Search Results

Cohesion may be based primarily on interpersonal ties or rely instead on the connection between member and group, while groups may cohere temporarily based on the immediate alignment of interests among members or may be tied together more permanently by socio-emotional bonds. Together, these characteristics define four prototypical group types. Cliques and coalitions are based primarily on dyadic ties. Groups of comrades or colleagues rely instead on the connection of members to the group for cohesion, which reduces the marginal cost of increasing group size. The strong glue of socio-emotional cohesion binds cliques and comrades, while coalitions and groups of colleagues are often based on weaker forms of cohesion. The mix of strong and weak adhesives and the greater scalability offered by the member-group bond provide the building blocks for assembling very large societies without overtaxing the social brain.

Liebman's public declaration was to announce his homosexuality. Leibman's coming-out letter is a performance of the closet, with repeated hints that what he is declaring publicity in his letter will not surprise Buckley in the least. Buckley's sanctimonious reply is equally such a performance, trading in what “is as irresistible to us, as it is to you.” Recloseted, reconverted, Liebman is instructed in Buckley's quasi-paternal message to recognize how he may remain the friend and comrade, what he must do to retain his love.

This chapter examines the trajectory of Rao's later fiction in terms of the earlier analysis of Kanthapura. While Kanthapura is contextualized in the history of the period, the ensuing analysis does not intend to pursue a similar exercise in the main, partly because the bulk of his fiction is written long after the achievement of independence, and partly since Rao's concern as an artist becomes more metaphysical and personal. It is possible, however, for the metaphysical to be seen as an extreme dimension of the nationalistic: having moved away from the political circumstances of the 1930s and the 1940s, Rao's metaphysical concerns are an assertion of the persistence of a fundamental Hindu tradition in a period of internal dislocation following independence, as also an anchor for personal dilemma. These are some of the issues that need to be mentioned in any consideration of Rao's later fiction comprising The Serpent and the Rope (1960), The Cat and Shakespeare (1965), Comrade Kirillov (1976), and The Chessmaster and His Moves (1988). The content of this chapter is ideological since it intends to raise questions related to the body of Rao's later fiction and to speculate on the development of his vision and its inherent contradictions through a brief internal study.

Time: fall 1963 to 1976. China saw an increasingly intense struggle over literature and art, with modern jingju as a primary battlefield. The 1964 Festival of Modern Jingju Performances for Emulation reconfirmed the priority of modern plays in xiqu creation, reinforced the significance of modern jingju in literature and art, and firmly established Jiang Qing as the leader of this movement. Model works were designated as the exemplar of socialist culture construction, exemplifying such creative principles as the Basic Task, the Combination of Revolutionary Realism and Revolutionary Romanticism, and the Three Prominences. Chapter 4 includes a close analysis of Jiang Qing’s controversial role in supervising modern jingju creation and an analytical chronicle of five major versions of Taking Tiger Mountain by Strategy—from the first version in 1958 to the final model version in 1970—as an illustration of changes in plotting and characterization during the creative process of model jingju development.

This chapter discusses the close friendship of Joseph Berg alias Joel Barr and Steven T. Usdin. This friendship endured until the death of Joel Barr. Usdin stayed with Barr several times in Leningrad. Barr lived with Usdin for weeks or months at a time in Washington, D.C., becoming a part of Usdin's family. The chapter states that on a personal level, Barr and Sarant's situations were extraordinary in part because, unlike virtually every other defector from the West to the Soviet Union, they led happy, productive lives there. Many other spies who escaped to the USSR were despised and distrusted by their Soviet counterparts; few adjusted to life in the totalitarian society they had risked their lives for; and quite a few drank themselves to death. This chapter discusses why Barr became an ardent Communist willing to risk everything to help the Soviet Union.

From 1923 to 1930, we witnessed the first half of korenizatsiia, that is, Soviet indigenization for the national minorities. Already there were major attempts to dismantle this program. Vladimir Arsenev called for the total deportation of the Koreans in 1928. Comrade Geitsman called them “aliens” to Soviet socialism, even those Koreans who were Soviet citizens. However, this did not deter the Koreans. Khan Myon She, a local Soviet Korean leader called out local Communist Party leaders for “ethnic chauvinism.” He was soon replaced by Afanasii Kim. Young educated Korean activists in the organization INKORPORE battled for equal land and rights for Korean farmers and settlers. Several regiments of local Red Army including one regiment led by Pen Khva Kim fought for the Red Army during the brief Sino-Soviet War (1929).

Who were these people, living in Mao’s China and prepared to ally themselves with it politically in an era of Cold War hostility? Blanket generalizations do not adequately explain their motivations. Some, as communist internationalists, saw the PRC as a bright new hope for socialism and were keen to participate in building a revolutionary society. Others described their underlying motivation as ‘humanitarianism’: China had turned them to communism rather than the other way round. Having lived in China since the 1930s or even earlier, they were not the only people to conclude that the Communist Party seemed to offer the best way out of the country’s poverty and corruption. Later arrivals included émigrés from Cold War McCarthyism. And for a few women, in particular, the decision to live under Mao was closely linked to their personal relationships.

As representatives of the West in China, to use Isabel Crook’s words, the long-term residents were active participants in the PRC’s ‘people-to-people diplomacy’ (or ‘friendship diplomacy’) which, like its Soviet counterpart, was directed towards influencing foreign public opinion, especially in the West. In her book A History of China’s Foreign Propaganda 1949–1966, PRC journalist and author Xi Shaoying saw the long-term residents, along with short-term invited ‘friends of China’, as playing an integral role in the government’s ‘foreign propaganda work’. In the West, the long-termers’ most contentious activity was their support for the PRC against their own governments.

To outsiders, the long-term residents seemed tightly knit, conscious of their group identity and wary of Westerners who did not share the mantle of ‘foreign comrade’ or ‘international friend’. But the small community also had its internal dynamics, reflecting the length of time that people had spent in China as well as their nationality, personality and political attitudes—even within the socialist range. The turbulent politics of the era, including the Sino-Soviet split, also impinged on relations within the community, while the Cultural Revolution had a dramatic impact on individuals’ lives when their official designation as comrades and friends became subordinated to that as suspect foreigners.

On 24 February 1954, twenty-one American GIs and a British marine crossed the border from North Korea into the PRC. Whatever the individual differences in the men’s explanations, there was a common theme that to some extent accorded with the emotive accusations of brainwashing. After taking over the camps from the North Korean army, the Chinese pursued their so-called leniency policy which, instead of punishing soldiers as the enemy, was directed at convincing them of the superiority of communism and the evils of their own government. The United States and Britain admitted that their soldiers had not been trained for this type of POW experience. There were also strong disincentives for returning to the United States—or even to Britain. To Western governments the men were collaborators, making them liable to prosecution.

Overall, China had failed to live up to the former POWs’ hopes. The grand socialist narrative of international peace and equality for all seemed to have little relevance to their everyday lives. The daily grind, whether working on a farm or in a factory—or even the hard slog of learning Chinese—was not quite the adventure that some had anticipated. There was also the low standard of living and the realities of everyday life in a strictly controlled society, even without the sense of isolation from the outside world.

To many other Western residents, the lives of embassy staff and their families seemed a world away from their own. Outside was Maoist Peking, its blue and grey cotton clothed inhabitants battling to get on crowded buses or cycling past the city’s low grey buildings and billboards urging them to ‘build socialism faster, better and more economically’. The world within was light and bright, a reproduction of a modern Western apartment with all its trappings—and in the evening the scene of many a party as people ate, drank and tried to enjoy themselves in defiance of the austere world outside.

Despite the restrictions, there was a small amount of ongoing personal contact, at least before the Cultural Revolution. Almost without exception, these friendships were with people who, as diplomats expressed it, were ‘licensed for contact’ with foreigners. Usually from the academic or cultural world, they often had long-standing Western connections which were virtually impossible to maintain in the new political environment. In the political environment of the Mao era—and even for a while beyond—ongoing personal correspondence between a Chinese person and a Western diplomat was highly unusual.

From the early 1970s, the US-China relationship was central to diplomatic reporting, with National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger’s visit to Peking in October 1971, President Nixon’s historic visit in February 1972, and the establishment the following year of small liaison offices in Peking and Washington. Following each of Kissinger’s further visits in 1973 and 1974, senior diplomats virtually queued up at the liaison office to find out what progress, if any, had been made towards the normalization of US-China relations. Peking’s diplomats, like some of their colleagues elsewhere in the world, did not always see eye-to-eye with their foreign ministries. There was little chance of their becoming overly attached to Communist China, as the Japanologists and Arabists were sometimes accused of doing for Japan and Arab countries. At the same time, living and breathing the PRC led some diplomats to regard Chinese Communism as being rather more nuanced—and the government somewhat less belligerent—than the Cold War images portrayed in the West, particularly the United States.

Western correspondents were in some ways even less welcome than diplomats. Embassy reports finished up in foreign office files but correspondents’ despatches were in the public arena, potentially undermining the images of new China that the government was trying so hard to project. On assuming power, the Communists had issued a series of bans on Western news organizations. Official images to the outside world were presented through the government news agency Xinhua, Peking Radio, and the handful of foreign language publications.

Mao’s China was a striking example of Ulf Hannerz’s research finding that foreign correspondents were likely to stick together more closely ‘in cities where there were few of them’. This was particularly the case when ‘they were living under tough conditions and perhaps in an adversarial or at least closely guarded relationship with the host society and especially its government’. With a paucity of information at their disposal, Peking’s correspondents often shared whatever was available.

The correspondents’ reports reflected not just the restrictions imposed on their access to information but official efforts to control what they wrote. Unlike the situation in the Soviet Union until 1961, this was not done through formal censorship but through admonitions, warnings, and the non-renewal of residence permits. Expulsion was the last resort. Without formal censorship, the onus was on individual correspondents to decide for themselves what self-censorship, if any, they should exercise in their reporting.