Soft Totalitarianism in China
Chalmers Johnson is president of the Japan Policy Research Institute and
author of more than a dozen books on Japanese and Chinese politics, including
Japan: Who Governs? (Norton Simon, 1995).
La Jolla - China is ostensibly ruled by
the Chinese Communist Party, the world's largest political party, but
which no longer has any legitimacy or moral acceptability in the eyes
of the Chinese people. Although the party came to power in 1949 as the
leader of the biggest and most complex revolution among all the historical
cases, it squandered its great popularity first in rural China because
of the famine that followed the Great Leap Forward, then among hard-core
Communist revolutionaries themselves because of the Cultural Revolution
(Mao's revenge against the part after he lost control of it in the wake
of the Great Leap Forward), and finally among the urban intellectuals
and burgeoning middle class because of the repression at Tiananmen in
1989 and the collapse of communism in Europe later that same year.
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