China's inequalities

China’s Communist Revolution was founded upon the idea of equality. It was a basic principle of the early Communist Party that inequalities ought to be eradicated and the power and privilege of elite groups should be dismantled. Today in China the situation is very different. Farmers and rural people no longer have the support of the central state in their grievances against powerful forces — land developers, factory owners, power companies. And economic and social inequalities have increased dramatically in China — inequalities between the rural population and the city population, between manual workers and professionals, between eastern-coastal regions and western regions (link). Small numbers of elites are able to capture wealth-creating...

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Posted in: CAT_China,inequality,unrest

Wartime China

Photo: Robert Capa's photograph of The Boy Soldier, Hankou, China, late March 1938 © Cornell Capa / Magnum International Centre of PhotographyChina's experience of World War II (1937-1945) was in some ways as destructive and horrific as that of the Soviet Union. Japan's occupation of many parts of China was extremely brutal, with terrible massacres in Nanjing and other cities, the use of chemical and biological weapons, and extreme mistreatment of civilians and prisoners of war. And the violence deployed against civilian populations in cities -- both air attack and ground forces -- produced vast numbers of refugees surging towards safer destinations in the interior of the country. Estimates indicate that tens of millions of Chinese people,...

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Posted in: CAT_China,China,narrative

Theories of the Chinese Revolution

Let us consider a question fundamental to twentieth century world history: why did the Chinese Communist Revolution succeed? Was it the result of a few large social forces and structures? Or was this a case of many small causes operating at a local level, aggregating to a world-historical outcome? (See an earlier posting on "small causes.")It should first be noted that the CCP's path to power was rural rather than urban. The Guomindong (GMD) had effectively expelled the CCP from the cities in 1927 and had detached the Communist Party from urban workers. (Note that this runs directly contrary to the expectations of classical Marxism, according to which the urban proletariat is expected to be the vanguard of the revolution. A massive...

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Posted in: CAT_China,China,class consciousness,microfoundations,revolution,social movements

Marx's theory of political behavior

Marxism is concerned with the politics of class: the success or failure of working class organizational efforts, the occurrence of collective action in defense of class interests, the logic of working class electoral politics, and the occurrence of revolution. Marx attempted to analyze and explain a variety of political phenomena--e.g., the forms that working class political action took in 1848 in France, the reasons for Napoleon III's overwhelming electoral victory in 1849, and the efforts by organizations of the English working class to achieve the Ten Hours Bill. What assumptions underlie Marx's analysis of the political behavior of class? I would say that his theory comes down to three elements: a theory of individual means-end rationality,...

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Posted in: CAT_collective action,identity,Marx,power,social movements

Understanding Southeast Asia

Themes and issues from Southeast Asia crop up fairly frequently in UnderstandingSociety. Red shirt demonstrations in Thailand, ethnic conflict in Malaysia, corruption and repression in Burma -- I think these are some of the more interesting social developments underway in the world today. And the resources needed for non-experts (like myself) to get a preliminary but factual understanding of these developments are now readily available on the web -- blogs, international newspapers, twitter, and google provide a truly unprecedented ability for any of us to gain insight into distant social processes. (A recent widget on the iPhone and iPod Touch is a case in point: the World Newspapers application gives the user easy access to almost 4,000...

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Posted in: area studies,CAT_globalization,culture,identity,Southeast Asia

A spatial twitter feed for Southeast Asia

View Southeast Asia in a larger mapQuite a few of the items included in the UnderstandingSociety twitter feed currently refer to events and conditions in Southeast Asia -- especially Burma, Malaysia, and Thailand. This posting introduces a dynamic map that I'll try to update with new feed items as they occur when it is possible to identify a specific location. It is possible to change the frame and scale of the Google map, and if you click on the pointers you'll find a link to the associated news item. Here is a direct link to the map, and it will remain accessible in the sidebar as well.I have also provided static maps that indicate the provinces and cities of Burma and Thailand.The integrative power of Google Maps is pretty striking in...

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Posted in: CAT_globalization,Southeast Asia,spatial pattern

Cultural authenticity and the market

Images: cover illustration from Anthony Appiah, In My Father's House; Chinese neolithic pot c. 1500 BCPeople often return from their travels with objects they've purchased to represent the culture and traditions of the place they've visited -- Alsatian pottery from Betschdorf, masks from Kenya, or Navajo pots from Arizona. And sometimes they purchase such artifacts at home in Cleveland or Sacramento to gain a little resonance from a distant culture -- Tibetan temple bells, Chinese funeral figures, Mayan woven goods. And there is generally a desire that these goods should be "authentic" -- that is, they should have been produced by artisans situated in a continuous tradition with the culture the artifact represents. Imagine the traveler's disappointment...

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Posted in: CAT_identity,culture,social practice

What cities have in common

Images: Beijing (1900), Mexico City (2000), London (1600), Chicago (1930)The "city" is a pretty heterogeneous category, encompassing human places that differ greatly with each other and possess a great deal of internal social heterogeneity as well. Size, population structure, economic or industrial specialization, forms of governance, and habitation and transportation structure all vary enormously across the population of cities. And so New York (2000), Chicago (1930), Rome (200), Mumbai (2008), Beijing (1800), Lagos (1970), London (1600), and Mexico City (1990) are all vastly different human agglomerations; and yet all are "cities". Ancient, modern, medieval, developed, and underdeveloped -- each of these places represents an urban concentration...

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Posted in: CAT_history,city,classification,urbanization

Modest predictions in history

Image: the owl of MinervaIn spite of their reputations as historical determinists, Hegel and Marx each had their own versions of skepticism about "learning from history" -- in particular, the possibility of predicting the future based on historical knowledge. Notwithstanding his view that history embodies reason, Hegel is famous for his idea in the Philosophy of Right: "When philosophy paints its grey in grey then has a shape of life grown old. By philosophy's grey in grey it cannot be rejuvenated but only understood. The owl of Minerva spreads its wings only with the falling of dusk." And Marx puts the point more sardonically in the Eighteenth Brumaire: "Hegel remarks somewhere that all great world-historic facts and personages appear, so...

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Posted in: CAT_history,explanation,regularities

What is Alsace?

It may seem like a strange question: What is Alsace? It is a region of France. It is a culturally and linguistically distinct population of 1.8 million people. Most visitors would observe that there is a distinctive Alsatian style in life, in architecture, and in culture. It possesses one great city (Strasbourg), many middle-sized cities (Hagenau, Wissembourg, Colmar), and hundreds of small villages. It is a beautiful collection of landscapes, villages, fields, forests, and vineyards. It is the homeland of Hansi and Marc Bloch. It is a region that has suffered acutely in warfare -- eastern Alsace was the site of most of the battles of the Franco-Prussian War in 1870, and it was the site of the final stages of the Battle of the Bulge and...

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Posted in: CAT_misc,France,globalization,social practice