Evolution of Maoist Strategy

Jobial Alex

Long before Mao, the Chinese adaptation of Marxism had begun at the level of
translation of key terms. Say for instance, Marx’s “proletariat” was certainly
associated in Western thinking with urban life. The translation into Chinese,
however, produced the term wuchan jieji, meaning “propertyless class,” in other
words, the very poor who might be either in the city or the countryside, and of
course in China were mainly in the countryside. In effect, the European
“proletariat” were automatically to be found in China in the poor “peasantry”
among the farmers and landless laborers. Quite aside from this terminological
problem in sinification, the economic foundation of Chinese life, being mainly in
the countryside, gave the Chinese revolution necessarily a rural character more
pronounced than that in the Soviet Union. The peasantry had to be the chief
revolutionists. The final factor making for sinification was the overriding
sentiment of Chinese nationalism based on cultural and historical pride, which
meant China could not be the tail of someone else’s dog. In effect, the Chinese
people could accept only a Chinese Marxism infer J K Fairbank and Merle
Goldman.

Mao argued that the key to success in China’s revolution must lie, first, in
the careful intellectual analysis of the various classes in the countryside and,
second, in using an intensely practical tactic of identifying those classes with
whom to work and those classes to work against in any given stage of the
revolution. Third, the role of the party worker in the village must be one of a
guide and catalyst rather than a know-it-all. He must closely examine the villagers’
needs and complaints, hopes and fears; only then could he articulate the
peasantry’s demands and follow the tactic of uniting with the largest possible
number to attack the smallest possible target as a step in the revolutionary
process. Mao wrote an essay of historical importance entitled ‘Report of an
investigation of the peasant movement in Hunan in March 1927. It was written as
a reply to the carping criticisms both inside and outside the party then being
leveled at the peasants’ revolutionary struggle. Mao spent 32 days in Hunan
making an investigation and wrote this report in order to answer these criticisms.
This report was a scientific generalization of the problem of the peasant
movement. Amit Bhattacharyya states that it fully appraised the role of the
peasantry in the Chinese revolution. However the rightists in the party, headed by
Chen Tu-hsiu, did not accept his views and stuck to their own ideas.

The peasant revolution was directed against all feudal forces, which had served as
the social basis of imperialist domination over China. Mao pointed out that the
revolution in rural areas would rise like a mighty storm, and that no power,
however great, would be able to stop it. It would sweep all imperialist and feudal
forces to their graves.

Hofheinz in his book, The Broken Wave pointed out that in that report Mao’s
message had 3 parts. First, he asserted the emergence of a new revolutionary
system in Hunan. A massive armed peasantry had come into existence. There
were challenges to every form of traditional authority, from that of clan elders
and clergy of various religions to that of male heads of households. Secondly, Mao
singled out a new force of the Chinese revolution. To him only the poorest
people, the bottom rung of the village society, were truly capable of sustaining
the revolution. Revolution was a process of turning things upside down, and this
meant that those who used to be considered the wretched of society would have
to stand up a leaders. Thirdly, Mao adopted a changed attitude to violence. In a
revolution, people at the top of society are going to be hurt. A rural revolution is a
revolution by which the peasantry overthrows the authority of the feudal landlord
class. Violence is not to be deplored; it is to be celebrated. He stated that it was
necessary to have a brief reign of red terror in every rural area. Otherwise it
would be impossible to suppress the activities of counter-revolutionaries in the
countryside or overthrow the authority of the gentry. In this way, Mao radicalized
the peasant movement in the fullest sense of the word.

In fact, Mao clearly made a distinction between Red terror or Revolutionary terror
and White terror or Counter-revolutionary terror, points out Jerome Chen. Mao
remarked time and again that there were many truths in Marxism; but all those
could be summed up in 1 sentence: ‘to rebel against reactionaries is justified’. For
centuries people had been saying: it is justifiable to oppress or exploit people, but
it is wrong to rebel.’ Marxism, Mao said, turned this thesis upside down.

In the later period the Report had become the focal point of the ‘Maoism
controversy’ between B Schwartz and J K Fairbank on the one hand and K
Wittfogel on the other. B Schwartz sees in the Hunan report ‘a unique trend
within the Chinese Communist Movement’, for it looks to the village as the key
center of revolutionary action. According to them the classical Marxism makes the
urban working class as the leader of the revolution. But in this report, Mao,
according to them, had made the peasantry the leader of the Chinese revolution.
The concept of Chinese agrarian revolution under the leadership of the peasantry
was an entirely new theoretical concept and could thus be regarded as the
‘Sinification of Marxism’. This according to Schwartz and Fairbank was one of
Mao’s contributions to Marxism. Wittfogel on his part has criticized this view by
pointing out that in the Hunan Report the peasantry has been portrayed not as
the leader but as the main force of the Chinese revolution.

According to classical Marxism, the working class is the leader of the working class
and it was the most industrially advanced zones that would be the center of the
revolution. At that time, the Soviet model of revolution was the only model
expected to be followed by the world Communists. Mao stood opposed to this
Soviet model of revolution and advocated an alternate path-a purely Chinese path
of revolution. The new strategy stood for the village rather than the city as the
center of revolution. Not the industrially advanced city but the economically
backward countryside. And the main force would be not the workers but the
peasantry. Mao arrived at this conclusion on the basis of his study of the long
revolutionary heritage of the Chinese people as also his experience of Chinese
revolution. It was this that constituted an important addition to the Marxist
theory of revolution. However, Mao never undermined the significance of the
proletariat. He acknowledged that the working class would be much better
equipped in overcoming the backwardness as they were less conservative and
exposed to the new ideas in the cities. The ultimate goal of socialism could not be
achieved by the peasantry because they would resist the abolition of private
property unlike the working class who is depended on the fruits of their labor.
Therefore, he was not blindly supporting the peasantry, but out of necessity since
peasants constituted 90-95% of the Chinese population. Furthermore, neither he
nor CCP ever proclaimed the deviation from classical Marxism.

In contrast to the view propounded by Schwartz, Bhattacharyya elucidates that in

the case of Russia the working class gave the leadership and also constituted the
main and the decisive force of the revolution, while the peasants acted only as
the auxiliary force. In China, on the other hand, the main force was the peasantry,
not the workers. The leadership, however in both the cases, was to be given by
the working class. Schwartz, argues Bhattacharyya, fails to see that to give the
peasantry such an importance that is its due because of the specific nature of the
Chinese situation is not to place him in the leading position. One who constitutes
the main force and even plays the decisive role might not also play the leading
role in a revolution. In fact Mao did not attribute the leading role to the
peasantry. Jerome Chen in her book, Mao Tse-tung and the Chinese Revolution
says that Mao’s strategy was the adjustment of Marxism Leninism to the
traditional pattern of Chinese peasant revolt by which he changed the entire
concept of revolution not only in China, but also in other backward countries. He
also made contributions to the Marxist principles which again were not confined
within the 4 walls of the Chinese national boundary. Ho Kan-chi regards the
Hunan Report as a classic on the leadership of the Chinese proletariat over the
peasantry.

During the time Mao was busy with political and organizational work among the
Hunan peasantry, he wrote a series of essays one of which was Analysis of Classes
in Chinese Society. In that essay Mao proposed a radical agrarian policy and
advocated the political line for organizing the peasantry under the leadership of
the CCP. Why is it that Red Political Power can exist in China? (1928), The Struggle
in the Chingkang Mountains (1928) and A Single Spark can start a Prairie fire
(1930) were some of his significant contributions. Moreover, he developed the
principles of guerrilla warfare. The first principle was to draw the enemy in along
his supply lines until his advance units could be surrounded and cut off. The
second principle was never to attack without superior numbers and assurance of
success.

Mao later argued that “the Chinese bourgeoisie and proletariat are new-born and
never existed before in Chinese history...they are twins born of China’s old
(feudal) society at once linked to each other and antagonistic to each other.” On
this basis it was appropriate for the proletariat to lead the bourgeois democratic
revolution, a theory which justified the CCP in struggling for power. In China this
made sense, whether or not it would in Europe. For example, in developing his
idea of New Democracy in China, Mao began with the Marxist assumption of a
bourgeois democratic revolution as the transition from feudalism to capitalism,
which would be followed by another revolution as the transition from capitalism
to socialism. In Europe the bourgeois democratic revolution was typified by the
French Revolution of the 1790s, while the socialist revolution was generally felt to
have succeeded only in Russia in 1917. What was the equivalent in China?
Chinese Marxists could only conclude that the bourgeois democratic revolution
had been ushered in by the May Fourth Movement in 1919, which could be
characterized by Leninists as an achievement of national capitalism. Since the
socialist revolution would be achieved by the CCP at some future time, this
application of Marxism–Leninism to China resulted in China having had 2,000
years of feudalism and only 40 years of capitalism. Hence, by European Marxist
standards, conclude Fairbank and Goldman, China was peculiarly out of shape.

The strategy of Mao depended essentially on geographical advantages.

Bhattacharyya points out that unlike the situation in Russia in 1917, the insurgent
regions in China were necessarily the most backward economically, the least
integrated into the market economy and the most tenuously controlled by the
central government. These were the regions most suitable for the existence of a
dissident movement. This was a definite departure from the classical Marxist
theory, which assigned the leading role in the revolution to the most developed
zones, where there were modern industry and an industrial proletariat.

Han Suyin in her account wrote that from the very start Mao fused the Party and
the Red Army into a twin synthesis, but with the party in ideological control. In
fact they were so indissolubly linked that throughout the next decades he would
never treat them as separate. This essential component of his thinking, refusing
the dichotomy which prevails everywhere else, had the most important effect.

In a nutshell, it was inevitably the peasantry, rather than the working class, which
was called on to make the main effort. Armed struggle required the mobilization
of the peasant masses; but this did not mean that the revolution would be no
more than a product of the mass movement. It was by an external process i.e.,
through outside factors that the revolutionary elements or the bearers of a new
ideology originating with other social classes, came to set the peasants in motion.
The Maoist strategy also implied a prolonged struggle. Unlike Paris during the
Commune of 1871, Petrograd in 1917 or Shanghai in 1927, there was no question
of seizing power in a few days or hours and no prospect of decisive victory or
defeat. The struggle would be a protracted one lasting for many years. These
were the main principles of the Maoist strategy as advocated by Mao and Chu
Teh which neither the CC of the CCP nor the Comintern really approved of.