Strategy of Protest and Revolution 5
Mao Zedong & The Chinese Communist Revolution, 1921-45
Part V. The 2nd Sino-Japanese War & Rectification (1937-45)
Hi, and welcome to Strategy Stuff. This is the 5th entry in ‘The Strategy of Protest and Revolution’, where we examine how historical revolutionary and protest movements achieved success. In this series, we focus on 3 key questions:
- How did activists turn public discontent into a coordinated movement?
- What did successful movements do to achieve their goals? And
- How have successful movement strategies changed over time?
In this 6-part entry, we’ll explore the revolutionary history of the Chinese Communist Party or CCP from 1921 to 45, with a particular focus on the experiences of its eventual leader, Mao Zedong. Here in Part V, we’ll analyze the Party’s actions during the 2nd Sino-Japanese War, including Liu Shaoqi’s ‘3 Magic Weapons’ strategy, the Hundred Regiments Offensive, and finally, Mao’s Rectification Campaign.
12. 1937-1939: The 2nd Sino-Japanese War
The CCP’s great ‘Window of Opportunity’ finally arrived in July 1937, when Japan invaded China again in what would become the 2nd Sino-Japanese War. Within months, regular KMT and warlord forces were swept out of the North China Plain, leaving a massive political vacuum that the conquering Japanese did not have the manpower to fill outside of the major cities. Leadership of the vast North Chinese countryside – and its 150 million people – was therefore up for grabs.
The Party naturally sought to take advantage of this development, but its initial decisionmaking revealed just how disorganized it had become since Jiangxi. Everyone agreed that the Communists ought to do 2 things: First, expand, and Second, contribute to the defense of China; but there was significant debate over how much effort should be devoted to each. Rather than coming to an agreement, however, many CCP leaders simply decided to implement their preferred policy measure unilaterally without consulting leadership. To make matters worse, thanks to the return of Soviet influence since the Xi’an Incident, many of them had relapsed back into the bookishness and ideological control that had caused the Party such grief in its early years!
Broadly speaking, the CCP had 3 strategic options. The first one was the familiar ‘guerrillaism’, which was the path favored by Mao. Here, the Party would prioritize its expansion above all else, dispersing its forces throughout the North Chinese villages in an attempt to ally with and eventually control them. Fighting Japan would almost be an afterthought under this plan, which fit in with the quiet but tense anarchy that characterized much of the Chinese countryside for large parts of the War, but went against the nationalistic instincts of almost every CCP activist.
The second option was active yet independent resistance to Japan, which was the strategy the CCP’s generals preferred. This would largely take the form of what Mao would later term ‘Mobile Warfare’, in which regular Red Army units would mass, gain tactical advantage through maneuver or ambush, strike and then evacuate before the Japanese could retaliate. The appeal of this approach was greatly enhanced by a significant Communist victory gained a few weeks into the War, though opportunities for similar success faded as the Japanese learned how to counter these attacks.
The third option was close cooperation with the KMT, which was what the Soviets wanted. This became semi-official Party strategy in late 1937, when most of the Soviet-trained ’28 Bolsheviks’, including their de facto leader Wang Ming, finally arrived at the CCP’s Shaanxi base to take over leadership of the Party. Wang’s strategy called for Red Army units to deploy as Chiang Kai-Shek requested, which by early 1938 meant guarding the flanks to the wartime capital of Wuhan. Such static defense of territory – which Mao would deem part of ‘positional warfare’ – was bound to inflict horrific casualties on the severely-outgunned Chinese, but for Wang, such sacrifices were needed to raise the CCP’s profile amongst the nationalistic public and advance the political side of his strategy, which was: to fully institutionalize the 2nd United Front by pressuring Chiang to hand power over to a representative ‘National Assembly’ that would include all the major factions of China. In this way, the still-miniscule CCP would leap into national relevance overnight.
To Mao, Wang’s strategy was the very definition of bookishness, in which the Party would bleed itself dry simply to demonstrate that it was a ‘good’ Communist and/or Chinese nationalist. And Mao knew exactly where these ideas were coming from: just before Wang arrived, Mao urged fellow Party leaders not to blindly follow the KMT simply out of nationalistic solidarity, warning that Chiang would exploit such naivete to undermine the CCP. Given that it was actually the Comintern that was demanding obedience to Chiang, it’s not a stretch to assume that Mao’s true target here was, in fact, the Soviet Union and its practice of exerting indirect control over cadres through ostensibly ‘legitimate’ interpretations of Communism.
Mao’s warning went unheeded: when Wang Ming arrived, he quickly gained the support of key Party leaders, most notably Zhou Enlai. Encouraged by his success, Wang went on to establish his own independent Party base, dividing the CCP in two with Wang in charge of Southern China and KMT relations, while Mao was left with Northern China. However, Wang’s plans soon unraveled, as the War brutally exposed the shallowness of his political and military project. For one, the Japanese advanced too quickly for Wang do much militarily, and Wuhan fell in late 1938 with little Communist input; for another, Chiang Kai-Shek was not someone who would give up power easily, and neither wartime sacrifices nor Zhou Enlai’s talents could make the ‘National Assembly’ a reality. With his strategy discredited, Wang Ming eventually returned to Shaanxi as a much-diminished political figure, though he retained some ideological influence as an authoritative interpreter of Soviet Communism.
By contrast, Mao was doing much better in Northern China. Much of this was due to his excellent choice in regional subordinates, notably his old revolutionary acquaintance Liu Shaoqi, who had been tasked with expanding the CCP in occupied Northern China. A longtime critic of Communist bookishness from Zhou Enlai to Wang Ming, Liu agreed with Mao that focusing on rural expansion would best serve the Party’s interests. Now, it was his job to carry it out.
Surveying the political landscape of rural Northern China, Liu made an astute observation that injected a useful dose of pragmatism into Communist strategy. This was the realization that, despite all the nationalistic propaganda, most local village elites were not looking for someone to lead them against Japan. Instead, amidst the political anarchy of the War, what the landlords actually wanted was a ‘protector’ to defend them against peasant unrest, and they didn’t really care whether the soldiers were Japanese or Chinese. Essentially, the CCP was engaged in a ‘bidding war’ against Japanese forces to provide village security at the lowest possible cost, with most elites willing to switch if the other side made a better offer.
Since changing the traditional system was undoubtedly viewed as a cost by these landlords, that meant that the CCP had very little room to push for any reform. And it was this understanding, more than anything said by the Comintern or the 2nd United Front, that underlay Liu’s exceptionally conciliatory application of Mao’s guerrillaism in rural Northern China, where the CCP initially shelved its ideological mission in favor of maintaining the existing rural status quo.
This did not mean that the rural CCP under Liu was completely passive. In fact, quite the opposite: building on Zhou Enlai’s Jiangxi work in the ‘Land Investigation Drive’, Liu devised a political strategy that, while appearing to change little about rural politics, gradually and subtly displaced the old elite system and paved the way for direct Party rule. The key improvement and advantage of Liu’s approach was that, unlike Zhou’s LID, Liu kept Communist-instigated violence to a minimum, reassuring elites and preventing them from fleeing and collapsing society in the process. After making peace with Chiang Kai-Shek, this was the answer to the Party’s other major strategic dilemma in the aftermath of the Jiangxi failure.
Mao would rephrase Liu’s strategy as the so-called ‘3 Magic Weapons’ of the CCP, which would be the foundation for all subsequent Party attempts at societal control. Unlike a step-by-step strategy, the ‘Weapons’ are developed concurrently, with each Weapon maturing at a different pace and solidifying the Party’s control over its targets in a progressively-organized way.
The First Weapon is the ‘United Front’, in which the CCP caters to the pre-existing interests of key actors in order to form alliances with them. During the opening phase of the 2nd Sino-Japanese War, this meant offering cheap, reliable security to village elites in exchange for their accepting Party rule; but as Liu Shaoqi noted, at this early stage in their relationship, the Party could not simply assume that this was enough for people to support the CCP over the KMT or even Japan. As such, it often sweetened the deal by conceding ideologically to the status quo, not only by dropping demands for social change, but also actively involving the traditional elite in its decisionmaking, and in some cases, even collecting rent on behalf of landlords!
Even as the United Front was being forged, however, the CCP would also work on developing its second Weapon: ‘Armed Struggle’. Here, the Party attempts to deepen the initial connection beyond mere mutual interest, typically by employing Leninist Agitation and social psychology to cultivate a sense of solidarity between the Party and its target. One of the quickest ways to accomplish this is through declaring a ‘state of war’ or some similar emergency, which fosters a ‘siege mentality’ that effectively silences or ‘others’ any potential dissent. Over time, this gives the Party more and more political room to pursue its own agenda at the expense of pre-existing interests.
Of course, the Sino-Japanese War was a very real conflict for Mao and Liu, but even then, they still carefully calibrated their actions to ensure that their guerrilla resistance expanded rather than reduced the Party’s political space. Large-scale military action, for example, would only trigger an unstoppable Japanese counter-attack that would erase all prior work, and so was to be avoided. Instead, village cadres were to engage in local, tit-for-tat raiding, which often made little military impact but crucially, promoted endless cycles of local retaliation and hostility that would rally village opinion behind the CCP. The Communists could then use this newfound loyalty to chip away at previously-untouchable elite interests, such as punishing landlords for quote-unquote ‘collaboration’, adjusting rent and debt in the name of ‘national unity’, or independently organizing the peasants for ‘self-defense’.
The Third and final Magic Weapon is ‘Party Building’, where the CCP constructs and empowers the bureaucracy that will ultimately compel everyone to align with the Party’s interests, as opposed to the previous two Weapons where it was the Party who aligned with pre-existing interests. The methods used to achieve this were similar to Zhou Enlai’s Land Investigation Drive as described in Chapter 10, though with national defense rather than land redistribution as the primary motivator. Unlike the LID, however, the Party’s previous work on the ‘United Front’ and ‘Armed Struggle’ would have ideally assimilated or neutralized most of the elite opposition by this point, thereby eliminating the need for destabilizing violence. Regardless, the landlords were still doomed: while the wartime CCP might have justified the formation of the Party-Government on defense grounds, it would of course not limit its use to that alone, and soon enough, a few cadres would begin experimenting with bureaucratic tools as a means of achieving land reform, such as a rudimentary progressive land tax.
Taken together, the 3 Magic Weapons form a comprehensive strategy for the CCP to gradually and subtly replace a society’s original system with a bureaucratic hierarchy solely responsible to the Party alone. Viewed chronologically, as each Weapon matures, the Party’s governance shifts from actively aligning its agenda with public opinion, to manipulating public opinion towards the Party’s agenda, to finally, imposing the Party’s agenda irrespective of public opinion. The main political trend here is a decreasing reliance on consensus politics based around shared Issues, and a corresponding increase in autocratic control based upon Party organization: this roughly mirrors the social movement progression that we’ve seen throughout this video series.
The resulting strategy – which is often simply referred to as the ‘United Front’ due to that Weapon’s relative visibility – is rightly feared as a powerful tool of CCP soft power, since its methodical application of Leninist psychological control, with each step designed to avoid a negative reaction from either target or authority, makes the strategy extremely difficult to counter or even recognize in the first place. Perhaps the greatest demonstration of its efficacy occurred during the early years of the Sino-Japanese War, as Mao’s CCP successfully established itself throughout rural Northern China. From a measly movement of 45 thousand in 1937, by 1940 Communist membership had exploded nearly tenfold to 500 thousand, with the Party commanding hundreds of thousands of soldiers across 5 major regions encompassing nearly 80 million people. To attribute this all merely to anti-Japanese feeling is to overestimate the depth of nationalist sentiment in rural China at that time, as we’ve seen and will see; and even if that were the case, it’s doubtful that many elites would have allowed their peasants to side with the CCP had the Party insisted on a violent, uncompromising rural revolution like in Jiangxi.
Mao Zedong’s guerrillaism combined with Liu Shaoqi’s pragmatism was therefore a spectacularly fruitful strategic approach for the CCP, but that did not mean that the results were flawless, and Mao would soon find fault with how individual Party branches were implementing his strategy. For starters, guerrillaist expansion was extremely resource-intensive, not surprising given that each CCP village branch would have to – depending on the Weapon it was developing – cater to the elite, agitate the peasants, and build a Party bureaucracy. This led to not only a drastic increase in personnel and spending, but also the wasteful proliferation of village organizations which often spent more time fighting each other than advancing the Party’s mission. At its worst, the CCP estimated that 3-6% of its population was tied up in bureaucratic or military work, resulting in numerous embarrassing resource shortages such as: military units lacking firearms, or Soviet aid still being the primary source of funds for a Party Central that theoretically dominated much of Northern China!
The other, larger problem was one Mao was all-too-familiar with: Party cadres falling under ideological control, though this time, from Chinese nationalism rather than Soviet Communism. As seen in Jinggangshan, one of the drawbacks of guerrillaism was that it was extremely easy for isolated activists to completely compromise on their ideology in order to gain local landlord support, especially since many of them – as descendants of elites themselves – lacked much knowledge or even interest in Communism.
The ’3 Magic Weapons’ strategy was supposed to show these cadres how they could consolidate power without abandoning their ideology, but in practice many of them, whether due to ignorance or weakness, were already failing at the first Weapon of the ‘United Front’. Specifically, the strategy’s advice for cadres to cater to local elite interests was not meant to legitimize those interests, but rather to build an ‘alliance of convenience’ that would buy time for the Party to develop more reliable methods of control.
Inevitably, however, many cadres wandered down the first path instead, possibly misled by the language of the KMT-CCP United Front which implied that all Chinese nationalists – including the Communists – should seek common ground in the face of the Japanese foe. This made it easy for local landlords to interpret Chinese nationalism in a way that discouraged CCP cadres from even considering societal reform: for example, by claiming that any reform would cause societal disruption and therefore jeopardize the wartime survival of China, which was not what a ‘good’ Chinese nationalist would do.
Persuaded by this logic, many local CCP branches reverted to being Communist in name only, with cadres failing to advance the CCP’s agenda in any meaningful way, whether through deepening Party control or land redistribution or even the most basic attempts to reduce landlord rents or interest. More infuriatingly to CCP leaders, some would even dare to parrot landlord logic back at Party Central, urging the Party to abandon land reform as quote-unquote ‘something that China didn’t need right now’!
In official Communist historiography, the ideological problems associated with the CCP’s expansion during the Sino-Japanese War are often explained as a result of the Party’s rapid organizational growth, which had created a bureaucratic class that had quote-unquote ‘lost touch with village life’. However, based on the above analysis, one can argue that, if anything, local Party cadres were in fact far too ‘in touch with village life’, specifically traditional Chinese village life where for centuries, local elites had the power to prevent the state from accessing their resources. The problem was that such a system had become vastly outclassed in the industrialized 20th Century, where the outcome of political competition largely depended on how efficiently central organizations could mobilize societal resources. By now, after nearly 2 decades of savage conflict, the veteran CCP leadership had a pretty good idea of what needed to be done for the Party to survive, and perhaps win, the struggle for China. Now, all they had to do was to get their subordinates to obey them.
13. 1939-1945: The Rectification Movement
Thanks to their organizational innovations during the Jiangxi Soviet and the 1st years of the Sino-Japanese War, the CCP now had a solid plan in the ‘3 Magic Weapons’ strategy to establish control over local society and compel people to participate in their movement. In particular, the first Weapon of the ‘United Front’ was implemented extremely well, as the Party catered to local elites, won their support, and achieved explosive growth as a result.
But the ‘United Front’ was never meant to be a standalone strategy, and soon it was pushing up against its political limits. For one, there were only so many suitable villages for the CCP to take over; but more importantly, the political climate was also changing. Starting in mid-1939, the Sino-Japanese War gradually ground to a stalemate, as both the KMT and Japanese armies reached logistical exhaustion. The outbreak of World War 2 in the West further dampened their belligerence, as Japan refocused on the European colonies in Southeast Asia and the KMT waited for the Allies to bail it out. Both sides now sought to consolidate control over the parts of China they held, especially against the common rival that had profited so greatly from their struggle – the Chinese Communist Party.
Already by late 1937, the 2nd United Front between the KMT and CCP had begun to disintegrate, as the KMT, alarmed by the CCP’s rapid growth, began denying economic aid to Communist-dominated provinces. Things quickly escalated, and within a year KMT partisans were clashing with CCP guerrillas throughout occupied and unoccupied China. This low-level warfare reached a climax with the so-called ‘New 4th Army Incident’ in early 1941, when KMT forces surrounded and destroyed the military headquarters of the Southern China CCP – ironically the Party faction led by the cooperative Wang Ming – forcing the Communists to halt all public activity in the region.
The reemergence of KMT opposition forced CCP leaders to once again prepare for political competition. It was no longer enough for the Party to simply find new villages to ally with; it now also needed to extract more resources from the ones it already controlled. This meant that local Party cadres had to begin the process of subverting the traditional elite system and replacing it with a loyal Party bureaucracy, as outlined in the ‘Armed Struggle’ and ‘Party Building’ sections of the ‘Magic Weapons’ strategy.
The problem was that most CCP branches, staffed by cadres who were more landlords than Communists, had no desire to do such things, even when pressured by KMT competition. This became clear in mid-1939, when Mao Zedong launched a drive to develop local Party organization, framed in terms of ‘punishing landlords’ for alleged ‘collaboration’ with Japan. His message went down poorly with most local cadres, who had bookishly absorbed the landlord view that punishing the elite would not benefit Chinese nationalism; and while a few publicly criticized the new policy, the vast majority simply ignored Mao’s orders, confident that their ties to village elites and their distance from the Communist capital of Yan’an would protect them from consequences.
Paradoxically, such defiance was preferable to the alternative, since the minority of cadres who did obey Mao’s directive almost always performed disastrously. Inspired more by the fiery zeal of Jiangxi than the boring pragmatism of the ‘3 Magic Weapons’, these cadres launched a flurry of attacks against the traditional elite, often involving arbitrary confiscation, peasant mobilization and violence. The results inevitably mirrored Jiangxi as well, as their efforts triggered a mass exodus of landlords to the KMT and even Japan, resulting in the collapse of the local economy, if not CCP control entirely! Such failures were, if anything, even more embarrassing for CCP Central, and by 1940 Mao had to call off his own political campaign, lamely blaming it on the quote-unquote ‘leftism’ of his rival Wang Ming.
More was to come. Seeing the example of the disobedient local Party branches, CCP commanders also decided to ignore Party Central and implement their own military solution to the CCP’s problems, which they ideologically justified as a demonstration of the Party’s commitment to Chinese nationalism. Starting in mid-1940, Communist forces launched what was initially intended as a sabotage campaign against enemy logistics, but eventually spiraled into a fully-fledged ‘Hundred Regiments Offensive’ against the Japanese Army. Benefiting from the element of surprise, the Communists scored some early victories, but were soon methodically wiped out by superior Japanese firepower. Even worse, the Japanese then countered with their infamous ‘3 Alls Campaign’, which through a combination of brutal retaliation, population relocation and collaborator recruitment ousted the CCP from a large chunk of rural Northern China, costing the Party a third of its army and population in the process!
The years between 1939 and 1942 were therefore pretty bad for the CCP, but they were not entirely pointless. For even as disaster after disaster struck the Party, behind the scenes Mao Zedong was quietly consolidating his political and bureaucratic power, especially against his rivals Wang Ming and Zhou Enlai. In particular, after Wang’s pro-KMT strategy failed, Mao secured the defection of a number of Wang’s ’28 Bolsheviks’, whose Soviet-trained talents significantly enhanced Mao’s organizational capabilities. Chief amongst them was the spymaster Kang Sheng, later to achieve notoriety as one of the masterminds behind the Cultural Revolution: he was tasked with developing a secret police system similar to Stalin’s, in an ominous sign of Mao’s future thinking
Mao finally revealed his plans in late 1941, shortly after the German invasion of the Soviet Union and the subsequent dissolution of the Comintern removed the last institutional checks on his power. The ultimate goal of what would be known as the ‘Rectification Movement’ was to ensure the CCP’s complete obedience to Mao, not just for the ‘3 Magic Weapons’ but for all future strategies and initiatives. And since 2 decades’ worth of struggle had taught Mao that the chief obstacle to this was ideological control by another political actor – be it Soviet Communism or landlordist Chinese nationalism – the primary task of Rectification was to conduct a thorough ‘brainwash’ of CCP cadres, mentally purging whatever they believed in before and replacing it with a new interpretation of Communism centered on Mao.
Because Soviet Communism had historically been the more challenging ideological obstacle due to its Marxist pedigree backed by the strength of the Soviet Union – as evidenced in the many times the CCP willingly sacrificed itself to serve what in reality were Soviet interests – Mao decided to focus Rectification efforts against it, despite the ideology’s relative weakness since the fall of the 2nd United Front. Using the ‘New 4th Army Incident’ as a pretext, Mao unleashed a torrent of criticism against CCP strategy dating back to Jiangxi and beyond, blaming its numerous failures openly on Wang Ming, covertly on Zhou Enlai, and in reality, on the Soviet Union who gave the 2 men their marching orders via ‘interpretations’ of Communism. In this retelling of Party history, Wang and Zhou’s ideological beliefs repeatedly quote-unquote ‘deviated’ from observable reality, resulting in mismatched strategies that failed to produce the desired results.
So how could ‘deviation’ be prevented? Mao’s answer essentially boiled down to a single phrase that has dominated Chinese political thinking ever since: ‘Chinese Characteristics’, or in this case, ‘Revolution with Chinese Characteristics’. By demanding that the CCP adjust its thinking to account for ‘Chinese Characteristics’, Mao re-interpreted the Party’s ideology to benefit his goals in 3 major ways. Firstly, it better reconciled the Party’s Communism with its Chinese nationalism, presenting the resulting ‘Dual Issue’ as an evolution of Chinese political thought rather than as a foreign import; Secondly, it downgraded the relevance that Soviet or non-Chinese interpretations of Communism could have on Chinese affairs; and Thirdly, it was still ambiguous enough to allow Mao extensive freedom to interpret what exactly ‘Chinese Characteristics’ were.
Mao quickly moved to impose ‘Revolution with Chinese Characteristics’ onto the rest of the Party. Justifying his views through a collection of texts that he had either vetted if not written himself, Mao urged the senior Central and regional leadership to study his new interpretation of Communism, advertising it as the Party’s route to success. Of course, in reality, there were practical political considerations at play: many of the Northern Chinese regional leaders such as Liu Shaoqi had been steadfast allies of Mao against Wang Ming, while the failures of the military commanders and particularly Zhou Enlai had so compromised them that they had no choice but to do what Mao wanted. Regardless of their ideological sincerity, their endorsement of Mao’s thought instantly gave the new interpretation a strong institutional legitimacy, which Mao would now use to broaden the scope of Rectification.
Mao’s next and primary targets would be the CCP’s ‘middle cadres’, whose collective seniority and experience gave them great influence over the Party. These were largely drawn from the idealistic elites who had both sustained the Party since its founding in 1921, yet had also fueled its ideological confusion through their unrestricted thinking. The struggles Mao had with these cadres have been a well-documented and recurring theme of this video, leaving him in no doubt that these were the people he needed to completely convert if he was to have any chance of establishing control.
Mao therefore deployed the full power of the Party organization against these elite cadres. Things once again began with a study of Mao’s writings, but the cadres would then be thoroughly incentivized to ‘re-educate’ themselves through a variety of psychological techniques derived from the vigilante justice of the rural Chinese frontier. In the infamous ‘struggle sessions’, cadres were subjected to hours and hours of grueling self-, group- and public criticism designed to break down mental barriers and open the mind to Mao’s ideology; and to top it all off, looming ominously over them were Kang Sheng and his secret police, who simultaneously launched an ‘Anti-Traitors’ movement where any ideological holdout was labelled an ‘enemy agent’ to be tortured or executed. Under such compelling organizational incentives, cadres quickly learned that the costs of opposing Mao far outweighed any ideological satisfaction they might receive, and accordingly, meaningful opposition from this group swiftly shriveled up.
Finally, there were the junior cadres of the CCP, mainly consisting of peasant or youthful activists who had never before been exposed to any form of Marxism. As such, Mao was able to easily imprint his ideology onto their impressionable minds, molding them into fanatical acolytes who – in a not-so-ironic twist – could be ideologically controlled to do whatever Mao interpreted Communism to be.
For this group, Rectification primarily involved strengthening their influence within the Party bureaucracy, especially against the ‘middle cadres’ whose ideological loyalties would always remain suspect. This was the impetus behind one of the core ideas of what would become Maoism, the ‘Mass Line’, where Communist policies are subject to constant revision based on so-called ‘feedback from the masses’. Since the junior cadres were the ones who normally interfaced with society the most, the ‘Mass Line’ naturally boosted their relevance within the policymaking process, with low-level committees empowered to supervise and veto Party initiatives based largely on how closely they adhered to the ‘Chinese characteristics’ of the ‘masses’ as interpreted by Mao Zedong.
While Rectification was meant to be implemented in every Central and local CCP branch, unsurprisingly given wartime conditions the strength of the movement varied greatly by region. In general, despite strenuous efforts to ferry local cadres into Yan’an, Mao’s ideological project produced the most results in and around the Communist capital, with cadres in neighboring areas partially Rectified depending on the regional boss’ zeal, and those stuck within occupied China barely Rectified at all. Still, since Yan’an housed CCP Central’s institutions, even the most remote Communist village was theoretically subject to the indirect supervision of some Rectified official, who could then take bureaucratic measures to compel the local cadres to do what Mao wanted.
As a result, Rectification produced important if uneven results for the wartime Party. In Yan’an and a few neighboring regions, 1942 to 1945 did see the Party become more aligned with Mao’s agenda, with cadres resuming efforts to develop the ‘Armed Struggle’ and ‘Party Building’ Weapons, while obeying more immediate orders to reduce personnel and budgets. As Liu Shaoqi envisioned, this would eventually lead to the CCP completely replacing the traditional elite system with its own Party-Government in an orderly manner, with the former landlords peacefully devolving into smallholder farmers via progressive taxation, enforced sales and other such bureaucratic tools. Over time, these organizational successes would spread out to the rest of the CCP, particularly after the end of the War, and form the foundation for a strong Party-State that would reliably sustain the Party in future political competition.
Equally important was what the CCP did not do during this period, which was to give in to nationalistic fervor and invite Japanese suppression, just as it had done during the Hundred Regiments Offensive. There were plenty of opportunities to do so, notably in early 1944, when hundreds of thousands of Japanese troops redeployed out of Northern China in preparation for Operation Ichi-Go against the KMT. To many commanders, this was a golden opportunity for the Party to strike and win some much-desired military glory; however, Mao said no and unlike in 1940, the commanders obeyed. Events proved Mao correct, as the unhindered Japanese proceeded to smash both the military and the prestige of the KMT, while the CCP largely escaped unscathed with even more opportunities to grow. Moreover, the Japanese interpreted the Party’s inaction as a sign of cowardice and incompetence, resulting in an overly-dismissive underestimate of Communist capabilities when those same Japanese advised Chiang Kai-Shek after the War!
But of course, it was Mao himself who benefited the most from Rectification, riding the movement’s self-reinforcing ideological adulation to ascend to unprecedented heights within the CCP. In mid-1943, he was given the title of Chairman, thoroughly stripping Wang Ming of power in the process; in 1945, Mao Zedong Thought was elevated to the same ideological level as Marxism-Leninism, formalizing Chinese Communism’s independence from the Soviet Union.
Many historians have interpreted these moves as a response to Chiang Kai-Shek’s own burgeoning cult of personality, as if Mao was merely an imitator acting without strategic purpose. Instead, as this video has hopefully demonstrated, the Rectification Movement should be viewed as the culmination of the CCP’s epic journey of organizational development where, having unlocked the secrets to controlling the masses, the Party now found a way to control its own activists and immunize them against the Ideological Control of both the Soviet Union and the traditional Chinese elites.
The Communists had come a long way from their origins as an unruly political club, becoming a highly-organized, Ideologically-Mobilized Party-Government capable of imposing Mao’s directives across vast populations and spaces. In the process, the Party had shed much of its intellectual diversity, as well as its bookish naivete that had nevertheless contained much of its idealistic hopes for China. But in return, it was now a movement that was finally capable of moving beyond mere social movement actions to engage in direct, head-on competition with Chiang Kai-Shek’s KMT, and the time for that was fast drawing near.
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Thanks for watching the video, and please like, subscribe and hit the bell button! If you have any questions, I’ll be happy to answer them in the comments section. This is Part V of a 6-Part series; Part VI will briefly go over the aftermath of the CCP’s revolutionary journey, before offering some thoughts on the influence of the Chinese Communist Revolution on social movement strategy and politics in general today.
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