Communist China
During the Sino-Japanese war of 1937, the Kuomintang immediately suffered
major
military defeats and lost control of eastern China. It was only saved
from total
hopelessness or defeat by Japan's suicidal decision to attack the
United States
and invasion of Southeastern Asia. But military rescue from
Japan brought no
significant improvement in the Kuomintang's domestic
performance in the
political and economic fields, which if anything to get
worse. Clearly the
pre-Communist history of Modern China has been essentially
one of weakness,
humiliation, and failure. This is the atmosphere in which
the CPC developed its
leadership and growth in. The result has been a strong
determination on the part
of that leadership to eliminate foreign influence
within China, to modernize
their country, and to eliminate Western influence
from eastern Asia, which
included the Soviet Union. China was changing and
even developing, but its
overwhelming marks were still poverty and weakness.
During their rise to power
the Chinese Communists, like most politically
conscious Chinese, were aware of
these conditions and anxious to eliminate
them. Mao Tse-tung envisioned a mixed
economy under Communist control, such
as had existed in the Soviet Union during
the period of the New Economic
Policy. The stress was more upon social justice,
and public ownership of the
"commanding heights" of the economy than
upon development. In 1945, Mao was
talking more candidly about development,
still within the framework of a
mixed economy under Communist control, and
stressing the need for more heavy
industry; I believe because he had been
impressed by the role of heavy
industry in determine the outcome of World War
II. In his selected works
he said "that the necessary capital would come
mainly from the accumulated
wealth of the Chinese people" but latter added
"that China would appreciate
foreign aid and even private foreign
investment, under non exploitative
conditions." After Chiang Kai-shek broke
away from the CPC they found
themselves in a condition that they were not
accustom to, they had no armed
forces or territorial bases of its own. It had no
program of strategy other
than the one that Stalin had compromised, who from the
Sixth World
Congress of the Comintern in 1928 to the Seventh in 1935 insisted,
largely
because the disaster he had suffered in China that Communist
Parties
everywhere must promote world revolution in a time of depression. The
CPC was
ridden with factionalism; the successful effort to replace this
situation with
one of relative "bolshevization" or in layman's term this
means
imposed unity, which was ultimately made by Mao Tse-tung, and not by
Stalin.
Parallel with the Comintern-dominated central apparatus of the
CPC in Shanghai,
there arose a half dozen Communist-led base areas, each with
a guerrilla army,
in Central and South China. These bases existed mainly by
virtue of the efforts
of the local Communist leadership to satisfy the
serious economic and social
grievances of the local civilians, often
violently, through such means as
redistribution of land at the expense of
landlords and the reduction of interest
rates at the expense of moneylenders.
Of these base areas, or soviets, the most
important was the one led by Mao
Tse-tung and centered in the southeastern city
of Kiangsi. Correspondingly,
in return for such service Mao was elected chairman
of a Central Soviet
Government, who supposedly controlled all the Communist base
areas in 1931.
Before I tell about Mao Tse-tung, I will tell you about Maoism.
By Maoism
or "the thought of Mao Tse-tung" as the CPC would put it is
the entire
evolving complex of patterns of official thought and behavior that
CPC
has developed while under Mao's leadership. It was very difficult
to
unscramble Mao's individual contribution while not confusing it with
other
thinkers of this time period as many have done and are still doing to
this date.
It is also difficult to separate the pre-1949 and the
post-1949 aspects and the
domestic from the international aspects. The first
basic and most important
characteristic that I believe is a deep and sincere
nationalism that has been
merged with the strictly Communist elements. Then
closely resembling nationalism
was his populism approach so full of strain
that the CPC saw itself not merely
as the Vanguard of the common people, plus
as the progressive side of the middle
class, but as representative of the
people. This was important as it played the
opposite position of the "three
big mountains" (imperialism,
feudalism, and bureaucratic capitalism) and
still yet accept the passively the
leadership CPC. Maoism still possessed two
other points that are significant in
understanding this ideology, it
recognizes the decisive importance in history of
conscious, voluntary
activity and of subjective forces in more detail than the
sometimes compared
Leninism which was opposed to deterministic, objective
forces. The last point
it brings out is that Maoism stresses contradictions and
struggle, or what
might be called the power of negative thinking, to the point
where it invents
enemies of all types and comments on their size and calls them
"paper tiger"
as he did in a speech in 1950.