The present state of Japanese research on the Chinese Communist Party: report on the joint review workshop “Great Dissection of the CCP”

Abstract

The present article focuses on five recent Japanese-language research monographs on the history of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and the People’s Republic of China (PRC), authored respectively by Eda Kenji, Mishina Hidenori, Zhou Jun, Takahashi Nobuo, and Suzuki Takashi. The books cover a wide span, reaching from the history of the early years of the CCP through the Communist-Nationalist civil war era, the early years after the founding of the People’s Republic, the implementation of the Great Leap Forward policy, the Cultural Revolution, and until the contemporary Xi Jinping regime. Based on a joint review workshop held at the Institute for Research in the Humanities at Kyoto University in 2025, the article discusses the contributions of the five books and the perspectives of their respective reviewers.