Coping with famine in Communist China (1949–62)

Several studies of Mao's Great Famine based on archival material have appeared over the past few years. This article is less focused on the famine than on how existing responses to starvation were gradually eliminated in the years before the launch of the Great Leap Forward in 1958, as well as how covert acts of resistance offered some hope to villagers during Mao's Great Famine from 1958 to 1962. China, after all, was a country well attuned to famine, and coping mechanisms existed at all levels of society, starting from a variety of survival strategies adopted by the villagers themselves and reaching all the way to international interventions by organisations like the Famine Relief Commission. Few of these were left intact in the wake of the Communist conquest in 1949, as is seen in the first part of this article. On the other hand, villagers were quick to learn how to lie, charm, hide, steal, cheat, pilfer, forage, smuggle, trick, manipulate or otherwise outwit the state. During the Great Leap Forward, these covert means of resistance were often the population's only hope for survival in many parts of the country reeling under the impact of famine, as seen in part two.     

The Political Slogan in Communist Czechoslovakia (1948–89)

This article employs an interdisciplinary approach to evaluate the role of the political slogan in Communist Czechoslovakia, with reference to Bakhtin’s concept of hierarchically superior texts, as developed by Alexei Yurchak and Michal Pullmann. It argues that the slogan performed a much wider range of temporally specific functions than has been generally recognized, and that its repetitive and ritualistic character had a major psychological effect on people’s memory and perception of reality (see C. Atkinson and R.M. Shiffrin, and David I. Kertzer). A clear distinction is drawn between denotative and connotative meaning, with detailed attention paid to J.L. Austin’s speech act theory, as elaborated by John R. Searle. The first two sections of the article define the concept and the functions of the ‘political slogan’, with special significance accorded to the use of language to establish a binary opposition between ‘us’ and ‘them’ (à la John B. Thompson’s notion of fragmentation). The third part identifies the sources and methodology adopted, and lists the principal word tokens identified. Following a brief contextualization of the slogan in the next section, the main body of the study uses corpus-assisted statistical analysis to evaluate the development of different thematic, lexical and semantic referents over three broad time spans (1948 to the mid-1950s, the mid-1950s to 1968, and 1969 to 1989).     

A study of the origins of the Chinese communist movement from a new perspective – The History of the Establishment of the Chinese Communist Party by Ishikawa Yoshihiro

From around the time of the Opium War to the May Fourth New Culture Movement, democracy in China advanced through four stages. Originally it surfaced as a germ of rough ideas gleaned from imported knowledge; from there, democracy transpired gradually via various avenues towards a more sophisticated level in the period from the Second Opium War until before the Sino–Japanese War of 1894–1895 and meanwhile a number of individuals favoring utilitarianism opted for a constitutional monarchy as a way of making the nation strong. Then, following the Sino–Japanese War 1894–1895 until prior to the 1911 Revolution, when manifold Western ideas of democracy penetrated China, people embarked on somber discussions about what kind of democratic system China actually needed to adopt. During the years between 1912 and the May Fourth New Culture Movement, people initially rushed to build democratic politics but afterwards began to examine the ideologies and social structures that demonstrated compatibility with democracy. By the time the May Fourth Movement emerged, people hardly disagreed on the sense of democracy that they understood. After the May Fourth Movement people mainly focused their attention on the question of true and false democracy or the matter of what type of democracy harmonized best with national conditions in China.     

Sharing a similar fate: the historical process of the Korean Communists’ merger with the Chinese Communist Party (1919–1936)

In their early history, the Chinese and Korean Communists had little contact with one another. However, similar fates brought them together, and some Korean revolutionaries in China voluntarily joined the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). After a futile effort to establish a Communist party in Korea, the Korean Communists shifted their attention to Chinese Manchuria. Under extremely difficult circumstances, different factions of the Korean Communist organizations either willingly or under force disbanded. However, after winning support from the Comintern, the CCP recruited a substantial number of Korean Communists. Thus, within a short period of time, the CCP expanded its strength in Manchuria. It also shouldered responsibility for assisting the Korean Communists in their efforts to establish their own party. In the aftermath of the September 18th Incident in 1931 the CCP Central Committee called for an armed struggle against the Japanese invaders. The Korean Communists in Manchuria became a force to be reckoned with. After the CCP gradually shifted the focus of its policy toward the War of Resistance against Japan, the Korean Communists in China became integrated into the CCP army.     

The failure of the Scandinavian defence union, 1948–1949

Knut Kjeldstadli: Jerntid. Fabrikksystem og arbeidere ved Christiania Spigerverk og Kvtemer Brug fra om lag 1880 til 1940. (Iron Age. Manufacturing system and laborers at Christiania iron works and the Kvaxrner factory from 1880 to 1940.) Pax forlag Oslo 1989. ISBN 82–530–1451–1. 594 pp., NKr. 198.     

The path-dependent evolution of the entrepreneurial ecosystem (EE) – dynamics and region-specific assets of the case of Vienna (Austria)

The paper sheds light on the path-dependent development of the Viennese entrepreneurial ecosystem (EE). By taking into account temporal dynamics from the 1990s onwards as well as region-specificities we are able to demonstrate the evolution of the EE is not a linear process, but rather the various pillars of the EE may develop in distinct directions and find themselves in discrete development stages. Our in-depth analysis supports the understanding of how various pillars of the EE – especially the regulatory and finance/funding pillar – interrelate. Furthermore, the detected cause–effect interlinkages are not balanced, but are rather shaped by power-constellations and temporal imprinting as well as other regional specificities, which influence the overall success of the EE.     

John Ashton (1952–2008)

Il Kalevala, O La Poesia tradizionale dei Finni, studio storico - critico sulle origini belle grandi epopee nazionali. DEL DOMENICO COMPARETTI. Firenze, 1891.

DER KALEVALA, ODER DIE TRADITIONELLE POESIE DER FlNNEN, ETC. Von DOMENICO COMPARETTI. (The authorised German edition.) Halle, 1892. By John Abercromby.

Vestiges de Paganisme dans la Région situé entre les cours supérieurs de l'oka et du Don. Par N. Troitzky. Congrès international d' Archiologie préhistorique et d' Anthropologie. Moscou, Août 1892, t. i. By A. C. Haddon.     

Huacayñán (1952–1953) and the biopolitics of in(ex)clusion

The foundation of the modern Ecuadorian State in the 1940s and early 1950s coincides with a series of attempts to synchronize and incorporate certain “problematic” sectors of the population that were supposedly resistant to progress and whose forms of life were incompatible with modernity, a capitalist economy, and a cohesive nation. This biopolitical project for the modernization and governance of the population also had repercussions on—and analogous manifestations within—the discourse of national identity, the design of cultural policies, and the production of State-sponsored national art. This article analyzes Huacayñán / El camino del llanto / The Way of Tears (1952–1953), a collection of FIGURE 3 aintings by Oswaldo Guayasamín that was commissioned by the government of Ecuador in 1951. Huacayñán was conceived within the ideology of mestizaje as an instrument of aesthetic cultural modernization and as a visual artistic showcase of the harmonious integration of ‘Ecuadorians.’ Despite, or even because of its governmental overdetermination, however, this article shows how Huacayñán instead materialized the exclusionary logic of the syncretic and biopolitical policies of the State, displaying dystopic visions of violence and exclusion, and of a fractured nation inhabited by monsters and resistant to mestizo-ization.     

The end(s) of national cultures? Cultural policy in the face of diversity

This paper analyses the impact of cultural diversity on cultural policies through an international overview of case studies and reflections. Cultural diversity is generally perceived as a threat toward national cultures. However, this paper argues that (1) there exist substantial national differences in the way in which diversity is perceived and integrated as a policy paradigm; and (2) cultural diversity can be used as an instrument for reconfiguring cultural policies, regardless of the governmental level in question. The authors discuss whether cultural policies of diversity exist and what they are. They also examine the practical consequences of the emergence of a new paradigm concerning the redefinition and implementation of cultural policies within a triple context: the plurality of the territorial configurations of diversity, the simultaneous coexistence of several levels of understanding this issue, and the economic dimensions of cultural diversity.