ChinaX Course Notes – Modern History I transmit, I do not innovate.216 If you copy this document, please do not remove this disclaimer These are the class notes of Dave Pomerantz, a student in the HarvardX/EdX MOOC course entitled ChinaX. My ChinaX id is simply DavePomerantz. First, a very big thank you to Professors Peter Bol and Bill Kirby and Mark Elliot and Roderick MacFarquhar, to the visiting lecturers who appear in the videos and to the ChinaX staff for assembling such a marvelous course. The notes may contain copyrighted material from the ChinaX course. Any inaccuracies are purely my own. Where material from Wikipedia is copied directly into this document, a link is provided. See here. I strongly encourage you to download the PDF file with the notes for the entire course. Sections do not stand alone. Each one refers many times to the others with page numbers and footnotes, helping to connect many of the recurring themes in Chinese history. 216 The Analects 7.1. See page 35. ChinaX Part 9 Communist Liberations Page 305 of 323 Part 9: Communist Liberations 37: Rise of the Communist Party Part 9 Introduction Founded in 1921with only 57 members, the CCP had millions of members by 1949 and ruled all of China. Mao Zedong was only 28 when he attended the first Congress, but he led that ruling party in 1949. John Fairbank wrote that no one in human history ever equaled that accomplishment, given the sheer size and magnificent history of China. How did the CCP come to power? The success was in part the result of early efforts under the Comintern to plan the revolution. But not everything was planned in advance. Many of the twists and turns of the success of the CCP were due to on-the-fly adaptations of political tactics. The Period of Orthodoxy In its first six years, from 1921 to 1927, Stalin guided the CCP toward a bourgeois revolution even though China had a tiny proletariat. Further, Stalin enlisted China in its global struggle against capitalist imperialism, its National Liberation Struggles. Lastly, the CCP was joined in an unholy alliance - the First United Front - with the Kuomintang. In 1927, Chiang Kai-shek crushed the CCP. For more details the First United Front, see page 284. The Period of Experimentation Mao saw the overthrow of the existing rural order as the central objective of revolution. This is a Chinese-centered view of a world dominated by rural peasantry rather than the kind of urban proletariat that was prevalent in industrialized Europe. Autumn Harvest Uprising Mao tried his form of peasant revolution in Hunan. It was put down and he was arrested, bribing his way to freedom while the peasants he led were massacred. From this he learned that “political power comes from the barrel of a gun.” Rather than going underground, he established a base in an inaccessible region of the Jinggang Shan mountains, and founded the Red Army with a local warlord named Zhu De. They gathered 10,000 men and armed them with 2,000 guns. In 1931, he founded the Chinese Soviet Republic in Jiangxi. Chiang Kai-shek launched five campaigns against him. The Comintern was also opposed to Mao since he hadn’t followed the communist doctrine of a proletariat revolution. In 1934, the Politburo seized control of the Jangxi Soviet and briefly arrested Mao. ChinaX Part 9 Communist Liberations Page 306 of 323 At its height, the Red Army numbered 300,000. They escaped from the Nationalists with 85,000 troops plus 15,000 officials and party bureaucrats. Thus they began The Long March, a retreat across China that lasted a year, crossing thousands of miles to Shaanxi, with only 8,000 survivors of the original 100,000. The Long March Politically, the Long March began in January 1935 in the town of Zunyi, where the Communist leadership named Mao its chairman, handing control to the man who had disavowed the Comintern. While the Long March was indeed a retreat, it held the seeds of future success due to its survival against overwhelming odds, strengthening Mao’s concept of voluntarism.217 While voluntarism was a Marxist concept, under the Soviets it sprang from the urban proletariats rather than the rural peasants, which were the corresponding underclass of China. Mao would leapfrog capitalism and drive straight to Communism, away from the rule of the “bad gentry and local bullies.” The strength that was necessary to survive The Long March and that would later fuel the revolution became known as the Yan’an Spirit. Mao’s view that the people could accomplish anything would carry into his leadership of the People's Republic. It was perhaps most evident in the horrific Great Leap Forward that would starve tens of millions of Chinese.218 An example of Mao’s vision was illustrated in his famous Speech At The Enlarged Session Of The Military Affairs Committee And The External Affairs Conference: There are so many things to study now, how shall we go about it? Just keep on in the same way, learning a bit, persevering and penetrating a bit deeper. I say that, if you are resolved to do it, you can certainly learn, whether you are young or old. I will give you an example. I really learned to swim well only in 1954; previously I had not mastered it. In 1954, there was an indoor swimming-pool at Tsinghua University. I went there every evening with my bag, changed my clothes, and for three months without interruption I studied the nature of the water. Water doesn’t drown people! Water is afraid of people, people aren’t afraid of water, of course, there are exceptions, but it should be possible to swim in all kinds of water. This is a major premise. For example, the Yangtse at Wuhan is water, so it’s possible to swim in the Yangtse at Wuhan. So I refuted those comrades who opposed my swimming in the Yangtse. I said, ‘You haven’t studied formal logic.’ If it’s water, you can swim in it, except in certain conditions: for example, if the water is only an inch deep you can’t swim in it; if it’s frozen solid you can’t swim in it; you can’t swim in places where there are sharks, nor where there are whirlpools, as in the three gorges of the Yangtse. Apart from certain circumstances, it should be possible to swim wherever there is water, this is the major premise, the major premise derived from practice. Thus, for example, the Yangtse at Wuhan is water; hence, the conclusion follows that it is possible to swim in the Yangtse at Wuhan. The Milo and Pearl rivers are water, you can swim in them. You can swim in [the sea off] Peitaiho; it’s water, isn’t it? Wherever there’s water, you should be able to swim. This is the major premise; apart from the fact that you can’t swim in one inch of water, and you can’t swim in water that’s at a temperature of over 100 degrees, or in water that’s so cold it’s f! rozen, or where there are sharks or whirlpools — apart from these circumstances, all water can be swum in; this is a fact. Do you believe it? If you are resolute, if you only have the will, I am convinced that all things can be successfully accomplished. I exhort you comrades to study. Mao was born with an indomitable spirit. But his leading of the Party to survive the Long March created in him a belief that he could accomplish anything. Anything at all. Because the people had the Ya’nan Spirit. 217 From Mao’s speech in 1945, The Foolish Old Man Who Removed the Mountains: …We must also arouse the political consciousness of the entire people so that they may willingly and gladly fight together with us for victory… 218 See footnote 225 on page 313 for more on the Great Leap Forward. ChinaX Part 9 Communist Liberations Page 307 of 323 Yan’an When the Japanese invaded, they weakened the Nationalists and led to an uneasy cooperation, the “Second United Front”, with the Communists. This legitimized the Communists and their army. Almost all of the casualties of the war were Nationalists whereas the Communists lost less than 3%, though they gave the impression of presenting major resistance to the Japanese. The Communists increased their strength from 92,000 in 1937 to 800,000 by 1945. The United Front ended in 1941. Blockaded from the south by the Kuomintang and pressured from the east by the Japanese, the Communists were forced back to Yan’an, with only the spirit of the Long March to sustain them. The Communist values of volunteerism and cooperation became more than slogans; they became social policies necessary for survival, and were known as the Yan’an Way. 38: Socialist Elder Brother Introduction Single World System In 1959, Nikita Kruschev said:219 If we want to speak of the future, it seems to me that the further development of the socialist countries will in all probability proceed along lines of reinforcing a single world system of the socialist economy. One after another the economic barriers which separated our countries under capitalism will disappear…Not a single sovereign socialist state is able to shut itself up within its own frontiers and rely exclusively on its own potential or its own wealth. If the contrary were true, we would not be communist internationalists, but national-socialists.