The Chinese Revolution and the Rise of Mao Zedong
The Communist Revolution in China, the Decolonization of Asia, and the Arab-Israeli Conflict
The Country
China, a global village, had 1,350,000 million inhabitants in 2005. During the nineteenth century, it was characterized by feudalism and its imperial structure: a centralist monarchy with a strong bureaucratic government. The social base was the immense dispossessed peasant population (80%), subject to a land tenure regime of semi-slavery, under a minority of noble landowners. Unlike what happened in Europe, the spectacular population growth was not matched by advances in cultivation methods or agricultural productivity.
The imperial court had to cede, under European pressure, territories like Hong Kong and Macao, and the Portuguese obtained control of strategic cities for foreign trade. This happened in 1842, after the so-called Opium War, which China lost. Imperial China would not permit this country to enter freely again.
Japan’s expansionism led to war between the two nations in 1895. China lost and had to cede Korea and Formosa (now Taiwan) to Japan.
From Japanese Invasion to the Popular Republic
In 1937, the Japanese took Beijing, Shanghai, and Nanking, so in 1939, the Kuomintang established Chongqing as the capital. The vicissitudes of World War II caused the union of nationalists and communists against the Japanese invader (United Front).
The communist leader, Mao Zedong, extended his influence from the north, beginning his peculiar vision of a peasant and egalitarian revolution. Meanwhile, Chiang Kai-shek’s troops suffered from Japanese attacks. From Chongqing, its capital, General Chiang Kai-shek maintained contact with the British and Americans, who, until 1942, provided economic and military aid from Burma, already dislocated against Japan.
After World War II, US General Marshall was sent to a devastated China to try to organize the country, especially to try to reconcile the Chinese nationalists of Chiang Kai-shek with the Chinese communists of Mao. On January 29, 1947, the US officially renounced intervening in the Chinese conflict, a conflict that had national projections and a civil war. Mao and his followers dislocated from the cities and became strong in the countryside. Finally, the communists of Mao, more by ideological conviction than by arms, defeated the Kuomintang armies of Chiang Kai-shek in Manchuria and came to dominate a good part of central China.
In January 1946, the nationalists and Maoists signed a ceasefire and began negotiations to establish a common government. The agreement soon failed, and at the end of 1946, new struggles began between the communists and nationalists for territorial control, especially for Manchuria, a rich area that Soviet troops had left that same year.
By 1949, Mao’s troops had practically total control of the country. In January 1949, a Kuomintang army surrendered in Beijing, and by April 1948, Chiang’s defenses in central China were shattered.
On October 1, 1949, the People’s Republic of China was proclaimed under a purely communist socio-political and economic model. One of the first things Mao needed to do was to establish good neighborly relations with the USSR. Thus, in early 1950, the Chinese leader traveled to Moscow to:
* Apply for financial aid * Establish a powerful military alliance with the USSR * Request the total departure of Soviet troops from the country, as Stalin still controlled part of Manchuria and Mongolia.
The Soviet leader saw the People’s Republic of China as a subordinate member of his sphere and was not willing to consent to something Mao feared. Stalin feared that Mao would become another Tito, and he might lose power and influence in the area.
Mao and the Revolution
In foreign policy, between 1950 and 1953, the Chinese engaged in the Korean War, helping the North Koreans against the US, a country declared public enemy number one. In February 1950, a treaty of friendship and cooperation was signed with the USSR, and in the same year, the conquest of Tibet began. Soviet aid after the 1950 treaty contributed to the creation of industrial enterprises in China, within the first five-year plan that covered from 1953 to 1957. In this last year, the so-called Great Leap Forward was planned, which was implemented from 1958 to 1961.
Between 1956 and 1958, Marx achieved great success in collectivization in rural production and the formation of communes, which was, in reality, a true social militarization of the Chinese population. This order was to clarify the formation of a perfect communist society on a large scale, following Mao’s own interpretations of the speeches of Marx and Engels. It began with immense farming communities to which light industries and local construction projects were attached.
This Great Leap Forward was characterized by tremendous repression (executions, summary trials, etc.). Mao exercised it against dissidents and imposed the official cult of the general secretary of the Chinese Communist Party with great popular support.
The reduction of the primary productive sector notably lowered the productivity of the communes, and in their eagerness to have steel at all costs to approach the most industrialized nations, they built blast furnaces throughout the country. They even destroyed more productive agricultural land and failed to obtain low-quality steel that could not be used in any industrial process. The aforementioned economic disaster caused Mao, the “Great Helmsman,” to resign as head of state, being replaced by Liu Shaoqi.
Cultural Revolution
The cult of Mao’s personality was imposed as mandatory from 1964, and Zhou Enlai, Prime Minister since the creation of the People’s Republic, announced the start of the infamous Cultural Revolution, which imposed Maoist principles (in 1966) and advocated the destruction of those whom Zhou Enlai and his collaborators accused of being the new bourgeoisie. This Cultural Revolution, which began in 1966, greatly influenced a good part of the West, especially the left in France, and was one of the triggers of May 1968. This Chinese Cultural Revolution caused the destruction of a vast number of works of art and books considered counter-revolutionary, which led to an irreparable cultural loss.
It is estimated that this peculiar Cultural Revolution cost the country 80 million lives. There were total violations of human rights, and there were even attempts at cannibalism to demonstrate the annihilation of the enemy. This revolution was directed against senior party officials, intellectuals, and those whom Mao and his followers accused of betraying revolutionary ideals. The Cultural Revolution allowed Mao to regain the political power he had lost after the failure of the Great Leap Forward.
Sino-Soviet Confrontation
From the 1960s, China began a confrontation with the Soviet Union, claiming various border territories that Russia had appropriated in the nineteenth century. The two countries fueled tensions: while in the USSR, the newspapers spoke of Mao as a new Hitler or a “heir of Genghis Khan,” the Chinese dailies denounced the “neo-colonialism of the new Soviet tsars” and the “fascism of Brezhnev.” Words turned into actions: there were real border clashes in the Ussuri region, a tributary of the Amur, between 1967 and 1969.
International socialist fraternity had vanished, and not even the dogma of the Marxists had held. For the first time, two communist countries were fighting with weapons.
In 1971, the US consented to China’s entry into the UN. Shortly after, President Nixon and Mao began a thawing of Sino-American relations. Mao died on September 9, 1976.
In December 1978, Deng Xiaoping, an old victim of the Cultural Revolution, took power, ousting Hua Guofeng from the leadership of the Chinese Communist Party, initiating the greatest economic transformation in his country and the most revolutionary in the world, called the “socialist market economy.”