Böcker utgivna av University of California Press

Using a wide variety of sources previously unavailable, Hong Yung Lee offers for the first time a theoretical and historical perspective on China's ruling elite, examining their politics and the bureaucratic system in which they participate. He traces the evolution of these cadres from the guerrilla fighters who first joined the communist movement and founded the new regime in 1949 to the technocratic specialists who wield power today. In the revolution the Communist leaders built a peasant-based party organization whose members were largely recruited from uneducated poor peasants and hired laborers. Even after they became the founders of a new regime, their rural orientation and revolutionary experiences continued to affect the political process. Lee shows that the requirements of modernization have compelled the state to replace the revolutionary cadres with bureaucratic technocrats. Selected from the postliberation generation, the new leaders are more committed to problem-solving than to socialism. Despite uncertainties in the immediate future, this elite transformation signifies an end to modern China's revolutionary era. Lee argues that it seems only a matter of time before China will have a bureaucratic-authoritarian regime led by technocrats possessing a managerial perspective and a pragmatic economic orientation.

We are continually trying to make sense of our world through the stories we tell and are told, but in our search for coherence, we often sacrifice our freedom and the rich randomness of life. In this passionate and lucid book, Michael André Bernstein challenges our practice of "foreshadowing," in which we see our lives as moving toward a predetermined goal or as controlled by fate. Foreshadowing, he argues, demeans the variety and openness that exist in even the most ordinary moments of life. And it is precisely ordinary life, with its random, haphazard, and contradictory choices, that Bernstein celebrates in his call for "sideshadowing"-an alternative practice that reminds us that every present is dense with possible futures.   Bernstein sees the Holocaust as the prime example of how our tendency to "foreshadow" and "backshadow" misrepresents history. He argues eloquently against politicians and theologians who posit the Holocaust as foreordained and who depict its victims as somehow complicit with a fate that they should have been able to foresee. Instead, Bernstein proposes a radically new understanding of the relationship between the Holocaust and earlier Jewish experience, transforming how we read and write both individual and communal history.  Foregone Conclusions is an extraordinarily wide-ranging book, both in its scope and in its broader intellectual and moral implications. From the latest biographies of Kafka to the peace accords between Israel and the PLO, from the role of cultural diversity in universities to the Crown Heights riots, Bernstein warns us against passively accepting our identities as being shaped primarily by historical or personal victimization. His book liberates us from stereotyped patterns of understanding the relationship between our lives as individuals and as members of racial, sexual, and historic/ethnic communities.   Berstein ultimately opens a powerful new way to understand the principles governing how we read and write narratives--whether historical, personal, or literary. In striking original juxtapositions and critical evaluations of Marcel Proust, Robert Musil, and Aharon Appelfeld, Bernstein sugests the need for a new literary model based on the prosaics of daily life. Bernstein speaks directly and persuasively to many of the most pressing issues in Jewish history, Holocaust studies, literary criticism, and cultural history. Foregone Conclusions is a provocative and poignant attempt to find coherence in our world without accepting either ineluctable destiny of pure coincidence.   This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press's mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1994.