The following is a series of five articles, originally published in the Morning Star, and written by Jenny Clegg to introduce her recently published book, ‘Storming the Heavens: Peasants and Revolution in China, 1925-1949 Viewed Through a Marxist Lens’.
Introducing the key themes of the book, which began life as her PhD thesis some decades previously, Jenny notes that: “The first step was to establish the condition of the peasants and the nature of their exploitation so as to identify their revolutionary character. This meant challenging the Western misconception of China as a society of owner-cultivators, farming small parcels of land. In the absence of the large landed estates of European feudalism, it was assumed that traditional China had a peculiar Oriental or Asiatic structure under a centralised bureaucratic state.
“Chinese Marxists, Chen Boda and Chen Hanseng, however, both put the landlord system at the centre as the determining factor in China’s economic stagnation and the peasants’ acute impoverishment. Whilst Chen Hanseng’s focus was on the fusion of the political and economic power of the landlords at the base of society, highlighting the grassroots nature of a revolutionary transformation, Chen Boda’s analysis of monopoly rent highlighted the concentration of land in the hands of a minority, the landlords and rich peasants, with the increasing dispossession and land hunger of the majority of rural households. In so doing, he identified the main force for revolution as the poor and middle peasant majority.”
She goes on to argue that the key question was therefore, given the small size of China’s working class, how was the Communist Party of China (CPC), as a proletarian party, able to lead the revolution?
Here she sees her argument as confronting the misconceptions of both Stalin and Trotsky who interpreted China’s peasant struggle along the lines of the Russian and European model where a rural bourgeoisie and proletariat emerged to challenge feudal power, when rather, as shown by Chen Boda, it was land hunger — subsistence — that drove the rural majority to revolution.
In her second article, Jenny tackles the inter-related questions of was China feudal and what made the peasants revolutionary.
Having noted the work of contemporary Western scholars such as RH Tawney, who saw a way out through reforms, she argues:
“To support the argument of revolution over reform, it was first necessary to establish the centrality of the landlord-peasant relationship with feudal relations as the major constraint of growth. This would then demonstrate the centrality of the peasant movement as the main force in China’s democratic revolution, in a grassroots transformation of Chinese society through radical land reform to completely eradicate feudal relations.
“The problem of the reform approach lies in the failure to identity those power structures and interests hostile to its agenda for change and at the same time to find allies capable of driving reforms forward.”
Jenny further tackles the twin issues of why was capitalism unable to develop in China as it had in Europe and why did peasant rebellions tend to end in failure:
“The answer lies in the way Chinese feudalism was shaped by Asiatic characteristics: while landlords served as mediators between the centralised bureaucratic state and the patriarchal villages, these features served equally to maintain their privileged position from above and below…
“In China then, unlike Europe, where commerce confronted landed interests from the cities, economic power accumulated in the hands of a trinity of urban-based landlord-merchant-officials and the development of market relations instead of releasing peasant independence led to increasing rural impoverishment. A parasitic relationship between town and country suffocated the ‘sprouts of capitalism’ ensnaring a potentially entrepreneurial rich peasantry in feudal relations.
“Imperialism accelerated commercialisation but this only strengthened the landlord economy, while in turn the imperialist powers, to secure the drain of the surplus to the world capitalist core, depended on the landlords both to extract the surplus by extra-economic means and to control the countryside.”
Through trial and error, she concludes, “the CPC came to grasp [that] the forces of revolutionary change were not a rising petty bourgeoise but the impoverished mass of poor and middle peasants, more interested in the confiscation of landlords’ land to meet their needs than in the preservation of private property.”
In her third article, Jenny looks at debates on the role of peasants in revolution starting with Russian revolutionary leader VI Lenin.
She explains that Lenin saw the peasants, as a whole, as a force against landlordism but with the bourgeoisie and proletariat struggling for leadership of the movement. The role of the vanguard proletarian party was then to mobilise the poor peasants so as to pave the way to socialism. For the neo-narodniks on the other hand it was the traditional village organisation, the mir, that provided the basis for a Russian-style socialism, and continues:
“In China, the question of how to build a Communist Party in a country predominantly of peasants with a weak working-class base, is clearly a challenging one to answer. Was Mao just a peasant leader, and the CPC a populist party which rode to power on a wave of peasant unrest, as many in the West, both Sinologists and Marxists, have argued?”
On the contrary: “Mao, following Lenin, was to argue in his early ‘Analysis of Classes in Chinese Society’ (1926) that the peasants were the largest ally of the proletariat. Observing the peasants organising in Hunan just months later, he was the first to grasp the significance of peasant power: although at first their demands for rent reductions were not that radical, he saw, as they paraded the landlords up and down in dunces’ caps, a bold challenge to the authority of landlord power.”
The fourth article looks at the question of the united front and again argues that neither Stalin nor Trotsky fully appreciated the complexities of the concrete situation in China, where a key issue concerned the relationship between the peasant and national movements.
The revolution in 1927 had failed because the nationalist and peasant movements pulled in different directions:
“While the vacillations of the national bourgeoisie were in part influenced by the imperialists’ strategies of aggression or co-option, peasant behaviours also had their effect. The persistence of peasant traditions was a condition of China’s stagnation under feudalism. Mao’s understanding of this was key in finding ways to resolve the contradictions between the two parts of the revolution.”
In her final article, Jenny considers what relevance this all has to our situation today and argues:
“In Britain, traditional parliamentary politics is collapsing, with millions breaking from the confines of social democracy, rejecting its compromises and incompetence. Given the hypocrisy and betrayals of its figureheads, the demand is for a leadership answerable to the working people. Meanwhile, the strength and breadth of the pro-Palestine movement has laid a wider basis for internationalism and anti-imperialism.”
But: “It is not enough to indicate the aim of struggle with slogans calling the masses to action — political activity has to be situated in the context of action. Here the experiences of Mao and the CPC may offer insights beyond the particular…
“As an imperialist power, our consciousness in Britain of the balance of world power is dulled — the assumption is that the external conditions follow what happens here. But now the rise of China and the Global South have become the international game changer.
“Day to day, facing increasing reaction, we confront ever-sharper challenges. Understanding the historical trend towards socialism as a long and uneven process gives a sense of direction; seeing that contradictions will not to be resolved quickly can also be a reality check against making impossible demands, looking instead to what can be gained in any particular set of circumstance…
“The relevance of the Chinese revolution today lies in showing that Marxism, applied in concrete conditions, can work.”
Aptly described by Morning Star editor Ben Chacko as “a masterful analysis that puts class struggle back at the heart of our understanding of China’s revolution,” Storming the Heavens: Peasants and Revolution in China, 1925-1949 Viewed Through a Marxist Lens can be ordered from the publishers, Manifesto Press.
A recording of the book launch, organised by Friends of Socialist China and held at the Marx Memorial Library in London on February 14, is embedded below, and can also be viewed on YouTube.
Storming the Heavens: introducing China’s peasant revolution
February 6 (Morning Star) – Revolutions, said Marx, project themselves towards the future: seeing China’s rise today we might certainly consider how its revolutionary years not only changed the country but also changed the world.
Storming the Heavens brings into focus the central role of peasant mass power in China’s revolutionary transformation. Based on research for a PhD carried out back in the 1980s, the work remains relevant not least as ideas of mobilising the masses for change rise up today’s political agenda.
China in the 1980s was undergoing dramatic change with the break up of the communes: instead individual farmers were being encouraged to “get rich.” Had the Communist Party of China (CPC) all along overestimated the revolutionary potential in the countryside? A re-examination of the nature of the peasant movement pre-1949 seemed called for.
The research was literature-based, examining western sinology on pre-revolutionary China; the much overlooked analyses of Chinese Marxists, Chen Boda and Chen Hanseng; debates on the peasants, especially Lenin versus the neo-Narodnik Chayanov, on the “middle peasant” question; and the communist literature — Stalin, Trotsky, Mao, Zhou Enlai and Liu Shaoqi.
Case studies by non-Marxist Western scholars, notwithstanding their theoretical limitations, opened the door to the peasant world: Thaxton’s Taihang peasants who lived in the mountains in “violent non-conformity;” Perry’s peasants trapped in a cycle of banditry and protectionism in the inhospitable borderlands of east and central China; and Marks’s study of Peng Pai, a revolutionary student who ended up on a mountain top leading a so-called soviet, drawing thousands of cult followers. Above all it was Isabel and David Crook’s Ten Mile Inn and William Hinton’s Fanshen, case studies of village land reform in the 1940s, that were the most revealing of CPC-peasant relations, enabling deeper overall analysis.
Was China feudal? What made the peasants revolutionaries?
The first step was to establish the condition of the peasants and the nature of their exploitation so as to identify their revolutionary character. This meant challenging the Western misconception of China as a society of owner-cultivators, farming small parcels of land. In the absence of the large landed estates of European feudalism, it was assumed that traditional China had a peculiar Oriental or Asiatic structure under a centralised bureaucratic state.
Chinese Marxists, Chen Boda and Chen Hanseng, however, both put the landlord system at the centre as the determining factor in China’s economic stagnation and the peasants’ acute impoverishment. Whilst Chen Hanseng’s focus was on the fusion of the political and economic power of the landlords at the base of society, highlighting the grassroots nature of a revolutionary transformation, Chen Boda’s analysis of monopoly rent highlighted the concentration of land in the hands of a minority, the landlords and rich peasants, with the increasing dispossession and land hunger of the majority of rural households. In so doing, he identified the main force for revolution as the poor and middle peasant majority.
Ny bringing these analyses in to play, the argument established the case for revolution over Western arguments for reform, that is, the urgent need for revolutionary transformation of village power through land reform taking peasant mass activism as the main force.
The question of proletarian leadership
The question was then, given the small size of China’s working class, how was the CPC, as a proletarian party, able to lead the revolution? Was Mao just a populist, his party captured by the peasants?
Here the argument confronts the misconceptions of both Stalin and Trotsky who interpreted China’s peasant struggle along the lines of the Russian and European model where a rural bourgeoisie and proletariat emerged to challenge feudal power, when rather, as shown by Chen Boda, it was land hunger — subsistence — that drove the rural majority to revolution.
Mao’s Analysis of the Classes in the Countryside (1933) serves as the standout work in the sinification of Marxism. Applying Marxist conceptual tools to identify the different ways in which rural people got rich — through feudal and capitalist exploitation but also the application of their own labour — it underpinned a strategy which focused on the struggle on feudal relations, neutralising the rich peasants given their dual characteristics as semi-feudal and semi capitalist, whilst uniting the poor, too weak on their own, with the middle peasants.
The mass line then constituted not a populist but a class line — an exercise in proletarian leadership which managed the contradictions among the peasants in recognition of their differing conditions of production.
This enabled the peasants to maintain their own leadership over rural transformation even as the landlords endeavoured the use those divisions to cause the peasant movement to degeneration from within.
Problems within the party — commandism and adventurism, bureaucratism and spontaneism — similarly arose when peasants were disunited.
Mao’s methods of rural work, party rectification and mass organisation were to evolve over time, bringing party and peasant together in a dynamic relationship of mutual learning as the revolution followed its zig-zag course.
The Peasant Movement and the National Movement
In 1927, mass risings of workers and peasants had swept across China — strikes, protests, land seizures — only to be brutally crushed as Chiang Kai-shek turned against the revolution. Trotsky blamed Stalin for compromising with the national bourgeoisie; Stalin blamed the CPC leader, Chen Duxiu, similarly. The fact was that the peasant and the national movement had ended up pulling in different directions.
Understanding why this first revolution failed goes a long way to understanding the reasons for the CPC’s success in 1949 in handling the contradictions between the agrarian and the national movements. Neither one could succeed without the other: the question was, with each struggle developing according to its own conditions, how did the two movements interact?
Bringing a new perspective to the Stalin-Trotsky controversy over the role of the national bourgeoisie, Mao saw them as vacillating, at one time under the influence of foreign capitalism; at other times anti-imperialist and open to accepting CPC leadership. A major factor affecting these vacillations in fact lay in the dynamics of rural struggle.
Situating the agrarian revolution in the context of the national situation, Mao identified rightist tendencies influenced by the national bourgeoise which favoured the better-off peasants supplying the towns whilst failing to mobilise the poor peasants, and leftist tendencies which went to extremes when the alliance with the national bourgeoisie broke down, failing to unite the poor with the middle peasants.
As a party of the working class, in whose interests it was to mobilise the poor peasants, the CPC sought to bridge town and countryside in a programme of land reform that, not aiming for equal land holdings, protected the interests of surplus-producing households at the same time addressing the subsistence needs of the poor peasants.
By stabilising urban supplies, the CPC were able to bring the national bourgeoisie on board whilst still keeping the poor peasants engaged in mutual aid teams with the middle peasants, thereby setting China on a new course of independent development paving the way beyond towards socialism.
Was China feudal? What made the Chinese peasants revolutionary?
February 10 (Morning Star) – Writing in the early 1930s, the social historian RH Tawney graphically described the plight of the Chinese peasant as standing up to his neck in water such that even a ripple would drown him.
But why was this so? According to Tawney, China was not a feudal society since there were no large-sized manorial holdings — the problem of impoverishment then was not landlord exploitation.
Instead he saw China as a society of small-scale owner cultivators whose age-old methods failed to compete against market forces.
Leaving aside China’s forcible opening to imperialist exploitation through the opium wars, Tawney maintained the answer for China lay in reforms to help strengthen the small farmers through loans, training in modern agricultural techniques and so on.
Western Sinology for the period has generally followed this reform-orientation: intent on proving the inadequacy of the Marxist and Communist revolutionary approach, claimed to have exaggerated the role of the landlords and the extent of tenancy, they focus instead on the state-village relationship.
Seen through Western eyes, China was considered a peculiar Orientalist or Asiatic system, the debates weighing whether or not its bureaucracy was totalitarian or benevolent. With the commercialisation of the Chinese economy, peasants were considered either as entrepreneurial farm owners or, like Tawney, as traditionalists unable to adapt to the modern market challenge.
To support the argument of revolution over reform, it was first necessary to establish the centrality of the landlord-peasant relationship with feudal relations as the major constraint of growth. This would then demonstrate the centrality of the peasant movement as the main force in China’s democratic revolution, in a grassroots transformation of Chinese society through radical land reform to completely eradicate feudal relations.
The problem of the reform approach lies in the failure to identity those power structures and interests hostile to its agenda for change and at the same time to find allies capable to driving reforms forward, a failure to tackle the informal was well as formal structures of power at grassroots level. Scything my way through the weight of the Western literature, I set about deploying the arguments of the Chinese Marxists of the period, using Chen Boda’s Study of Land Rent (1947) to and Chen Hanseng’s Landlord and Peasant (1936) to reveal the critical role of the landlords in the economic and political structure of Chinese feudalism.
Taking the holdings of landlords and rich peasants together, the Communist Party of China (CPC) maintained that 10 per cent of the population owned approximately 70 to 80 per cent of the land while the remaining 90 per cent held only between 20 to 30 per cent. This laid bare the main agrarian contradiction as between a land monopoly, with the increasing concentration of land ownership in the hands of a few, and the land hunger of the peasants with under-utilised labour, farming land insufficient to their means.
As Chen Boda explained, these monopoly conditions gave rise to exorbitant rents of over 50 per cent of the crop indicating the extraction of surplus through extra economic compulsion.
China’s pattern of stagnating agriculture with farming fragmented in uneconomic plots rather than large landlord estates was the result then of peasant land hunger. As this drove returns on rent above any other form of wealth creation, landlords and rich peasants sought to buy more land to rent out in small parcels so as to squeeze more rent from the peasants rather than invest in production. It was this system that was the major constraint on growth.
Collecting rent in kind allowed landlords to dominate markets and, as Chen Boda found, whether in areas of commercial cash cropping for export or in the barren and isolated regions of the hinterland, owner peasants were losing out. Squeezed by heavy taxes hiked up by the weakening Qing dynasty following defeat in the opium wars and by the militarisation demands of the warlords, these middle peasants were falling into debt, giving up land to the landlords. Calculated as making up 20 to 25 per cent of the population, but owning only 15 per cent of the land, they too stood to gain from land redistribution.
Conditions of stagnation under monopoly rent also saw the assimilation of an emergent rich peasantry into the landlord system, their path to capitalism blocked. China’s feudalism was not simply a matter of landlord-tenant relations, it shaped the entire class structure of agrarian society.
Addressing the question of the political power, Chen Hanseng saw how the weakening state came to rely increasingly on local elites to maintain control, with the fusion of political and economic power at the base of society pointing to the necessity for social transformation through revolution from the grassroots.
But why had Chinese feudalism proved so tenacious over the centuries? Why was capitalism unable to develop as in Europe? Why did peasant rebellions tend to end in failure? The answer lies in the way Chinese feudalism was shaped by Asiatic characteristics: while landlords served as mediators between the centralised bureaucratic state and the patriarchal villages, these features served equally to maintain their privileged position from above and below.
Peasants were kept in place both through the formal structures of the state, with magistrates upholding landlords’ interests in court, and informally through kinship ties and bonds of Confucian benevolent patronage. These connections with both state and village saw the economic and political power of the landlords combine in a particularly flexible way which allowed them to adapt to the development of commerce.
A system of pre-capitalist mortgage allowed landlords to buy land leaving kinship and community relations intact. In this way, the peasants were never fully dispossessed but rather remained tied to the land while the landlords grew at the expense of both peasant and state.
In China then, unlike Europe, where commerce confronted landed interests from the cities, economic power accumulated in the hands of a trinity of urban-based landlord-merchant-officials and the development of market relations instead of releasing peasant independence led to increasing rural impoverishment. A parasitic relationship between town and country suffocated the “sprouts of capitalism” ensnaring a potentially entrepreneurial rich peasantry in feudal relations.
Imperialism accelerated commercialisation but this only strengthened the landlord economy, while in turn the imperialist powers, to secure the drain of the surplus to the world capitalist core, depended on the landlords both to extract the surplus by extra-economic means and to control the countryside.
But as foreign and domestic exploitation combined to deepen the agrarian crisis, the whole framework of Confucian legitimacy which held the system together began to fall apart. With benevolent patronage exposed as no more than a cover for hyper-exploitation, landlord-peasant bonds began to crumble, unleashing the peasants’ potential for spontaneous rebellion.
China’s revolution was not, however, to unfold according to the patterns of the European and Russian overthrow of feudalism. Through trial and error, the CPC came to grasp the forces of revolutionary change were not a rising petty bourgeoise but the impoverished mass of poor and middle peasants, more interested in the confiscation of landlords’ land to meet their needs than in the preservation of private property.
Mao, the peasants and the question of proletarian leadership
February 12 (Morning Star) – Debates on the role of peasants in revolution can be traced back to the disagreements between Lenin and the populist neonarodniks. The question was whether the “middle peasants” were a class in disintegration, differentiating into a rural bourgeoisie and proletariat or a revolutionary force in their own right opposing the predations of both tsarism and capitalism.
Lenin saw the peasants as a whole as a force against landlordism but with the bourgeoisie and proletariat struggling for leadership of the movement. The role of the vanguard proletarian party was then to mobilise the poor peasants so as to pave the way to socialism. For the neonarodniks on the other hand it was the traditional village organisation, the mir, that provided the basis for a Russian-style socialism.
In China, the question of how to build a Communist Party in a country predominantly of peasants with a weak working-class base, is clearly a challenging one to answer. Was Mao just a peasant leader, and the CPC a populist party which rode to power on a wave of peasant unrest, as many in the West, both Sinologists and Marxists, have argued? Did the CPC impose its own ideas, methods and personnel from the outside into the peasants’ struggles? How were traditional rural protests transformed into modern revolution and peasant consciousness raised?
From the view of the urban-based nationalists and communists in the 1920s, the peasants were “clodhoppers” — a passive bastion of the Confucian state but also prone to wild excesses as in the Boxer Rebellion of 1899-1901. But Mao, following Lenin, was to argue in his early Analysis of Classes in Chinese Society (1926) that the peasants were the largest ally of the proletariat.
Observing the peasants organising in Hunan just months later, he was the first to grasp the significance of peasant power: although at first their demands for rent reductions were not that radical, he saw, as they paraded the landlords up and down in dunces’ caps, a bold challenge to the authority of landlord power.
China had a long history of peasant rebellions which tended to end in failure. The Taiping Rebellion (1850-64) for example spread over 17 provinces, but lacking a coherent programme beyond general calls for equal distribution of wealth, collapsed through internal disunity and leadership betrayal. Left to their own devices, peasant-based politics was bound to fail again: a different kind of leadership was needed.
When, after their 1927 defeat, the CPC retreated to the mountains in the south, the Comintern advised that to exercise proletarian leadership over the peasant movement, it should organise poor peasant leagues and co-ordinate simultaneous uprisings in the cities and the surrounding countryside. But this again failed disastrously.
Mao, struggling against workerist tendencies in the CPC, maintained that despite the 1927 defeat, the revolution was actually continuing independently of the workers’ movement, in the ongoing peasant struggles against the landlords for land. Grasping the key elements of peasant power and a Red Army, he found the way out of defeat through a strategy of protracted people’s war, with the countryside surrounding the cities bit by bit.
However, the fact was that the objective contradiction between landlord and peasant was not expressed directly in class struggle. The implementation of land reform was complicated on the one hand by the influence of traditional Confucian benevolence with landlord patronage embedded in kinship hierarchies and on the other by divisions among the peasants.
Peasant competition in conditions of scarcity under the overall constraints of monopoly rent, created divisions with some communities restricting access to land, adopting strategies of closure against outsiders, leading others to resort to predatory banditry for survival. Peasant protest was also deeply influenced by traditions of egalitarianism: the Taiping believed that “the land is for all to till, the food for all to eat, the clothes for all to wear, and money for all to spend” — their land system prescribed each household to keep five chickens and two mulberry trees.
As the CPC experimented with different systems of land reform, Mao began to reflect on his observations of village politics. In a rural upsurge, he noted, tendencies were unleashed to target not just the landlords but all surplus lands, causing the middle peasants to waver whilst the rich peasants were driven to the landlords’ side. These divisions left the poor peasants isolated as struggles ebbed, and the village landlords sought to restore their position using the influence of kinship ties and patronage.
Mao drew two conclusions from this: that the strength of the poor peasants lay not in their separate organisation — the poor peasant leagues — but in their ability to unite with the middle peasants who stood to gain from the redistribution of feudal holdings; and second, that the rich peasants had dual characteristics — although they had interests in using their capital to develop production, unlike the Russian kulak class, they also sought to gain in part from feudal exploitation.
Mao’s 1933 work How to Differentiate the Classes in the Rural Areas provides a systematic analysis of rural classes according to sources of wealth and conditions of production and livelihood. Integrating Marxist principles with China’s specific realities, it sets out clearly the different ways in which rural classes got rich: from own labour, from the implementation of means of production, that is capitalist exploitation, and from feudal forms of exploitation, namely rent and interest on debt.
Transcending simplistic traditional understandings of wealth, this enabled the CPC to exercise proletarian leadership, directing the otherwise chaotic peasant struggles towards feudal targets through the implementation of the mass line. This was not simply a populist unleashing peasant spontaneism — or a general “doing everything the masses want” — but a carefully calibrated method of organising the peasants along class lines. Recognising material differences in their production conditions, it looked to build unity between the poor and middle peasants while neutralising the rich peasants, disentangling them from the feudal system by opening new opportunities to develop their capital in line with the democratic goals of the revolution.
The peasants’ own consciousness-raising was dialectically interconnected with the CPC’s struggle to overcome its own organisational limitations through party rectification. Operating amid complex personalised village politics, the CPC was susceptible to landlord infiltration, but there were also tendencies to reproduce patterns of elitism and bureaucratism within its ranks, a danger inherent in forming a vanguard.
Some leaders advocated the study of Marxist theory to strengthen revolutionary commitment, but Mao was to advocate novel methods of party-building, evaluating practice through criticism and self-criticism among cadres while also practicing an “open door” policy. By running party rectification in parallel with village mass meetings to decide the redistribution of village land, party and peasant learned together in the process of revolution.
In this way, where past peasant rebellions had failed through disunity and leadership degeneration, the CPC sought to tackle the resilience of feudal power through handling the contradictions among the peasants. Neither populist nor dogmatically Leninist, the CPC, working closely with the peasants to apply the class line, was able to create a strong grassroots mass democratic movement to oust and replace landlord power, opening new ways for the development of the village economy.
Building class unity: trial and error in China’s communist revolution
February 13 (Morning Star) – Preoccupied with the Stalin-Trotsky controversy over the KMT-CPC United Front and the role of the national bourgeoisie, Western Marxists have rather neglected consideration of the peasants.
In this, the real reason for the CPC’s success has been obscured, namely its ability to bridge the contradictions between town and countryside by grasping the dynamics of class interactions between the national and peasant movements.
Stalin, advocating the United Front, considered the national bourgeoisie to constitute a revolutionary force against imperialism; Trotsky claimed they were essentially agents of foreign capital. However, as Mao saw it, they in fact vacillated between the two positions — anti-imperialist but also liable to capitulation to reaction.
Imperialist subordination of China produced a pattern of twisted growth, with a weak and dependent national capitalist class. Reliant on loans from foreign banks, Chinese businesses at the same time not only lacked the capacity to compete in international markets but also faced restricted growth in domestic markets given the increasing impoverishment of the peasants.
Urban businesses then had an interest in land reform to expand internal demand and to secure the supply of raw materials. However, these domestic capitalists lack the strength to pursue reforms necessary for their own advancement, nor was there a basis for a rural reform alliance given the rich peasants remained partially rooted in feudal exploitation.
Meanwhile supply lines to the towns and cities were vulnerable as the rural masses on the margins of subsistence would frequently “block the roads” against the transport of grain from the villages.
For the modern urban reformers, such behaviours were down to peasant “backwardness.” Worse yet, in a rural upsurge, peasants would go to extremes, confiscating all private property — “gathering all oxen, manure, ploughs and pigs for public use.”
This caused the national bourgeoisie, many of whom retained feudal properties alongside their urban businesses, to take fright. The 1927 revolution fell apart because the nationalist and peasant movements pulled in different directions.
While the vacillations of the national bourgeoisie were in part influenced by the imperialists’ strategies of aggression or co-option, peasant behaviours also had their effect.
The persistence of peasant traditions was a condition of China’s stagnation under feudalism. Mao’s understanding of this was key in finding ways to resolve the contradictions between the two parts of the revolution.
Critical of attitudes of urban disdain within the party which blamed peasant backwardness for the difficulties of rural work, Mao appreciated peasant protectionism as not so much an anti-urban retreat into rural isolation but rather a reaction against the parasitic drain of the towns on the countryside.
At the same time, he rejected “absolute egalitarianism” which drove not only the national bourgeoise but also the intermediate class of rich and well to do middle peasants to the side of the landlords and the big bourgeoisie.
While the peasants had their own beliefs and methods of protest, town and countryside were not entirely separate worlds: what complicated matters was that differing approaches in land policy impacted on the different sections of the peasants in different ways.
Mao was to identify the problems as lying in mistaken policies of the party in the shifting context of the national situation: the tendency towards Rightism — giving too much leeway to capitalist interests — when in alliance with the national bourgeoisie, and the tendency towards Leftism — directing the struggle against capitalism as well as feudalism and imperialism — when relations broke down.
In their in-depth village studies of land reform in 1946/7, the Crooks and William Hinton were to reveal the ways in which these errors were reproduced in the party’s rural work.
Under the United Front, the CPC had moderated land policies to consolidate a broad class unity against Japanese aggression. This had given rise to a Rightist “middle peasant line” emphasising improvements in market conditions for the better-off surplus-producing households only to cause frustration amongst those too poor to take advantage of these limited reforms. This set the stage for a peasant backlash once the United Front broke down.
As CPC policy returned to radical land confiscations to completely eradicate feudal property, a peasant upsurge saw attacks on other forms of wealth — acts of extremism compounded by a Leftist egalitarian “poor peasant line” pursued under the slogan “to each man, land, a house and a horse” which extended confiscation to wealthier middle peasants to benefit the poor.
To correct Rightist errors, the CPC sought to mobilise the poor together with the middle peasants from the start while Leftist errors were to be contained by including middle peasants in the process of land confiscation and redistribution.
Rather than completely equalising households, CPC reforms were to result in an uneven distribution in landholdings, providing a certain minimum subsistence guarantee for poor peasants while also lifting middle peasants from the margins of subsistence to producing a surplus even though they received less land than the poor.
Eradicating the feudal land monopoly, CPC village programmes transformed the use of surplus from land speculation and extravagance towards productive investment.
Catering to both poor and middle peasant interests, while encouraging the rich peasants to invest in production, separating them from the landlords, the CPC set out a new basis for town and countryside exchange.
Reforms unleashed production by the rich and better-off middle peasants, however this was done without benefiting capitalism more than was necessary. Poor peasants were kept engaged in rural economic development, united with middle peasant in mutual aid teams sharing labour and tools.
This unity of the majority ensured peasant leadership over the direction of rural transformation avoiding the dangers of elite revival, the downfall of previous rural rebellions.
The policies of the nationalist reformers based on urban business interests had proven inadequate in meeting the subsistence needs of the impoverished rural population. Efforts to boost surplus-producing households to supply industry only exacerbated contradictions among the peasants playing into the hands of the traditional rural elites.
Unable to establish stability in the countryside, the national bourgeoisie vacillated between reform to open up the domestic market and reliance on local landlords to maintain social order in the villages in the face of their failures.
It was only the CPC that, acting in the interests of the working class in mobilising the poor peasants, was able to bring the national and agrarian movements together.
Key here was the recognition of how different urban classes, favouring different land reform policies and approaches, exerted an influence of peasant consciousness and behaviour and vice versa.
As the CPC plotted out a sequenced approach, taking down adversaries one by one while at each stage preparing the ground for the next, it co-ordinated the two movements together.
Moderating land reform policies in the face of Japan’s expanded aggression so as to encourage landlords to support the war economy, it kept the poor and middle peasants mobilised together to prepare for the elimination of landlordism once Japan had been defeated.
Through measures addressing their needs for survival at least in part, while offering further hope for the future, the CPC was able to influence the poor peasants, containing rural extremes in the anti-feudal struggle. In this way, and by further ensuring the flow of supplies to the towns and cities, the CPC gained the confidence of the national bourgeoisie, containing their vacillations.
Mobilising the broad peasant classes united with the working class in alliance with the national bourgeoisie, the CPC came to lead a force capable of defeating both imperialism and feudalism, bringing the revolution to victory.
Opening up new forms of interchange between the cities and the countryside, the revolution was to realise its overall democratic goals of independence, unlocking new directions for development to pave the way for a socialist future.
China’s revolution: What relevance today?
February 19 (Morning Star) – WITH China on course to become the world’s most advanced major power in the next decade or two, understanding the roots of its transformation is obviously a necessity.
China’s revolutionary past is deeply imprinted into its present with its socialist constitution identifying the special characteristics of its primary stage — the leading role of the Communist Party, the alliance of the workers with the peasants, and the empowering of all the people contributing to building socialism. This includes the private entrepreneurs, who historically supported the revolution, and today continue to develop the economy, creating jobs in the cities for millions of rural migrants.
With these ”Chinese characteristics,” the CPC is clear theirs is not to be taken as a model — early on it followed the Russian path too closely, at great cost. Given the gap of time and such differing conditions, are there any universals in the particular experience from which wider lessons might be drawn?
Questions of democracy
In Britain, traditional parliamentary politics is collapsing, with millions breaking from the confines of social democracy, rejecting its compromises and incompetence. Given the hypocrisy and betrayals of its figureheads, the demand is for a leadership answerable to the working people. Meanwhile, the strength and breadth of the pro-Palestine movement has laid a wider basis for internationalism and anti-imperialism. Some now look to other mass struggles in the global South — the chaotic youth movements seen in Bangladesh, Nepal and Tanzania, and also Ibrahim Traore’s channelling of Sankara’s peasant-centred self-reliance and anti-imperialism in Burkina Faso.
The utopian left, however, tends to suffer an infatuation with spontaneism. It is not enough to indicate the aim of struggle with slogans calling the masses to action — political activity has to be situated in the context of action. Here the experiences of Mao and the CPC may offer insights beyond the particular.
Like Lenin, Mao saw political action taking place amidst complex conditions with contradictory struggles engaging a cast of political actors reflecting varied, unevenly unfolding interests. And like Lenin, situating the CPC as a conscious vanguard within these popular struggles — the spontaneous demonstrations, the strikes, the village and township protests — he responded flexibly to these diverse and contradictory currents, developing strategies over time to pull these together based on a working-class perspective.
The Chinese experience shows how at the point of interaction between the people and the leadership, democracy is created over time beyond formal structures. Nor is it just about unleashing a populist upsurge or simply a laissez-faire “doing everything the masses wants.” Opinions fluctuated between extremism and passivism as the influence of different sections of the people came to the fore at different times. Mao, it should be said, was adept at seizing the opportunity in a rising tide, “striking while the iron is hot,” but he was equally capable of working against the grain of spontaneism when swings of opinion began to undermine the overall popular movement.
Here the CPC’s responses were based on a distinctive approach to democracy, seeking to resolve the contradictions among the people. This was done through a policy programme which catered at least in part to the differing material interests underlying the varying political tendencies.
“Organising the workers” is not so simple: it is about engaging with different viewpoints, binding varying interests which share an underlying common goal together in such a way as to capture the popular will at any one time. But, as Ben Chacko pointed out in his Morning Star review of Storming the Heavens, the left in Britain has repeatedly failed to build a winning alliance that unites a majority of working people, taking into account their differences in income and assets.
Systems thinking
The challenge faces two interconnected ways — building unity among those seeking change, and targeting their opponents precisely as these seek to pry the unity apart. This calls for strategising — what Chinese Marxists term “systems thinking” namely, the dialectical method of the “splitting of a single organic whole and the cognition of its contradictory parts.”
Mao’s On Contradiction is the example — analysing out of a complex political situation, the whole series of conflicts around imperialism, feudalism and capitalism, not just as a collection of campaigns and struggles, but as an interconnected whole so as to find the key links.
Systems thinking enabled the CPC to take a long-term view, prioritising targets and sequencing struggles to take down adversaries one after another — the Japanese aggressors, then the bigger bureaucrat and compradore capitalists and landlords, then, with the national bourgeoisie left isolated, the takeover of private enterprise in the peaceful transition to socialism in 1956.
At each stage, it was necessary to work out how to move on the next, something the CPC accomplished by aligning classes in such a way as to ensure the continuing revolution. This sequencing stands out in contrast with the Trotskyist “all or nothing” permanent revolution which reduces the particularity of complex political processes to an abstract capital v labour conflict.
Imperialism, anti-imperialism and Chinese Marxism
Unfolding over several decades, the Chinese experience shows perhaps more clearly than that of the Bolsheviks, how the uneven development of both imperialism and anti-imperialism can impact on objective and subjective class conditions.
The CPC found its bearings amid its domestic complexities as part of the longer-term world proletarian revolution opened by the Russian Revolution in which the Chinese revolution served as a stage in the transition between semi-colonialism and semi-feudalism and socialism. Imperialism had its opposite impact: as Mao observed: when the imperialist powers used political, cultural and economic means of domination, ruling elites in oppressed nations would compromise, but when coercion and aggression were applied, this created opportunities to unite the various classes around national goals.
As an imperialist power, our consciousness in Britain of the balance of world power is dulled — the assumption is that the external conditions follow what happens here. But now the rise of China and the global South have become the international game changer.
Day to day, facing increasing reaction, we confront ever-sharper challenges. Understanding the historical trend towards socialism as a long and uneven process gives a sense of direction; seeing that contradictions will not to be resolved quickly can also be a reality check against making impossible demands, looking instead to what can be gained in any particular set of circumstance.
As Western Marxism comes under criticism from Domenico Losurdo and others as too dismissive of the concrete struggles of the people in socialist countries, Storming the Heavens helps to reveal the key points of Chinese Marxism as it developed from the revolutionary struggle of the Chinese people.
These are as follows: seeking legitimacy in resolving people’s problems and securing their livelihoods; applying dialectical and historical materialism; emphasising the long term, starting from basic reality; systems thinking — sequencing and setting priorities; learning from practice; balancing different interests among working people while focusing on their shared aspirations for a better life.
The relevance of the Chinese revolution today lies in showing that Marxism, applied in concrete conditions, can work.
