Chinese National Revolution (1920-1927)
The last imperial dynasty in China fell in 1911 in what is called the Xinhai Revolution. After the First World War, Sun Yat-Sen, the head of the Kuomintang (KMT), known as the Nationalist Party, became Premier of China. (Sun had served as President for a month in January-February 1912.)
Sun served as the head of the Chinese government from 1919 to his death in 1925. The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) was founded in 1921 and in 1924-1927 cooperated with the Kuomintang government, a course supported by the Soviet government in Moscow. The new KMT leader, Chiang Kai-shek, broke with the CCP in 1927. The CCP with Mao Zedong as chairman declared a Soviet republic in southeastern China in 1931.
The Long March and the Second World War
Chiang’s Nationalist government beginning in 1930 conducted a series of military campaigns against Mao’s Soviet enclave. The Communist forces under Mao, which had once had about 85,000 soldiers, began a 4000-mile retreat in October 1934 which lasted a year, with around 8,000 of their forces completing the march. “The Long March marked the emergence of Mao Zedong as the undisputed leader of the Chinese Communists.” (1)
Second World War
Japan invaded Manchuria in 1931, then part of China. China started mounting more active resistance to the Japanese occupation in 1937, which is conventionally taken as the beginning of the Second Sino-Japanese War. China officially declared war on Japan in 1941. From that point until the end of the Second World War, the Communists who were by then based in the city of Yenan in the eastern part of China cooperated with the official Chinese Nationalist government in a United Front against Japan.
Establishment of the People’s Republic
The People’s Republic of China was officially founded on October 1, 1949, headed by Mao Zedong and the Communist Party of China.
Great Leap Forward (1958-1960)
This was a basically quixotic attempt by Mao to jump-start economic development with a drastic departure from the Soviet model.
The promulgation of the Great Leap Forward was the result of the failure of the Soviet model of industrialization in China. The Soviet model, which emphasized the conversion of capital gained from the sale of agricultural products into heavy machinery, was inapplicable in China because, unlike the Soviet Union, it had a very dense population and no large agricultural surplus with which to accumulate capital. After intense debate, it was decided that agriculture and industry could be developed at the same time by changing people’s working habits and relying on labour rather than machine-centred industrial processes. An experimental commune was established in the north-central province of Henan early in 1958, and the system soon spread throughout the country.
Under the commune system, agricultural and political decisions were decentralized, and ideological purity rather than expertise was emphasized. The peasants were organized into brigade teams, and communal kitchens were established so that women could be freed for work. The program was implemented with such haste by overzealous cadres that implements were often melted to make steel in the backyard furnaces, and many farm animals were slaughtered by discontented peasants. These errors in implementation were made worse by a series of natural disasters and the withdrawal of Soviet support. The inefficiency of the communes and the large-scale diversion of farm labour into small-scale industry disrupted China’s agriculture seriously, and three consecutive years of natural calamities added to what quickly turned into a national disaster; in all, about 20 million people were estimated to have died of starvation between 1959 and 1962. (2) [my emphasis]
The “backyard furnaces” were a particularly crackpot concept that is often taken as an example of Mao’s “voluntarism,” i.e., the idea that concentrated effort and enthusiasm can overcome basic economic challenges.
Cultural Revolution (1966-1977)
The Cultural Revolution was an upheaval instigated by Mao himself that began in 1966 and in some ways extended until Mao’s death in 1976 and was formally declared to be over by the CCP in 1977. It was essentially a mass uprising directed by Mao against other leaders in the Party. A kind of self-coup or auto-coup, in other words. But it was staged as a popular uprising against corrupt and party leaders who were take to be insufficiently Communist.
It was a huge disruption, which featured Party officials, even very senior ones, being purged, attacked, publicly criticized and berated, and even executed. Many young party members - including the current President of China, Xi Jinping - were sent to the countryside to learn about rural life. It also included similar disruptions to the economy as those of the Great Leap Forward.
“Historians believe somewhere between 500,000 and two million people lost their lives as a result of the Cultural Revolution.” (3)
Sino-Soviet split
The new People’s Republic for several years coordinated closely with the Soviet Union, very notably in their direct intervention against American forces (formally UN forces) during the Korean War.
But beginning in 1956, China began heavily criticizing the Soviet Communist Party positions. Part of this was based on Chinese divergences in economic policy from the Soviet-recommended approach. The Soviets also cut back their support of China’s nuclear program because they worried that Mao took a reckless attitude toward the risks of nuclear war. The rivalry involved a military confrontation between the two powers that never broke out into war, but could have. (4)
It also involved a detailed and public debate between the Chinese and Soviet Communist Parties about the correct interpretation of Marxist doctrine, with each side enthusiastically accusing the other of the sin of “revisionism.”
Mao specifically objected to the Soviet doctrines of “peaceful coexistence” with the capitalist world as well as their concept of the possibility of a “peaceful transition to socialism” via elections in liberal-democratic capitalist countries. The Chinese position emphasized the need for “armed struggle” as an essential element of strategy for Communist parties in the developed world as well as the “Third World.” This became a key part of a Chinese “Three Worlds” theory, with the US and the USSR being the First World; Europe and medium powers like Canada, the Second World; and, everyone else including China, the Third World. (5)
Those seven factors became major elements of what would become known as “Maoism,” or, more formally, “Marxism-Leninism-Mao Zedong Thought.” They would result in the dramatic realignment of China with the US to balance against the USSR. And they would have great influence in how China approached building its influence in what these days is called the Global South, or the Global Majority. (6)
Coming in Part 3: How Mao projected his preferred image
Notes:
(1) Long March. History.com 08/21/2018. <https://www.history.com/topics/asian-history/long-march>
(2) Editors (2024): Great Leap Forward. Britannica Online 01/05/2024. (Accessed 2024-23-02).
(3) Phillips, Tom (2016): The Cultural Revolution: all you need to know about China's political convulsion. The Guardian 05/11/2016. <https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/may/11/the-cultural-revolution-50-years-on-all-you-need-to-know-about-chinas-political-convulsion>
(4) Radchenko., Sergej (2008): Fehlwahrnehmungen in den chinesisch-sowjetischen Krise 1966 bis 1969. In: Greiner, Bernd et al, (eds.), Krisen im Kalten Krieg. Studien zum Kalten Krieg, Bd. 2, 343-368. Hamburg: Hamburger Edition.
(5) Shen, Zhihua (2020): A Short History of Sino-Soviet Relations, 1917–1991, 189-325. Singapore: Palgrave MacMillan.
(6) Friedman, Jeremy (2015): Shadow Cold War: The Sino- Soviet Competition for the Third World. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press
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