Days before the sudden end of the war in East Asia, the Soviet Union was
persuaded by president Truman to enter the war against Japan. After the
dropping of two atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Soviet forces flooded
into the northeastern provinces to seize Japanese positions and to accept the
surrender of the 700,000 Japanese troops stationed in the region.
Later in the year, Chiang came to the awkward realization that he lacked the
needed military resources to prevent a CPC takeover of the northeast after the
scheduled Soviet departure. He therefore
made a deal with the Soviets to delay their withdrawal until he had moved
enough of his best-trained men and modern arms into the region. The Soviets
spent the extra time systematically dismantling the entire Manchurian
industrial plant built by Japan with Chinese slave labor and shipping it back
to their war-ravaged motherland.
The civil war in China ultimately ended with CPC victory and the People's
Republic of China was established on October 1, 1949, under the leadership of
CPC headed by Mao Zedong, after which socialist construction of the war-torn,
imperialism-ravaged nation began.
Socialist construction in the People's Republic
Mao understood that Confucianism (ru jia) had permeated Chinese society
perniciously and hindered its advancement in modern times, so he tried to
combat it by launching mass movements, culminating in the Great Proletarian
Cultural Revolution in 1966.
But even after a decade of enormous social upheaval, tragic personal
sufferings, fundamental economic dislocation and unparalleled diplomatic
isolation, Confucianism stood its ground in Chinese societal mentality. The
Cultural Revolution failed to achieve its spiritual goal even with serious
damage to the nation's physical and socio-economic infrastructure and to the
prestige of the Communist Party of China (CPC), not to mention the decline of
popular support and near total bankruptcy of revolutionary zeal among even
loyal party cadres.
Confucianism will have to wait for many future cultural revolutions to restrain
its negative influence on the Chinese civilization and to revive its positive
elements. A culture that took two millennia to develop cannot be changed in
just one century.
Realistically, nostalgia aside, the feudal system under imperial monarchy
cannot be restored in modern China. Once a political institution is overthrown,
all the king's men cannot put it back together again. Nor would that be
desirable. Yet the modern political system in China, despite its revolutionary
clothing and radical rhetoric, is still fundamentally feudal, both in the
manner in which power is distributed and in its administrative structure. This
is why cultural revolutions are necessary and will be necessary to move Chinese
civilization forward.
However, violent revolutions cannot be regular events without destroying the
very purpose that justifies them. China needs a continuous non-violent cultural
revolution to ensure that its revolutionary path toward national revival
through socialism is not reversed. It does not need destructive factional
political violence in the name of ideological vaccination that ends up
disrupting the national purpose.
In Chinese politics, loyalty is traditionally preferred over competence. The
ideal is to have both in a minister. Failing that, loyalty without competence
is preferred as being less dangerous than competence without loyalty - the
stuff of which successful insurrection and revolts are made. Therein lays the
seed of systemic corruption in Chinese politics.
For socialist China, loyalty is to the socialist cause, not personal relations.
It is imperative that leaders remain loyal to socialist ideals. Yet loyalty to
socialist ideals alone is not enough. It must be augmented by competence.
Confucianism, by placing blind faith in a causal connection between virtue and
power, has remained the main cultural obstacle to modern China's attempt to
evolve from a society governed by men into a society governed by socialist
legalism, which should not be confused with the Western bourgeois concept of
rule of law. The danger of Confucianism lies not in its aim to endow the
virtuous with power, but in its tendency to label the powerful as virtuous.
In order to change Chinese feudal society toward a communist social order,
which is understood by all communists as a necessary goal of human development,
Mao Zedong developed out of abstract Leninist concepts specific operational
methods that took on special characteristics necessary for Chinese civilization
and historical-cultural conditions, its strengths and shortcomings.
These methods, above all the system of organized mass movements to achieve the
advancement of the mass interest, stress the change of social consciousness,
that is, the creation of new men for a new cooperative society, as the basis
for changing reality - the replacement of private ownership as the mode of
production by collective ownership. The concept of mass politics, relevant in
Chinese political thought from ancient time, is implemented by an elite cadre
corps within the party which is the political instrument of the people.
Mao's mass line
Mass movement as an instrument of political communication from above to below
is unique to Chinese communist organization. This phenomenon is of utmost
importance in understanding the nature and dynamics of the governance structure
of the CPC as the ruling party. The theoretical foundation of mass movement as
a means of mediation between the leadership and the will of the people
pre-supposes that nothing is impossible for the masses, quantitatively
understood as a collective subject, if their power is concentrated by a
political party of correct thought and responsive actions.
This concept comes out of Mao's romantic yet well-placed faith in the great
strength the masses who are capable of developing in the interest of their own
well-being. So the "will of the masses" has to be articulated with the help of
the party but by the masses and within the masses, which the CPC calls the
"mass line".
Mao's mass-line theory requires that the leadership elite be close to the
people, that it is continuously informed about the people's will, and that it
transforms this will into concrete actions by the masses. "From the masses back
to the masses" is more than just a slogan. This means: take the scattered and
unorganized ideas of the masses and, through study, turn them into focused and
systemic programs, then go back to the masses and propagate and explain these
ideals until the masses embrace them as their own.
Thus mass movements are initiated at the highest level - the politburo; are
announced to party cadres at central and regional work conferences; are subject
to cadre criticism and modification; after which starts the first phase of mass
movement. Mass organizations are held to provoke the "people's will", through
readers' letters to newspapers and at rallies at which these letters are read
and debated. In modern times, expressions on the Internet have augmented the
role of the print media. The results are then officially discussed by the staff
of leading organs of the state and the party, after which the systematized
"people's will" is clarified into acts of law or resolutions. Then the mass
movement spreads to the whole nation.
The history of Chinese socialist politics is a history of mass movements. Mass
movements successfully implemented land reform (1950-53); marriage reform
(1950-52); collectivization (1953) - the "General Line of Socialist
Transformation" (from national bourgeois democratic revolution to proletarian
socialist revolution); and nationalization (1955 - from private ownership of
industrial means of production into state ownership). The method used against
opposition was thought reform through "brainwashing" (without the derogatory
connotation since given in the anti-communist West), which is a principle of
preferring the changing of the political consciousness of political opponents
instead of physically liquidating them.
All this was despite the enormous cost imposed on the national economy by the
Korean War. The opening ceremony of the Beijing Summer Olympics in 2008, which
television audiences saw around the world, was a manifestation of Chinese
socialist mass movement. It had the legacy of Mao Zedong written all over it.
Before 1949, the Chinese peasant had been deprived of basic health services for
over a century. One of the party's first steps in medical reform called for
mass campaigns against endemic infectious diseases. Tens of thousands of health
workers were trained with basic hygienic skills and sent out into the
countryside to examine and treat peasants and organize sanitation campaigns
with mass movement techniques.
Health teams examined 2.8 million peasants in 1958, the first year of the
schistosomiasis program. One team claimed to have examined 1,200 patients in a
single day. Some 67 million latrines were reportedly built or repaired, and
over the next few years, hundreds of thousands of peasants were set to work day
and night, drying out swamps and building drainage ditches to get rid of the
habitat of snails that help to spread the disease. Party workers claimed
schistosomiasis cure rates of 85 to 95% in some areas, and that the disease had
been wiped out in more than half of previously endemic areas along the Yangtze
River.
Mao's mass movement success until 1957
The Hundred Flower Movement of 1957 was launched on February 27 by Mao with his
famous four-hour speech, "On the Correct Handling of Contradictions among the
People", before 1,800 leading cadres. In it, Mao distinguished "contradiction
between the enemy and ourselves" from "contradiction among the people", which
should not be resolved by dictatorship, that is by force, but by open
discussion with criticism and counter criticism. Up until 1957, the
mass-movement policies of Mao achieved spectacular success in both social and
economic construction.
Land reform was completed, the struggle for women's emancipation was
progressing well, and collectivization and nationalization were leading the
nation towards socialism. Health services were a model of socialist
construction in both cities and the countryside. The party's revolutionary
leadership was accepted enthusiastically by society generally and the peasants
specifically. By 1958, agricultural production almost doubled from 1949 (108
million tonnes to 185 million tonnes), coal production quadrupled to 123
million tonnes, and steel production grew from 100,000 tonnes to 5.3 million
tonnes.
Head
Office: Unit B, 16/F, Li Dong Building, No. 9 Li Yuen Street East,
Central, Hong Kong Thailand Bureau:
11/13 Petchkasem Road, Hua Hin, Prachuab Kirikhan, Thailand 77110
