Socialism with Chinese Characteristics (1950s) - Campaigns

So what did Mao learn about Marxism from around ten years of government culminating in the mass starvation precipitated by the Great Leap hysteria? Partly he was confirmed in his view that soviet methods needed to be better adapted to Chinese conditions but wasn't convinced that he could ever be wrong, I guess. I’m going to go back now to viewing the decade as Mao was viewing it and see if that helps us understand what was going on and what needed to (or would) happen next.

Mao was a campaigner who had developed his own campaigning methods (developed for Chinese conditions - now forced into soviet moulds). This would clearly not last long. He also had his own views on the role of intellectuals (that also fed into what eventuated in the Great Leap). The very first quotation in Mao’s famous ‘little red book’ (the publication of which I’ll discuss later) hints at the real orientation of the mind of Mao for many scholars. He asked “who are our friends and who are our enemies?” The quote is from 1926.

So now let’s first consider the campaign style (and both its intended and actual effects). The first role of the campaigns for Mao was to constantly update the understood definition of friend and enemy; that is, to answer what was for him the foundational question for his people. Once enemies were identified in the process of the campaign the next role of the campaign was, naturally, to either neutralise them or to in some way turn them into friends. One of the ways used to transform an enemy into a friend was labour (and this might be forced or voluntary) as Mao apparently genuinely believed in a mystical capacity of labour to proletarianise.

Not all of this obsession with enemies was paranoid. One fact of the new PRC was significant assassination campaigns against CCP cadres: 40,000 were killed by Nationalists and others in 1950 alone, for example.

The campaign formula (first developed in Yan’an) was always as follows:

1) There would be a launch with publicity, guiding documents and examples of targets (the current enemies) given;

2) Mass ‘struggle’ meetings would then be convened at which denunciations of people apparently meeting any of the targeted new enemy criteria would occur;

3) Then arrests and executions would occur; and

4) Finally some of the people would be considered rehabilitated and allowed to return to their normal lives. They would have had to criticise themselves after becoming reformed and re-educated (often after labour camp stints where Marxist re-education also occurred).

There were four notable campaigns of the early 1950s (summarised as follows) that enabled Mao to both generally re-educate his people and consolidate his power:

Year	Campaign Title	Targets	Results
1950	Suppression of Counter-Revolutionaries (鎮反)	‘armed bandits, spies and Nationalist backbone’	2 million arrests, 700,000 executions
1951	Thought Reform (思想改造)	Urban intellectuals	Marxist re-education of intellectuals
1951-52	Three Antis (sanfan三反)	Party members and government officials: for corruption, waste and bureaucratisation	‘Cleansing’ of party and government ranks
1952	Five Antis (wufan五反)	Bourgeoisie: for bribery, tax avoidance, theft of government property, theft of materials and theft of economic intelligence	Increased control over private enterprise

More on the particular recipe of Maoism for Mass Mobilisation, Five Struggles at Yan’an and Liu Shaoqi

Liu Shaoqi (1898 to 1969) was Mao’s deputy until he was purged during the Cultural Revolution and as such a major early CCP theorist and thinker. He is known especially in theoretical terms for his contribution to the theory of CCP mass mobilisation. He compared the arrival of the new consciousness for the peasants to having a new head placed on their shoulders and claimed a peasant had first given him this image.

Here’s Liu on mass mobilisation from ‘On the Mass Movement for Rent and Interest Reduction’ in Selected Works of Liu Shaoqi, Vol 1, pp. 235-6:

We should carefully prepare a talk, the gist of which might run: Who created the world? The workers and peasants did. Where do our food and houses come from? They are created by the workers and peasants... The experiences of peasant struggles in other places and the success of the revolution in the Soviet Union should be used to drive home the point that the workers and peasants should become masters of society. Once they appreciate this truth, they will be in high spirits and will raise the demand to turn the existing world upside down and wipe out the landlords altogether... When they first became politically awakened, many peasants in central China were so excited that they could hardly sleep at night. They approached the work teams, asking all sorts of questions. In this way, the peasants acquired revolutionary ideology or, to use their expression, “had a new head” placed on their shoulders. This type of stimulation is what we mean by Marxist-Leninist education of the peasants. It is an enlightenment campaign of a new form – class education. If it is carried out successfully, the peasants will follow us and will not have misgivings or waver when things are not going smoothly.

As it happens, Liu also illustrates (by his own dramatic rises and falls essentially at the whim of Mao) the inherent instability of the methods of Maoism involved in effecting such mystical transformations. Mao did not envisage stability but he rather imagined continual instability (and contradictions) arising from his revolution. He saw continual struggle and contestation (even within the party organisation) as a good thing (as long as he ultimately won the war, as it turned out). He promoted criticism and self-criticism as part of what he considered was a vital process.

In the Yan’an period, Mao was challenged by five other potential leaders over five issues:

1) By Zhang Guotao over military tactics and leadership;

2) By Liu Zhidan over the predominance of the party centre over localised centres of power;

3) By Wang Ming (with other Soviet trained intellectuals) over ideological control;

4) By Wang Shiwei over the intellectual freedom of intellectuals and artists; and

5) By Ding Ling over Mao’s preference to subordinate women’s rights to the goals of the larger revolutionary project.

Several problems have arisen for Maoists both in claiming to be Marxist and in claiming that Maoism will lead to utopia. The rest of this history will explore in part how the four main problems below (two of each type) continued to be wrestled with by especially CCP leaders and theorists and with what results for the theory and practice of CCP rule in the PRC.

The first two concern whether Mao is even a Marxist having appealed to the peasants rather than the proletariat for leadership and having not waited until Capitalism had become developed to revolt. The second issue was of course also faced (and was dealt with) by the theory of Leninism and Mao dealt with the first but discussion continues.

Some of the main problems for utopia may include the subordination of the rights of intellectuals, women, locals and artists to the struggle and the central controllers. The contradictory issue perhaps at the heart of Maoism is broad: how can a strong, unified and centralised system, as envisaged and practiced by Mao, avoid irreconcilable tension with the ‘mass line’ approach to government of, by and for the people fully valuing local initiative and mass participation?

In the next post I will move on to the first decade of CCP rule and focus on rural reforms. In subsequent posts I’ll go on to outline reforms made in the cities.

The Yan’an Period

While the CCP was still licking its wounds, recovering and regrouping at Yan’an in 1937, Japan got greedy. This proved a relatively great boon for the greatly weakened party. Japan was regarded as a hated enemy by many Chinese especially since it had been engaged in brutal occupations of various parts of China since the early 1920s (sharing the WWI ‘spoils’ of the other ‘foreign devils’ on the winning side). CCP success in fighting the Japanese would begin to rebuild their popular support and the GMD would also be too busy with the Japanese to attack Yan’an with full force. They might even be forced back into an actual alliance with the CCP, however shaky that might prove. This forced alliance provided breathing space the CCP desperately needed. In the meantime, it had a chance to practice government over around 3,000,000 people.

Jiang actually refused to fight the Japanese in 1937 and this led to his kidnapping by agents of the CCP and his being forced to resume heading a new alliance with the CCP (along with other nationalist parties). Zhou, a former colleague at Whampoa, was instrumental in bringing about his agreement to this state of affairs. The GMD was forced to re-enter into an alliance (a second ‘united front’) with the CCP for the sake of national unity. The fact was, however, that the GMD continued to prefer containing the Communists (while the latter actually fought against the Japanese) to actually fighting the Japanese themselves. For much of the war against the Japanese, around half a million of the GMD’s crack troops were occupied blockading CCP territory.

The GMD forces of the GMD 2IC in fact ran away from Japanese forces invading Manchuria in the North and even in the heartland the GMD abandoned Shanghai to them in November of 1937 (albeit after a little more of a fight than in Manchuria). Japan also took the prizes of Beijing and Tianjin to go along with Manchuria and Shanghai in 1937.

The Japanese proved a brutal occupier and committed notable atrocities in October (around the time their aerial bombardment of Shanghai was also producing mass casualties). In a few short months Japan had gained control of half of the seaboard of China and in December they commenced the so-called “Rape of Nanking”, the by then abandoned capital of the GMD, massacring an estimated 200,000 people there. Further to that, Jiang’s idea of inundating a significant region of China to halt the Japanese advance not only didn’t work, its fruition was the death by drowning of several hundred thousand more Chinese men, women and children and the homelessness of several hundred thousand more again.

Meanwhile Chongqing further west (on the Yangzi in eastern Sichuan province) became the new GMD capital. The Japanese then commenced the bombing of Chongqing. The exodus of people and infrastructure from Nanjing (Nanking) to Chongqing was phenomenal but equally noticeable was the bleeding of many people to the Communist capital of Yan’an (and to a party that was actually fighting the Japanese). People were also inspired by the relative closeness of the CCP leadership to its people (admittedly they had the advantage in this connection of ruling over a smaller population but the 'mass line' (see below) was practiced and that practice was noted and widely admired).

Mao had set up the Anti-Japanese University in Yan’an. This attracted students from all over China seeking training to become military and political/intellectual cadres of the CCP. They were then sent all over China to do the party’s work and could even belong to rural capitalist classes such as the landlord class; this was based on the idea of ‘New Democracy’ (again see below) (provided they weren’t actually collaborating with the Japanese in any way). Women were also permitted to contribute to this mobilisation for the first time in China (as women in the West were also fighting for virtually the first time).

In this war period (after the initial Japanese successes), the Red Army became a formidable fighting force, due in part to its practice at simultaneously fighting external and internal enemies (and making alliances across classes based on the Sun idea of ‘New Democracy’ (again see below - this later proved to be merely pragmatism for Mao)).

The CCP commando/guerrilla tactics proved successful against the Japanese while the GMD preferred to hold back from fighting the Japanese in anticipation of the expected later fight with the CCP, which they hoped would be severely depleted by their virtually unaided fight with the Japanese.

There were indeed also several actual GMD/CCP skirmishes in this period. One that occurred in January of 1941 actually wiped out a complete CCP unit and brought about the end of the formal coalition. Jiang noted at one point something to the effect that “the Japanese are a disease of the skin but the CCP are a disease of the heart” when discussing his attitude to his two foes.

While fighting the Japanese (and GMD) the Communists didn’t neglect home affairs at Yan’an and a style of rule developed that later came to be referred to as “the Yan’an Way”. There were five features:

1) ‘New Democracy’ as a pragmatic theory that recognised the interests of a middle class and ‘national’ capitalists as well as those of workers and peasants;

2) A “mass line” policy that compulsorily and regularly brought leaders (and all CCP members) into close contact with the masses (including a manual work requirement);

3) A comprehensive political, economic, social and military party organisational structure;

4) Ideological and educational campaigns were used to spread correct ideas; and

5) Intellectuals were required to labour with the peasants and literature, intellectualism and art were regarded as subordinate to the service of the revolution.