the 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

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.