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20 Probs. Communism 2 (1971)
Patterns of Asian Communism

handle is hein.journals/probscmu20 and id is 4 raw text is: Patternso Asian Communisml By Robed A, $catapino .. . . . .. . . . . .. . . . .. . . . . .. . . . .. . . . . .. . . . .. . . . . L ike all political systems, communism is a method, first, of gaining power and, second, of holding on to it after it has been won. These two separate functions suggest an important pre- liminary distinction that needs to be made in analyz- ing Asian communism today. Outside of Mainland China, Mongolia, North Korea, and North Vietnam, where the Communist Party already wields ruling authority, the Asian Communist parties or movements are all still in the stage of attempting to gain power, While their tactics run a considerable gamut, only in Japan, Ceylon, and India (excluding the Naxalites) are they accepted participants in the regular political process, seeking to achieve their objectives by legal, parliamentary methods. Everywhere else in Asia, the Communist movements operate as an illegal force challenging those in authority by every available means, and the vast majority of them are firmly committed to armed revolution as the only effective method of attaining power. Their primary tactics are those of violence and the forceful overthrow of the established govern- ments confronting them. In the handful of countries where the Com- munists already rule, the primary concern of the regimes has naturally shifted to the tasks of preserv- ing and consolidating their own power and building up the power of the states they rule. They are de- termined to make their own revolution the final one Mr. Scalapino is Professor of Political Science at th. University of California (Berkeley) and editor of the journal Asian Survey. His works on Far Eastern poli- tics include The Japanese Communist Movement, 1920-1966 and Communism in Korea (Berkeley, University of California Press, 1967 and 1970, re- spectively), the latter co-authored with Chong-sik Lee. for their respective societies, and their postrevolu tionary institutions attest to that determination. Yet, in sharp contrast to the majority of estab- lished Communist regimes in Europe, those in Asia (with the exception of Soviet-dominated Mongolia) still retain to a considerable degree, in their post- revolutionary policies and ideological positions, a continuing commitment to violence. This character- istic manifests itself internally, for example, in the continuing, heavy stress placed on the necessity of waging unremitting class struggle, as strikingly evi- denced in China's Cultural Revolution. Externally, it manifests itself in the strenuous resistance of these regimes to the whole concept of peaceful coexistence between socialist and capitalist states and in their active encouragement and support of wars of na- tional liberation, This poses the question: Why is the commitment to violence so extensive and enduring in the Asian Communist movements generally? Bearing in mind that all but a few of these movements have yet to win power, two interrelated factors would appear to be centrally involved. First, parliamentary, party- centered politics remain weak or nonexistent in much of Asia, making the route to power via the ballot box difficult, if not impossible. Moreover, the power of elected bodies is normally limited, and the election processes themselves are challengeable. More fundamentally, however, the answer appears to lie in a second, much broader and more complex phenomenon. Asian communism has derived its pre- ferred style of revolution partly from select but cru- cial aspects of traditional Asian political culture interacting harmoniously with certain political-ideoo logical tendencies characteristic of communism as an operative system. In the Asian cultures, majori- tarianism, for example, has never had any particular

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