Socialism 101
Page 12
The Man of Steel
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Stalin wasn’t Russian: he was born in the Caucasian province of Georgia. His original name was Iosif Dzhugashvili. Like Lenin, he used several aliases when he was active in the political underground. Stalin is from the Russian word for “steel,” a good choice for a self-professed hard man.
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Having control over the political machine helped Stalin triumph over his rivals in the power struggle that followed Lenin’s death in 1924. Within four years he was the supreme Soviet leader.
STALINISM
The term Stalinism is used to describe a set of policies and a style of government rather than an ideology. Stalin would have been the first to declare that he was not a theory guy. He prided himself on adhering to the tenets of Marxist-Leninist ideology. Despite his protests, Stalin made two contributions to communist political theory that changed the shape of the Soviet state and its satellites: the theory that class struggle continues after the revolution, and the idea that socialist revolutions do not have to be international.
“Aggravation of the Class Struggle Along with the Development of Socialism”
According to Stalin, class struggle does not end with the revolution. In fact, the closer a society is to attaining a truly socialist state, the more the doomed remnants of the capitalist classes will struggle. Beginning in the 1930s Stalin used this theory to justify the repression of his political opponents, real and perceived, as counterrevolutionaries.
The Kirov Assassination
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Many people opposed Stalin’s methods, including party leader Sergei Kirov, who was assassinated in December 1934. Following Kirov’s murder, Stalin launched a purge of alleged spies and counterrevolutionaries from the party, removing anyone who presented a threat to his authority. It is estimated that 500,000 people were executed and twelve million sent to the labor camps. Some historians suspect Stalin himself of having ordered Kirov’s assassination as a way of getting rid of a rival and providing an excuse for the purge.
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NOT ENOUGH
Lenin took the position that revolution in one country was not enough. In fact, he argued that because Russia was the weakest link in the industrialized world, revolution there would cause the entire capitalist-imperialist structure to fall. When it became clear that the socialist revolution was not going to spread into Western Europe, Stalin turned Lenin’s dictum on its head and proclaimed “the proletariat can and must build the socialist society in one country.”
The Growth of the Soviet Bloc
The USSR remained the only communist state until the end of World War II, when the Soviet Union installed left-wing governments in the countries of Eastern Europe that the Red Army had liberated from the Germans. These governments followed the Soviet pattern of a single-party system: substantial state ownership of the economy, adherence to an official ideology based on Marxism, and the maintenance of power through nondemocratic means.
CHINESE COMMUNISM
The East Is Red
Mao Zedong’s idea of a peasant-based socialist revolution was an innovation in Marxist thinking, which held that the revolution would come from the urban poor. The idea of a peasant-based revolution was less startling in China, where dynasties often rose or fell as a result of peasant uprisings. In fact, it was a political truism that peasants are like water: they can float the boat or they can sink the boat.
MAOISM
According to the Chinese constitution, Maoism (called “Mao Zedong thought” in China) is simply “Marxism-Leninism defined in a Chinese context.” Mao’s most original contribution to Marxism was his recognition of Chinese peasants as the main force of revolution in China. As early as 1925, in his Report on an Investigation of the Peasant Movement in Hunan, he urged the Chinese Communist Party to turn its attention to the countryside. He argued that proletarianism was a mindset as much as an economic condition and that the Chinese peasants would be the “vanguard of the revolution.”
Mao’s Little Red Book
Very few people have read Marx’s Capital, but millions of people have read a simplified version of Mao’s political philosophy. Quotations from Chairman Mao Zedong, known in the West as The Little Red Book, was commissioned by General Lin Biao in 1964. Made up of selections from Mao’s writings, the book was intended to simplify Maoist thought for the relatively uneducated soldiers of the People’s Liberation Army. Lin issued a free copy of the book to every soldier. It quickly became a vehicle for both spreading Maoist ideology and increasing literacy.
During the infamous Cultural Revolution in the 1960s and 1970s the book was made available to the public for the first time. Everyone in China soon owned a copy, and it became a talisman for members of the Red Guard.
THE CHINESE REVOLUTION BEGINS
In 1912 Dr. Sun Yat-sen’s nationalist Revolutionary Alliance overthrew the Qing dynasty, which had ruled China since 1644. Sun became the provisional president of the Republic of China.
Sun Yat-sen
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Both the People’s Republic of China and Taiwan claim revolutionary leader Sun Yat-sen (1866–1925) as their founding father. Trained as a doctor in Hawaii, Sun returned to China to battle against the Qing dynasty, which he saw as the source of Chinese “backwardness.” At first he envisioned establishing a constitutional monarchy but soon changed his goal to full democracy.
To make matters a bit more complicated, Sun and Chiang Kai-shek both married into the same family: the Soongs. Sun married Soong Ching-ling (1893–1981), while Chiang married Soong Mei-ling (1897–2003). While Mei-ling supported her husband and became a prominent voice in the China lobby in the United States, Ching-ling generally moved toward the communists, although she was not a member of the party.
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The Republic didn’t last long. In 1916 China’s second president, Yuan Shikai, dissolved the new parliament and tried to make himself emperor. He was met with immediate opposition, via both political protests and military revolts in the provinces. Yuan died before he could consolidate his power. He left behind a conservative government seated in Beijing that claimed to rule all of China. In fact, the country was a mess of semi-independent warlords and armed political parties, most notably Sun Yat-sen’s Kuomintang (Nationalist) Party.
THE BEGINNINGS OF CHINESE COMMUNISM
A new intelligentsia began to emerge at the end of the Qing dynasty as a result of educational reforms and the end of the centuries-old civil service examination system, which was based on history, poetry, and calligraphy. Thousands of young Chinese went to Japan, Europe, and the United States to study subjects that were not included in the classic Chinese curriculum: science, engineering, medicine, economics, law, and military science. They came to China with new academic knowledge and revolutionary ideas.
The New Culture Movement
The student leaders of the New Culture Movement, sometimes referred to as the Chinese Renaissance, called for “new thought” and “new literature” as they questioned Confucian values and institutions in the light of Western ideas. As a group, they were interested in national independence, individual liberties, and re-creating Chinese society and culture on modern terms.
The May Fourth Movement
On May 4, 1919, the news reached Beijing that the peacemakers at Versailles had decided to transfer the former German concessions in Shandong province to Japan instead of returning them to Chinese control. More than three thousand students demonstrated against the treaty provisions in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square. Over the following weeks demonstrations against the Shandong provision spread beyond the students to the general population. Merchants closed their shops, workers went on strike, and banks suspended business.
Treaty Ports
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In the nineteenth century the so-called Unequal Treaties between the Qing dynasty and various European governments opened “treaty ports” to foreign trade and habitation. Foreigners who lived in their own compou
nds in the treaty ports, called “concessions,” did not have to pay Chinese taxes and were exempt from Chinese laws.
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Faced with widespread demonstrations of anti-Japanese feeling, the Chinese government refused to sign the peace treaty.
Chinese Communist Party
The Chinese Communist Party grew directly out of the May Fourth Movement. The party’s early leaders were professors and students who believed that China needed a social revolution.
Prior to 1905 the few Chinese socialists were students who had discovered Proudhon, Bakunin, and Kropotkin while studying in Paris and Tokyo. The attempted Russian revolution in 1905 excited interest among reform-minded Chinese, who saw parallels between the Qing dynasty and the Russian tsars. A translation of The Communist Manifesto into Chinese appeared in 1906, ending with a somewhat muted rendition of the original call to arms: “Then the world will be for the common people, and the sounds of happiness will reach the deepest springs. Ah! Come! People of every land, how can you not be roused?”
The Centrality of the Peasantry
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The Chinese translator anticipated Mao’s placement of peasants at the center of the Chinese revolution. In a note he explains that he used the phrase common people as the translation for proletariat since the Chinese word for “worker” did not include peasants.
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After the initial flurry of excitement, Chinese radicals put Marxism to one side. After all, Marx himself had claimed that his cycle of historical development didn’t apply to China.
The Russian Revolution of 1917 induced some Chinese intellectuals to look at Marx more closely. The most prominent among them was Li Dazhao (1889–1927), the head librarian of Beijing University. Excited by the possibilities of following the Russian example, Li created an informal study group that met at his office to discuss political developments and Capital. Six months later Chen Duxiu, then dean of the School of Letters at Beijing University, ran a special issue of New Youth devoted to Marxism, with Li Dazhao as the general editor. Soon radical study groups were meeting in a half dozen cities.
In May 1920 Chen Duxiu and Li Dazhao moved from studying Marxism to organizing. With the help of two agents from the Comintern, they founded a Soviet Youth League, laid plans for the creation of a communist party, and began recruiting. They soon had fifty members located throughout China and Japan.
In July 1921 Chen and Li held the founding meeting of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in Shanghai. Thirteen Chinese communists, including Mao Zedong, and two Comintern agents, attended it. Chen was elected to be the party’s first secretary-general.
The CCP spent the next two years recruiting new members, publicizing Marxist ideology, publicizing the need for a national revolution directed against foreign imperialism, and attempting to organize China’s handful of railway and industrial workers into unions.
By 1923 the party had almost three hundred members, and it was dangerous to be a known communist. With some arm-twisting on the part of the Comintern, the CCP became part of the Kuomintang.
MAO AND THE CHINESE REVOLUTION
The Great Helmsman
Mao Zedong (1893–1976) was the son of a wealthy peasant in Hunan province. His father wanted him to be a farmer and took him out of the local school when he was thirteen. Mao wanted more. Four years later he left home to study at the teacher’s college in Hunan’s provincial capital, where he became caught up in the revolution against the Qing dynasty in 1911.
In 1918 Mao finally graduated with his teaching certificate and went to Beijing to attend the university there. Like other graduate students, he had little money. He took a job as a library assistant to Li Dazhao, who introduced him to Marxism. Although Mao was one of the original members of the Chinese Communist Party, he did not become a party leader until the 1930s.
CIVIL WAR
After Sun Yat-sen’s death in 1925, Chiang Kai-shek became the head of the Kuomintang. He immediately mobilized a massive campaign against the warlords in northern China. His intentions were to consolidate his power within the party and unify the country under his own leadership. In 1927, concerned about the rising influence of the Chinese Communist Party within the ranks of the Kuomintang, Chiang ordered the arrest and execution of hundreds of communists and other leftists.
Chiang Kai-shek
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Unlike most of the Chinese revolutionaries, Chiang Kai-shek (1887–1975) trained as a career military officer. He served with the Japanese army from 1909 to 1911. While in Tokyo, he met young Chinese revolutionaries who converted him to republicanism. He fought in the revolt against the Qing dynasty and joined the Kuomintang in 1918.
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The international community formally recognized Chiang’s government after he conquered Beijing in 1928, but his hold on the country remained precarious. Northern warlords still challenged his authority. The Japanese invaded Manchuria in 1931, and showed signs of taking a large bite out of China’s northern border. Closer to home the communists who had survived the 1927 purge created a Soviet-style republic in Jiangxi province, with its own army and government. Aided by a popular program of land redistribution, the Jiangxi Soviet controlled several million people by 1930.
Chiang decided to deal with the communist threat first. Between 1930 and 1934 he launched five campaigns against the Jiangxi Soviet. The communists successfully fought off the first four attacks using guerilla techniques that Mao designed.
Chiang brought in more forces for the fifth attack. In 1934 he built a series of concrete blockhouses around the communist positions manned with 700,000 troops. The communists might have succeeded in fending off the fifth attack if they had continued to use Mao’s guerilla tactics. Unfortunately for them, the CCP’s Central Committee had taken command of the communist forces when it moved to Jiangxi earlier that year. Instead of fighting a guerilla campaign, they met the larger and better-armed Kuomintang forces using more conventional military tactics.
The Long March
In October 1934, faced with defeat by Chiang’s forces, the Red Army had only two options: surrender or retreat. They chose to retreat.
On October 16 the remaining 86,000 members of the Red Army, including administrative personnel and thirty women, broke through the Kuomintang line and began a 6,000-mile march from their base in southern China to the northwest province of Shanxi. The Long March took 368 days. For the first three months they suffered repeated Kuomintang attacks from the air and on the ground. They quickly ran out of rice and were reduced to eating first their horses and then their leather belts. Finally, they marched with empty stomachs. Only eight thousand survived the march.
By the time they reached Shanxi, Mao was the undisputed leader of the CCP. Other communist units in search of a leader soon joined them, raising their strength to thirty thousand.
The United Front
In 1937 Japan invaded China. Like squabbling siblings who quickly resolve their differences when an outsider picks on one of them, the Chinese Communist Party and the Kuomintang suspended hostilities and fought together against the Japanese.
The Sino-Japanese War gave the CCP a chance to revitalize itself. Operating out of their base in Shanxi, the communists used guerilla warfare tactics to harass the Japanese, often sending small units behind enemy lines to provide a nucleus for local resistance. In rural areas the communist fighters were often the only organized opposition to Japanese brutality. At the same time that they organized a willing population to supply food and hiding places for guerilla units, they also recruited new party members.
By the time Japan surrendered in 1945, popular opinion had shifted in favor of the communists. Disaffected Kuomintang troops joined Mao’s army in large numbers, armed with captured Japanese weapons.
THE PEOPLE’S REPUBLIC OF CHINA
American efforts to build a coalition government between the two sides failed. Full-scale civil war broke out again in June 1946.
Despite American aid, Chiang
’s forces were on the run by late 1948. Beijing fell without a fight on January 31, 1949. The communist army took the Kuomintang capital of Nanking on April 23. Chiang Kai-shek and his supporters retreated to the island of Taiwan. On October 1 Chairman Mao announced the formation of the People’s Republic of China, which he declared to be a “people’s democratic dictatorship.”
The CCP faced an enormous challenge. China had been torn by civil war for more than thirty years. With the brief exception of the Jiangxi Soviet, they had no experience in government. At first communist policies were based on what Mao later described as “copying from the Soviets.” Ignoring his own policy of “encircling the cities from the countryside,” Mao instituted a five-year plan focused on urban industrialization with Soviet technical assistance.
THE GREAT LEAP FORWARD AND THE CULTURAL REVOLUTION