The making of the Communist party-state in Shandong Province, 1927-1952.

摘要

This dissertation examines how the Chinese Communists' linkage of state-making with social revolution led to their accession to national power by focussing on the specific experiences of the Chinese Communist movement in Shandong Province, 1927-1952. The Shandong base area served as a major transportation and communication conduit for the Communists during World War II, then provided essential personnel, materials, and revenue during the great campaigns of the Chinese civil war, 1945-1949. It was thus imperative that the Communists develop a bureaucratic and organizational infrastructure at both the provincial and regional levels. Based on newly-available sources from the Shandong provincial archives and other Communist party history materials, this study argues that centralization and unification of the Communist party-state did not begin in a vacuum from 1949, but had its origins in the necessity to unify and concentrate materials and organizational structures in order to wage war.;This dissertation finds that throughout the 1940s and through the first three years of the formal Communist state, the Communists grappled with such statebuilding problems as how to balance power among central, provincial and local authorities, among the party, government, and military organizations, and with tensions between the Communist military and local society. The pragmatic policies the Communists devised in order to solve these problems included development of fiscal and economic administration, systematization of civilian labor service during the civil war, coordinated with rear-area production and front-line support, and management of foreign trade, including the export of opium, despite the Communists' public condemnation of opium production and trade. This study emphasizes that, like today, commerce and trade were vital to the growth of the Shandong Communist movement during the 1940s, not only as part of its wartime economic development platform, but also to finance the Communists' civil and military organizations. This dissertation concludes that continuities in the statebuilding goals of the late Imperial and Republican regimes; the early Communist party-state; and today, have prevailed over ideological differences among different regimes.