What do you think?
Rate this book
The Chinese Communist Party
Ten engaging personal histories introduce readers to what it was like to live in and with the most powerful political machine ever the Chinese Communist Party. Detailing the life of ten people who led or engaged with the Chinese Communist Party, one each for one of its ten decades of its existence, these essays reflect on the Party's relentless pursuit of power and extraordinary adaptability through the transformative decades since 1921. Demonstrating that the history of the Chinese Communist Party is not one story but many stories, readers learn about paths not taken, the role of chance, ideas and persons silenced, hopes both lost and fulfilled. This vivid mosaic of lives and voices draws together one hundred years of modern Chinese history - and illuminates possible paths for China's future.
304 pages, Paperback
Published May 6, 2021
33 people are currently reading
397 people want to read
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews
July 23, 2021
An edited collection of ten short biographical essays. That is one for each decade of the existence of the Chinese Communist Party, which celebrated its centenary in July 2021.
The Party is the largest political party in the world, and it is still poorly understood by most. The essays approach the party's history from multiple angles. In the 1920s, it was still a fragile and underground organization, nearly purged completely by the Nationalist government at the time, partly composed of idealistic students and pragmatic Soviet volunteers.
There are some common threads between these separate essays. One the one hand, you can see the party's multiple efforts at reinventing itself - when Mao asserted his leadership in the 1930s and when the party was on the brink of extinction; when Mao died in 1976 and the party was adrift and shellacked after the Cultural Revolution, and augmenting its governing philosophy in the 1990s after domestic turmoil. An organization that large, and with such ambitious goals, could not stay completely stagnant if it intended to survive.
A second thread might be the party's complicated relationship with intellectuals. At times, the party has wooed writers and thinkers in and out of China with its promises of allowing them to teach and uplift the masses; and when the party pulls on its slack and intellectual freedoms are curtailed, then those who had previously held prominent positions in the party could find themselves alone, cast as heretics.
This is a historians' book of essays, emphasizing the fine details over a broad and final judgment. Recommended.
The Party is the largest political party in the world, and it is still poorly understood by most. The essays approach the party's history from multiple angles. In the 1920s, it was still a fragile and underground organization, nearly purged completely by the Nationalist government at the time, partly composed of idealistic students and pragmatic Soviet volunteers.
There are some common threads between these separate essays. One the one hand, you can see the party's multiple efforts at reinventing itself - when Mao asserted his leadership in the 1930s and when the party was on the brink of extinction; when Mao died in 1976 and the party was adrift and shellacked after the Cultural Revolution, and augmenting its governing philosophy in the 1990s after domestic turmoil. An organization that large, and with such ambitious goals, could not stay completely stagnant if it intended to survive.
A second thread might be the party's complicated relationship with intellectuals. At times, the party has wooed writers and thinkers in and out of China with its promises of allowing them to teach and uplift the masses; and when the party pulls on its slack and intellectual freedoms are curtailed, then those who had previously held prominent positions in the party could find themselves alone, cast as heretics.
This is a historians' book of essays, emphasizing the fine details over a broad and final judgment. Recommended.
April 15, 2022
First half was good but second descends into boring and predictable China bad polemics
July 5, 2021
People usually believe that the Chinese Communist Party is a monolithic organization. The book aims to prove the contrary. By ten small biographies, it shows how the CCP has diversity, cosmopolitanism, and even divergence. These ten miniatures provide a rich introduction to the dilemmas and controversies that shaped the CCP in its first century.
August 18, 2021
Personally difficult for me, a reader who goes quickly snowblind in the flurry of political acronyms and politico-philosophical terms necessary to read a history of the Chinese Communist Party.
So why did I read this book? I did find it edifying to get a schematic of the Chinese political system over the past 100 years and the semi-personalized format - profiles of 10 individuals, 1 from each decade, who had a measurable impact in the development of the CCP - was helpful for a non-politico-sociologically-oriented individual like to get a sense of the basic story.
So why did I read this book? I did find it edifying to get a schematic of the Chinese political system over the past 100 years and the semi-personalized format - profiles of 10 individuals, 1 from each decade, who had a measurable impact in the development of the CCP - was helpful for a non-politico-sociologically-oriented individual like to get a sense of the basic story.
September 12, 2021
2.5 stars. I got the distinct impression that nearly everyone involved with this anthology was "phoning it in" - either that, or they were all rushed and needed to turn something in likity-split to meet the 2021 publication deadline. The Chinese Communist Party: A Century in Ten Lives is one of a slew of publications to come out in 2021 to capitalize on the centenary of the CCP, so I'm guessing there was a pretty firm deadline and everyone involved just wanted/needed to turn in some succinct, publishable-for-a-general-audience version of something they're working on in order to get paid. Indeed, what with the "Selected Further Readings" section - which I notice includes the works of many of the contributors with little bracketed descriptions that say things like "a vivid narrative" and "a vivid re-telling" - this anthology almost struck me as an add for the more substantial scholarship the contributors engage in, but perhaps I'm being overly cynical.
Frankly, I'm not sure who I would recommend this to. If you don't have much of a background in the subject matter and are interested in learning more about modern China and the CCP - this is definitely not a good place to start. Most of the subject matter will be way too niche for you and you'll be left without much of an understanding of what's going on; you might also feel bewildered and bored. If, on the other hand, you're somewhat familiar with the subject matter and maybe recognize a few of the names here, like, say, Tony Saich or Julia Lovell, then I would say this book will be both too remedial in its overview and too superficial in its coverage. You'd probably just be better off reading one of the actual works from the contributors you're interested in. Julia Lovell, for example, has clearly just recycled a snippet (on the Maoist insurgency in Peru) from her recent book Maosim: A Global History - which, if you were especially interested in, you could probably just read more about in the recent book The Shinning Path, but I digress).
Separately, I couldn't help but feel like the whole product came out a little dis-jointed and uneven. If the objective was to highlight different voices in the CCP with biographies that typified the Party in that decade in order to highlight the diversity and potential of the CCP, well, I think some of these essays could have chosen different subjects or been done differently. One China Many Paths, for instance, is an anthology that does an interesting job of exploring different intellectual visions for China's future. Some of the essays here definitely do that, but others, which I'll leave unnamed, don't.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, the strongest essays were written by two of the anthology's editors: Hans van de Ven (on Wang Ming) and Timothy Cheek (on Wang Shiwei), which is perhaps to be expected as they are both academics whose work I'm interested in, and who had a clear vision of how their works would fit into the whole project since (presumably) they envisioned it and put the whole thing together. Which isn't to say all of the other essays were bad, there are certainly some interesting nuggets in them, they just didn't really offer what I thought this project was purporting to deliver.
On the whole, I did learn some stuff, but mainly I felt like this was a missed opportunity.
Frankly, I'm not sure who I would recommend this to. If you don't have much of a background in the subject matter and are interested in learning more about modern China and the CCP - this is definitely not a good place to start. Most of the subject matter will be way too niche for you and you'll be left without much of an understanding of what's going on; you might also feel bewildered and bored. If, on the other hand, you're somewhat familiar with the subject matter and maybe recognize a few of the names here, like, say, Tony Saich or Julia Lovell, then I would say this book will be both too remedial in its overview and too superficial in its coverage. You'd probably just be better off reading one of the actual works from the contributors you're interested in. Julia Lovell, for example, has clearly just recycled a snippet (on the Maoist insurgency in Peru) from her recent book Maosim: A Global History - which, if you were especially interested in, you could probably just read more about in the recent book The Shinning Path, but I digress).
Separately, I couldn't help but feel like the whole product came out a little dis-jointed and uneven. If the objective was to highlight different voices in the CCP with biographies that typified the Party in that decade in order to highlight the diversity and potential of the CCP, well, I think some of these essays could have chosen different subjects or been done differently. One China Many Paths, for instance, is an anthology that does an interesting job of exploring different intellectual visions for China's future. Some of the essays here definitely do that, but others, which I'll leave unnamed, don't.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, the strongest essays were written by two of the anthology's editors: Hans van de Ven (on Wang Ming) and Timothy Cheek (on Wang Shiwei), which is perhaps to be expected as they are both academics whose work I'm interested in, and who had a clear vision of how their works would fit into the whole project since (presumably) they envisioned it and put the whole thing together. Which isn't to say all of the other essays were bad, there are certainly some interesting nuggets in them, they just didn't really offer what I thought this project was purporting to deliver.
On the whole, I did learn some stuff, but mainly I felt like this was a missed opportunity.
March 15, 2023
A collection of 10 essays, structured around 10 people, each assigned one of 10 decades (though of course there's much spillover). Most of the essays are well-structured and written, even in translation. Each chapter is preceded by the editor's introductions but these miss a little more about the author's contexts, leaving the authors to introduce themselves (or not as the case may be). It's important in works like this to get that contextual grounding in order to couch the claims of any given essay.
The essays themselves are well-chosen. There's no overarching through-narrative designed to stigmatise or celebrate and instate the individuals covered tend to have heroic/negative aspects and are grounded in their times. The first eight essays can be read as historical analysis. The final two are more broadly socio-political (covering the last 20 years or so). I particularly enjoyed Golkorn's essay but have been a fan of his style since the old Danwei days. It felt like a much-needed tonal shift from some of the more sombre essays and some of his disappointment at Chinese lost social potential in the 2000s clearly rings through. The last two essays see 2011 as a tipping point - the coming of Xi to the throne, the beginnings of the end for the Wild West of the Chinese Internet and an increase in autocracy designed to preserve party-rule for the foreseeable .
Excellent addition to any reading collection on China and appreciate greatly the inclusion of Chinese authors in translation.
The essays themselves are well-chosen. There's no overarching through-narrative designed to stigmatise or celebrate and instate the individuals covered tend to have heroic/negative aspects and are grounded in their times. The first eight essays can be read as historical analysis. The final two are more broadly socio-political (covering the last 20 years or so). I particularly enjoyed Golkorn's essay but have been a fan of his style since the old Danwei days. It felt like a much-needed tonal shift from some of the more sombre essays and some of his disappointment at Chinese lost social potential in the 2000s clearly rings through. The last two essays see 2011 as a tipping point - the coming of Xi to the throne, the beginnings of the end for the Wild West of the Chinese Internet and an increase in autocracy designed to preserve party-rule for the foreseeable .
Excellent addition to any reading collection on China and appreciate greatly the inclusion of Chinese authors in translation.
December 19, 2023
Good historical overview of China's recent political history through the lens of individuals at the heart of key events in the country's political landscape. While its content is well-sourced and for the most part unbiased, the author does however display a common Western misunderstanding of China's approach towards democracy, which does verge on political bias at times.
February 21, 2022
I love this book and the approach - the CCP story as revealed from less known historical players. Very enriching and I learnt so much more than what I already know about the Party.
March 2, 2025
Surprisingly accessible for someone who has very little knowledge of Chinese history. Worth a read
Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews