BiblioVault - Books about Communist China

An American Dream

The Life of an African American Soldier and POW Who Spent Twelve Years in Communist China

Clarence Adams

University of Massachusetts Press, 2007

Throughout his life, Clarence Adams exhibited self-reliance, ambition, ingenuity, courage, and a commitment to learning—character traits often equated with the successful pursuit of the American Dream. Unfortunately, for an African American coming of age in the 1930s and 1940s, such attributes counted for little, especially in the South.

Adams was a seventeen-year-old high school dropout in 1947 when he fled Memphis and the local police to join the U.S. Army. Three years later, after fighting in the Korean War in an all-black artillery unit that he believed to have been sacrificed to save white troops, he was captured by the Chinese. After spending almost three years as a POW, during which he continued to suffer racism at the hands of his fellow Americans, he refused repatriation in 1953, choosing instead the People's Republic of China, where he hoped to find educational and career opportunities not readily available in his own country.

While living in China, Adams earned a university degree, married a Chinese professor of Russian, and worked in Beijing as a translator for the Foreign Languages Press. During the Vietnam War he made a controversial anti-war broadcast over Radio Hanoi, urging black troops not to fight for someone else's political and economic freedoms until they enjoyed these same rights at home.

In 1966, having come under suspicion during the Chinese Cultural Revolution, he returned with his wife and two children to the United States, where he was subpoenaed to appear before the House Committee on Un-American Activities to face charges of "disrupting the morale of American fighting forces in Vietnam and inciting revolution in the United States." After these charges were dropped, he and his family struggled to survive economically. Eventually, through sheer perseverance, they were able to fulfill at least part of the American Dream. By the time he died, the family owned and operated eight successful Chinese restaurants in his native Memphis.

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Communist China, 1955–1959

Policy Documents with Analysis

Robert R. Bowie and John King Fairbank

Harvard University Press

The years 1955–1959 in Communist China included striking fluctuations and successes for Mao Tse-tung’s Party, and the working out of the first Five-Year Plan for economic and agricultural development. Here analysis of domestic developments is supported by 48 documents—directives, speeches, and articles. The major Party pronouncements are given in full. The significance of each is clarified by prefatory comments indicating additional readings, and by the 41-page introductory essay. This newly integrated picture of five crucial years pioneers the use of documentation (as in Soviet studies) for dealing with Communist China.

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The Economy of Communist China, 1949–1969

Cheng Chu-yuan

University of Michigan Press, 1971

Economic development in mainland China during the first two decades of Communist control provides a typical example for the difficult task to transform a vast underdeveloped agrarian economy into a modern industrial one. In the first half of this period, a series of massive transformations of social and economic institutions was accompanied by a drafted industrialization program; the result was an impressive speed-up in economic growth. The second decade witnessed an economic crisis (1960–62) and a political upheaval (1966–68). These disruptions marred the economic performance over the period as a whole. Consequently, the long-term growth rate appears to have been only moderate.

The Economy of Communist China reviews selected aspects of the economy. After examining the development strategy, it analyzes the quantitative trends and the structural changes. The book goes on to analyze the key factors contributing to the earlier growth and the elements responsible for the later disruption and finally assesses the impact of the Cultural Revolution on the Chinese economy and the prospects of the current Third Five-Year Plan.

The text includes a bibliography of selected materials on Chinese economic development.

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Literary Dissent in Communist China

Merle Goldman

Harvard University Press

In modern China, literature has been regarded as a vehicle of political and idea logical dissent, a concept that has persisted under communism. This study exhaustively analyzes the conflict between the Chinese Communist party and the intellectuals, particularly the writers, in the crucial decades of the 1940's and 1950's.

By singling out individual writers as egregious examples, party leaders, through a series of thought-control campaigns, have tried to mold intellectuals along orthodox doctrinal lines. But these same leaders, holding to the paradoxical conviction that personal initiative and creativity are necessary catalysts in the effort to construct a Communist state, have not wanted to stifle these qualities altogether. The result has been a pattern of permissiveness and pressure, as illustrated by the ill-fated "Hundred Flowers" movement and the subsequent return to a policy of harsh regimentation.

In depicting the views, feelings, frustrations, and tragic fates of many individual intellectuals in the confrontation with an oppressive party bureaucracy, the author reveals, in an unprecedented way, the nature of the authoritarian society that has evolved in Communist China. Her study convincingly demonstrates that totalitarian rule has not guaranteed the subservience of the Chinese intelligentsia and, even more important, that the alienated, critical intellectual remains a significant and vital force.

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Market Control and Planning in Communist China

Dwight H. Perkins

Harvard University Press

In the first study in depth of this subject by an economist, the author focuses on a major problem—common to all planned economies—that has confronted the Chinese Communists: whether to centralize all controls in the hands of the planners, or to allow factory and farm managers some degree of autonomy regulated only by the indirect pressures of the market. Because the finding of a satisfactory solution has been of highest importance to Peking, this study of the issue throws light on the shifts and turns of Chinese economic policy in general and on the underlying nature and significance of the broad trends in China's economy and society since 1949.

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The Rate and Pattern of Industrial Growth in Communist China

Kang Chao

University of Michigan Press, 1965

The Chinese Communist government places a high priority on the development of industry in its national economic plans. Anxious to show advancement, it has published gross values of industrial production for the years prior to 1961 and corresponding indexes. Many of these data are biased and unreliable. In The Rate and Pattern of Industrial Growth in Communist China, Kang Chao carefully reconstructs two sets of industrial production indexes that are more meaningful and reliable. He also lays out the statistical procedures necessary to construct new indexes that reflect fundamental economic facts in contrast to official statistics. His approach represents an excellent model for others to follow in index-making for countries with limited output statistics and production cost data. The appendix contains valuable tables on China's industrial output, commodity by commodity, as well as on industry employment, wages, and prices. These tables were compiled from diverse and scattered sources and represent the most comprehensive compilation for that sector ever to appear except for the classified statistical documents of the Chinese Communist government.

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