Mao’s Chinese Communism: A Summary of the Causes and Consequences of Communism in China by Mao Zedong.
At the beginning of the twentieth century, the Celestial Empire, with its capital in Beijing, began to falter, due to the penetration of the Western powers (the “war of economic concessions”, for which there had already been the Boxer revolt , a reactionary anti-Western secret society, in 1900 , the first nationalist episode in China ) and Japan (the Sino-Japanese war in 1895 , with the Simo-Nosaki peace ). A famine caused popular discontent and the consequent spread of anti-imperialist and anti-colonialist ideas, which were condensed in the United League of Chinese Revolutionaries first and then in the National People’s Party ( Kuomintang ), both led by Sun Yat Sen. In 1911 the Manchu dynasty was deposed and the republic was proclaimed , with Sun Yat Sen becoming president. His political project was identified with the three principles of the people :
- national independence and elimination of foreign concessions;
- representative democracy
- overcoming feudal structures.
The hostility of the army and the rural nobility forced Sun Yat Sen to resign and leave the post of president to Yuan Shih-k’ai , who established a military dictatorship favorable to Westerners. In 1917, he decided that China would enter the war on the side of the Entente, but at the winners’ table, his interests, which were of lesser importance than those of Japan, were not taken into consideration. This aroused the indignation of the nationalists, supported by Russia. The numerous concessions made to foreigners and the attempt at excessive centralization of power caused the fall of Yuan Shih-k’ai, also determined by the opposition of the ” warlords “, military governors opposed to any democratic reform, who held power in the whole of northern China; the central-southern regions, linked to Sun Yat Sen, obtained aid from Russia to fight the “warlords”. Thus in 1921 there were two governments:
- legal, pro-bourgeois government of Beijing;
- national-progressive government in the North.
MAO TSE TUNG
In 1921 , students and intellectuals founded the Chinese Communist Party , and in 1923, Soviet agents reorganized the Kuomintang on the model of the Russian Bolshevik Party and formed a revolutionary nationalist army under the command of Chiang Kai-Shek. In 1927, accused of wanting to establish a dictatorship, the communists of Beijing and Canton were exterminated. In 1928 , the nationalist army defeated the “warlords”, occupied Beijing and Chiang Kai-Shek became head of the new government; with loans obtained from England and the USA, he prepared to modernize the country towards a capitalist model. The communists who escaped persecution fled to the rural areas under the command of Mao Tse-Tung , who believed that, since China was an agricultural country, the revolution should involve the peasant masses, who already formed the Red Army. In 1931 , in the province of Kiangsi the group coagulates in the Chinese Soviet Republic . Chiang Kai-Shek will try in vain to defeat the Red Army, succeeding only in 1934 ; consequently, in that year, the communists undertake the ” long march ” to move to the mountainous region of northern Shaanxi, in the city of Yenan.
Communists and nationalists will join forces only on the occasion of the Japanese threat between 1937 and 1945; after the Second World War, however, the different ideas of Mao and Chiang lead to a fracture that will lead to the civil war ( 1945-1949 ):
- Mao: a Soviet-style constitution is needed;
- Chiang: Western and landowner interests, wants a liberal democratic parliamentary system.
The Red Army, also supported by the Japanese war potential and the support of the peasants, finally entered Nanking, causing Chiang, recognized by the Western powers as the leader of the Chinese people, to flee to Taiwan; on October 1, 1949 , Mao proclaimed the birth of the People’s Republic of China .
Foreign Policy:
- in 1950 the Chinese army invaded Tibet and made it an autonomous region, establishing a climate of terror that led the Dalai Lama to flee to India;
- Mao signs economic assistance treaty with Moscow;
- China participates in the Korean War, intervenes in Vietnam and Cambodia;
- 1958: breakdown of relations with the USSR; in 1969, armed conflict on the Ussuri River and in Sikiang;
- 1964: China has the atomic bomb;
- more relaxed relations with Nixon’s USA, liberalization of trade;
- 1971: China enters the UN, because the US has removed its veto.
Domestic policy: the process of modernization through:
- agrarian reform: confiscation of the lands of large landowners and religious people in favor of the people;
- unites small farms into agricultural cooperatives (kolkhoz type);
- end of private property;
- nationalization of all industries;
- 1953: First Five-Year Plan: Control of money and banks, filing of all individuals, work units ( danwei ) regulate everything;
- 1958: second five-year plan and break with the USSR: the discontent of the peasants convinces Mao to focus on agricultural development, with the policy of the ” great leap forward “, creating popular communes, forms of direct democracy, without hierarchy (while Soviet communism is top-down), but fails; his aim is to create a communism that is an example for third world countries (third world vocation, unlike the USSR, which has Europe as its reference).
The failure of the “Great Leap Forward” policy, which causes a food crisis, is also caused by Mao’s attempt to reconcile the well-being of the masses with the egalitarian spirit of Marxist principles and brings back into fashion the bourgeois differentiations between manual and intellectual work; this pushes Mao to decide for the revolution.
CHINESE COMMUNIST PARTY
Between 1966 and 1968 , Mao repressed all internal opposition to the Communist Party itself, including the Deng Xiao-Ping faction (Khrushchevite), and launched the ” cultural revolution “, a policy based on overcoming the gap between city and countryside, between worker and manager, between intellectual and manual work and between educated and uneducated, but also characterised by the violent repression of any opposition, eliminating bureaucracy and meritocracy. The diffusion of his ideas, collected in the Little Red Book, through the student “red guards” and the People’s Liberation Army, fit into this policy: Mao wanted an extreme form of democracy, based on rigid principles of equality, but the fanaticism of the “red guards” ran the risk of causing a civil war to break out; this convinced Mao to renounce the new course in 1967 , promoting the formation of ” coalition committees ” between the various political, military and cultural forces. With Chou En-Lai in government as Prime Minister, a period of normalization began, in opposition to the hard and pure communism propagated by Lin Piao, who was against openness to the Western world.
