to internal state security and sovereignty as well as to international relations. Irregular war may not always appear to hold political purposes; many today seem driven by religious ideology, but the institution of theocratic governance has a politics of its own. Thus, like regular war, irregular war is subordinate to a political purpose. Whether they occur on the periphery of regular wars or perform roles to keep state competition from escalating into conflict, irregular wars are often intricately tied to their regular counterparts. While two broad theories of counterinsurgency both claim to have prescriptions for winning an irregular fight, one – the good governance approach – is plagued by problems of implementation at the governmental level, and the other – coercion – entails unreasonable brutality against both insurgent and population, often unbefitting a liberal counterinsurgent force.

Chapter 11 focuses on the creation, expansion, and operating mechanism of the communist totalitarian regimes in China. Its coverage starts from the first of these regimes, the Chinese Soviet Republic, founded in 1931, up to the founding of the nationwide regime, the People’s Republic of China, and the establishment of a full-fledged classical totalitarian system. The key communist totalitarian strategies were state mobilization and domination, including land reform and the suppression of those deemed to be counterrevolutionaries. The chapter explores the regime’s progression from decentralized to centralized totalitarianism, detailing how power became more concentrated over time. The final section explores the “Sovietization” of the state, describing the construction of a classical totalitarian system, following the Soviet model, which was characterized by strict centralized control and ideological uniformity. This transformation laid the groundwork for the pervasive and enduring nature of the Chinese communist state.

Not only did the institutional genes of the Chinese imperial system facilitate the transplantation of totalitarianism from Soviet Russia to China, but they also guided China’s divergence into regionally administered totalitarianism (RADT), which localized and enhanced the adaptability of the Chinese Communist system. Chapter 12 traces the inception and entrenchment of RADT in China. It begins with the Anti-Rightist Movement that established the foundation for a divergence from the Soviet model by instituting a national reign of terror. The transition to RADT began with the Great Leap Forward, when poorly conceived regional competition, characteristic of the RADT regime, precipitated the Great Famine within the nascent People’s Commune system. The Cultural Revolution further entrenched the RADT regime, allowing it to establish its roots firmly within the Chinese political landscape.

Chapter 10 investigates the establishment and growth of China’s Bolshevik Party, the core element in the communist totalitarian revolution and regime, that was orchestrated by the Comintern. The chapter commences with an examination of the inception and operational dynamics of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) as a Comintern offshoot. It also addresses the reorganization of the Kuomintang (KMT) and the formation of the CCP-KMT alliance as key strategies implemented by the Comintern to bolster the fledgling CCP.

The narrative underscores the essential role the Chinese secret societies played in the development of the CCP’s organizational and military forces, following the directives of the Comintern and their implementation in practice. Additionally, the chapter examines the introduction of totalitarian rules within the CCP and its military branches, which fostered a reign of terror and enabled the rise of a totalitarian leader. It traces the initial establishment of a totalitarian institutional structure within the CCP and assesses the Comintern’s decisive role in fortifying the CCP’s ultimate leadership, suggesting its profound and lasting impacts on the Chinese political landscape.

In East Asia, the liberal Westernizing tendencies of the 1920s were replaced in the 1930s by authoritarian single-party rule in China and ultranationalistic militarism in Japan. Japan was wracked by a series of assassinations and attempted coups, which left the miliary in control. On the pretext of a staged explosion on the tracks of the Japanese-run South Manchurian Railroad (in China) in 1931, the Japanese army seized control over much of Manchuria and established a puppet state called Manchukuo. While Chiang Kai-shek struggled to put the Republic of China on a secure foundation, the rising communist leader Mao Zedong began experimenting with rural peasant revolution. After Chiang Kai-shek was kidnapped by his own generals and compelled to agree to a United Front with the Communists against Japan, a minor incident in July 1937 triggered the start of full-scale war with Japan. Japan’s inability to decisively defeat Nationalist China, then, led Japan to expand the war, eventually attacking Pearl Harbor and bringing the Allies into the war on China’s side.

Once the totalitarian regime is established, various disasters are bound to recur. A totalitarian state is diagonally opposite to liberal democracy, which is characterized by prevalence of horizontal connections, the sum total of which constitute a social contract. An ideal totalitarian structure, to the contrary, is like a zero-impedance conductor: orders flow from the top to the lowest level all without any obstacle. It was this totalitarian system that enabled Mao, the charismatic leader, to use his overwhelming social support to overthrow his political rivals within the system when his authority was weakened. Like a courtly struggle, the Cultural Revolution was for the sake of Mao’s personal power, but the cost of social destruction was incomparably greater.

This chapter recounts the Vietnam War in the context of the Sino-Soviet competition for leadership in the global communist movement. It shows that after Nikita Khrushchev’s fall from power in October 1964, the Soviet leadership sought to build up their own revolutionary legitimacy by supporting Hanoi’s war effort. The Chinese leaders resented Soviet involvement, and tried to dissuade North Vietnam from overdependence on Moscow. However, China’s descent into the chaos of the Cultural Revolution lessened Beijing’s leverage over North Vietnam. From the late 1960s, Hanoi increasingly began to tilt in the Soviet direction, beginning a geopolitical shift that would completely reshape the region in the coming years.

This chapter makes the point that there is no need to go as far back as pre-modern Cambodian and pre-modern Vietnamese and Chinese histories to describe the well-documented hostile feelings between the Cambodians and Vietnamese, and that of Vietnam and China. The narrative thus begins during the period in which many of the main protagonists in the Third Indochina War were already active in the arena of the conflict.

By the early 1960s, Vietnam was firmly lodged in China's embrace. Khrushchev's commitment to Vietnam was limited, as he focused instead on relations with the United States. However, after his ouster in October 1964, Khrushchev's successor, Leonid Brezhnev, began to see Vietnam as an opportunity to demonstrate Moscow's revolutionary leadership. The Soviet Union's support for Vietnam served two purposes: establishing credibility in the revolutionary world and asserting its position as America's equal. As the war escalated, both Moscow and Beijing's commitment to Vietnam grew. Despite disagreements over military tactics, the Soviets won Hanoi's loyalty, largely because they supplied Vietnam with badly needed military aid. Yet the end of the war became a Pyrrhic victory for the Soviets. Moscow ended up investing heavily in Vietnam's reconstruction and industrialization, which contributed to the Soviet Union's later insolvency. This chapter highlights the importance of understanding the Vietnam War not only as an East–West struggle but also as an East–East struggle, with the Soviet Union and China competing for power and influence across the region.

De-Stalinization in the Soviet Union deepened the crisis within the international Communist movement. The exposure of Stalin's crimes led to widespread disillusionment in Communist parties in the West, while the Soviet intervention in Hungary in 1956 highlighted the moral bankruptcy of the Communist project. This chapter offers a broad overview of this difficult year, discussing why Khrushchev refrained from invading Poland and why he ordered the invasion of Hungary. It also provides new details on the joint Sino-Soviet effort to pressure North Korea's Kim Il Sung to ease brutal repressions. Lastly, the chapter argues that Mao Zedong's efforts to define Stalin's legacy contributed to his emergence as the self-proclaimed strategist for the socialist camp, bolstering China's influence.

This chapter explores Stalin's approach to China, in particular his difficult relationship with Mao Zedong. It shows Stalin at pains to redefine his strategy as the Chinese Civil War produced an unexpected set of victories for the Communists. By delving into the details of Anastas Mikoyan's negotiations with Mao in Xibaipo, and later Mao's talks with Stalin in Moscow, the chapter brings out hidden tensions between would-be allies while explaining how and why, despite these tensions, Beijing and Moscow managed to conclude a treaty of alliance. The chapter also explores the road to the Korean War, highlighting Stalin's reasons for permitting North Korea's Kim Il Sung to invade South Korea in June 1950. The war allowed Stalin to both strengthen the Sino-Soviet alliance and keep the Americans occupied, postponing the possibility of a conflict in Europe.

During the past 2,000 years, Christianity has evolved from a small group of fishermen recruited on the Sea of Galilee to become the world’s oldest continuously operated religious institution and largest Abrahamic religion. Of all the Christian denominations, including Protestantism and Orthodox Christianity, Roman Catholicism remains the largest denomination.1 In 2018, the population of practicing Catholics was equivalent to the population of the People’s Republic of China, or 1.33 billion adherents. Traditionally Europeans dominated the church (21.5 percent). However, the majority of global Catholics are now composed of North and South Americans (48.3 percent), while the fastest growing communities are in Africa, at more than 17 percent.