Maoism

AFTER A BLOODY split in April 1927, Chiang Kaishek of the Kuomintang, or Nationalist Party, ruling China broke with his allies in the Communist Party. He launched a series of “extermination” campaigns that gradually were destroying the communists and their Red Army. At that time, Wang Ming, the leader of the Communist Party, had been discredited when he had fled for his life to the Soviet Union in January 1931. Within China, the de facto leader of the party became Mao Zedong, who had become involved in progressive [Page 295]politics while still a student at the First Normal School of Hunan in 1912, the year the Chinese Republic had been proclaimed by Sun Yatsen. In October 1934, Mao and the communists set out upon their epic Long March to ultimate safety in Shanxsi.

Chinese political prisoners, many of whom were labeled as spies, subversives, or traitors, are assembled for sentencing by Communist Party leaders in the early 1950s. Maoism put a high price on disloyalty to the changing nature of the revolution.

At a critical moment in the Long March in January 1935, after heavy casualties, Mao won an important meeting at Zunyi, which established him as leader of the communists in China. Finally, by the time they finally reached Shanxsi province in the north in the autumn of 1935, little more than a tenth of those who had set out were still alive. But they had reached the sanctuary of the north, remote mountains and difficult terrain where they could regroup and launch new offensives. In December 1935, the Red Army was refreshed enough to march to Yenan where, for 11 years, Mao made his military base.

It was there in the caves at Yenan that Mao formulated the ideology that could be described as Maoism—the authentic voice of Chinese Communism. The relationship with the peasantry became the cornerstone of the Maoist world view—not that China lacked a working proletariat as had revolutionary Russia. Indeed, the Chinese Revolution had begun with workers' risings in Wuchang and Hankow. Indeed, Mao viewed the working proletariat as already radicalized, and thus an important ally of the Communist Party in awakening the peasantry. A major influence in Mao's thought was the “revolutionary literature” of China's past, including his favorite, The Romance of the Three Kingdoms.

In all of these tales, revolutionary bandits rebelling against unjust emperors had survived, and sometimes triumphed, with the help of the peasants who, in 1935, were still in the vast majority of China's population. [Page 296]Indeed, they still are in 2004. Mao had astutely observed the alienation among the peasants that had accompanied the rampages of the armies of the warlords, like Chang Tsolin, who had surrendered Beijing to Chiang in 1928. Mao realized correctly that if he were to win out against the superior Kuomintang forces of Chiang, he had to win the loyalty of the peasant masses. Chiang, of course, remained in power largely due to extortionate tax-gathering among the peasants.

As early as March 1926, Mao had written, “poor peasants [who] possess neither adequate farm implements or funds … are among the most hard—pressed of the peasants, and very receptive to revolutionary agitation.” Furthermore, “farm laborers find themselves the most oppressed in the villages, and hold a position in the peasant movement as important as the poor peasants.” He saw potential allies already in those peasants he called the lumpen peasants—those who had lost everything and had formed gangs outside the Chinese economy. He wrote, “able to fight very bravely but apt to be destructive, they can become a revolutionary force if properly guided.”

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