During the Sino-Japanese war of 1937, the Kuomintang immediately
suffered major military defeats and lost control of eastern China. It
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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
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.