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