Abstract
By the beginning of October 1949, Mao Zedong felt sufficiently secure to officially proclaim the founding of the “People’s Republic of China,” a “new democracy” that would occupy the place of the recently defeated “one party dictatorship” of Chiang Kai-shek’s “Republic of China.” It would be a unique form of democracy, a “people’s democratic dictatorship,” under “the leadership of the proletariat and the Communist Party,” that would “work with one mind,” together with “the Soviet Union and the New Democracies” to surmount all difficulties, domestic and international, in order to construct a “New China” as part of the welcomed and imminent universal “proletarian revolution.”3 Mao thus signaled his readiness to leave behind that much of the bourgeois convictions of Sun Yat-sen.
Ours will no longer be a nation subject to insult and humiliation. We have stood up…. We are already confronted with the task of nationwide economic construction…. Our national defense will be consolidated and no imperialists will ever again be allowed to invade our land.
—Mao Zedong1
In the construction of irrigation works … we moved, nationwide, over 50 billion cubic meters of earth and stone, but from the winter to next spring we want to move 190 billion cubic meters nationwide, an increase of well over three times. Then we have to deal with all sorts of tasks: steel, copper, aluminum, coal, transport, the processing industries, the chemical industry—[they all] need hordes of people…. I think if we do [all these things simultaneously] half of China’s population unquestionably will die; and if it’s not a half, it’ll be a third or ten percent, a death toll of 50 million people.
—Mao Zedong2
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Notes
Mao Zedong, “The Chinese People Have Stood Up!” Selected Works (Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 1977), vol. 5, 17–18. Hereafter SWM.
Mao, “Talks at the Wuchang Conference (November 21–23, 1958),” in The Secret Speeches of Chairman Mao: From the Hundred Flowers to the Great Leap Forward, eds. Roderick MacFarquhar, Timothy Cheek, and Eugene Wu (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), 494.
The official CCP estimates of the number of “counterrevolutionaries” and “bandits” “exterminated” by the government in the period between 1949 and 1954 ranged from four million to five million. See Mao’s comments, in Mao, “The Party’s Mass Line Must Be Followed in Suppressing Counterrevolutionaries” and “Strike Surely, Accurately, and Relentlessly in Suppressing Counterrevolutionaries,” SWM, vol. 5, 50–56. See the numbers provided by Mao in Mao, “On the Correct Handling of Contradictions among the People (Speaking Notes),” The Secret Speeches of Chairman Mao, 141–42. The estimates tendered by foreign observers vary widely, but generally fall between eight million and 8.5 million. See R. J. Rummel, China’s Bloody Century: Genocide and Murder since 1900 (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Press, 2007), chap. 9, and the account in Jean-Louis Margolin, “China: A Long March into Night,” in
Stephanie Courtois, Nicolas Werth, Jean-Louis Panné, Andrzej Paczkowski, Karel Bartosek, and Jean-Louis Margolin, The Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 476–87.
V. I. Lenin, “Seventh Moscow Gubernia Conference of the Russian Communist Party,” Collected Works (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1966), vol. 33, 115. Hereafter LCW.
As will be indicated, Mao came to deplore Communist China’s abject dependence on the Soviet model in the years immediately following the victory of the CCP at the end of the civil war in 1949. See Mao, “Talks at the Chengtu Conference (March 1958),” in Chairman Mao Talks to the People. Talks and Letters: 1956–1971, ed. Stuart Schram (New York: Pantheon Books, 1974), 98–99.
See Mao’s comments in Mao, A Critique of Soviet Economics (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1977), 34–38, 122.
Lenin, “Fourth Anniversary of the October Revolution,” “The New Economic Policy and the Tasks of the Political Education Department,” and “Ninth All-Russia Congress of Soviets,” LCW, vol. 33, 51–79, 155–77. See the discussion in Richard Pipes, Russia under the Bolshevik Regime (New York: Vintage Books, 1995), chap. 8. Sun Yat-sen saw the NEP as an abandonment of Marxism—as did other commentators on the Russian Revolution.
In these circumstances Engels’ Socialism: Utopian and Scientific, written toward the end of the 1870s, was a standard reference. There Engels spoke of the preconditions of Socialist revolution as “the enormous expansion of modern industry,” in which “markets are glutted, products accumulate,” and society lapses into crises of overproduction, a “crisis of plethora.” In such a productive environment, “the great majority of men” are reduced to wage earning “urban proletarians.” Only then would the social revolution “become possible, could become an historical necessity, only when the actual conditions for its realization were there.” See Engels, Anti-Dühring: Herr Eugen Dühring’s Revolution in Science (Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1962), 375, 377–78, 384–85. It was from this volume that the popular pamphlet was taken.
“In general people cannot be liberated as long as they are unable to obtain food and drink, housing and clothing in adequate quality and quantity.” Liberation “is a historical and not a mental act, and it is brought about by historical conditions, the [level] of industry, com[merce], [agri] culture, [intercourse].” Marx and Engels, The German Ideology, in Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Collected Works (New York: International Publishers, 1975), vol. 5, 38. Hereafter MECW.
Typical of those accounts is Karl Kautsky, Die soziale Revolution: Am Tage nach der sozialen Revolution (Berlin: Vorwärts, 1904).
Bukharin began his account in November 1919, to conclude in May 1920, immediately precedent to the commencement of the NEP. His account became part of the debate on economic policy that followed. Critical to Bukharin’s discussion was his dismissal of some of the central traditional Marxist notions concerning the proletarian seizure of the means of production following the social revolution. See the editor’s preface to N. Bukharin, Economia del periodo di trasformazione (Milan: Jaca Book, 1971), and also chap. 4.
Evgeny Preobrazhensky, The New Economics: An Experiment in Theoretical Analysis of the Soviet Economy (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965).
All of the anti-Bolshevik works of Karl Kautsky serve as testimony. See Karl Kautsky, The Dictatorship of the Proletariat (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, 1964).
“The founding of the People’s Republic of China in 1949 marked the basic conclusion of the democratic revolution and the beginning of the transition to socialism.” Mao, A Critique of Soviet Economics (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1977), 40; see also page 34.
The tactical character of Mao’s policies was emphasized by Liu Shaoqi, “Guiding Principles for New China‘s Economic Development,” Selected Works of Liu Shaoqi (Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 1984), vol. 1, 424–28.
See the discussion in A. James Gregor, Metascience and Politics: An Inquiry into the Conceptual Language of Political Science (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2003), chaps. 5 and 6.
See the discussion in A. James Gregor, Marxism, Fascism, and Totalitarianism: Chapters in the Intellectual History of Radicalism (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009.
While the founders of classical Marxism were hesitant to wax eloquent concerning the values that inspired their activities, one only need read their early works, such as the essays contained in Marx’s Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, in MECW, vol. 3, 231–346, to identify their moral incentives. At about the same time, Engels argued that only a “proletarian” revolution could “hold out the prospect of an all-sided development. A happy existence for all members of society.” He went on to anticipate that the “communist organization of society will give its members the change of an all-round exercise of abilities that have received all-round development.” Engels, “Principles of Communism,” MECW, vol. 6, 353. He specifically identified humankind’s redeemer as urban “proletarians,” those workers produced by the “factory system.” Engels, “Draft of a Communist Confession of Faith,” MECW, vol. 6, 101. See Engels’ comments in “Principles of Communism,” MECW, vol. 6, 341–42, 346–47. An account of the moral, quasi-religious, sentiments that animated the founders of Marxism is provided in A. James Gregor, Totalitarianism and Political Religion: An Intellectual History (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2012), chaps. 2 and 3.
Karl Kautsky, The Class Struggle (Erfurt Program) (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1971), 156–57, 187, 191.
“The final victory of Socialism in the first country to emancipate itself is impossible without the combined efforts of the proletarians of several countries.” Stalin, “The October Revolution and the Tactics of the Russian Communists,” Problems of Leninism (Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1953), 147.
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Gregor, A.J. (2014). The Making of Maoism. In: Marxism and the Making of China. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137379498_6
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