Search

This article examines the organization of social welfare production work (shehui fuli shengchan gongzuo) in China's southwest Sichuan province from 1956 to 1965, with a focus on the marginalized experience of disabled workers during and after the Great Leap Forward Campaign (1958–62). Utilizing unexamined state archives, local gazetteers, and newspaper publications, the study traces how disabled workers were incorporated into or excluded from the campaign and their survival strategies after its derailment. During the Great Leap Forward, a campaign that aimed to rapidly industrialize China and accelerate developmental timelines, disabled workers were mobilized into collective production for the first time in the People's Republic of China. When the industrial labor force needed to shrink, however, these once-mobilized disabled workers were marginalized and excluded from the state production system and instead resorted to heterodox forms of labor not officially recognized by the Communist state. The article argues that the tension between disabled workers and the Chinese Communist state, intensified by poor economic conditions, stemmed from the marginalization of disabled individuals with limited productivity in the state's idealized vision of productive labor. By uncovering the interplay between disability, labor mobilization, and state ideology, this article contributes to a deeper understanding of the social and economic dynamics during the Great Leap Forward era. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 1958, the People' s Republic of China initiated the Great Leap Forward campaign. In the same year, People's Communes were established as an administrative entity in rural China with the goal of developing collective economy. One of the most important elements of the commune was the Communal Canteen (gonggong shitang), which were established to ensure all the members within the commune obtained a fair share of economic growth, while simultaneously forbidding the preparation of food at home. This article discusses three recipe books created for Communal Canteens published in 1959. These books suggested that the Communal Canteen provide various delicious and nutritious dishes, such as those containing meats and eggs. In reality, however, the recipe books did not play any significant role in the development of Communal Canteens, because of the nationwide famine that began in late 1958, thus neither meat nor eggs were available. By examining booklets published by local authorities and government documents, this article reveals the actual foods Communal Canteen provided, demonstrating that the government created false hope that a communist society could be achieved through Communal Canteens and the Great Leap Forward more generally. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Sino-Soviet Alliance: An International History When this book on the Sino-Soviet split during the Cold War was published in 2014, it joined two other prominent works that were also based on extensive international archival research. But without leaders with strong personalities such as Mao and Khrushchev, China and the Soviet Union might have been able to avoid a rupture in the early 1960s and border clashes in 1969. Thus, by 1958, a left-turning China under Mao and a right-leaning Soviet Union under Khrushchev could not see eye to eye and stay on good terms. [Extracted from the article]

By contrast, we see two fulcrums of successful state direction in capitalist countries that have shaped the postwar world. How to Make an Entrepreneurial State. [Extracted from the article]

This article uses legal archives from Liangshan 梁山 county, Shandong, to explore the ambiguous position of rural markets in China during the Great Leap Forward campaign (1958–1962). These testimonies, though sparse, show that negotiations at a local, indeed personal, level underpinned the symbiosis between the "second economy" of illicit trade and the party-state's putatively socialist political economy. Liangshan's gray market bridged the gap between the party-state's Sputnik promises and catastrophic realities, contributing twofold to the party-state's political survival. First, illicit commerce helped famine survivors, including local cadres, obtain desperately needed sustenance; these cadres' support of trading villagers despite top-down restrictions on such transactions likely helped them retain local moral authority after the Leap. Second, the intermittent formal prosecution of "profiteers" in the ritualized space of the county courtroom projected justice, stability, and coercive power, which also contributed to the party's continuing hold on authority. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

MIT Professor and Head of Architecture there, Nicholas de Monchaux explores the recent forays of Bartlett School of Architecture professors Mark Smout and Laura Allen into forestry, regreening and ecology, for example their 'Rescue Lines' drawing/table project, conceived in conjunction with LA‐based critic Geoff Manaugh and presented at the Venice Architecture Biennale in 2021. De Monchaux's wide‐ranging exposition offers further thoughts on the nature of drawing relative to Smout Allen's work, with reference to the underwater forest made by the timber piles below Venice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Relatively few studies have examined the 'echo effect' of health shocks related to prenatal and early-life malnutrition, that is, whether the legacy of such shocks is transmitted to the next generation. This study addresses this gap by leveraging extreme malnutrition during the Great Leap Forward famine in China, and by examining its intergenerational consequences. Using a difference-in-differences framework, we estimate the effect of the famine on a wide range of outcomes of children of mothers who were exposed in-utero and in early-life including income, education, and employment, indicators that have not been considered in detail before. Using a refined measure of famine exposure at the prefecture level in rural areas, and by exploiting rich data on those directly affected and their children, we find that on average, the famine had negative echo effects on second-generation outcomes. These echo effects are primarily due to adverse impacts on daughters. Mechanisms include impacts of the famine on the human capital of mothers, and suggestive evidence of son preference. Our results withstand a battery of robustness, specification and falsification checks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The document provides a collection of notes on various topics related to national security and military strategy. It includes references to sources discussing the 2018 National Defense Strategy, the US-China relationship, China's economic coercion, and China's growing jingoism. The document also mentions concerns about the US military's readiness for war and the potential for conflict with China over Taiwan. It highlights the need for a revised military approach and the importance of information superiority and network-centric warfare. The document concludes with references to the Joint All-Domain Command and Control strategy and the concept of war at information speed. [Extracted from the article]

The article analyses the scope and quality of selected aspects and issues of relations between the German Democratic Republic (Gdr) and China in the 1950s and early 1960s. How was Chinese dictator Mao Zedong's Hundred Flowers Campaign perceived and interpreted in East Berlin, why and until when was Gdr leader Walter Ulbricht supportive of and indeed enthusiastic about Mao's disastrous Great Leap Forward are among the questions this article will address and seek to answer. As it turned out, East German leaders' assessments and newspaper reporting on Mao's domestic and foreign policy and government propaganda did not in any way correspond with Chinese on the ground realities. The same was true for Chinese reporting and propaganda on Ulbricht's decision to divide Berlin with a wall in 1961: misleading and wrong reporting in support of a fair-weather friendship, in the wake of the Sino-Soviet Split in early Sixties would turn into enmity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

China's influence in global capitalism has increasingly become prevalent, exceeding the limit of studies about China. Our special issue, I Global China i , aims to highlight the complex entanglement of China and fashion-making in the transglobal landscape (Ling and Segre-Reinach [15]). Thus, I Global China i encompasses a twofold concept for the study of fashion in the 21st century: Contemporary China is a major player in global culture. China as the world's factory continues to fill wardrobes across the globe, whether they are manufactured in China or made and invested by Chinese outside of China. [Extracted from the article]

Ten years after the 2008 global financial meltdown, sufficient experience had been gathered to evaluate the long-term economic policy responses to the crisis. The three defining tendencies of the state capitalist system include (1) its coincidence with political illiberalism; (2) private property remains dominant, though indirect channels of state influence are multiplying; (3) formal and informal state coordination mechanisms are dominant, which alongside corruption leads to significant market distortions. The analysis suggests we should reject the assumption that state intervention crowds out market actors and logics, and instead pay attention to how market-based governance supports state power - and vice versa. From this point of view, one can argue that I all i capitalism is state capitalism, since states create markets and support particular kinds of property rights over others. [Extracted from the article]

The article focuses on media comparatively that is determining as to what extent media technologies are aggrandizing, autonomous forces that reorganize the environment around them in order to accommodate their own technological needs. Topics include considered that technology is a standardizing, overcoding force that erodes local particularities.

China's Great Leap Forward of 1958–60, an attempt to increase agricultural production through increased labor inputs, resulted in the greatest famine in world history from 1959 to 1961. Most histories emphasize the political mistakes of this period, which were disastrous. But to understand how the political mistakes led to the famine, here I concentrate on the ecosystem mismanagement that led to drastic drops in food production. To explain these effects, I use the concept of the "Four Horsemen of the Ecopocalypse:" over-emphasis on single variables, cross-scale mismatches, top-down panaceas, and ignorance of system feedbacks, all of which eliminated the resilience of agro-ecosystems to both internal contradictions and external disturbances. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article analyzes deep entanglement between cinema and material productions in industry, agriculture and infrastructure and investigates the intertwined histories of media practice and social transformation. Topics discussed include Great Leap Forward, a mass campaign of China to speed up industrialization, Documentary films witnessing the greatest growth of 1958–1959, social transformations in existing class structure of China and impact of cinema on practices of labor and technology.

Historicising Chinese foreign‐aid thinking has become indispensable given China's increasing global role. This article examines a key aspect of this context: the Great Leap Forward and the emerging Sino‐Soviet split period (1958‐1961). The Peking Review is utilised as a window into official aid‐related discourses of the time. The article is organized around an aid vs. "aid" rhetorical and conceptual symmetry within the magazine. Aid is ultimately what Mao Zedong and other leaders intend audiences to code as pro‐development and prestigious. The greater the unreciprocated cost to the donor and the higher the embodied technology, the more helpful and prestigious the donor. At the same time, the more ideologically correct the recipient or donor, the greater its relative prestige in the equation. An ideologically correct recipient such as China deserves more help but needs it less, and accrues more prestige even as it gives comparatively less aid. "Aid" is the reverse image of aid in that it is harmful rather than helpful. But instead of being the opposite of prestigious, "aid" is powerful in a predatory, paper tiger‐like way. While this discourse reflects parochial concerns of the period, the underlying concepts are likely to continue to influence contemporary Chinese aid thinking and practices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The context of modern China is particularly revealing of the effects of centralized management on ecosystem resilience, inasmuch as the overall scale of human population and its effect on environment(s) is amplified, management is intense, and centralized political control is effective. At the same time, social-ecological systems become dependent on these big projects; they create rigidity traps (Holling I et al. i [3]: 95) that limit adaptive capacity and increase vulnerability to large-scale or unanticipated disturbances. The articles in this topical cluster evolved out of a regional symposium centered on the theme of socio-ecological resilience in modern China, held in April 2019 at the University of Puget Sound in Tacoma, Washington. [Extracted from the article]

The article examines the transnational dimensions of the industrialisation drive in Bulgaria in the late 1950s and poses the question of how extensively this campaign was influenced by the contemporary 'Great Leap Forward' in China. Although there is no evidence of comprehensive adoption of a Chinese model, there was widespread enthusiasm for China, and technologies were transferred in connection with the Chinese acceleration policies. These transfers did not have a geopolitical implication, as Western Cold War historians had supposed, but rather happened in a context of widespread technological exchange and hint at multi-centrality in the socialist camp before the Sino-Soviet split. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper discusses the promotion of the Great Leap Forward in Czechoslovakia as an example of a socialist globalization, i.e. an attempt of the PRC to propagate in the socialist bloc the economic policy of the Great Leap Forward as an alternative path towards communism as opposed to the strategy of the Soviet five-year plans. The author deals with the presentation of the Great Leap Forwards in various works written in 1958 and 1959 by Michal Falťan, Slovak politician and economist, who visited the PRC in autumn 1958. Other means of promotion of the Great Leap Forward (e.g. Chinese exhibitions in Prague, newspaper articles about people's communes, special issue of the journal Světová literatúra with the translations of the Chinese folk poetry of this period) are also mentioned. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Primarily based on official archives produced from Mao's China in the mid-1950s to 1963 in Wuwei County, Anhui Province, this article explores sexual abuse carried out by local cadres of the Chinese Communist Party around the time of Mao's Great Famine (1958-1961). It first clarifies key concepts of sexual abuse and then reviews the crucial role of grain in many sexual cases. Further efforts are made to discuss the female victims, male perpetrators, and institutional factors of these crimes. A series of political, economic, and social policies, systems, and movements of highly centralized governance set up institutional traps for disadvantaged female victims who were "liberated" from traditional households. Supplemented with other local cases, the article argues that the overlap of state patriarchy and the authoritarian party-state made women vulnerable to local cadres and institutionalized sexual abuse. The case of Wuwei indicates that Mao's regime was yet another form of gender domination. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines documentary evidence that has emerged from the Chinese state archives showing that from the outset, the Great Leap Forward failed as a method for improving agricultural productivity; that its failure was quickly evident and purposefully ignored; and that the level of human suffering and death was greater than has been suggested. In addition, in contrast to the image of a strictly disciplined communist society in which errors at the top cause the entire machinery to grind to a halt, the portrait that emerges from archival documents is one of a society in deliquescence, as people resort to every means available to get by as well as they can. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article places the great famine in Kazakhstan (1931-33) in the context of policies implemented by the Stalinist and Maoist governments towards Central Eurasian pastoral populations. After highlighting the factors that caused the famine in Ukraine, the article focuses on the specificities of the famine among the Kazakhs, and its regional distribution within Kazakhstan. It then analyses the role that the same factors could have played in other mainly pastoral regions, both during the 1930s (Kyrgyz ASSR, Outer Mongolia), and during Mao's Great Leap Forward (Inner Mongolia, Tibet, Qinghai, Xinjiang). The article compares the different cases and investigates their transnational connections. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Ayer: Revista de Historia Contemporánea is the property of Asociacion de Historia Contemporanea and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

ABSTRACT The Great Leap Forward (GLF) (1958-61) in China was a natural experiment that removed private property rights to achieve rapid growth via central planning, producing immediate famine and death. Using three measures for the GLF, we find that it still exerts a significant negative effect on output per worker in 2004 across Chinese provinces. This result is robust to the use of political factors from the GLF period as instruments. The causal relationship persists after controlling for climate conditions and initial output per capita. Moreover, the causal relationship exists when we change the dependent variable to output per worker in 1978, which refutes the notion that market-oriented reforms alone explain the difference in income in 2004. Therefore, the GLF has had a lasting, negative effect on output. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article uses rural gazetteer biographies to examine village and household-level famine relief during the great North China Famine of 1876–9 to deepen our understanding of past relief methods and dynamics at the most local level. Despite the appearance of major works recently on famine in modern China, particularly on the Great Leap Forward, knowledge of Chinese famine relief remains thin and scattered considering the enormity of the subject. Nineteenth-century China saw intensifying international relief activity as well as the emergence of a vibrant charity-relief sector based in China's major cities, leading to the rise of prominent relief institutions in the twentieth century, such as the Chinese Red Cross. But the increasingly intense disasters of China's modern period also saw a surprising persistence of local humanitarian traditions still barely covered by historians. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines instances in which Mao Zedong used food as a symbol or administrative contrivance for mass mobilization and political maneuvering during the Great Leap Forward and its aftermath. This type of “food politics” was based on some seemingly trivial matters, such as Mao’s personal preferences for certain foods, a steamed bun brought to his attention by his bodyguard, his diet during the famine, and so on. On one hand, in a political environment dominated by Mao’s personality cult and in a culture that placed great importance on culinary matters, the “triviality” of Mao’s food preferences or comments nevertheless had a cascade effect that endlessly multiplied and extended into much broader statecraft. On the other hand, in a subtle and savvy way, grassroots society circumvented the established political legitimacy with the very same comments, effectively using Mao’s own words against the policies that Mao himself advocated and enforced. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over the last decade, qualitative researchers have begun to challenge the domination and universalistic claims of the Global North. Nevertheless, it is still unclear what pursuing qualitative research (QR) from the Global South might entail. I advance this effort by situating it in the larger context of the decentering endeavor in social science and decolonizing methodologies in aboriginal scholarship. Informed by their locally-grounded approach in the quest for constructing alternative social science accounts and articulating decolonized knowledge, I argue that writing locally-grounded histories is an essential first step to explore methodologies and epistemologies of QR from the Global South. Noting that no national history of QR has been derived from the Global South, I present an example of writing the history of QR by examining MAO Zedong's legacy of "investigative research" (IR). Specifically, I analyze the practices of IR during China's "Great Leap Forward" (1958-62). In conclusion, I discuss the implications of IR to the development of social science research in contemporary China. I lay out key issues in pursuing QR from the Global South and present how such a pursuit is relevant to social science inquiry in the Global North. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using new archival materials, internal publications, and gazetteers as its sources, this article studies the conduct of disaster governance in Tianjin city during the Great Leap Forward famine from 1958–1962. The city was organizationally well able to implement disaster relief efforts, and early on it took a number of measures to control and mitigate the food crisis that began in the city in early 1959. However, Maoist campaign-based disaster management could not work well when other campaigns were prioritized in its stead. Lacking central sanction for a major disaster relief effort, city leaders resorted to strategies that prioritized its residents over suburban peasants and outsiders. The city actively sought resources from outside while trying to prevent their outward flows. The city's own production of vegetables must not be overlooked as one of the reasons for better survival rates among urban residents, but even this policy was hampered by other Great Leap Forward initiatives. In the case of Tianjin, urban disaster governance of the famine was inward-looking and, at the same time, constrained and reliant on the central government. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article provides an interpretation of Mao Zedong's political strategy during the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962. The connection between the internal and external struggle towards revisionism – launched by Mao in the first half of 1962 to eradicate the critics of the Great Leap Forward from the CCP – was energised by Mao's ability to exploit the opportunities offered by the Cuban crisis. Mao managed to capitalise on Moscow's strained relations in the Caribbean: the propaganda campaign launched within the country to support the Cuban revolution and criticise Soviet revisionism helped Mao to consolidate his political struggle and win over his opponents. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Over the last decades, qualitative researchers from the global south have questioned the dominance of the Anglo-American core and the current divide between the core and periphery. Nevertheless, it is unclear how to disrupt the divide. This article advances this endeavour by demonstrating the interplay between Anglo-American domination and a local hegemonic discourse that has perpetuated the core–periphery divide and hindered the development of critical qualitative research (QR) in the periphery. The author conceptualizes the periphery as an incubator that nurtures locally grounded and globally informed qualitative researchers. This demands interrogating the interplay between core domination and local hegemony. Doing so lays the foundation for qualitative researchers in the periphery to explore, and eventually articulate, decentred methodologies and locally situated epistemologies on a globalized platform. Using two case studies of QR conducted in China, the article examines the practices and politics of doing (critical) QR in contemporary China. It discusses methodological and epistemological issues pertinent to decentring QR in a global era. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Independent documentary film projects dealing with history have recently multiplied in China. While all seek to shed new light on personal experiences of the Mao era, they vary greatly in form, method, and scale. Launched in 2010 by Wu Wenguang at the Caochangdi Workstation, a space devoted to contemporary dance and documentary film, the Folk Memory Project aims at producing various textual and visual records of the historical experience of rural populations, especially during the Great Leap famine. Of special interest are the 20 documentaries of the Folk Memory Project's film section – a body of works constantly growing following yearly returns by filmmakers to their "home" villages. These films are characterised by a performative aspect that is rare in other Chinese documentaries on similar topics. This contribution examines this body of documentaries and the role of performance and performativity in the recording of collective memory of the famine. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the scar literature of the early 1980s, fiction and fictionalised autobiography have played an important role in bringing to light the mass violence of the Cultural Revolution. However, these texts remained within a well-defined framework in which the political system itself was not questioned. Over the last decade, by contrast, the Chinese literary field has focused more specifically on the 1950s, with works such as Yang Xianhui's Chronicles of Jiabiangou (Tianjin, 2002), and Yang Jisheng's Tombstone (Hong Kong, 2008). This paper focuses on Yan Lianke's Four Books (Hong Kong, 2010), a full-fledged fictionalisation in a fantastic mode of the famine of the Great Leap Forward in a village on the Yellow River. Considering literature in the context of theories of the public sphere, it suggests that Yan's book aims to broaden decisively the discussion on certain previously out-of-bounds aspects of the Mao era, an aim only partially thwarted by its failure to be published within mainland China. Four Books, like Yang Jisheng and Yang Xianhui's works, thus represents an attempt to call into question the original legitimacy of the PRC polity and to create debate within the Chinese-speaking public sphere on the foundations of the current regime. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study tests the evolutionary hypothesis that maternal nutritional condition can influence offspring sex ratio at birth in humans. Using the 1959-1961 Chinese Great Leap Forward famine as a natural experiment, this study combines two large-scale national data sources and difference-in-differences method to identify the effect of famine-induced acute malnutrition on sex ratio at birth. The results show a significant famine-induced decrease in the proportion of male births in the 1958, 1961, and 1964 in the urban population but not in the rural population. Given that both the urban and rural populations suffered from the famine-induced malnutrition, and that the rural population experienced a drastic famine-induced mortality increase and fertility reduction, these results suggest the presence of a short-term famine effect, a long-term famine effect, and a selection effect. The timing of the estimated famine effects suggests that famine influences sex ratio at birth by differential implantation and differential fetal loss by fetal sex. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose -- The purpose of this paper is to explain the puzzle of Chinese Great Leap Famine, which started with a good harvest in the end of 1958 and ended with lowest rural grain consumption per capita in 1961, by focussing on the communal dining system characterized by compulsory collectivization of peasants' total grain rations, and deprivation of private plots and household sideline production. Design/methodology/approach -- The paper uses the panel data of 25 provinces from 1958 to 1962 to make the benchmark estimations by POLS and endogeneity-elimination estimations by 2SLS, employing the great advance in agricultural cooperative movement between 1954 and 1956 and the rural population density as the IVs for the radicalism of communal dining system during the Great Leap Forward. The β coefficients and Gfields decomposition are also presented to assess the relative importance of various factors on famine. Findings -- The empirical study finds that the communal dining system does play a critical role on the famine. The evidences of the β coefficients and Gfields decomposition basing on previous estimations also show that communal dining system is the most important cause on the famine. Social implications -- The lesson from communal dining system on famine provides reference for resolving the current "Three Agrarian Issues" in China. It is important to allow peasants to exit from the compulsive collective system. Originality/value -- The paper discovers the institutional root of the famine by the endogeneity-elimination estimations of IVs and the assessment of relative importance of various factors on famine by β coefficients and Gfields decomposition. Paper type Research paper [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We review James Kung and Shuo Chen's study, published in the American Political Science Review, on the causes of China's Great Leap Famine (1959–1961). Kung and Chen explain the variations in provincial leaders' radicalism on the basis of the career incentives facing the provincial First Secretaries. In this article, we question the validity of their basic assumptions and also uncover serious issues with the Kung and Chen dataset. We conclude that their empirical findings were based on faulty foundations. Our alternative hypothesis instead explains the dynamics of political radicalism during the Great Leap Forward in terms of the provincial leaders' political loyalty to Mao. Our findings point to the significance of political networks in influencing the behavior of elites and, by extension, political and socio-economic outcomes. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Drawing on insights from economics, psychology, sociology, political science, and policy sciences, this article proposes a definition and measurement strategies for policy bubbles. A policy bubble is a real and/or perceived policy overreaction that is reinforced by positive feedback over an extended period of time. Positive feedback is here integrated in a model of human herding as the key factor that propels this process but also as a key generator of change. The process is conceptualized in terms of the formation, growth, and burst of policy bubbles. This causal-explanatory understanding of the term allows for the possibility that different modes of policy overreaction lead to different types of human herding, thereby resulting in different types of policy bubbles. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Beginning in 1958, the communist regime of the People's Republic of China forged an alliance with the provisional government of the Algerian Front de Libération Nationale (FLN). China's willingness to patronise the FLN posed a sharp challenge to France and other Western powers, but it was in the domestic politics of China and Algeria that this partnership had its most profound effect. Embroiled in the Great Leap Forward, the Chinese government used its support for Algeria to reaffirm its claim to embody a genuinely revolutionary ideology. The FLN, which was eager to legitimise its control over the Algerian nationalist movement, relied on the Chinese government to endorse its political and military strategy. Thus, the relationship between China and the FLN was for both sides a convenient means by which to articulate ideologies of nationalism, unity, and revolution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]