“The Reddest Reddest Red Sun in Our Heart, Chairman Mao”
(Women xinzhong zuihong zuihongde hong taiyang Mao zhuxi he women xin lianxin)

This is the final part of a four-part article. The other parts can be found here:

Part 1
Part 2
Part 3

VI. “LIBERATION”: THE SUBSTITUTE PROLETARIAT IN POWER

When Mao’s Communist “party of the proletariat” swept into the cities from 1947-1949 this would have been the opportune moment for the substitute proletariat to validate its claim to be the “representative” of the proletariat by inviting the actual proletariat to become the “masters of the country” that CCP propaganda claimed they were. After abandoning the urban proletariat in 1927, the returning Party trumpeted extravagent pro-labor rhetoric and widely advertised their “New Democracy” as being under “the leadership of the proletariat.” Official pronouncements hailed the workers as the “masters of the country” (guojia de zhuren), the “leading class” (lingdao jieji), and said that they should rightfully “take charge” (dangjia zuozhu).[107]

The substitute proletariat confronts the actual proletariat

Many workers and unions took those pledges seriously. Thus as Mao’s armies approached the cities, here and there workers rose up against their capitalist bosses and took over their factories. A reporter from the Trotskyist journal The Militant described what happened in April 1949 :

From a worker, just escaped from Jinan (capital of the Shandong province), we learn of this horrible incident: As the ‘liberating army’ approached, the workers in his factory instinctively understood that it was time to liberate themselves. They drove out the boss and set up a factory committee to control production. They were immediately visited by a Stalinist political worker who demanded to know who was responsible for this action. The workers replied that they had decided in common to liberate themselves. He then insisted that the committeemen follow him to headquarters. There they were chained together and led to a courtyard where they were massacred wholesale by a firing squad. The factory was then returned to the frightened owner….

In another factory where a strike broke out for the simple economic demand of equal treatment, “the strike was brutally crushed by the Stalinists and three strikers stood up before a firing squad…”[108] In a third case,

An order was issued to the Sun Sun Textile Factory No. 9 to dismantle and move to Manchuria. Workers barricaded themselves in the plant to resist. Troops of the Stalinist “liberating” army were sent to carry out the order. A bloody clash ensued in which 10 workers were killed or wounded and three soldiers killed.[109]

The workers failed to understand that the Communist Party’s revolution was not for the proletariat. It was a military conquest and capture of the country of, by, and for the substitute proletariat “new class,” the Communist Party. The class that led the revolution and seized power in the name of the proletariat was not interested in sharing power, least of all with the workers. So it took immediate steps to suppress labor militancy while permiting the capitalists to continue running their factories until those were nationalized in 1956.

Thus in February 1948 as his armies prepared to cross the Yellow River, Mao declared that the party’s policy in the newly liberated cities would be devoted to “developing production, promoting economic prosperity … and benefiting both labor and capital.” As his armies captured the city of Luoyang, Mao telegramed the Luoyang front leaders to give them instruction:

On entering the city do not lightly advance slogans of raising wages and reducing working hours, . … Do not be in a hurry to organize people of the city to struggle for democratic reforms and improvements in livelihood.[110]

Before the fall of Shanghai, Tianjin, and other cities, Mao and General Zhu De issued a proclamation stating in part:

It is hoped that workers and employees in all trades will continue to work and that business will operate as usual … and obey orders of the PLA and People’s Government.”[111]

In 1949-50 the government issued labor regulations that prohibited strikes and mandated mediation and arbitration by the government-controlled Labor Bureau.[112] Banning strikes violated the principles and propaganda of the CCP in its first decade. The First Manifesto of the CCP (June 1922) included the demand : “Freedom to strike” as did subsequent editions. The Canton Commune of 1927 called for “the right to organize and strike.[113] But that was when the Party was still a majority proletarian party.

“Our golden age, our age of glory and splendor, lies before us!”

The program of the substitute proletariat

Mao did not think in terms of classes but of nations. In his view China was a “proletarian nation” and he, its heroic leader, the “force that will not stop, that cannot be stopped” its Great Savior, Great Helmsman, and Red Sun. Thus his first priority was to secure the dictatorship of the substitute proletariat.

Construction of the totalitarian police state

Once the communists seized power, they dispensed with the multi-class New Democracy they had been promising since the 1930s, and installed a police state modeled on Stalin’s, replete with military regimentation of the civilian population, mass brainwashing, secret police, forced labor camps, mass executions of real and imagined “counterrevolutionaries,” invasive state control over private lives including housing, jobs, birth control, children, school curriculums, etc., and decades of crazed political campaigns one after another to crush all real or imagined opponents and to cow the general population into submission.

First up: “elimination of counterrevolutionaries.” Who were those? Immediately after liberation the entire population were assigned class labels (chengfen), one of roughly 60 in all, based on their family background, education, occupation, prerevolutionary employment, prior employment by the GMD or suspected sympathy with the GMD or Western imperialists, etc. This information was noted in the new dossiers, also copied from Stalin, which would follow a person for the rest of his or her life.[114] “Good” classes included revolutionary cadres, soldiers, industrial workers, and poor peasants. “Middle” (dubious) classes included petty bourgeois, middle peasants, and intellectuals. “Bad” classes included landlords, rich peasants, and capitalists. But these were shortly collapsed into “red” vs. “black”– revolutionaries and counterrevolutionaries. What’s more, the labels were inherited.[115] In this way, the children and their children have suffered discrimination and worse for the alleged crimes of their parents or grandparents – down to this day.[116] The purpose of all this was to “struggle” against the counterrevolutionaries, “remold” those who were salvageable, and imprison or kill the rest.

The struggle against counterrevolutionaries got underway in the rural base areas occupied by the Communists as the Civil War began in earnest in 1946. Mao directed cadres to launch all-out class war in the countryside. CCP work teams divided villagers into five classes: landlords, rich peasants, middle peasants, poor peasants, and laborers, mirroring Stalin’s system in the USSR. The Party determined that at least 10 percent of the rural population were landlords or rich peasants – hence class enemies, counterrevolutionaries.[117] But village realities defied such crude distinctions. Never mind that there were great regional and even local differences based on climate, ecology, crop patterns, soil fertility, proximity to urban centers, local custom, indebtedness, subsidiary industries, and other factors that contributed to the economic condition of individual farm families. In some provinces such as Shanxi, Shaanxi, Hebei, Shandong, and Henan, peasant proprietors constituted two-thirds of farm families. Around the great urban centers in the Guangdong delta and Yangtze deltas, 85-95 percent of the farmers were tenants – but most to absentee landlords who resided in the cities, and those absentee owners were often collectives: clans, temples, clubs, etc. rather than individuals. So very often there were no landlords in the villages to struggle against. In other areas, seasonal farmwork was almost all done by hired labor — but many laborers were often as not migrants, not local villagers.[118]

Liu Binyan, the future renowned investigative journalist, was a young Party cadre working in land reform near Harbin in 1947 where he both witnessed and participated in atrocities. “The leader of our team gave orders to tie up a landlord and beat him. They tried to force him to confess that he had ties to local bandits, and had hidden arms and ammunition. The man denied everything and was beaten to a pulp. It was the first time I had witnessed such a scene. I could not interfere; I could only look the other way…. The landlord was just a miserable wretch who owned about an acre of land. But every village had its target of class struggle to arouse class consciousness, and that landlord served the purpose.” He adds “I felt quite ashamed…. I thought it was important to divide the land among the peasants…. But there were also landowners who had, through a lifetime of hard work, scrimped and saved to buy up small plots of land. There were of course also loafers among the landless peasants.”[119]

None of this mattered to Mao or to Kang Sheng, Liu Shaoqi, and Deng Xiaoping whom he had assigned to oversee the land reform campaigns in different regions. Kang demanded that every villager take a stand. Quotas were set for landlords and rich peasants to be found in every village and punished. The accused were often dragged out onto a stage where they could be ferociously denounced by crowds of villagers, beaten, sometimes gruesomely tortured and often killed in “struggle sessions.” Xi Zhongxun (father of Xi Jingping) reported the cruelties to Mao in January 1948: “People are drowned in vats of salt water. Some have boiling oil poured over their heads and burn to death.” Liu Shaoqi reported that “when the masses fight, they beat, torture and kill people, and right now it is out of control.” “People were buried alive, dismembered, shot, and strangled to death. Sometimes their bodies were hung from trees.”[120] Land reform turned into an orgy of violence across the countryside.

In preparing to launch land reform in the south in June 1950, Mao declared that land reform is war, “the most hideous class war between peasants and landlords. It is a battle to the death.”[121] The party proceeded accordingly: The reign of terror against local leaders in the south was accompanied by onerous grain requisitions that incited mass protests and rebellions against the Communists. Famished peasants stormed government warehouses and transport boats to retrieve their grain. Some seized arms from local police. Hundreds of villages turned against the government. By March 1950 internal documents reported that dozens of “relatively large rebellions of a mass character” had rocked Hubei.[122] The rebellions were crushed with extensive loss of lives.

Why all this violence and killings? After all, as Frank Dikötter points out, land reform was carried out peacefully in post-war Japan, South Korea, and even Taiwan under Chiang Kai-shek, and no blood was shed. In Taiwan large landlords were compensated by the government with commodity certificates and stocks in state-owned industries for their farms, which were redistributed to the tillers. Land reform in north China had been carried out in the midst of Civil War so some violence might have been expected. But in the south, where the campaign did not begin until June 1950, the war was over and yet Mao’s campaign was if anything even more violent. Even Stalin, who himself had massacred the kulaks in 1928 and sent two million to Siberia, cautioned Mao in 1950 to pull back, limit the struggle to landlords only, and leave the economy of the rich peasants intact to help China’s post-war recovery.[123]

Mao wasn’t listening. Dikötter argues that “Mao wanted traditional village leaders overthrown so that nothing would stand between the people and the party … [and] unlike the Soviet Union where the security organs had liquidated the kulaks, Mao wanted the villagers to do the job themselves … [to break the village social bonds of solidarity and reciprocity] by “pitting a majority against a minority. Only by implicating the people in murder could they become permanently linked to the party…. Everybody was to have blood on their hands through participation in mass rallies and denunciation meetings.”[124] Between 1947 and 1952 when land reform was shut down, an estimated 1.5-2 million rural Chinese had been killed.[125] The terror crushed open resistance but depressed agricultural production.

Engineering human souls

Mao launched the first of his many terror campaigns in the cities with the Thought Reform campaign launched in October 1950 to “wash the brains” of the entire population. The campaign began with the intellectuals first because of their suspect bourgeois and petty bourgeois backgrounds and their role in education, culture, and social development. The Party applied the same methods as in Yan’an: Teachers, professors, students, scientists, journalists, and writers were all forced to submit to intensive indoctrination classes, public examination of family histories, self-criticism, confessions, and self-abasement to induce guilt and remorse until all resistance was crushed, until they “felt as if they were reborn” and sincerely expressed their gratitude to the Party for their redemption. Students were encouraged to “draw a line between themselves and their parents.” For thousands the only way out was suicide. “Student suicides happen incessantly” internal documents reported.[126] In 1950, Hu Sidu, son of Hu Shi, a liberal leading-light of the May Fourth Movement, denounced his father, calling him “a public enemy of the people and an enemy of myself.” In 1957 Hu Sidu himself was labeled a “rightist” and driven to suicide.[127]

The government hounded and persecuted non-communist teachers, artists, and musicians, even those who had been sympathetic to the Party. Those who only had their careers destroyed got off easy. Hundreds of thousands were publicly denounced, imprisoned, and sent to labor camps. Teachers were arrested and killed. Professors committed suicide.[128] Chinese and Western books were incinerated. Dikötter writes that “With the literary inquisition came a great burning of books.” In Shanghai some 237 tons of books were reportedly destroyed in 1951. In the former treaty port Shantou in May 1953 a giant bonfire lasting three days consumed 300,000 volumes representing ‘vestiges of the feudal past.’”[129] Western classical music was suppressed. Jazz was banned outright as degenerate, decadent. Popular music was replaced with the “Hymn to Chairman Mao,” “The favors of the Communist Party are too many to be told,” “Brother and sister plough the Wasteland” and similar hit tunes. In the Great Terror of 1951, Buddhism, Taoism, Catholicism, Protestantism, and Islam were suppressed, monks beaten, killed, sent to reeducation camps, and their books and institutions destroyed.[130]

China’s gulags

Chiang Kai-shek’s China had nowhere near enough prisons to meet Mao’s needs. So in the late nineteen-forties and early fifties, the government built new ones and established its own gulag archipelago of laodong gaizao or “reform through labor” camps (laogai for short) modeled on Stalin’s gulags There were somewhere between a thousand and fifteen hundred of them situated in every province. Millions were interned and put to forced labor in road building, mining, reservoir excavation, and opening up new farmlands.[131] Many were simply worked to death. As the government explained:

Except for those who must be exterminated physically due to political considerations, human beings must be utilized as a productive force with submissiveness as the prerequisite. Laogai units force prisoners to labor. The Laogai’s fundamental policy is, “Forced labor is the means, while thought reform is the basic aim.”[132]

Unsurprisingly, Mao professed enthusiasm for the economic advantages of slave labor and called for more laogai. “The large number of people who are serving their sentences is an enormous source of labor … they [the laogai] should be expanded.”[133]

Wang Bing’s eight-hour long film Dead Souls walks the viewer through former prison camp fields in Gansu province, turning over the exposed bleached bones and skulls of dead inmates and interviews dozens of elderly survivors of the more than a half-million Chinese intellectuals, teachers, critically thinking cadres and anyone deemed to have an independent mind who were imprisoned in the Anti-Rightist campaign of 1957, most starving to death.[134]

West North Korea

Life outside the gulags in China in the 1950s was somewhat freer but day-to-day repression was intense. Every aspect of one’s personal and work life was soon regulated by the state.[135] As capitalist enterprises were taken over, all jobs were assigned by the government. Living quarters were likewise assigned. Free mobility was abolished as workers were tied their work units (danwei ) which also provided housing, food rations, schooling, medical care, and so forth. Peasants were yoked to their farms by the hukou system that tied access to their food and clothing rations, schooling, medical care, and so on to the farmer’s place of residence. The government nationalized all schools and colleges, imposed its own Maoist curriculum. Compulsory political education was introduced in all work units, schools, and government offices. Newspapers and other media were replaced with thought control and propaganda. Loudspeakers were installed indoors and out across the country to blast out orders, propaganda, and patriotic music. Work life and even leisure were regimented and militarized. Political meetings consumed so much time that teachers, workers, and staff suffered from “extreme fatigue.” [136]

Thought reform campaigns encouraged colleagues to denounce each other, children to denounce their parents, parents to denounce each other, other family members, and friends.[137] Thus the Shanghai Liberation Daily of June 22, 1954, praised workers who “reported suspicious acts amongst friends. This shows that the political consciousness of the masses is being continuously raised.”[138] The despised criticism-self-criticism sessions were extended to workplaces to deflect criticism from the government itself and instill fear and docility before the police state.

Shortly after liberation, Mao announced his latest brilliant correct idea: “Every mouth comes with two hands.” In other words, the more people the more labor power the faster the economy will grow. So the government’s natalist policy banned abortion and by 1952 “contraceptive devices disappeared from the market.”[139] Predictably, the population exploded, nearly doubling in a decade while industrial and agricultural productivity plummeted, presenting Deng Xiaoping with the need in 1981 to come up with some new correct ideas: capitalism plus forced abortions and the one-child policy.

In short, “liberation” turned the country into the largest open-air minimum security prison camp on earth, sprinkled with gulags where millions languished in far worse conditions. Think North Korea, which Kim Il-Sung modeled after Mao’s China. That’s what Mao’s China looked like. As the bamboo curtain was drawn around the country in the early fifties, its borders were sealed. In Mao’s day, the only way to get out of China was to swim to Hong Kong, take a row-boat or a secret trail. In the 1950s and 60s more than million refugees did just that.

Today, after a few decades of comparative relaxation, retro-Maoist Xi Jinping has revived the lockdown nation as well as systematic invasive police-state control and manipulation of every aspect of Chinese lives again. Weibo critics call Xi’s China “West North Korea.” Xi’s repression is driving another generation of Chinese, at least those with means, to flee the country again. They call this runxue or “run philosophy” [a bilingual amalgam of the English “run” with the Chinese “xue”, learning] – researching how to run away from China.[140] Many of those who can’t find a way to escape describe themselves as “the last generation” because they’re refusing to have children. One Weibo user under the hashtag “#thelastgeneration” says “Not bringing children to this country, this land, will be the most charitable deed I could manage.”[141]

Self-reliant development by means of accumulation and its consequences

Mao’s second priority was to industrialize China and “overtake the US.” He was motivated to pursue this goal for two reasons: First, national chauvinism: Mao sought to surpass the West to reclaim China’s “rightful place” as the premier civilization and culture of world history, the natural leader of the world, while winning ever-lasting glory for the Communist Party, regardless of the costs to China’s masses. Speaking to the Preparatory Meeting for the CCP’s Eighth Party Congress (1956-58), Mao said:

We are going to catch up with to the strongest capitalist nation on Earth, America. America has 170 million people, we have several times that number, plentiful resources, and a similar climate; catching up is possible. Should we catch up? Of course we should, or else what are you 600 million people doing? Are you asleep? Should you be sleeping, or working? … If you can’t catch up you don’t deserve any glory, and you don’t deserve to be called mighty…. If in 50 or 60 years you still can’t catch up with America, what’s the matter with you? You deserve to have your membership in the human race revoked![142]

Second: imperialism. Mao and the Party aimed not merely to industrialize but to do so as self-sufficiently as possible. To some extent self-sufficiency was imposed on them by the trade blockade imposed by the United States in 1950. But it was also the preferred option for Mao as with Stalin and for the same reason: China, and Russia were communist nations in a sea of global capitalism. To maintain their independence and prevent the capitalists from taking over their economies, they needed to be as self-reliant as possible. That’s why Mao pursued a near autarkic development strategy. That’s why Deng Xiaoping invited Western investors to modernize his economy but limited their investments to certain sectors and banned them from the commanding heights of the economy. Further, Mao and Stalin both understood that ultimately, their only guarantee of security was to achieve economic and military superiority over the United States. When the Soviets lost their economic and arms race against the United States in the 1980s, the Soviet Communist Party collapsed in December 1991 and the Soviet Union disintegrated. Deng and his successors, notably Xi Jinping, have been determined to avoid that error. That’s why Xi is suppressing the private sector, pushing back against Western demands to open new sectors for Western investment, and even driving many Western companies out of China.

The Bolsheviks understood that however fortunate their success in seizing power in 1917, they could not build socialism in largely pre-industrial Russia without massively exploiting the Russian workers and peasants to extract the surpluses to pay for industrialization as the capitalists had exploited the proletariat of England and slaves of the colonies to accumulate the capital to industrialize England. That’s why they tried to help the German revolution in hopes that a socialist revolution in Germany would enable them to hitch the Russian train to the “German locomotive.” As Trotsky put it “We place all our hopes upon the revolution igniting the European revolution. If the rising of the peoples of Europe does not crush imperialism, we will be crushed … that is certain.”[143] When the European revolutions failed the Bolsheviks were not overthrown, but they were thrown back on their own resources with fatal consequences for millions of Russian peasants.

Whether such an internationalist strategy was feasible in the immediate post-WWII era is an open question. In fact, the great wave of post-war anti-colonial revolutions was only then just beginning so who knows? Yet even if the prospects for world revolution were slim at that moment, Mao’s Party could have sat down with China’s workers and peasants and put the question to them: “Should we pursue high-speed economic development that will necessitate great sacrifices from you, probably for many decades, in order to furnish the surpluses to underwrite high-speed industrialization, or, should we pursue a ‘Bukharinist’ New Economic Policy (NEP) strategy of development with tolerance for markets, that would give us some growth while enabling you to avoid undue exploitation and gradually improve your living standards?”

But the Great Savior-dictator was a nationalist, fiercely hostile to democracy as we’ve seen, and vaingloriously ambitious. The Great Teacher also knew little about economics. Worse, he ignored and criticized his own economic team of Bo Yibo, Chen Yun, Li Fuchun, and Deng Zihui who knew something about economics and urged him to slow the pace of economic growth and adopt a kind of Bukharinist NEP.[144] Even Joe Stalin warned him in September 1952 not to be “rash.” But Mao was having none of it. He was philosophically an idealist and a voluntarist. On June 15, 1953, he told the Politburo that

The general line … of the party for the transition period is basically to accomplish the industrialization of the country and the socialist transformation of agriculture, handicrafts, and capitalist industry and commerce in ten to fifteen years, or a little longer. … Do not depart from this general line, otherwise ‘Left’ or ‘Right’ mistakes will occur.[145]

As always, Mao was full of himself and confident that he alone voiced the “correct line.” But his idealist voluntarist fantasies could not overrule reality: Self-industrialization could only be based on systematic, ruthless, and long-term exploitation of China’s workers and peasants as Stalin had done in Russia. Despite the strong strategic differences with Stalin, the CCP had nowhere else to turn, and so looked to the Soviet Union for aid and modeled its own industrialization strategy after the Russians’. Industrial expansion had been predicated on three sources of finance: Soviet aid, self- accumulation out of industry, and taxation of agriculture. As it turned out, Soviet credits and technical assistance, while critical to certain key industrial projects, were far less than expected. And they were loans, not grants. China’s industrial sector provided roughly 50% of the state’s budget revenues in those years. But the industrial base was tiny so it alone could not provide much. Consequently, Mao’s strategy of industrialization depended crucially on accelerating agricultural output over and above population growth and taxing the surpluses to support industry.

Peasants resist surplus extraction

Those expected agricultural surpluses failed to materialize. In the first place, the extremely low productivity of Chinese agriculture meant that, by and large, the massive surpluses needed for industrialization did not exist in the Chinese countryside. For example, Chinese per capita grain production in 1952 stood at less than half that of the Soviets in 1928 (220 vs. 480 kilograms per annum).[146] This meant that there could be no question in China of a purely extractive solution to the grain crisis: the Party could not simply go and seize huge surpluses from rich peasants, as Stalin did In Russia from 1928. Secondly, the new government lacked the industrial capacity to supply tractors and other industrial inputs to boost productivity. Thirdly, it faced peasant resistance to state surplus extraction.

In short, with respect to the peasantry, the state was caught in a double bind: it aimed to be developmental and extractive at once. To industrialize, to build steel plants, to produce tractors and other machinery, the state needed both to maximize agricultural output to skim off surpluses from agriculture to support industry and an industrial labor force. So agricultural collectivization had a two-fold aim: to boost output through cooperative and economies of scale, and to centralize surplus extraction by preventing peasant hoarding. But taking away the peasants surpluses not only undermined their capacity to reinvest to expand output, it threatened their very subsistence. A policy that demanded sacrifices with little hope of gain in the near future would tend to provoke their resistance. Consequently each attempt by the state to step up taxation and collectivization was met the peasant opposition.

The First Five-Year Plan set targets for increased grain output of up to 6.5% per year (1953-57). But far from providing a surplus, actual growth rates (of around 1.7% to 2.0%) barely kept pace with population growth.[147] Similarly, cotton production declined by 9.3% in 1954. Low government-set prices for these staples meant that the peasants had little incentive to produce them.[148] Thus they tended to cut back on production and conserve their surpluses. The output of farm subsidiary industries also stagnated or fell. The government reported that between July 1954 and July 1956, 17 million pigs were lost. Again, the peasants preferred to slaughter their pigs rather than market them at low prices or turn them over to the collectives.[149] By the mid-1950’s, the situation had reached crisis proportions. There were increasingly sharp ”grain crises” in 1953, 1955, and 1956 resulting in widespread food shortages in the cities. The lack of agricultural raw materials brought some industries, such as textiles, to a virtual standstill, and undermined accumulation.

Yet instead of backing off, Mao’s response at every point was to accelerate collectivization to squeeze more surpluses out of the peasants. During the 1950’s, the state sponsored a series of so-called “socialist upsurges” (the 1950-52 land reform, the 1952-53 mutual-aid campaign, the 1954-55 cooperativization campaign, and the 1955-56 collectivization drive). To each, the peasants responded by cutting production, slaughtering or neglecting their livestock, felling orchards, stopping fertilizer collection, and fleeing the land for the cities.[150] Each advance and the reaction forced the state to retreat, at least partially and temporarily. But with each next stage Mao wrenched the screws tighter.

During the second phase, in November 1953 the government imposed a state monopoly on grain to confiscate peasant surpluses. Whereas previously farmers could sell their surpluses on the market and pocket the profits, under the new “unified purchase and sale” system, farmers were allowed to consume only 13-16 kilos per head per month of their own grain – a bit over half the required amount to provide 1,700 to 1,900 calories per day – i.e. a less than subsistence diet. In response, across the country peasants protested shouting “Down with Mao Zedong!” “Eliminate the People’s Liberation Army,” “Better rebel than die from starvation.” The state responded, as usual, with more violence. In 1954 the government was taking more food from the peasants than ever before and as a result “famine gripped large parts of the countryside” and it was reported that desperate peasants were selling their children. In January 1954 the Central Committee warned that peasants were being driven to starvation. Farmers were destroying their tools, felling trees and slaughtering their livestock. “Some openly rebelled as pitched battles were fought between villagers and the security forces.”[151]

In the early months of 1955 Deng Zihui, then regional boss of south China who had calculated that the peasants had a third less food than before liberation, starting letting some co-operatives disband. Others in the leadership including Deng Xiaoping supported this relaxation. Mao initially acquiesced to this setback but soon renewed his attacks on “negative attitudes toward collectivization.” In May he declared that “middle peasant claims of hardship are all fake.”[152]

A common response to collectivization was to flee to the cities and in 1954 farmers were fleeing the countryside en masse. But in June 1955 the Maoists cut off that exit by extending the household registration system used in the cities since 1951 to the countryside. On top of that, food was rationed from 1955 and without a ration card, which was valid only in one’s official place of residence, peasants who fled to the cities were denied food rations. That effectively tied China’s 120 million farm families to their land, virtually as state serfs, just as urban residence permits tied the workers to their danwei. This was the fourth stage of collectivization.[153]

In July, Mao pushed back at Deng Zili and Deng Xiaoping and called for a new campaign to accelerate the transition to socialism in just three years. In prose reminiscent of his 1926 investigation in Hunan he told the Central Committee

A hurricane in the new socialist mass movement will soon sweep across the villages throughout the country. But some of our comrades are tottering along like a woman with bound feet, constantly complaining about the others: too fast, too fast! … No! This is not the correct policy, it is a wrong policy.[154]

Again, the Great Helmsman insisted that he alone had the “correct policy.” But 1957 was not 1927. In the “mighty storm” of the nineteen-twenties the peasants were overthrowing their landlords and seizing the lands they farmed to improve their lot, whereas in the 1950s Mao’s “hurricane” aimed to dispossess them, expropriate the private property they had been granted by the same Mao Zedong in the land reforms of 1947-52, and collectivize not only their land but their means of production and even their housing. Despite his rhetoric, Mao knew very well that the peasants would not accept this dispossession voluntarily. Collectivization would thus require a new “war”– this time against the peasants instead of landlords. On August 15, 1955, speaking before the assembled heads of all provinces and large cities, Mao condemned Deng Zihui’s order to slow the pace of collectivization, reiterating that

A tottering pace in collectivization suits the rich peasants, it conforms to the capitalist road [they want to take]. Socialism must have a dictatorship, it will not work without it…. This is a war: we are opening fire on peasants with private property…. [They’re] counterrevolutionaries who should be sent to labour camps.”[155]

Workers and “economism”

Peasant resistance to state surplus extraction was paralleled by productivity problems in industry and growing discontent from China’s industrial workforce. The development of workers’ opposition can be understood in terms of the revolution’s failure to develop institutions of workers’ self-rule. In contrast to the revolution of 1925-27 when workers’ strike committees—embryonic soviets—took control of Canton, Shanghai and other cities, Mao’s government imposed a top-down hierarchical factory management structure and absolute Party dictatorship over society and the economy. Workers were shut out of decision-making about economic policies—how much for accumulation, how much for improved living standards, etc.

With no say in wages or conditions, workers had little incentive to contribute. Thus the Party sought to boost productivity by imposing harsh labor discipline and material incentives. After banning independent unions and imposing compulsory arbitration, rigid state labor codes enforced discipline with severe penalties for infractions. A system of police records or “labor books” was instituted to restrict mobility and job entry and to prevent organized opposition. Whereas in the 1920’s, the principal demands of the Communist Party had been the abolition of piecework and the institution of the eight-hour day, in the early 1950’s workdays were lengthened, vacations cut, and piecework expanded to one-third of the workforce in 1952, and 42% by 1956. The state-imposed speedups including “shockwork” campaigns, and instituted sharply graded wage scales in state-owned and private enterprises.[156]

Workers resisted actively and passively. From the early 1950’s the Chinese press complained repeatedly about “slackened labor discipline,” chronic absenteeism, “go-slow strikes,” and ”counter-revolutionary sabotage” in the factories and mines. These escalated into widespread strike waves in 1955-57.[157] Workers who protested the speedup, productivity drives, or low wages were attacked by the Party leadership for “economism” and “syndicalism” and told that they “spoke merely from the standpoint of individual welfare and did not sufficiently recognize that the state must accumulate capital to strengthen its defense and develop its industry.”[158]

Cadres and corruption: from “serving the people” to serving themselves

Finally, by the mid 1950’s, Mao’s socialist construction project was running into difficulties from a third quarter — from a loss of ”communist consciousness,” a loss of commitment to self-discipline and self-denial by the Party cadre itself. As Mao complained in January 1957: “They vie with each other not in plain living, doing more work and having fewer comforts, but for luxuries, rank and status. They scramble for fame and fortune and are interested only in personal gain.”[159] Such “bourgeois” tendencies also undermined production. As he observed, “Our experience is that … the lordly behavior of the cadres makes workers unwilling to consciously observe and implement labour discipline.”[160] Cadre self-interest and careerism also led to mismanagement of the economy. The press complained constantly that many factory and mining managers and provincial cadre “put their own interests above the needs of the state and the people” sabotaging national planning and accumulation by resisting higher output quotas, hoarding funds and supplies, and feeding misinformation to the leadership.[161]

Back in the Yan’an days of war communism there were few possibilities for cadre self-enrichment. But given their monopoly of political power, once the substitute proletariat assumed state power and gained control of the whole economy, the cadres had access to the receipts from industry, commerce, and agricultural taxation. After years of “plain living and hard struggle” they were looking to relax and consume. Arguably, after decades of hardship and privation they were perhaps entitled to some improvements. But in the midst of the poverty of China’s masses, they had, in Mao’s words, “gone to heaven.”

   VII. POLITICS IN COMMAND  

With the “transition to socialism” in jeopardy, Mao reasserted his youthful voluntarist faith in subjective consciousness, mind over matter, and the will of dedicated people to “move mountains.” If China’s masses could win the revolution against overwhelming material odds, they could build both socialism and its prerequisites simultaneously. Flattered by the “great success” of the collectivization drive of 1955-56 as reported by his terrified underlings, the Great Teacher penned fatuous “revisions” of Marxism and gave himself up to delusions of imminent communist utopia. Not only was Marx wrong but even Lenin:

Lenin said ‘The more backward the country, the more difficult its transition from capitalism to socialism.’ Now it seems that this way of speaking is incorrect. As a matter of fact, the more backward the economy, the easier, not the more difficult, the transition from capitalism to socialism.”[162]

In his most delusional tract, the Russian populist-inspired “poor and blank” essay published in June 1958, he explicitly rejected materialism and affirmed his messianic voluntarism in stark terms:

China’s 600 million people have two remarkable peculiarities; they are, first of all, poor, and secondly, blank. That may seem like a bad thing, but it is really a good thing. Poor people want change, want to do things, want revolution. A clean sheet of paper has no blotches, and so the newest and most beautiful pictures can be painted on it.[163]

“Barracks communism” and the militarization of labor

What a fine model of barracks communism! Everything is here: communal dining halls, communal sleeping quarters, accountants and offices regulating education, production, consumption, in a word, all social activity, and at the head of everything stands, ᴏᴜʀ ᴄᴏᴍᴍɪᴛᴛᴇᴇ, nameless and unknown, as supreme leader. This is indeed the purest anti-authoritarianism.

                                                                                                             — Karl Marx[164]

In the fall of winter of 1957-58 Mao launched the Great Leap Forward in a superhuman effort to break through the impasse and hurl the country into modernity in the space of a few years of intense “exertion.” With mass mobilization, intense effort and “proletarian” leadership, Mao asserted, China could “catch up with the industrialized countries in 15 years.”[165] “Our revolutions are like battles. After a victory, we must at once put forward a new task.” And the new task was now “the transition from socialism to communism.”[166]

On the promise of imminent abundance cadres herded hundreds of millions of peasants into huge “communes” designed to maximize labor and minimize consumption. Whereas in 1950-52, men put in about 119 (and women about 70) full-time labor days in agricultural field work per year (excluding domestic labor and private plot sideline activities), in 1958-59 some communes were requiring more than 330 days from men, and 300 days for women.[167] On the promise that the commune ”free supply” system would guarantee housing, free meals in public mess-halls, provide nurseries and “happiness homes” for the aged, peasants were required to turn over “to the common ownership of the commune all privately-owned plots of farmland and house sites and other means of production such as livestock, tree holdings, etc.”[168] It was said that “[t]he adoption of the combined system of grain or meals supply and wage payment marks the beginning of the gradual transition to the stage of ‘from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.’ It ensures that everyone in the commune can equally eat his or her fill—a great liberation no doubt….” [169]

But how could the peasants’ consumption increase when the whole point of the “free supply” system was to maximize accumulation at the expense of consumption? As the People’s Daily of August 18, 1958, described it:

Grain can be saved … on a planned basis … everyone in the mess halls has a plan for grain consumption, which is less [than would be consumed in their individual homes]. For example, Yin Fu-yuan and his family formerly consumed eight catties and two taels of grain per day, now in the mess hall they consume only seven catties…. Consumption of firewood is also reduced.[170]

Enormous battalions of peasants were sent into the fields and engaged in round-the-clock ”shock work” in a monumental effort to ”turn labor into capital.” The press reported that tens and hundreds of thousands of peasants “fight for every single minute or second regardless of night or day, rain or shine.” In Hebei some 150,000 commune members ”continued working even on windy and snowy days, eating and sleeping right in the field.” In Henan, “people fought day and night, shifting all the activities of life—eating, sleeping, office, conference and even nursery—to the field.” In the “Battle for Iron and Steel,” peasants and workers in Kirin province “fought round the clock, eating and sleeping beside the furnaces”; and in Beijing too, workers moved their bedding into the shops during the latter half of 1958 under the slogan “not to leave the forefront before accomplishing the task” and ”not to leave even when slightly wounded” and so on.[171]  As a Henan party secretary described it:

The peasants were not equal to beasts of burden in the past, but are the same as beasts of burden today. Yellow oxen are tied up in the house and human beings are harnessed in the field. Girls and women pull plows and harrows, with their womb hanging down. Cooperation is transformed into the exploitation of human strength.[172]

“Revolution is not a dinner party”

It was the same story in industry. The abolition of piecework, wage-differentials, material incentives, and the like was, in principle, ”a step closer to communism.” As the People’s Daily editorialized on November 13, 1958:

During the Great Leap Forward movement, workers voluntarily abolish the piecework system and the extra-pay for extra-work system. People now work not eight hours but ten hours, even twelve hours. If work requires, they work throughout the night. Each one is not working for himself but for the whole nation and the future. This kind of enthusiasm breaks down capitalist principles, the remuneration system and the strife for personal gains … it gives a big lift to the Communist spirit…. [173]

The policy of the state was ”to hire five workers on three workers wages.” ”Excessive increase in consumption and elevation of the wage level will run counter to the demand of the Chinese people for fulfilling the prescribed historical task,” a ministry spokesman commented. ”Hence the necessity for austerity….” [174]

When did China’s workers and peasants “demand” austerity, demand to work throughout the night, and on reduced rations? Who decided they should work themselves to death to fulfill Mao’s “historical task” of overtaking the United States in 15 years? The ministry spokesman didn’t say.

Without modern industrial inputs, the overdriving of people, machinery, and the land brought the economy to the brink of collapse by the spring of 1959. As grain ran out, communal kitchens shut down, people were forced to eat grass, tree bark, even each other. Cannibalism became widespread.[175] Yet even as peasants starved, “Cadres continued routinely to eat more than their share while people starved around them.” Filling their own bellies gave them the strength to beat thousands of peasants to death in anti-hoarding campaigns.[176] Suicides soared.

When I read the horrific testimonies and official government reports quoted in Jasper Becker’s Hungry Ghosts, Yang Jisheng’s Tombstone, and Frank Dikötter’s Mao’s Great Famine, even cynical as I am I can’t understand how Party cadres who fancied themselves “communist” revolutionaries could be so cruel, savage, and inhuman toward helpless people under their control during the Great Leap Forward: deliberately starving prisoners to save grain to add to already overfilled party cadre grainaries, savagely beating starving peasants, even skinning them alive for the “crime” of slaughtering livestock after the canteens ran out of grain, burying people alive and deliberately freezing them to death, “smashing cooking pots in every household to prevent them from being used at home to cook grass soup” and worse (Becker, chapter 8). I could understand if this were Genghis Khan or medieval Catholic inquisitors, but “communists?” Yet this is what the “substitute proletariat” morphed into, and not only in China.

In the end, Mao got neither accumulation nor communism. He got economic collapse, horrific famine and unparalleled barbarism. Somewhere between 30 and 50 million peasants starved to death between 1958 and 1962, either way, by far the largest famine in history.[177] Millions more perished in his gulags. Untold numbers committed suicide.

The Great Leap Backward was Mao’s penultimate “correct idea.” His ultimate correct idea, the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, aka “ten years of madness,” took another two million lives, witnessed even more extreme tortures, even Party-condoned cannibalism in the name of “class struggle,” wrecked the economy, the country, and permanently traumatized the entire population.[178] Instead of overtaking the West, China fell more decades behind.

Deng Xiaoping came up with new correct ideas. First: sell the 16-hour day labor of hundreds of millions of police state-enforced union-free, EPA-free, OSHA-free, NIOSH-free, civil-rights-free, helpless and vulnerable migrant Chinese workers to the Western capitalists at the world’s lowest wages — the “China price”[179] — in order to squeeze surpluses out of them to modernize China’s industry and catch up with the West. Second: marketize CCP power so that communists, beginning with his own children, could “get rich first.”[180] Third: impose his one-child policy with forced abortions. Fourth: lock up Democracy Wall protestors Wei Jinsheng and others to stop the calls for a Fifth Modernization: democracy. Fifth: shoot the Tiananmen protestors en masse and run them over with tanks à la Stalin in Hungary.

Today, retro-Maoist Xi Jinping has his own correct ideas: Enslave Xinjiang Muslims and Tibetan Buddhists in prison factories and erase their cultures and languages;[181] crush the Hong Kong democracy movement; obliterate or “partyize” Islam, Christianity, and Buddhism; crush the private economy; drive out Western/foreign liberal/cultural influences in universities and society; and lock up the entire populations of Shanghai and other cities for months on end rather than accept the “humiliation” that his China-made Covid vaccines don’t work very well and import vaccines that do work from the “evil” West. But far and away, his most catastrophic correct idea is his “China Dream” plan to drive his economy at 6-8% per year until China overtakes the United States to become the world’s leading superpower — even if this requires burning enough coal, oil, and gas to doom life on Earth.[182] In October 2019 climate scientists published research predicting that, on present trends, global warming is going to “all but erase” Shanghai, Shenzhen, and “most of the world’s great coastal cities by 2050” – barely 28 years from now.[183] There won’t be any “great rejuvenation,” any “golden age of glory and splendor” for the Communist Party when China’s glaciers evaporate, when its rivers dry up, when farming collapses across the North China Plain, when its coastal cities are flooded. There will be industrial collapse, ecological collapse, famine, and untold human suffering.

So much for the “proletarian attitudes and values” of the substitute proletariat. Little wonder that Maoists like the Monthly Review editors and the Qiao Collecitve refuse to discuss the nature of China. Even a cursory review of the historical evidence debunks their delusionary Maoist theory. It’s past time to bury Maoism, bury Fidelismo, bury all third-worldist illusions in savior-dictator “substitute proletariats” and reassert the primacy of the working class and the indispensability of mass democracy. Socialism is not about skyscrapers, high-speed trains, blingfrastructure, or Xi’s phony “common prosperity,” let alone the crude barracks communism of Mao Zedong. Socialism is about liberation, freedom, social equality, and working-class self-rule, not repression, slavery, and Orwellian thought control. There are no “great saviors.” The emancipation of the working class must be the act of the working class itself  or it won’t happen at all.

Notes

[107] Elizabeth Perry, “Masters of the Country? Shanghai Workers in the Early People’s Republic,” in Jeremy Brown and Paul G. Picowicz, eds., Dilemmas of Victory: The Early Years of the People’s Republic (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2007), 58.

[108] RCP (5 April 1949) “Special Report from China on the Civil War,” The Militant, XIII, 18, 2 May 1949: 1-2.

[109] C.L. Liu (20 October 1949) “China: An Aborted Revolution,” Fourth International, 11, 1 (January-February 1950), 3-7. Thanks to Paul Hammond for these sources from The Militant and the Fourth International.

[110] Perry, op cit., 12.

[111] New China News Agency, May 3, 1949, in Gluckstein, Mao’s China, 212-213.

[112] Gluckstein, Mao’s China, 213-214.

[113] Gluckstein, Mao’s China, 214-15.

[114] Dikötter, Tragedy, 50.

[115] Dikötter, Tragedy, 47-48

[116] The impact this had on children is movingly described by Ai Weiwei whose father the poet Ai Qing, labeled a “black element,” endured innumerable humiliations, some which nearly killed him, over decades at the hands of Mao. Weiwei suffered many of those along with his father and also after his father died as a “son of a Five Black Category element.” 1000 Years, chapters 6-9.

[117] Dikötter, Tragedy, 65,74.

[118] Hsiao-tung Fei, Peasant Life in China (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1962), chapter 11; Hsiao-tung Fei and Chih-I-Chang, Earthbound China (Chicago: University of Chicago: 1945), R.H. Tawney, Land and Labor in China (London: Allen and Unwin, 1932).

[119] Liu Binyan, A Higher Kind of Loyalty (New York: Pantheon, 1990), 24-25.

[120] Dikötter, Tragedy, 69, 73-75.

[121] Dikötter, Tragedy, 76.

[122] Dikötter, Tragedy, 77

[123] Dikötter, Tragedy, 74-75.

[124] Dikötter, Tragedy, 74-75.

[125] Dikötter, Tragedy, 73-74, 76-77, 80-81, 83.

[126] Cheng, New Man, 70-75; Dikötter, Tragedy, 183.

[127] Cheng, New Man, 73-74.

[128] Dikötter, Tragedy, 182-83.

[129] Dikötter, Tragedy, 190.

[130] Dikötter, Tragedy, 190, 193, 196ff.

[131] Dikötter, Tragedy , chapter 12.

[132] Laogai Research Foundation, Laogai Handbook (Washington D.C. 2006), 14.

[133] Laogai Handbook, 8.

[134] Wang Bing, Dead Souls (Icarus and Grasshopper Films, 2018).

[135] Liu, Loyalty, chapter 5.

[136] Gluckstein, Mao’s China, chapters 20 and 21. Liu, Loyalty, chapter 3 and passim.

[137] Liu, Loyalty, chapter 6; Dikötter, Tragedy, chapter 9.

[138] Gluckstein, Mao’s China, 327-330

[139] Liu, Loyalty, 38.

[140] Alice Su, “Searching for a way out” Alice Su, Twitter, May 5, 2022.

[141] Li Yuan, “‘The last generation’: disillusionment of young Chinese,” New York Times, May 24, 2022.

[142] Quoted in Liu, China Dream, Chapter 1.

[143] In R. Craig Nations, War on War: Lenin, the Zimmerwald Left, and the Origins of Communist Internationalism (Duke: Duke University Press, 1989), 211. (Thanks to John Ridell for the source).

[144] Dikötter, Tragedy, 227-31.

[145] Dikötter, Tragedy, 230-31.

[146] By 1957 Chinese per capita grain availability was still only 256 kilograms per annum: Anthony M. Tang, “Policy and performance in agriculture” in Economic Trends in Communist China, ed. Alexander Eckstein et al. (New York: Aldine Atherton, 1968), 466.

[147] Nai-Ruenn Chen and Walter Galenson, The Chinese Economy Under Communism (New York: Aldine, 1969), 95; and Anthony M. Tang. “Policy and Performance In Agriculture”, in Eckstein et al., eds., Economic Trends, 504-505.

[148] On the grain supply crisis of the mid-fifties and peasant resistance to collectivization, see Kenneth R. Walker, “Collectivization in Retrospect: The ‘Socialist High Tide’ of Autumn 1955-Sprlng 1956,” China Quarterly no. 26 (Apr.-June 1966), 1-43; and Thomas P. Bernstein, “Cadre and Peasant Behavior Under Conditions of Insecurity and Deprivation: The Grain Supply Crisis of the Spring of 1955,” in A. Doak Barnet (ed.), Chinese Communist Politics in Action (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1969), 365-399.

[149] Kenneth R. Walker, Planning in Chinese Agriculture (London: Routledge, 1965), 66; also Mao, SW 5, 196-7.

[150] Walker, “Collectivization.”

[151] Dikötter, Tragedy, 217-220, 222-23, 234-35.

[152]  Dikötter, Tragedy, 235.

[153]  Dikötter, Tragedy, 224-25.

[154] Mao, “On the co-operative transformation of agriculture” (July 31, 1955), SW 5, 184; Dikötter, Tragedy, 236.

[155] Dikötter, Tragedy, 236-37.

[156] Gluckstein, Mao’s China, chapters 10-14; and Kenneth Lieberthal, “Mao vs. Liu? Policy Towards Industry and Commerce: 1946-1949,” China Quarterly, no. 47 (July-Sept. 1971), 494-520. no. 859.[what does no. 859 refer to?]

[157] Gluckstein, Mao’s China, 218-223; Mao’s contradictions speech of February 27, 1957 in SW 5, 414-415; Elisabeth J. Perry, “Shanghai’s strikewave of 1957,” China Quarterly, no. 137 (March 1994), 1-27; Dikötter, Tragedy, 278-79.

[158] Liberation Daily, June 25, 1952, in Gluckstein, Mao’s China, 235.

[159] Mao, SW 5, 350-55.

[160] Mao, Miscellany of Mao Tse-tung Thought 1949-1968 (Arlington, VA: Joint Publications Research Service, 1974) no. 61269-1, 283.

[161] E.g., “The case of the Shenyang Transformer Plant,” New China News Agency, July 22, 1956: and ”Politics as the guide: ministry of coal industry deals with the ‘under-assessment of capacity’ question,” Political Study, no. 5, May 13, 1958: ECMM no. 139.

[162] “Reading notes,” (Taipei, 1967), in Meisner, Mao Zedong, 150.

[163] Hongqi (Red Flag), June 1, 1958, pp.3-4, in Meisner, Mao Zedong, 149.

[164] Thus wrote Marx in his sarcastic takedown of the forced collectivism and communism of the nihilist-anarchist Sergey Nechayev in his “Fundamentals of the future social society” (1870), K. Marx and F. Engels, Soch, 2nd ed., vol. 18, 414.

[165] Meisner, Mao Zedong, 143.

[166] Meisner, Mao Zedong, 140.

[167] Peter Schran, The Development of Chinese Agriculture 1950-1959 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1969), 69-78.

[168] “Tentative Regulations of the Weihsing People’s Commune,” August 7, 1958, reprinted in Cheng Chu-yuan, People’s Communes in China (Hong Kong: Union Press, 1959), 61-80.

[169] “The People’s Commune Movement in Hope,” Red Flag, Oct. 1, 1958, reprinted In People’s Communes in China (Beijing: Foreign Language Press, 1958), 55.

[170] Quoted in Geoffrey Hudson, et al., The Chinese Communes (New York: 1960), pp. 23-24.

[171] ³⁴Red Flag no. 11, 1958. This and the following examples of ”shock work” are drawn from Cheng, People’s Communes. See especially chapters 3-6.

[172] Current Background (CB) no. 515.

[173] See Hu Shang, “Speaking of the Government Issue System,” Joint Publications Research Service (hereafter JPRS) no. 6230.

[174] Sung Ping, “Why is it Necessary to Introduce a Rational Low Wage System?” Study (December 3, 1957), ECMM no. 118. See also articles on the abolition of piecework, “bourgeois right,” and “money in command” in CB no. 537.

[175] Jasper Becker, Hungry Ghosts (New York: Free Press 1996), 118ff.

[176] Yang Jisheng, Tombstone: The Great Chinese Famine 1958-1962 (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux 2008), 45.

[177] Becker, Ghosts; Yang, Tombstone.

[178] Zheng Yi, Scarlet Memorial (Boulder: Westview Press, 1996).

[179] Alexandra Harvey, The China Price (London: Penguin, 2008).

[180] On this, see my China’s Engine, chapter 6.

[181] Anthony Galloway and Eryk Bagshaw, “China forces 500,000 Tibetans into labour camps,” Sydney Morning Herald, September 22, 2020, https://www.smh.com.au/world/asia/china-forces-500-000-tibetans-into-labour-camps-20200922-p55xyk.html.

[182] In 2020, China’s CO2 emissions were 10.67 billion tons (bt), more than twice those of the U.S. (4.71 bt) with a GDP just two-thirds as large, more than the entire OECD. What’s even more concerning are the trends. In 1990 China’s emissions were just 2.48 bt while US emissions were 5.11 bt. While U.S. emissions have fallen slightly from their 1990 level (and dropped significantly from their peak of 6.13bt in 2007), China’s emissions have relentlessly grown, more than quadrupling since 1990, growing by 4-5% p.a. since 2016 with no end in sight. Data from Our world in Data, https://ourworldindata.org/co2/country/china.

[183] Denise Lu and Christopher Flavelle, “Erased by rising seas by 2050,” New York Times, October 30, 2019; and my China’s Engine, chapter 7 and p. 195.

“The Reddest Reddest Red Sun in Our Heart, Chairman Mao”
(Women xinzhong zuihong zuihongde hong taiyang Mao zhuxi he women xin lianxin)

This is the third part of a four-part article. The other parts can be found here:

Part 1
Part 2
Part 4

V. FORGING THE “SUBSTITUTE PROLETARIAT”

The petty bourgeois intelligentsia as “substitute proletariat”

Mao and his comrades gradually, and almost unconsciously at first, began to assume the task of constructing a new subjectively socialist revolutionary social force. While maintaining the fiction of the “leading role of the proletariat” to mollify Stalin’s Comintern and the urban-centric Central Committee in Shanghai, Mao and his seconds Liu Shaoqi, Kang Sheng and others began the task of creating an entirely new communist party out of mostly petit bourgeois elements: students, teachers, patriotic intellectuals, journalists, artists, déclassé sons of the gentry, defecting GMD officers and soldiers, millions of peasants, and even lumpen bandits — converting the Communist Party itself into a mass party, a new social agency, a “new class” – what Paul Sweezy would later term a “substitute proletariat.”[61]

After losing tens of thousands of veteran communist workers and organizers in the coups of 1926-27, in the white terror that followed, in fighting off GMD attacks on the first rural soviets, and on the Long March, by the 1930s the Party was almost entirely composed of illiterate and semi-literate peasants – very far from proletarian pamphleteers. The Party badly needed educated cadre who could read and write, organize, produce propaganda, administer base-area governments — and eventually administer a future communist national government and economy. Thus in a Central Committee decision in 1939 Mao stressed the need for the party to recruit petty-bourgeois intellectuals: “Without the participation of the intellectuals, victory and the revolution will be impossible.”[62]

To this end, in 1936 the CCP leadership had launched what turned out to be a brilliant and highly effective propaganda campaign to attract patriotic urban intellectuals to remote Yan’an. In this campaign Edgar Snow’s 1936 bestseller Red Star Over China — systematically edited by Mao himself to ensure that it projected the correct message — played an outsized role not only in mobilizing liberal-left Western cheerleaders but also in mobilizing urban Chinese to join the CCP, as Julia Lovell describes in fascinating detail.[63] “Mao’s aims,” Snow declared, were “to awaken [China’s millions] to a belief in human rights, to combat the timidity, passiveness, and static faiths of Taoism and Confucianism, to educate, to persuade … them … to fight for a life of justice, equality, freedom, and human dignity.”[64]

The book was a sensation. “Translated into Chinese, it convinced crowds of young, educated liberals and patriots — in the mainland and across the Chinese diaspora — to abandon their urban existences and trek to the northwest to serve Mao’s revolution as organizers, administrators, and propagandists.” Translated into dozens of other languages it became a handbook for Third World revolutionaries around the world.[65]

After Japan invaded China in 1937, the CCP and GMD negotiated a truce and agreed to form a Second United Front against the invaders, CCP mobilization and recruitment went into overdrive. Mao’s generals Zhu De, Peng Dehuai, He Long, and others led the Eighth Army deep into North China to establish additional base areas. The Red Army grew from fewer than 30,000 men to 250,000 by autumn 1938. Parallel with the military build-up, tens of thousands of patriotic and leftist intellectuals frustrated by Chiang Kai-shek’s crumbling resistance, began trekking out to the Mecca of revolutionary Yan’an to join the Communist “saviors of the nation” and experience for themselves the promised utopia.

These new intellectual recruits were inspired by the May Fourth movement’s celebration of science and democracy. Before he co-founded the CCP Chen Duxiu had been the leading intellectual light of the May Fourth movement, famously calling for “Mr. Science” and “Mr. Democracy” to replace Mr. Confucius.[66] Thus many volunteers bought the CCP promise of a “new democratic revolution.” In the words of Dai Qing, “Young people searching for a way to rescue the nation had broken through the lines of the KMT and Japanese blockade and had arrived at or were on their way to Yan’an – the barren yellow dirt plateau that in the young people’s passionate aspirations was a holy place without exploitation and suppression, wherein equality, freedom, and democracy reigned.”[67] One young volunteer described his feeling: “At last we saw the heights of Yenan city. We were so excited we wept. We cheered from our truck…. . We started to sing the “Internationale” and Russia’s Motherland March.'”[68]

“Yan’an spring” 1937-38

Yet, Yan’an soon turned out to be the opposite of what they had expected. Instead of critical thinking they found dogmatic instruction including rote memorization and recitation of Party texts mimicking Confucian pedagogical methods. Instead of equality and comradely-shared sacrifice, they found a rigid hierarchy in which everything from the quantity and quality of food, to housing, health care, uniforms, and access to information, were all allocated by six categories of rank. Instead of democracy they found authoritarianism, enforced collectivism, enforced subordination of the individual to the Party. Instead of sexual equality they found rampant sexism. The young volunteers were spirited revolutionaries willing to sacrifice for the cause. But their May Fourth-inspired independence, anti-authoritarianism, feminism, critical thinking and pro-democratic political instincts were a threat to the Confucian Stalinized top-down CCP and Mao’s vision.[69]

In the years before 1939 when Mao was not yet in charge and had not yet seized control of the schools and institutes, the atmosphere in Yan’an was relatively free. Mao, Wang Ming, Zhu De, and other Party leaders wore simple clothes, spoke casually with young people, and were unaccompanied by retinues. Young people addressed Party leaders as “Comrade Wang Ming,” “Comrade Enlai [Zhou Enlai],” or “Comrade Bo Gu” without adding titles such as secretary or director. Relations between men and women were fairly relaxed. Young women felt able to “cast off their chains and feel liberated.” “Taking their cue from Alexandra Kollontai, sexual desire was considered ‘as natural as thirst.’” Revolutionary romantic attachments bloomed. “For a time,” historian Gao Hua writes, “Yan’an rang out with laughter and cheer and it seemed to have become a utopia for the young” in the “idealism-filled days of 1937 and 1938.” [70] 

But once the Comintern endorsed him as “supreme [political] leader” of the Party in September 1938, Mao “moved forward with full confidence as he seized all Party and military authority from the Soviet faction.”[71] The turning point came at a critical five-day senior cadres Politburo meeting in September 1941 where Mao delivered withering sarcastic and mocking critiques of Wang Ming, Zhang Wentian, Bo Gu, Wang Jiaxiang, and the rest over their history of failed military strategies and their dogmatic adherence to classical Marxist precepts which in Mao’s words were “divorced from reality” in the Chinese context. The Comintern faction capitulated, disintegrated, and lost control over the CCP from then on. Wang Ming bowed to Mao, resigned from the leadership and never again played a leading role.[72] Other opponents criticized themselves and groveled in hopes of forgiveness from the rising Red Sun. Liu Shaoqi, Chen Yun, Ye Jianyang, and others in Mao’s own faction issued their own self-criticisms, extoled Mao to his face with fawning tributes as “the model and exemplar for Marxists,” as “dialectical materialism incarnate,” as the “Greatest Chinese leader ever” and so on.[73] Mao lapped it up and relentlessly promoted this self-glorification, demanding unconditional submission from subordinates.[74] From that point on we can say that the CCP had become effectively a totalitarian Stalinist-Maoist party and the cult of Mao begun in earnest. Minority views or even majority views that did not accord with Mao’s henceforth invited punishment.

Bureaucratic centralism displaces democratic centralism

In 1938 Mao assumed command of an already more or less fully Stalinized, bureaucratic-centralized party and he set about in the late 1930s and early 1940s eliminating the last vestiges of independent thinking in Yan’an and the base areas. Mao himself had already become a thoroughgoing Stalinist and wannabe totalitarian as early as 1929 when, addressing the Ninth Congress of the Fourth Red Army in the Kiangsi Soviet, he complained that “ultra-democracy is still deep-rooted in the minds of many comrades.” Comrades persist in making such “erroneous demands as that the Red Army should apply ‘democratic centralism from the bottom to the top’ or should ‘let the lower levels discuss all problems first, and then let the higher levels decide.’ It was imperative, he said, to “destroy the roots of ultra-democracy” and “ensure democracy under guidance” by enforcing the following rules: [paraphrasing: (1) the individual must obey the organization, (2) the minority must obey the majority, (3) lower echelons must obey higher echelons, and (4) the entire Party must obey the Central Committee”].[75] In short: Leaders make decisions, the rank and file carry them out. This is CCP “democracy” from Mao to Xi Jinping.

Of course one could say that after all this was an army and where is there any democratic army? True, but Mao insisted that the Red Army was not just a fighting force. It was a party-army, a political army:

[Some comrades] think that the task of the Red Army like that of the White army, is merely to fight. They do not understand that the Chinese Red Army is an armed body for carrying out the political tasks of the revolution…. The Red Army fights not merely for the sake of fighting but in order to conduct propaganda among the masses, organize them, arm them, and help them to establish revolutionary political power. Without these objectives, fighting loses its meaning and the Red Army loses the reason for its existence.

Besides, Mao didn’t confine his enforcement of top-down bureaucratic centralism to the army. Like Stalin, he generalized it to the entire Party and government. This naturally raises the question, “why shouldn’t rank and file civilian or military cadres have the right to offer input, discuss policy alternatives, and vote on decisions about ‘the political tasks of the revolution?’”

Origins of terror, torture, and the mass murder of comrades

At the beginning of Mao’s 1942 “Rectification Campaign” one of the young volunteers in Yan’an, Wang Shi-wei – a famous leftist writer and translator of Marx, Lenin, and Trotsky into Chinese — had the nerve to pose just this question. Wang penned several essays in the Party newspaper Jiefang ribao (Liberation Daily) criticizing Party authoritarianism, sexism, suppression of free speech, and the growing alienation of young people. His essay “Wild Lilies” depicted the rise of a “new privileged authoritarian class” already in the 1930s[76] and appealed for a humane and democratic socialism. He wasn’t criticizing hierarchy and ranks in the military. He understood that armies aren’t democracies. He was criticizing the internal regime of the Party. His essay, “Politicians and Artists” proposed a separation of powers, confining Party power to politics while leaving artists and writers free both to “arouse the revolution’s spiritual forces” and also criticize the “darkness” wherever it was found. [77] His essays were widely popular among the new recruits.

Mao’s response was “Who’s in charge here, Karl Marx or Wang Shiwei?” In fact Wang and Marx were on the same page with respect to democracy. It was the aspiring dictator Mao Zedong who was contradicting Marx’ democratic ethos. Mao “demanded the editors admit their fault in allowing such a work to be published and pledge to avoid any such error in the future.”[78] Then he put Wang on trial and charged him with leading an alleged “Five Member Anti-Party Gang” — China’s first show trial. The Party’s senior cadre and the new intellectual recruits were compelled to condemn Wang. Artist Ai Weiwei recalls how his father, the poet Ai Qing, caved:

Under the pressure to conform, everyone sank into an ideological swamp of “criticism” and “self-criticism.” My father repeatedly wrote self-critiques, and when controls on thought and expression rose to the level of threatening his very survival, he, like others wrote an essay denouncing Wang Shiwei, the author of ‘Wild Lilies,’ taking a public stand against his inner convictions.[79]

Wang’s real offense was that he refused to recant, bow his head, admit errors, grovel and conform to Mao’s authority. So Mao had him locked up in a cave for five years and then on July 1, 1947, a subordinate of Mao’s dragged Wang out of his cave and chopped his head off.[80]

Yet this gratuitous murder of a Party comrade on trumped-up charges was no aberration on Mao’s part. By the 1940s he was already accomplished in the tools and practices of terror, torture, cruelty, and gruesome mass murder. During the Kiangsi Soviet in 1930-32 Mao purged his opponents with a campaign of red terror against a supposed “Anti-Bolshevik League” (AB League for short). According to Nanjing University historian Gao Hua, Mao’s campaign “encouraged the extortion of confessions under torture and a policy of ‘killing without mercy’” that culminated in mass rallies and the execution of “Party members who came from landlord or rich-peasant families as well as complainers and malcontents.” “In less than one month, more than 4,400 of the Red Army’s 40,000 men, many of them ardent young volunteers, were identified as members of the AB League and … were put to death.”[81]

Mao not only ordered the slaughters but also approved Li’s torture of comrades to obtain confessions:

Li Shaojiu used various forms of torture on these comrades until they were “a mass of wounds” and “their fingers were broken and their bodies were burned so badly that they could not move” with some dying on the spot. Whenever torture was employed, Li Shaojiu was always present. According to contemporary records, the tortured comrades “shook the heaven with cries that lingered in ones ears as every available form of torture was applied.” On December 8, wives of Li Baifang, Ma Ming, and Zhou Mian visited their husbands in detention, but they were then also arrested as members of the AB League. They were similarly tortured, with bamboo strips driven under their fingernails, their genitals burned with incense sticks, and their breasts cut with small knives.[82]

The AB League massacres were, as far as I’m aware, the first mass murders of Communist Party cadres by Mao’s partners in crime. They weren’t his last. In 1937, Mao launched his own campaign of terror against Trotskyists. Again, it was not enough just to shoot them. Mao let loose his Rottweiler Kang Sheng (since 1936 head of the Office for the Elimination of Counterrevolutionaries and trained by Stalin’s NKVD secret police in Moscow where he is said to have “eliminated” hundreds of Chinese Trotskyist students) and his crew who delighted in secret orgies torturing and murdering hundreds more Trotskyists – years before he put Wang Shiwei on trial. I’ll spare the reader details of the “72 methods” of torture employed by Mao’s sadists and their inventive means of mutilating and killing their comrades.[83]

Social engineering the virtuous communist mandarinate

Once he had secured monopoly control of the military in 1935 and formal political control of the Party and government in 1938, Mao turned to the task of achieving ideological supremacy: dethroning the last of the Soviet faction, and establishing his own “revision of Marxism” (substituting the peasantry for the urban proletariat, substituting guerilla war for workers’ insurrection, replacing democracy with dictatorship, and replacing materialism with voluntarism) and remolding the Party cadre to instill in them the tenets of Maoism. The “Thought of Mao Zedong” would be enshrined in both the Preamble to the revised Party Constitution of 1945 and in the first rewrite of Party history: “Resolution on Certain Questions in the History of Our Party” (April 1945).[84]

To this end, Mao reorganized the Party’s training schools, put himself and Kang Sheng in charge and imposed a radically new Confucian-Stalinist curriculum based on 22 short texts, mostly written by Mao and Liu Shaoqi. Gao Hua says that Yan’an became “virtually a college town” with schools disseminating CCP ideology, teaching military arts, and playing a key role in Yan’an’s political life.[85] By 1939, Yan’an City had a population of about 6-7,000 local residents and 30,000 young volunteers, cadres, and soldiers. The eight-year long Second United Front gave Mao the freedom from most fighting to use his schools to as Gao Hua put it, “stockpile and maintain a senior cadre corps” of future government administrators and managers.[86] During the eight years of the United Front with the KMT from 1937 and 1945 Party membership grew from 40,000 to 1,200,000 and its military forces from 30,000 to one million plus another million militia support groups, and they governed nineteen base areas with nearly a hundred million people.[87] By 1949 Party membership would soar to 4.5 million.[88]

The schools were established to train a new revolutionary-cum-ruling class, to be a politicized party-bureaucracy of competent, disciplined, incorruptible, and obedient organizers, propagandists, managers, and administrators who would govern the base areas and eventually the whole country as beneficent dictators over and above society — not unlike the Mandarin scholar-officials of the ancien regime.

But the notion of Party cadres as beneficent dictators posed a two-fold problem: First, without democratic elections there was no way to hold those officials accountable to society. Second, without inner-party democracy there was no way to hold the Party leaders accountable to the membership. Without democracy, what was to prevent the substitute proletariat from morphing into a new ruling class, serving themselves instead of the people? This idealist theme of a permanently self-reforming substitute proletariat was the central contradiction that ran through Mao’s thought from Yan’an to the Cultural Revolution. His “solution” at this stage was to try to social engineer his cadre into an upright, self-denying, self-disciplining, self-reforming “virtuous” elite by combining elements of Confucianism and Stalinism.

Mao’s synthesis of Confucianism and Stalinism

It’s deeply ironic that while the Chinese Communist Party was born in struggle against the shackles of traditional Confucianism, when Mao set about social engineering his “New Men” and “New Women” in Yan’an, he sourced neither Marx nor Lenin but Confucius and Stalin — prompting the Chinese Trotskyist Wang Fanxi to ask rhetorically “How could an idealist, ‘feudal,’ class-bound Confucianism be an integral part of Mao’s communist ideology?” And “not just a source but an enduring component.”[89] Wang, like many China scholars, tends to see Mao’s “residual” Confucianism as an aberration, a cultural hangover from his pre-Marxist days. But what this approach fails to appreciate is how central and essential Confucianism was to Mao’s whole project of constructing a “substitute proletariat” – his scholar-official like “communist mandarinate” revolutionary-ruling class.

Mao copied plenty from Stalin: his top-down bureaucratic centralism; his party-state organizational structure that insured party control of all institutions of government, military and civil society; his shameless vilification of veteran Bolsheviks as “opportunists,” and “enemies of the people”; his ruthless use of terror and violence to destroy the so-called “old Bolsheviks”; his mendacious rewriting of official history to glorify himself; his primitive thought reform that Mao systematized and developed, and more.[90]

But he also copied plenty from Confucianism because it uniquely and conveniently suited his need to engineer his communist mandarinate. Confucianism assumed that human beings were perfectible through instruction, self-cultivation, emulation of virtuous models, and lifelong self-reform. In his book Creating The “New Man” Yinhong Cheng writes that that “[t]he Confucian ideas of ren (benevolence), li (sense of propriety), and xiao (filial piety) were all exalted moral qualities embodied in junzi — an ideal moral person [aka superior man].”[91] In Confucian China ordinary people sought virtue by respecting Confucian ethical principles and “rectifying” their behavior such that each member of the family fulfilled the duties and obligations required of their position and accepted the limits of his/her rank in the patriarchal social order (younger son submits to elder son, wife to husband, family to state, etc.). To the extent that one can discern a coherent political ideology in the fortune cookie maxims and parables attributed in the Analects and other collections to The Sage, Confucius held that the cultivation of virtuous leaders was the key to good governance. A junzi virtuous administrator, Cheng tells us, disciplines himself, refrains from self-indulgence and governs in the interest of society. By contrast, xiaoren, a “small or petty” person or official, is egotistic, self-indulgent, seeks power and fame, and his governance suffers in result.[92] The job of Mao’s schools was to combine Stalinism and Confucianism to train this virtuous communist mandarinate ruling class.

Speaking at the founding of one of those schools in 1937 Mao emphasized the necessity of building character, moral uprightness, and selflessness in the “vanguard” of the revolution in prose that updated Confucius:

We must educate … the kind of people who are the vanguard of the Revolution, who have political farsightedness, who are prepared for battle and sacrifice, who are frank, loyal, positive and upright; the kind of people who seek no self-interest, but only national and social emancipation…. [93]

And again:

At no time and in no circumstances should a Communist place his personal interests first; he should subordinate them to the interests of the nation and of the masses. Hence, selfishness, slacking, corruption, seeking the limelight, and so on, are most contemptible, while selflessness, working with all one’s energy, whole-hearted devotion to public duty, and quiet hard work will command respect.[94]

The Confucian moral education of the upright communist official was the foundation of Communist Party schools in Yan’an — and remains so to this day. Thus in June 2020 Xi Jinping’s People’s Daily front page sermon explaining “How to measure up as a party member in the New Era” was all about morality, character, feudal tradition, and emulation of virtuous public servants:

The country does not prosper without virtue … Party members … should be the practitioners of good moral character, the general public’s moral benchmark…. All party members, especially leading cadres, must talk about cultivation, morality, integrity, cultivate the high moral character of the Communist Party…. Party members and cadres must … consciously draw nutrients from the excellent Chinese traditional culture, always and everywhere … strengthen self-discipline and … carry forward the spirit of Jiao Yulu [touted as a “heroic” 1960s Henan province party secretary].[95]

Needless to say, none of this moralistic claptrap has any roots in Marx, Lenin, or even Stalin. This is all straight out of Confucius, Mencius and Xunzi.

Thought reform of the intellectuals

To enforce this “thought revolution” the first task was to, as the communists themselves called it: xinao, “wash the brains” of the students. Yan’an’s young recruits and older cadres as well were subjected to intense pressure, required to engage in “criticism and self-criticism” (piping yu ziwo piping, or jiantao) to examine their “mistakes and shortcomings,” to express their feelings of guilt regret over their petit bourgeois backgrounds. They were ordered to write running confessions about their personal and family histories and reveal their “bad thoughts.” These became the basis of the first dossiers in Communist China – a record that would follow individuals for the rest of their lives.[96] These confessions were regularly examined and criticized by the teacher and the whole class who then demanded more, deeper self-reflection and longer confessions. Students were made to publicly humiliate themselves often in front of large audiences. They were told to “draw a line” between themselves and their bourgeois parents, renounce their past, renounce individualism, swear unconditional loyalty and obedience to the Party and to Mao, and declare their heartfelt gratitude to the Party for their redemption. Recalcitrants were subjected to “struggle” sessions, sometimes before mass audiences of thousands. Incorrigibles were imprisoned and sometimes executed.[97]

Mass Mobilization the Yan’an Way

The Communist Party’s victory was hardly foreordained. Mao’s guerilla road to revolution was novel but had no guarantee of success. The Party had been all but destroyed twice in 1927 and again in 1934. In 1936 the remnant party-army was still no mass popular movement. What saved the CCP this time were the Japanese invasions of 1931 and 1937. In 1931 the Japanese occupied Manchuria. Chiang offered no resistance. When the Japanese invaded in force in 1937 to seize the whole country, Chiang’s armies retreated southward, abandoning the capital and major cities one after another to end up in southwest Sichuan province. Given a choice between the incompetent, corrupt, and dictatorial GMD and the Communists, most Chinese chose the Communists and hoped for the best. That said, to their credit, Mao Zedong and his comrades built a massive popular movement to support the Red Army, a story celebrated by Western authors and scholars from Edgar Snow’s Red Star Over China to Mark Selden’s Yenan Way in Revolutionary China.

To improve the peasants’ livelihood and mobilize existing resources for the war effort, the communists organized agricultural and industrial cooperatives and sponsored literacy campaigns and medical programs. These relied on primitive technology, “men over machines,” popular initiatives, and local self-reliance. They were designed to overcome the peasants’ fatalism, to give them the confidence in their capacity to win the war and the revolution. It was the Party’s consistent and ever more refined application of these policies that enabled the Party to win the active support of the rural villagers who fed, clothed and hid the Red Army, provided it with spies, informants and recruits, and permitted the party-army to move through village society as “fish in the sea.”[98]

“From the masses to the masses”? Where do correct ideas come from?

Through the more than two decades of anti-Japanese war and civil war the Party crucially depended upon voluntary mass support in the rural base areas and it could not force this. Setting a moral example and establishing “clean governments” sharply distinguished the Communists from the corrupt and plunderous Guomindang -governments and military. As Mao wrote in 1928:

Every Communist engaged in government work should set an example of absolute integrity, of freedom from favouritism in making appointments and of hard work for little remuneration. Every Communist working among the masses should be their friend and not a boss over them, an indefatigable teacher and not a bureaucratic politician.[99]

The Party sought to elicit active participation of the masses by persuasion rather than diktat, what Mao termed “mass line” (qunzhong luxian) politics. In one of the most famous quotations in all of Mao’s work, from a 1943 Politburo resolution on leadership, he said:

In all the practical work of our Party, all correct leadership is necessarily “from the masses, to the masses.” This means: take the ideas of the masses (scattered and unsystematic ideas) and concentrate them (through study turn them into concentrated and systematic ideas), then go to the masses and propagate and explain these ideas until the masses embrace them as their own, hold fast to them and translate them into action, and test the correctness of these ideas in such action.[100]

In the high tide of Western Maoism in the 1960s and 70s Maoist China scholars wrote no end of nonsense about this “fundamental principle” of the Party. They took Mao’s text to mean that the peasants themselves were the source of manifold “correct ideas,” that the Party was merely “learning from the masses,” articulating their ideas, and implementing policies that reflected their wishes – even, some argued, superior to “Western liberal democracy.” Thus Stanford University economist John Gurley told us that “the politically conscious leadership listened to the “largely inarticulate, largely illiterate and politically undeveloped mass of the local community, learns from the community … sums up these ideas … then returns them to the masses in articulate form … and with the agreement of the majority, puts the consequent practices into practice….”[101] Even today, London School of Economics Professor Lin Chun suggests that Mao’s mass line approach is superior to Western democracy: “Instead of competing ‘interest groups’ of liberal democracies, this form of politics and governance seeks to integrate public preference for sound policymaking while minimizing cleavages and mistakes [and resting upon] the premise of the sovereignty of the people.”[102]

Rubbish. “With the agreement of the majority.” Please. When did Mao ever put any decision up for popular vote? For all the reasons I’ve adduced above — the incapacity of isolated, illiterate, economically backward peasants to lead their own revolution much less conceive of an alternative social order; the need to restrain poor-peasant “left excesses” in order to maintain a multi-class united front; Mao’s own explicitly derisive opinion of backward localist-minded peasants who hadn’t a clue about modern industry or imperialism; and Mao’s own fierce hostility to democracy, imbued by his elitist Confucian schooling, reinforced by the Stalinist culture of the CCP, put into practice with his criminal direction of torture and executions of thousands of comrades who simply differed with him over policy issues – for all his “from the masses to the masses” mumbo jumbo, he knew very well that it was not from the peasant masses that the correct strategy and tactics for successful national liberation war came from; it was not from the peasant masses that Five-Year industrialization plans were developed; it was not from the peasants that the vision of socialism came, but from above, from the Party, especially from the leadership, and especially from the Great Helmsman himself. So while he insisted that the cadre “must listen to” the masses, Mao warned at the same time against ”an erroneous emphasis on “doing everything as the masses want it done and an accommodation to wrong views existing among the masses.”[103]

Once the CCP had abandoned the urban working class, democracy would no longer be possible. The only way to steer a multi-class mass movement whose basic interests were not in the direction of socialism, was for the substitute proletariat to constitute itself not merely as the political leadership of the struggle but as a proto-ruling class over and above the masses.

Even Mark Selden, the most sympathetic historian of the Yan’an period, emphasized that while the Party supported local government elections to win popular support, they were designed to elicit mass participation but not democratic control from below. The Party insured that real political power and control remained firmly and exclusively in its hands:

Although the laws stipulated that all anti-Japanese parties were entitled to campaign, there was at the time but one party, the Communist…. This did not eliminate debate, discussion, or criticism, nor did it assure that all candidates elected were party members. Indeed, party branches had not yet been established in large areas of the border region. But it redefined the grounds for discussion: this focused more often on policy implementation than on formulation of policy guidelines, and on the performance of individual officials and local issues where there was considerable latitude for maneuvering within established policies. Finally, elected government was never the ultimate authority: rather it was but one facet of New Democratic politics in which power was shared by the party, the bureaucracy, the army, and mass organizations…. The party remained the ultimate arbiter in policy matters.[104]

Unsurprisingly, such built-in elitist practices regularly generated complaints about “commandism” and “bureaucratism” if not yet significant economic corruption – that would come later. But so long as Mao was determined that the substitute proletariat should rule unencumbered, then such tendencies would become endemic and it would be impossible to prevent the party-bureaucracy from morphing into a new ruling class.

The intelligentsia as a class for itself

The Red Army, as Liu Shaoqi described it, was the ”crucible” that forged the revolutionary cadre into an independent political force:

More than twenty years of civil war and national war have steeled our Party…. They have had to undergo a stern ideological and organizational schooling and tempering: as a result, their class-consciousness and collective will have been raised and their sense of organization and discipline strengthened.[105]

Decades of guerilla warfare and intense Maoist political indoctrination also forged the substitute proletariat into a revolutionary class for itself, imbued with a vision of its own superiority and indispensability since it was the font of all “correct ideas.” Indeed, the party-army-bureaucracy had already become the de facto ruling class in the base areas for more than a decade before 1949. As historian Maurice Meisner described it:

The Party emerged from the revolutionary years as a highly disciplined and tightly knit organization with a membership of nearly 5,000,000. Two decades of armed struggle had imparted a military-like discipline to its organization…. Its cadres were not only experienced revolutionary organizers but also experienced governmental administrators – and they possessed a strong sense of national consciousness and purpose. Functioning as a quasi-government long before the formal establishment of the People’s Republic, the Party provided the main organizational base, leadership, and methods of mass organization for the new state…. The pattern was repeated down to the lowest levels of the state structure;…. Between 1949 and 1952 the organizational web of the CCP was woven throughout the fabric of Chinese society….

Although the new political order [the so-called New Democracy] was officially represented as based on an alliance of four social classes and appropriately decorated with “democratic personalities,” the locus of state power resided in the CCP which officially represented itself as the party of the proletariat. Or more accurately, political power rested with the Party’s Central Committee (which had forty-four members in 1949) and more particularly with its 14-member Political Bureau (Politburo); or more precisely still, the levers of state power were in the hands of the five men who made up the latter’s Standing Committee in 1949: Mao Zedong, Liu Shaoqi, Zhou Enlai, Zhu De, and Chen Yun.[106]

Substitute proletariat or substitute bourgeoisie?

In the event, for all its internal contradictions, Mao’s revolution was a stunning triumph. With the end of WWII the Guomindang crumbled and as U.S. patience with Chiang Kai-shek wore out and the U.S. aid was reduced, Mao’s peasant armies swept into the cities with relatively little opposition. His party-army overthrew the old regime, kicked out the last of the imperialists, united the country, wiped out the old gentry landed classes, and initiated forced-march industrialization. Simply put, Mao’s revolution succeeded where the bourgeois revolution of 1912 and the workers revolution of 1925-27 both failed. But instead of socialism, the substitute proletariat installed itself as the new ruling class. “Liberation” abolished old forms of exploitation and oppression to replaced them not with freedom but with new forms of exploitation, oppression, and unfreedom.

Maoism: revision or rejection of Marxism?

Mao claimed to have “revised” Marxism by substituting the peasants for the proletariat. But this both misrepresents and understates his actual accomplishment. Mao did not revise Marxism, he completed abandoned every tenet of Marxism. He kept the useful vocabulary but he rejected Marxist materialism for idealism and voluntarism, rejected workers’ democracy for a dictatorship of the substitute proletariat, rejected proletarian internationalism for ultra-nationalism and Han chauvinism, and rejected workers’ self-emancipation via insurrection for military conquest. His real accomplishment, and originality, was to provide the theoretical framework and political-military strategy for the post-war wave of party-substitutionist revolutions across the Third World, and the rationale for the dictatorship of the substitute proletariat.

[continued in part 4]

Notes

[61] On the social composition of the revolutionary party in the 1920s and 30s see Philip C.C. Huang, “Mao and the Middle Peasants, 1925-1928”, Modern China (July 1975) pp. 271- 296: and idem, “Intellectuals, lumpenproletarians, workers and peasants in the Communist movement,” in Philip C.C. Huang, Lynda Schafer Bell and Kathy Lemons Walker, Chinese Communists and Rural Society 1927-1934 (Berkeley: Center for Chinese Studies, 1978), pp. 5-28. Also Mao, “The Chinese revolution and the Chinese Communist Party,“ (1939).

[62] “Decision of the CC on the absorption of intellectual elements (December 1, 1939)”, Conrad Brandt, Benjamin Schwartz, and John K. Fairbank eds., A Documentary History of Chinese Communism (London: Allen and Unwin, 1952), 349; Mao Zedong, “Recruit large numbers of intellectuals.”

[63] Julia Lovell, Maoism: A Global History (London: The Bodley Head, 2019), chapter 2.

[64] Lovell, Maoism, 61-62.

[65] Lovell, Maoism, 62.

[66] See David Bandurski, “The May 4^th Movement: How China buried ‘Mr. Democracy,’” Hong Kong Free Press, May 4, 2020.

[67] Dai Qing, Wang Shiwei and “Wild Lilies” (London, M.E. Sharpe, 1994), 10.

[68] Jung Chang and John Halliday, Mao, The Unknown Story (New York: Anchor, 2005), 234-35.

[69] Gao, Red Sun, 343; Frank Dikötter, The Tragedy of Liberation (New York: 2013), 174.

[70] Gao, Red Sun, 344-47, 369.

[71] Gao, Red Sun, 179, 279.

[72] Gao, Red Sun, 300-301, 318.

[73] Gao, Red Sun, 240. 303-308,

[74] Gao, Red Sun, 273-277.

[75] Mao, “On correcting mistaken ideas in the Party” (December 1929); Compton, Reform Documents, xli.

[76] Gao, Red Sun, 347.

[77] Gao, Red Sun, 343; Dai Qing, Wang Shiwei, 15-16; Gregor Benton and Alan Hunter, Wild Lily, Prairie Fire (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), Introduction.

[78] Ai Weiwei, 1000 Years of Joys and Sorrows (London: Bodley Head, 2021), 79.

[79] Ai, 1000 Years, 79.

[80] Dai, Wang Shiwei, 3.

[81] Gao, Red Sun, 20, and 10-30; and Lovell, Maoism, 76-77.

[82] Gao, Red Sun, 23-24. Regarding the extraction of those confessions through torture, Gao quotes General Xiao Ke who states in his 1982 memoir that “Even half a century later, one can only sigh in grief. Those of us who experienced this still cannot bear to recall it” (p. 24). In 1982 the Party admitted that the charges were fabricated and that there never was any Anti-Bolshevik League.

[83] See Gao, Red Sun, 477-482.

[84] Boyd, Reform Documents; Constitution of the Chinese Communist Party, June 11, 1945, in Conrad Brandt et al., A Documentary History of Chinese Communism (London: Allen and Unwin, 1952) 419-39; “Resolution On Certain Questions In The History Of Our Party,” adopted on April 20, 1945 by the Enlarged Seventh Plenary of the Sixth Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party.

[85] David E. Apter and Tony Saich, Revolutionary Discourse in Mao’s Republic (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1994) Appendix; Gao, Red Sun, 221-25.

[86] Gao, Red Sun, 224.

[87] Benjamin Yang, From Revolution to Politics: Chinese Communists on the Long March (New York: Westview 1990), 307. Kenneth Lieberthal, Governing China: From Revolution to Reform (New York: Norton, 2003), 43-48.

[88] Lian Xi, Blood Letters (New York: Basic Books, 2018), 258-59 footnote 40.

[89] Wang, Mao Zedong Thought, 73.

[90] On what Mao learned from Stalin’s History of the CPSU see Gao, Red Sun, 199-203. On copying Stalin’s organization structure see Boyd Compton, Mao’s China Party Reform Documents 1942-1944 (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1952), xl-xlii.

[91] Cheng, Creating the “New Man”: From Enlightenment Ideals to Socialist Realities (Univ. of Hawaii Press, 2009), 49.

[92] Cheng, Creating the “New Man,” 59-70.

[93] Jerome Chen, Mao Papers (London: Oxford University Press, 1970), 11; Cheng, 61-62.

[94] Mao, “The role of the Chinese Communist Party in the national war,” (1938).

[95] Xi Jinping, “How to measure up as a party member in the New Era?” People’s Daily, June 30, 2020, trans. by David Cowhig.

[96] Peter J. Seybolt, “Terror and conformity,” Modern China, 12.1 (January 1986), 45.

[97] Seybolt, “Terror,” 46-47. See also the biography of one such student, in Lian Xi, Blood Letters.

[98] Selden, The Yenan Way in Revolutionary China (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1971).

[99] Mao, “The role of the CCP in the national war” (1938).

[100] Mao, “Some questions concerning methods of leadership,” SW III.

[101] Jack Gray and Patrick Cavendish, Chinese Communism in Crisis: Maoism and the Cultural Revolution (New York: Praeger, 1968), 49-50. Selden, Yenan Way, 274-276 and passim.

[102] “Mass Line,” in Christian Sorace et al., Afterlives of Chinese Communism (Verso: 2019), 121-22.

[103] Mao, Selected Works (Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 1977) 4, 197.

[104] Selden, Yenan Way, 135 (italics in original).

[106] Meisner, Mao’s China and After (New York: Free Press, 1977), 63-64.