Content area
Full Text
THE RETURN OF IDEOLOGY: The Search for Regime Identities in Postcommunist Russia and China. By Cheng Chen. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2016. x, 228 pp. (Tables.) US$65.00, cloth. ISBN 978-0472-11993-6.
The literature on post-communist transition has overwhelmingly focused on the transition from planned to market-oriented economy, and the political transition from authoritarianism to democracy. Yet, despite the economic and political changes in the post-communist states, neither economic nor political transitions have happened as expected. In many post-communist states, not only has the transition to a market economy met great difficulties, but the initial democratization has also tended to be reversed. How can such developments be explained? Lately, scholars have begun to turn to other aspects of the post-communist transition. The book under review here stands out and makes an important contribution to this still growing body of literature. In this excellent study, Cheng Chen focuses on ideology, a subject that has been unduly understudied in the literature.
More than sixty years ago, in his Ideology and Organization in Communist China, Franz Schurmann pointed to the significance of political ideology to the Chinese communist state, arguing that what held Communist China together was ideology and organization. This argument is certainly applicable to other communist states. Therefore, when one talks about the transition, these two aspects...