Once carried to power in 1949, the communists
were able to establish effective rule over the mainland
of China and end the warfare that had torn
the country apart since the first decades of the
twentieth century. Chinese sovereignty was soon
extended to the offshore islands and in 1950
forcibly to Tibet. Only Taiwan and a few other
small islands remained outside the control of the
new Chinese Republic. There, Chiang Kai-shek,
vowing anew each year to continue the civil war,
established a separate state by occupying the
islands with his fleeing army. Taiwan (Formosa),
together with the Pescadores and the tiny islands
of Quemoy and Matsu, continue to represent the
other China. However, the possibility of renewing
the civil war has long ago vanished. The
People’s Republic has ceased to be shunned by
the West and its representative has taken his place
as a permanent member of the United Nations
Security Council. Even the brutal suppression of
the movement, largely of students and young
people, crushed so bloodily in Tiananmen Square
in 1989, isolated the Chinese communist leadership
from the West for only a short time. Today
China benefits from huge Japanese and Western
investment.
The father of Chinese communism was Mao
Zedong. The China he knew in his youth had
been exploited and invaded in turn by foreign
nations – Britain, France, Russia, Germany and
Japan – in the nineteenth century and during the
first half of the twentieth. The Chinese Republic
founded and presided over by Sun Yat-sen was
too weak to halt foreign depredation, and modernisation
efforts made slow progress in the face
of the hugeness of China’s problems, the backwardness
of the overwhelmingly peasant population
and the decades of incessant warfare.
This was the China Mao Zedong had known all
his adult life. He was born in 1893, just two years
before Japan’s first victory over China in war had
added to its humiliating record of defeats by the
Europeans. His father, through thrift and by
means of lending his savings at usurious rates,
amassed what was for a peasant modest wealth.
Mao worked on his father’s farm, collected his
father’s loans and, taught by a tutor, read widely.
In the turbulent last years of the Manchu dynasty
and during the revolution of 1911 that followed,
Mao gained first-hand experience of the poverty
and distress of the peasantry, and felt the stirrings
of social revolt and patriotism of these years. For a
short time he became a soldier in the service of the
revolution. Like other Chinese progressives, he
avidly read Western books to gain the new knowledge
that the progressives believed would save
China. But as Mao later remarked, ‘Imperialist
aggression shattered the fond dreams of the
Chinese about learning from the West. It was very
odd – why were the teachers always committing
aggression against their pupil?’
The Russian Revolution then brought a new
learning to China, Marxism–Leninism. Mao was
an enthusiastic supporter of the May the Fourth
Movement (1919), demonstrating and rising in
protests against both the conservative society and
foreign subjugation. His patriotic and radical
views soon led him beyond the May the Fourth
Movement to Marxism and, in 1921, joining the
Chinese Communist Party. For all his adaptations
of this doctrine to Chinese conditions, Mao
remained faithful to the basic tenets of Marxism–
Leninism all his life. He would later claim that it
was Russia after Stalin’s death that was departing
from the course prescribed by Marx, Lenin and
the younger Stalin and that the mantle of the
world leadership of the true faith had passed to
China. But the sense of world mission did not
exclude a strong feeling for China’s unique
national identity. The world would be transformed
not by Chinese conquests but by the
Chinese example and the successful struggle of
the suppressed masses of other nations.
Through all the turmoil of fighting against his
Chinese opponents from 1927 onwards and then
against the Japanese too, Mao’s vision was of a
China that would be reborn ‘powerful and prosperous’,
a ‘people’s republic worthy of the name’.
Mao hated his enemies with passion, could act
with bitter ruthlessness to destroy opponents but
was also able with brilliant tactical good sense to
persuade and cajole, to divide the opposition and
so to emerge the strongest. For Mao, China’s
future required the mass mobilisation of the peasantry,
the vast majority of Chinese citizens, and
he believed that the application of Marxist–
Leninist doctrines would transform their lives.
The social classes which could not place the good
of the community before their individualistic
desire for gain might be reformed, but if that
failed they would be destroyed. At the root of the
social revolution, Mao observed, lay a revolution
of the human spirit. This would occur not by
itself, but only through unremitting class struggle
and the teaching of the masses.
Mao repeatedly warned that perseverance was
necessary to bring about the socialist economic
revolution but that this would not be enough,
that it was necessary also ‘to carry on constant and
arduous socialist revolutionary struggles and
socialist education on the political and ideological
fronts’. His ideology was fanatical; in his
pursuit of it, millions would die and suffer.
Marxism–Leninism provided Mao both with the
means to be adopted and the ends which would
thereby be achieved. The disciplined party – the
party groups, the cadres, sent to convert the
masses community by community – was the basic
method used in the Soviet Union and later in
China too. In China, Mao concentrated on the
countryside, the poor peasantry, driven to increasing
desperation by the combination of the natural
and human depredations afflicting China in the
1920s, 1930s and 1940s. Village associations,
youth movements, student federations, women’s
organisations and other societies had millions of
members after 1949 and served as the means of
linking the central authorities with the masses.
But no mercy would be shown to those identified
as the enemies of the people. Violent death
on a huge scale was nothing new to Chinese
history. Mao pursued his vision of utopia regardless
of human cost.
The October Revolution in Russia had been
spearheaded by the industrial proletariat. Mao’s
contribution to revolutionary theory, it is often
claimed, is that he relied on the peasantry: to surround
the towns with the countryside and then
to conquer them – that was the model of the
Chinese revolution. For Mao, however, this was
a matter not of inventing a new doctrine but of
practical necessity. He had to rely on safety in
remoteness and on the peasantry for the recruits
to his army and for its supplies. This led him to
organise regions over which communist authority
could be established as rural ‘base areas’ where
the peasantry were to be won over by redistribution
of land. Mao’s revolutionary struggle thus
also belongs to the tradition of the great peasant
risings in China’s history.
Mao’s capacity for organisation had already
showed itself in 1929 when he analysed the
requirements of these communist base areas; he
stressed the need for discipline, tight leadership
and a ruthless, single-minded sense of purpose.
The Chinese warlords were ruthless too, but the
indiscipline and cruelty of their armies were
wanton and indiscriminate. Mao’s goal was political
power, and the means to attain it was the Red
Army. But this army was not to conform to the
existing pattern of Chinese armies, to be encouraged
by prospects of rape and booty or driven to
fight by fear of punishment. Mao explained, ‘The
Red Army must not merely fight; besides fighting,
it should also shoulder such important tasks
as agitating among the masses, organising them,
and helping them to set up political power.’ His
ideal was an army recruited from volunteers, a
people’s army, whose task it should be to teach
and help the people of China in their daily tasks,
to gain their support and to motivate them to
communist victory. The Red Army was to be the
instrument of the party, not its master; its ultimate
objective was to make possible the revolution
along the lines determined by the party. The
army was to be a part of the masses, to be egalitarian
and to win respect for its honesty and discipline.
Theory and reality usually part company.
The ‘instrument of the party’ tended to obey
what the party’s leaders believed was for the good
of the people and not what people believed was
good for themselves. It would be used whenever
necessary to suppress popular discontent and to
carry out orders against other Chinese groups.
Mao, just as Lenin did, saw that the fundamental
problem in all societies was the relationship
between the leadership and the mass of the
people. If the commands were given by a small,
all-powerful party group, how were they to be
transmitted to the masses without an inefficient
and corrupt bureaucracy filling the gap between
the two? This was no mere theoretical problem.
During the anti-Japanese-War phase of Chinese
communism from 1937 to 1945, communist base
areas had to be consolidated not only in Chiang’s
Chinese controlled territory but also behind
Japanese lines. The resources and production to
maintain and expand the communist-controlled
regions, which enabled the Red Army to carry on
the fight against the Japanese, had to be developed
within these areas.
Mao’s response during those years was tactical
flexibility, to which communist ideology, land
reform and egalitarianism had at this stage to be
subordinated. The peasants’ aspirations had to be
taken into account, the cooperation of the masses
won as far as possible by persuasion and by material
help. Mao’s slogan was ‘From the masses to
the masses’, and he developed a programme of
contact with the masses that became known as the
‘mass line’. Trained communists, well indoctrinated,
were sent in groups into the communities,
where they said they had come to listen to the
desires and ideas of the people. On their return,
the party would then learn what measures would
particularly appeal and would incorporate and
adapt them to their own policies, which would be
presented in turn to the people. The process was
intended to be continuous and became a powerful
tool of propaganda. By 1945 the communists
had reached 100 million people and the mass line
was now carried to the people by more than 1
million party members. The maintenance of party
unity, the acceptance of common goals by the
communists scattered over the vast regions of
China, however, was a constant problem, and the
mass line had to be matched by periodic attempts
to tighten discipline and intensive periods of
internal discussion and ‘self-examination’. Over
all this, Mao established in the 1940s his authority
and leadership.
A large proportion of the trained Communist
Party leadership did not come from poor peasant
or worker backgrounds. Once in their own
regions sympathies with relations and friends,
even with their own social class, affected the way
in which they accomplished their tasks. This
became especially evident during the first two
years after the communist takeover. A close study
made of early communist rule in Canton shows
that it took several years to bring under communist
control the vast areas of central and southern
China that had been militarily overwhelmed in a
short space of time. Many administrative tasks had
to be left still to Chiang’s Kuomintang to provide
the necessary expertise. The early transition from
Kuomintang to communist rule was accomplished
by example, by persuasion, and by terror as
‘enemies’ were summarily executed.
From the first there were strong contrasts
between the Russian and Chinese revolutions.
While Marx, Lenin and Stalin provided models
and inspiration, the Chinese were determined to
develop a Chinese communism to suit the very
different circumstances and needs of their
country. Mao adapted dogmatic communist ideology
to his experience in the years before victory
in 1949. The leadership of Mao had been
accepted by 1935. He never forgot the lessons of
a decade earlier when the old Bolshevik leadership
sought to spread revolution by first trying to
capture the cities. It was in the rural regions that
the communists built up their bases from which
the cities and the rest of China were revolutionised.
Revolution in China was not to be
brought about within a short space of time, as it
had been in Russia; indeed it took two decades
to accomplish. The Chinese Revolution might
never have been carried forward to a successful
military conclusion but for the opportunities provided
by the Japanese invasion of China. The barbarity
of the Japanese turned the Chinese against
them. They sought protection from the Japanese
army’s killings, lootings and spoliation and found
it wherever the communists could establish their
authority. Mao’s call for resistance by all Chinese
classes to the Japanese invaders, coupled with the
programme for rural reform, attracted mass
support. The composition of the Communist
Party in 1949 provides striking evidence of this:
just as the war aided the growth of communism,
so it revealed the corruption, incompetence and
inefficiency of the Kuomintang and Chiang Kaichek’s
leadership. The mistakes of the generals
and the generalissimo, a rank Chiang had accorded
to himself, were accompanied by hyperinflation,
which destroyed the economy in the rear.
The arms supplied by the US were frequently
turned against the Nationalist armies as the
Red Army captured them or as whole sections of
the Nationalist forces deserted. The mass of the
Chinese people had lost all confidence in the
Kuomintang regime and longed for an end to
famine, death and the civil war.
Mao’s triumph occurred in 1949. He now faced an
entirely different problem – not only of organising
a revolution against the state’s authorities, but of
managing the vast Chinese continent with the revolutionaries
as the rulers. The greater part of China
had fallen into communist hands only during the
last months of the civil war, much more quickly
than he had anticipated. Unlike the old liberated
base areas where communist rule had already functioned
for years, more than half of China had
recently been under Kuomintang control. There
were simply not enough trained communist personnel
to take over the running of thousands of villages,
towns and cities. Faced with the alternatives
of total disruption or of a more gradualist approach
to the transformation of China, Mao chose to take
time to win wide support.
The ideology and tactics of Mao and a few
trusted advisers would determine the fate of millions
of Chinese. But the Chinese people had won
no more rights. Mao thought in terms of history
and destiny, of the future of the quarter of
humanity that was Chinese, of the fate of the
world. In an almost godlike fashion he never
doubted his mandate, and became impatient as he
grew older. The sacrifice of millions of Chinese
to promote the fulfilment of China’s destiny
counted for little in the scales of history as he saw
them. Justifying the means by the end took on
the most frightening aspects when applied to the
lives of whole peoples by the twentieth-century
ideological messiahs; they were tyrannical and
ruthless in pursuit of their particular visions of a
better world. Mao was one of these.
Mao was ready in the aftermath of military victory
in 1949 to accept help from many quarters
provided it would assist China in achieving the two
main preliminary goals the communists had set:
freedom from foreign control and the ending of
‘feudalism’. Feudalism in this definition was a
broad concept; it encompassed exploitation by the
landlords and ‘capitalists’, so that in abolishing it
China would undergo an economic and social revolution
both in the countryside and in the cities.
Mao was supremely confident that China’s revolutionary
role was as significant as Russia’s. Although
China’s revolution, like Russia’s, would be based
on the concepts of Marxism–Leninism, it was to
remain distinct. In the early years Mao acknowledged
Russia’s leadership of revolution in the
communist association of nations; but every
nation, Mao believed, must remain the master of
its own destiny, completely sovereign and independent.
The corollary of this attitude was that
revolution could not be imposed externally – it had
to develop from within. Mao was at times ready to
adapt policies opportunistically; at other times he
imposed his own doctrinaire ideas. No particular
interpretation of Marxism would block the path he
wished to follow.
Among the most urgent tasks of 1949 was to
work out a new relationship with the Soviet communist
leaders. Mao could have had few illusions
about Stalin or the Soviet Union. Stalin’s chief
concern appeared to be to avoid provoking the
US to war, and in his conservative view, as in
Roosevelt’s and Truman’s, Asia took second place
to Europe in the East–West confrontation. Stalin
faced the task of reconstructing the Soviet Union,
of building up its strength sufficiently to deter the
capitalist West, of strengthening Soviet leverage in
Eastern and central Europe; meanwhile he wanted
Asia to remain relatively quiet. ‘Reparations’ were
one obvious means of assisting the repair of
Russia’s devastated industries. As long as they
could be moved, machinery and whole factories
were transported to Russia from China. Half the
capital equipment the Japanese had accumulated
in Manchuria to develop industry there was carried
off by the Russians with scant regard to China.
Stalin, moreover, had completely miscalculated
Chinese communist strength and had expected
Chiang Kai-shek to stay in power and to have the
capacity to crush the communists. Despite giving
limited help to the communists in northern China,
he had recognised Chiang Kai-shek and had allied
with the Nationalist Kuomintang, thus backing
the wrong horse. Mao therefore had little reason
for gratitude to Stalin or to the Soviet Union. The
Chinese had made their own revolution, despite
the Russians. Nor did Mao regard a breach with
the US and the West as inevitable in 1949.
Indeed, a very significant portion of China’s
export trade continued with the West after the
communist victory.
Nevertheless, in 1949 Mao counted on receiving
Soviet help and on a reorientation of Soviet
policy towards China. He wished to build up
China’s industrial potential, and China’s communists
had little expertise in bringing about the necessary
changes in the urban economy and in urban
societies. The Soviet Union, which had faced this
task after 1917, could serve as a useful model. The
communist cadres, Mao told his party followers in
1949, had to learn quickly the new task of administering
cities. It was not out of love for Stalin or
acceptance of Soviet leadership that Mao proclaimed
early in 1949 that there was no middle
way and that China must ‘lean’ to one side or the
other and so against ‘capitalist imperialism’. China
was weak. The US needed to be deterred from
backing Chiang’s cause further, indeed from protecting
the Nationalist remnants on Taiwan. The
‘liberation’ of the island was a priority in 1949, to
complete the revolution territorially.
But there was a further reason for leaning to
the Soviet Union. There was nowhere else the
Chinese communists could go. Mao regarded
himself as Marx’s and Lenin’s disciple and
regarded the Soviet Union as the first successful
revolutionary state. As he saw it, a broad ideological
division existed in the world and China
belonged to the Marxist–Socialist camp opposed
to the imperialist aggressive nations. He also
recognised the pre-eminent power of the Soviet
Union in the communist alliance of nations and
believed that this power was essential to safeguard
the weaker socialist nations. What Mao would not
accept was that this gave the Soviet Union a right
to interfere with and dominate any of the smaller
communist states, or that each nation should not
be able to choose its own path of evolution based
on Marxist–Leninist teaching but suited to its
particular society and needs. There was thus, to
use Mao’s favourite tool of analysis, a ‘contradiction’
in the Sino-Soviet relationship. China, the
weaker ally, needed the financial, technical and
military support of the Soviet Union, so China
would openly identify itself with the communist
nations led by, by far, the most powerful of them.
But China rejected Moscow’s leadership in determining
the course of its revolution. Mao’s own
strong sense of national and ideological independence
here asserted itself.
After winning the civil war in China, Mao
immediately turned to the Soviet Union, jour-
neying to Moscow in December 1949. He was
received by Stalin without much warmth. After
all, not only was his victorious leadership in China
living proof of Stalin’s misjudgement, but Stalin
recognised in Mao a leader of enormous strength
of will and of an intellectual calibre approaching
his own self-estimate. Then there were the more
immediate material concerns of Soviet interests in
China, which were now a problem. It had been
possible for Stalin, with American and British
backing, to impose Russia’s terms on Chiang Kaishek,
who was trying to gain control of his
country and to defeat the communists. It was
going to be very much more difficult to justify
these gains when face to face with a communist
ally who was determined to rid China of all
foreign ‘imperialist’ shackles. Two tough and
ruthless men faced each other in Moscow during
the winter of 1949. Mao and his entourage
pursued their tasks with tenacity, remaining in the
Soviet capital for an unprecedented eight weeks
from December 1949 to February 1950.
A new alliance treaty was eventually concluded
on 14 February 1950. Agreement was reached on
the setting up of joint Sino-Soviet trading companies,
which would continue to give the Soviet
Union a special position in Manchuria, though it
was humiliating for Mao to concede this foreign
‘colonial’ incursion. In the treaty text Mao also
had to confirm that China relinquished any claim
to Outer Mongolia. But he won some major revisions
of the 1945 alliance treaty Stalin had concluded
with Chiang Kai-shek; he reasserted
Chinese sovereignty over the Manchurian railways
(the Chinese Eastern Railway), and Dairen and
Port Arthur were to be handed back to China not
later than 1952. Stalin promised to send technical
advisers to assist the Chinese authorities especially
in industrial and urban development, in
which the Chinese communists lacked experience.
He also promised financial aid. A meagre Soviet
credit of the equivalent of US$300 million was
granted. Finally, and perhaps most importantly
from Mao’s point of view, the Soviet Union and
China bound themselves to a defensive alliance by
which they agreed to come to each other’s aid in
the event of aggression by Japan or by any state
allied with it: this referred to the US, though it
was not mentioned. Years later Mao recalled how
difficult a struggle it had been to persuade Stalin
to sign the treaty, not least because the Soviet
leader wished to retain the option of mending
fences with the US; he had not wanted a victorious
communist revolution in China in the first
place and now that it had succeeded he was afraid
that Mao might become another Tito in Asia. He
did all he could to ensure communist China’s
subservience to and dependence on the Soviet
Union through economic, military and ideological
ties, and until his death China played internationally
a secondary role – too weak and too
reliant on Soviet help to do otherwise.
Mao, within China, followed his own course,
and in his lifetime was to make several sudden
changes. The policy laid down in the spring of
1949 by Mao and the Chinese Communist Party
was to secure broad popular support and a wide
coalition of political forces under the leadership of
the party, excluding only the Kuomintang. Mao
proclaimed this ideological line to suit the particular
popular-front tactics he wished to follow as the
‘People’s democratic dictatorship’. All depended
on Mao’s definition. Thus the ‘dictatorship’ was
designed to destroy the ‘enemies’ of the people,
while the ‘people’ included not only poor peasants
and the ‘middle’ peasants and workers, but also
professional people, intellectuals, the propertied,
merchants and those of limited wealth. The peasants
would continue to own their land – even the
better-off peasants were left in possession – and so
were the landlords of the land they themselves
farmed. The Agrarian Reform Law, which came
into effect in the summer of 1950, reflected this
moderation. The same gradualist approach in
1949 and 1950 can be seen in communist dealings
with industry. The thinking behind it was not a
belief in the merits of a mixed economy but rather
the realisation that the production of the rich peasants
and of industry in private hands was essential
if the aims of socialism and the modernisation of
the country were to be realised. But the communist
administration also continued to provide itself
with the means to exercise increasing control over
all production in the many regions of China.
The early achievements of the takeover were
impressive. There was far less disruption than
would have ensued if a purist communist social
revolution had been decreed from the start. The
whole vast country of some 540 million people
was pacified and brought under a unified control.
The evil of rapid inflation was also mastered
during the first two years of communist rule.
China’s struggle to modernise had been
dominated by the policies of the great European
nations, which had carved the country into
spheres of concessions, including ports which, like
Hong Kong, became colonies, or the scores of
‘treaty ports’ in which the foreigners enjoyed
special rights. The impact of the foreigners had
provided an impetus to modernisation in big
cities like Shanghai, in the construction of railways
and in the growth of the Japanese-controlled
industry in Manchuria. But all this development
was designed to benefit the foreigners rather than
the Chinese.
In 1949 Mao and the communist leadership set
out to change the fabric of Chinese society and to
unite and strengthen the country. Modernisation
as the West understood it – improving technology,
increasing industrial and agricultural production,
spreading education and literacy, developing
communications, rejecting traditional philosophies
– was necessary not only to lift the population
from the trap of abject poverty and periodic
famine but to enable a Chinese nation to survive
at all. How else would it be possible to muster the
strength to eject the foreigner and prevent his
return on any but China’s terms? Yet Mao tried to
find a way to profit from Western culture without
wholesale Westernisation, to assimilate it in an
essentially Chinese way. The Soviet model could
be followed, but like other Western models there
would be no slavish imitation or subjugation. Mao
was determined to wipe out the humiliation of the
‘unequal treaties’ exploiting China’s resources
which had been imposed by the Western powers,
including Russia. For the time being Mao needed
the protection of the Soviet Union, especially as
he busied himself with expelling the Western ‘capitalists’.
While it was true that tens of thousands of
Chinese had formed close ties with the West and
that the Western presence – in missionary, educational
and medical fields – was also humanitarian,
most Chinese hated the foreigner for assuming a
position of superiority in a land not his own. Many
Western residents had already left the mainland by
the time it fell under communist control. Those
who remained were to be rapidly expelled in the
wake of the Korean War.
The Korean War itself marked a watershed in
the development of communist internal policies in
China, in the relationships with Asia and in the triangular
power alignments of the Soviet Union,
China and the US. The enormous impact of the
Korean War was felt in Europe as well. The communist
and anti-communist confrontation was
seen in Washington, Moscow and London more
and more in interrelated global terms. Global
strategies were devised to meet the threat and the
independent forces shaping the future of Asia
came to be viewed by the nations of the First
and Second Worlds, both communist and anticommunist,
through the distorting mirror of their
own ideological assumptions. One consequence of
enormous significance for China was its isolation
from the West.
World History
