The Urban Scene – Consolidation (1949 to 1952)

Firstly I want to consider the political structure of the party and state and the consolidation of power in the cities before getting to what happened with the industrialisation project. This was what was being set up and managed while collectivisation was rapidly happening in the countryside and women (there especially) were being told to wait for further liberation from their red-necked men. Industrialisation really had to wait to some extent for the reforms in the countryside to bear their as yet prospective fruits.

There were four levels of both the party and the state set up with an additional fifth very localised and committeefied level of the party (and still are): the Centre (there is 1); the Provinces (30); the Counties or Cities (2,500); the Town or District (40,000); and the Rural Collectives, Urban Work Units and Residents’ Committees (600,000).

At the Centre, running of the party was formally by the National Party Congress, the Party Chairman (Mao), a 200 person Central Committee, a Standing Committee of from 5 to 7 members and a 20 person Politburo with a General Secretariat.

The party was mainly responsible for deciding broad issues of policy and the National Congress was ostensibly the supreme decider. At first (in the 1920s before the PRC was formed) it was anticipated that the Congress would meet annually but it later came to meet less frequently to the point where from 1977 onwards it has met five-yearly (so far without fail). The next Congress (expected in 2012) will be the 18^th. The 17^th occurred in 2007 and still has the following English language website: http://www.china.org.cn/english/congress/225438.htm. The congress formally appoints the central party leadership group. In Mao’s time he was given the role of Chairman and also Supreme Leader. The above Standing Committee (ostensibly appointed by the Congress) is formally a standing committee of the Politburo and is the next most important congressional leadership group after the Chairman and his advisors.

The corresponding central arms of government from 1949 on were the State Council and Premier (Zhou Enlai until his death in 1976 – for virtually all of Mao’s time) and 20 to 30 Central Ministries. The state then extended its control outwards via most of the ministries in the form of Provincial Departments, County/City Bureaux and Town/District Offices for each ministry.

The government was mainly given the role of implementation of party policy (decided formally by the Congress and Central Committee of the party but informally by Mao and the Standing Committee of the Politburo). The main difference when compared with the party structure was that the Premier formally ruled over the State Council whereas the Congress was formally supreme in the party (i.e. over the Chairman).

So how did the CCP consolidate its power from 1949 to 1952 using this dual structure? Mao had stressed to the party just before his 1949 victory that the cities would need to be a real focus of reform and engaged socialist learning immediately following the victory. The principles of ‘New Democracy’ were still applied in the cities for the time being, however. Only foreign and unrepentant GMD-sympathiser-owned industrial properties were immediately nationalised (especially if they were large properties). Other businesses were allowed to remain in private hands. The major unrepentant GMD sympathisers had already mainly fled to either Taiwan or the US.

The first priority for Mao was getting industry working again after the mismanagement and corruption that were partly the results of the long war of independence and then civil war. Socialism and class war could wait. The first five-year plan was set to begin in 1953 but in the meantime Mao sought to produce a good base from which to build in the plan period.

The CCP re-established itself in the trade union movement as early as possible. The movement was made a party link and a socialist educational structure (for businesses and workers). The workers were immediately given the role of supervising their bosses (where they remained private employers) in anticipation of them later becoming the bosses once socialism got fully underway (and also for party purposes). Workplaces were made social, political, economic and welfare units of the party structure and of urban society.

The other social and political unit set up was the neighbourhood via the formation of street committees. In part this was to enable the regulation of people like street vendors (and really anyone) who didn’t have workplaces and so would otherwise not have come under immediate party control. These committees would be notified by the party of bad elements (usually people with some connection at some time with the GMD) so that their activities could be monitored and reported on by the committees back to relevant officials.

The CCP then and later

One historical question concerning the next 30 years (1919 to 1949) that I'll in turn be concerned with here is why did the CCP succeed and the GMD fail? The answers are both ideological and practical. In short, the CCP proved to be better nationalists (and fighters of the external enemy) than the nominal Nationalists and also had better economic and social programmes but this state of affairs took time to develop. Another question that I will also get into is how did this period shape the CCP, what is that shape and what has this meant for the People’s Republic of China (PRC) even today? One feature to especially note is the CCP's vastly different effects on each succeeding generation: within the space of three generations China experienced a time before Mao and Communist rule, the Cultural Revolution and other aspects of Maoism and Dengist capitalism and beyond.

In 1920, Communist International (Commintern) agents arrived in China (following the success of Li Dazhou and the May Fourth Movement). At first (founded in July 1921 at Shanghai) the CCP was a party of city intellectuals influenced by the recent (1917) Russian Revolution attempting to inspire a very small urban proletariat in an economically ‘backward’ country. This had not been directly contemplated by Marx in such a country but had been by Lenin. Lenin had also directly suggested that socialist revolution in the mature advanced West (from the Marxian point of view) now in fact depended on national revolutions in the East due to the ameliorative effect on working conditions for the Western proletariat (and thus delay of revolutionary impetus) permitted by exploitation of the East by the West. So in Lenin’s book world revolution or indeed any and all Communist revolutions now actually depended on anti-colonial and anti-imperial revolutions that hadn’t even especially interested Marx as potential historical prime movers. And the Commintern had only just been set up in 1920 in Moscow to set these newly envisaged processes in motion.

The founding leader of the CCP was Chen Duxiu (陳獨秀). The party together with others was easily able to organise strikes and protests in the industrialised cities especially against the extremely harsh working conditions of the time (both local and foreign capitalists were involved) thus linking intellectuals opposed to capitalism with city workers. Membership in the party increased rapidly (from 1,000 in 1924 to 58,000 in 1927) and there was widespread support. Politically, though, the Commintern ordered the party (in 1924) to subordinate itself to the GMD as the GMD then had more resources and political capital and the parties shared a nationalist agenda.

Unity with the GMD was somewhat tested especially with the death of Sun Yat-sen (actually 孫逸仙 – Sun Yixian) in 1925 and accession to the role of GMD leadership of the less charismatic (and more conservative and frankly anti-Communist) Chiang Kai-shek (strictly Jiang Jieshi (蔣介石)) in June 1926. However the push north to unify the country was ready to begin so on it went. The combined GMD/CCP armies defeated 34 warlords in six month in 1926-27. They were at that time disciplined and passionate and had the support of the people. The CCP especially promised better conditions and the CCP forces made a point of always paying for what they ate and drank. Many people readily joined the Communists as they sought to abolish many cruel, outdated or exploitative practices such as foot-binding and the charging of exorbitant rents but there were already reservations. The CCP also sought to do away with sometimes cherished ideas and traditions.

Chiang’s next move upon arrival in Shanghai in April of 1927 (the planned end of the first phase of the northern push) was to bloodily purge the alliance of any Communists and labour activists he could find there. This naturally brought on violent opposition and in the end thousands of Communists were summarily executed.

Chiang then formed his GMD government with its capital at Nanking. He was really now the preeminent warlord of China but was now threatened by both the CCP and Japan. As part of legitimising his rule he then brought Sun’s body to be reburied at Nanking (really Nanjing – literally “South Capital”) and married one of Sun’s relatives. She proved to be a benefit to his rule as she was able to be an appealing Diana Spencer to his less appealing Prince Charles thus aiding in the public relations department. The GMD were now coming to control the heartland of China and were able to modernise and unify China’s currency. Forms of exploitation however persisted (in both the cities and the countryside) and this enabled the CCP to remain a popular force.

I’ll be dividing this history of the rise of the CCP to eventual power in the next few posts into four more stages that also consolidated the power of the then young Mao Zedong: the Jiangxi Soviet period (1927 to 1933), the Long March (1934 to 1935), the Yan’an period when the parties were forced to recombine (however weakly and tactically) against Japan (1936 to 1945) and the second civil war period (1945 to 1949).

The ‘Making’ of ‘Modern China’

So for two thousand odd years the Chinese culture area had been generally more or less united and unbowed. And it had been a flourishing area in most ways. The Middle Kingdom was the usual state of China; it was in the middle of the world and the best state to which all others were formally tributaries. But something strange was coming and that was the science and modernity and equal feelings of superiority – in shorthand, the guns – of European powers. Never mind that gunpowder had been invented in China, it was now to be successfully used to intimidate China, classic Sun Zi methods were employed. There was a bit of opium in there, too.

China had to decide what was going on and also think what was to be done about it. The task fell mainly firstly to the Qing rulers. They ruled from the 17^th to the 20^th Centuries. The last in the line attempted modernisation and many of China’s intellectuals also absorbed European ideas that they sought to use to make China strong. China had nevertheless come under virtually the complete control of a number of European governments including Russia’s and the Japanese government.

Regardless of these city developments, China at the beginning of the 20^th Century was a mostly traditional subsistence-based agrarian society despite containing many large especially coastal cities. Men were obliged to wear the queue as a symbol of subservience to the Manchurian Qing dynasty. The revolt of 1911 and overthrow of the dynasty led to China’s first weak republic. Men everywhere cut off their queues. Before many decades would pass, Mao and Chiang Kai-shek and their armies would be duking it out for the final control of the land.

China remains quite agrarian today but it is following the worldwide modernising trend towards urbanisation. Managing this development has naturally occupied much of the attention of various Chinese governments of the 20^th and 21^st Centuries. The other tension in modern Chinese history has mainly occupied the communist period of the late 20^th Century and into this century and that is the tension between revolutionary Maoist/Trotskyite development and Dengist capitalist development with Chinese features. From around 1976 to 1978, Dengism has been in the ascendancy. I’ll get into more on all of that later.

The first government of 1911 was ineffective and many regional warlords effectively ruled their regions. It was a very violent and complex time. Warlords varied from bloodthirsty tyrants holding large landholdings to Christian generals often at war with each other. Foreign powers supported the ruling warlords in their spheres of influence and foreigners, called ‘foreign devils’ by many Chinese because they were seen as working to keep China weak and divided, lived in the foreign ‘concessions’.

That was China's parlous state as Europe entered into its first major 20th Century civil war; a war that would shake up the world ultimately including China.

Three Kingdoms and Seven Sages

Why the Han unity evaporated is less important than other things about the Three Kingdoms period. From the Han period on, historians of China now have two basic methods of elucidating Chinese history (this is well illustrated in the period). There are now histories, the classic secondary sources, as well as the primary sources that have been discovered since antiquity but can now also be interpreted with the benefit of the secondary sources. Much of the primary material of special interest is in the form of poetry because poetry was a normal form of writing in the period and it also tended to encode messages that couldn’t be expressed unencoded. Deciphering the code thus provides more information than the histories could safely tell.

The Three Kingdoms period provides an illustration of that in the form of the history of the Kingdom of Wei – one of the three Kingdoms – that lasted only from 220 CE to 265 CE and the poetic work of one of the Seven Sages of the Bamboo Grove, written, in code, about Wei.

The ruling family of Wei was the Cao family and its founder, who died as the Han unity dissolved, was Cao Cao (曹操). The other family that was in the Wei power mix and in the ascendant in this period was the Sima family (no relation to Sima Qian). The forced abdication of the final Cao ruler in favour of a Sima in 265 CE ended the Wei Kingdom and began the Jin dynasty of the Sima family.

The sages, including Ruan Ji, the sage and poet on whom I’ll concentrate as he was possibly the most noted of his era and had so much to say in code, were interested in Daoism and probably also Buddhism. The background to stories of the sages is the basic conflict between Confucian and Daoist ideals. One story of the sages tells that he opened his door to a stranger with no clothes on. When the shocked stranger thus confronted remonstrated, the sage retorted “my home is my trousers, what are you doing in my trousers?” When the mother of one died he first feasted when fasting was the expected custom but then cried ‘misery’, spat blood and died. This was a time when sons whose parents died competed with each other to be the most renowned for the extremity of their grief and thus their preeminent Confucian filial piety so this story (or that sage) was shedding light on that process. The sages questioned all prescribed behaviour of that kind because of the similar competition it promoted (the competition to be most ‘Confucian’ was in any case actually selfish and thus un-Confucian – it was really about gaining honours by a public pretence). One compared such poseurs to a louse in a pair of trousers keeping to a confined area and thus hoping to not be found out (this reference would be well understood as even the well-to-do in North China at the time exercising the best hygiene suffered from lice in clothing partly due to the cotton padding used). Whatever the louse did it was still after all a louse.

Ruan Ji’s writing included dialogues on such issues including one that involved a superior acting hermit. The problem with the hermit from Ruan’s point of view was that he actually believed in his ‘goodness’ and expected honours for it whereas Ruan considered the idea of good and bad itself to be problematic. That dialogue ends with the hermit’s lonely death. Another of the dialogues is between the sage and a Daoist wood gatherer concerning gaining greatness and avoiding disaster and ends with a bit of a cosmic ego trip signifying who can tell what, really?

The interesting bit about Ruan’s writing, though, from the point of view of Wei history is that it’s politically encoded and it’s partly done with the language of flowers that has political codes hidden within it. This kind of coding was common in autobiographies of the time.

As Ruan was writing much of his work, he worked for a Sima family that was seriously intriguing to replace the Cao family as rulers. This involved serious massacres of Daoists in 249 CE while a Sima was regent and in 254 CE. As a serious Daoist he had serious issues with thus being involved (a degree of self-hatred is evident, as you can imagine, as he was an honest author).

He expressed his emotions concerning his personal position in an encoded and none too personally flattering poem about a monkey (himself) being kept for the amusement of his captors (the Sima family). He portrays the monkey as a base animal with no conscience.

Another poem is about two doves in a cage after a dog gets into the cage and it appears to be a lament at the murder of a Cao regent and his brother. He also alludes to a story used by Sima Qian of two old men in ancient China that preferred to starve to death rather than serve the Zhou rulers. Sima expresses confusion at the story and Ruan also suggests that he would choose life.

So this valuable 3^rd Century CE poetry could contain irony and express veiled dissent and was often a coded discussion and indicator of problematic issues and divisions of the time.