Words Kill: Calling for the Destruction of 'Class Enemies' in China, 1949-1953

by Cheng-Chih Wang

When Communist revolutionaries seized control of Mainland China in 1949, they faced enormous challenges of state and nation building. China occupied a vast territory, had a huge and poorly integrated population and suffered from a woefully backward economy. Building a Socialist Chinese state required effectively managing significant opposition to the imposition of the Communist regime. This study examines how the Chinese Communist Party employed language as an essential part of its strategy to achieving these goals.

Genres: China

208 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 2002

Reviews

[Emma · Rating 1 out of 5]

This book is centered around the existence of a "genocide" committed by the Communist Party against Chinese landlords. To do this, Wang stretches the definition of genocide to refer to the elimination - lethally or not - of any group or class of people. Wang fails to acknowledge that according to this definition, a state that eradicated poverty by transforming people from "poor" to "not poor" would have conducted genocide against the poor. He hypes up an internal Party document as a "smoking gun" to prove that the Party set execution quotas for each province. When he finally quotes directly from this document though, it only ever refers to a limit on the number of executions that may carried out. A maximum is not the same as a minimum.

[William · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a dissertation analyzing People's Daily editorials about "class enemies" in the period 1950-53 during the Korean War and the Land reforms of the Chinese Communist Party. This work posits that a genocide against landlords was incited by newspaper editorials of the CCP. It is a very crucial period to understand as the CCP secured its power in China. This book is weakened by many spelling errors and in not using pinyin properly, but it is a very important subject. Traditional China was dependent on landlords in upholding Confucianism and for the CCP this constituted a revolutionary change that had to be made in the name of new ideas of socialism.