An essay in universal history

8. MAOIST COMMUNISM

Mao cunningly managed to combine loyalty to communist ideology with a nationalist emphasis on the superiority of the Middle Kingdom and a firm rejection of all Western concepts of international order. Thus when establishing the People’s Republic of China on October 1, 1949, he declared: “The Chinese people have stood up”… As Kissinger writes, “Mao elaborated this slogan as a China purifying and strengthening itself through a doctrine of ‘continuous revolution’ and proceeded to dismantle established concepts of domestic and international order. The entire institutional spectrum came under attack: Western democracy, Soviet leadership of the Communist world, and the legacy of the Chinese past. Art and monuments, holidays and traditions, vocabulary and dress, fell under various forms of interdict – blamed for bringing about the passivity that had rendered China unprepared in the face of foreign intrusions. In Mao’s concept of order – which he called the ‘great harmony’, echoing classical Chinese philosophy – a new China would emerge out of the destruction of traditional Confucian culture emphasizing harmony. Each wave of revolutionary exertion, he proclaimed, would serve as a precursor of the next. The process of revolution must be ever accelerated, Mao held, lest the revolutionaries become complacent and indolent. ‘Disequilibirum is a general, objective rule,’ wrote Mao: ‘The cycle, which is endless, evolves from disequilibrium to equilibrium and then to disequilibrium again. Each cycle, however, brings us to a higher level of development. Disequilibrium is normal and absolute whereas equilibrium is temporary and relative. In the end, this upheaval was designed to produce a kind of traditional Chinese outcome: a form of Communism intrinsic to Chine, setting itself apart by a distinctive form of conduct that swayed by its achievements, with China’s unique and now revolutionary moral authority again swaying ‘All Under Heaven’.

“Mao conducted international affairs by the same reliance on the unique nature of China. Though China was objectively weak by the way the rest of the world measured strength, Mao insisted on its central role via psychological and ideological superiority, to be demonstrated by defying rather than conciliating a world emphasizing superior physical power. When speaking in Moscow to an international conference of Communist Party leaders in 1957, Mao shocked fellow delegates by predicting that in the event of nuclear war China’s more numerous population and hardier culture would be the ultimate victor, and that even casualties of hundreds of millions would not deflect China from its revolutionary course. While this might have been partly bluff to discourage countries with vastly superior nuclear arsenals, Mao wanted the world to believe that he contemplated nuclear war with equanimity…”¹⁰⁸
Since Mao, writes Maria Hsia Chang, “was essentially ignorant of the doctrines of Marx and Engels, whatever knowledge of Marxism he had was that given currency by Lenin and Stalin. From Lenin he inherited a perspective of Marxist class struggle generalized to include entire countries. The world was divided into two adversarial camps: On one side were the ‘progessive’ socialist states led by the Soviet Union; on the other were the ‘decadent’ capitalist-imperialist countries with the United States at the fore. In the global struggle that was to culminate in the inevitable collapse of capitalism, China must ‘lean to one side’ by joining the socialist camp with the Soviet Union as its mentor. From Stalin, Mao adopted the model of the command economy. The state would determine production, control costs, fix wages, and set prices; capital assets would be autarkically generated through forced savings by the Chinese people. The preponderance of those assets would be funneled into heavy industrial development rather than agriculture or consumer industries.
“To these ideas of Lenin and Stalin Mao appended his own notions concerning the persistence of the class struggle and the imperative for a ‘continuous revolution’ in which all must participate. Both turned on his inversion of Marx’s conceptualization of the relationship between the base and the superstructure.
“Instead of the classic Marxist dictum that the economic base determines the superstructure, Mao was convinced that superstructural elements of willpower and mass enthusiasm would transform the Chinese economy. Detached from the base, the elements of the superstructure became infinitely malleable, so that ‘class’ became redefined by Mao as a state of mind – a decided departure from its original Marxian meaning. An individual could become a ‘capitalist’ simply because s/he entertained ‘capitalist’ thoughts (whatever that meant), despite neither owning the means of production nor exploiting the labor of others. Given his new definition of class and class membership, Mao could argue that the installation of a socialist state in China with the attendant abolition of private property had failed to eliminate all noxious class elements. On the contrary, so long as capitalism remained in the world, its pernicious influence could seep into socialist China to contaminate the masses, resulting in ‘antagonistic contradictions’ between the unpolluted ‘people’ and the infected ‘enemies of the people’. Toward those enemies, the ranks of whom could include even leading members of the vanguard Communist Party, the state could employ ‘dictatorial’ means for their eradication. Society and the state therefore must be constantly vigilant since corruption of the self and of others was a perpetual possibility. There would have to be regular and periodic campaigns to purify and instruct the masses. All of which meant that the revolution brought the CCP to power in 1949 would have to be continuous and unceasing.
“Indeed, for as long as Mao was in power, China would lurch from one political campaign to another., In the 1950s there were the Land Reform, Three- and Five-Anti, Hundred Flowers, Anti-Rightist, and the Great Leap Forward campaigns. The 1960s were caught in the convulsion of the Culturual Revolution, followed in the 1970s by a bewildering succession of campaigns that included the Anti-Confucian and Water Margin campaigns. Punctuating all these were the periodic ‘rectification’ (zhengfeng) campaigns within the Communist Party to purge itself of impure elements.
“The first years of the People’s Republic began with the ‘socialist transformation’ of the Chinese economy, in which feudal remnants and rudimentary capitalism were eradicated to make way for socialism. In 1950-52, land was confiscated from its owners and distributed to the heretofore landless peasants, in the course of which 1 to 15 million landlords were executed. In the cities, a process of deprivatization and demarketization began, aided by Soviet technicians and planners. Around a core of 130 industrial plants supplied by the Soviet Union, a Stalinist economy was constructed. The state rationed raw materials, maintained a monopoly of traded items, supplied producer goods, and established output quotas. By 1956, all of China’s industries had come under state control, accounting for 93 percent of total national output and 97 of all retail sales.
“The early years of socialist transformation coincided with China’s involvement in the Korean War. Convinced that their national sovereignty and security were imperiled by the activities of the United Nations forces in the Korean peninsula, millions of Chinese ‘volunteers’ went into battle to aid the North Koreans. The ill-equipped Chinese divisions were thrown into a mismatched conflict that exacted a devastating toll. By the time the war ended with an armistice in 1953, China had sustained about a million battlefield casualties.”¹⁰⁹