Strategy of Protest and Revolution 5
Mao Zedong & The Chinese Communist Revolution, 1921-45
Part VI. Aftermath & Conclusions
Hi, and welcome to Strategy Stuff. This is the 6th 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 VI, we’ll briefly recount the CCP’s victory in the Chinese Civil War, before concluding with some suggestions on how the Chinese Communist Revolution remains relevant today.
14. Aftermath & Conclusions
The surrender of Japan in August 1945 almost immediately ushered in a new round of political competition within China, as the CCP and KMT moved to fight the Civil War that both sides had been preparing for since at least 1939, if not 1927. Now with an army numbering 1-and-a-half million and a large chunk of rural Northern China under its control, the CCP swiftly established a new base in formerly-Japanese Manchuria, even as Chiang Kai-Shek prepared to once again exterminate the Party with his 3-million-man army.
The CCP was not expected to win this contest, with the US, Japan and even the Soviets to a degree initially believing that the KMT would ultimately win. But such judgements were based on a simplistic comparison of material strength which failed to account for the CCP’s organizational transformation under the Rectification Movement, and more importantly, the KMT’s failure to effect even remotely-comparable change.
Preoccupied with militarily fighting both the Japanese and the Communists, Chiang Kai-Shek had failed to arrest the organizational deterioration within his own Party; and while this was excusable in the early years of the Sino-Japanese War, when his own forces had been crushed and he had to rely on warlord strength, Chiang’s negligence continued even after he had reconstituted his forces – though one could also place blame on his newly-arrived American military instructors, who trained Chiang’s armies to be tools of pure military control, ignoring the role they historically played in politically shoring up the KMT.
As a result, the KMT failed to organizationally overpower the traditional system and especially break the stranglehold that local elites had over local resources. Landlords continued to siphon off much of KMT China’s wealth, legitimizing this through their own interpretation of Chinese nationalism, which argued that ‘true’ nationalists would not seek to destabilize wartime China by attempting reform. But without reform, elite accumulation grew unchecked, and eventually combined with other local powers, warlord militaries and even KMT bureaucrats to metastasize into powerful factional alliances who could effectively deny resources to the central government.
Such enforced decentralization could not possibly fulfill the demands of modern industrial warfare, which in turn led to the infamous ‘corruption’ of the KMT. Blocked from raising the all-important land tax beyond 10% of the harvest, Chiang’s government was forced to fund its gargantuan expenses through increasingly arbitrary and illegitimate means, such as through forced labor, monopolizing the distribution of basic goods, and money-printing. At the same time, the KMT also offloaded the burden to local governments, resulting in a new round of local elite extraction that collectively amounted to a final tax rate that was several times higher than officially stated! The inevitable result was low productivity, widespread famine, banditry and even revolts, which continued even after the KMT regained control over Japanese-occupied China in late 1945.
Despite this mismanagement, the
KMT still had enough for one major push. Ignoring US advice to first
consolidate his own territory, in 1946 Chiang sent his best forces into CCP
territory, initially overrunning much of southern Manchuria and northern China,
including Mao’s wartime capital of Yan’an. For the next year and a half, about
all the CCP could do was grimly hold out, harass enemy forces, and wait for Chiang’s
offensive to push the KMT’s degraded organization beyond the breaking point.
By 1947, the KMT’s tax revenues were only half of what they had been during the height of the Sino-Japanese War, resulting in not only a severe fiscal crisis that could only be relieved through hugely-unpopular money-printing, but also left the government completely unable to supply its armies stuck at the ends of several very long and vulnerable rail lines. The result was an unstoppable KMT implosion throughout 1948 and 49, as Chiang’s political support collapsed, his armies melted away, and entire provinces defected from his rule.
Now at long last, it was Mao’s CCP who was in pursuit, impressing the newly-conquered locals with its military might, organizational discipline, and initial ideological flexibility. The People’s Republic of China was declared in October 1949, bringing a formal end to 28 years of Chinese Communist Revolution.
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Due to the incredibly complex environment that the CCP operated in, the Chinese Communist Revolution of 1921 to 1945 serves as a classic example for not only the ‘Ideological Mobilization’ social movement grand strategy, but also for a whole slew of other sociopolitical phenomena, not to mention being the founding story for one of the world’s leading political entities. Maoism remains an influential strand within Marxist thought, albeit in the form edited later by Mao as opposed to what actually happened. It would be misguided to dismiss any of this as being outdated or only applicable to socialism; and in the following analysis, I will try to show how a century-old revolutionary story still has relevance today.
Way back at the start of this video series, I mentioned the Chinese Communist Revolution as the prime example of Ideological Mobilization, which I noted was odd given that the CCP did not adopt this approach until Zhou Enlai’s Land Investigation Drive at the earliest and Mao’s Rectification Movement at the latest, 10 and 20 years respectively from when the Party first began attempting revolution. Nevertheless, this allows us to compare and contrast the CCP before and after its Organizational transition: before transition, the CCP was utterly subservient to the whims of others, unable to defy the wishes of its traditional Chinese elite allies, let alone the more sophisticated ideological manipulations of both the Soviets and the KMT.
Through Zhou’s LID, the increasingly-organized CCP first acquired the capabilities to impose its will over local society, but it was only after Mao’s Rectification that the Party finally obtained full control over its own agenda and could deploy those capabilities in a way that truly advanced its aims. In particular, by using Maoism to neutralize the ideological influence of Soviet Communism, the CCP likewise broke past the stifling restraints imposed on it by Soviet strategy, which had undermined the effectiveness of far better-resourced Communist parties elsewhere, most notably in Europe.
This ultimately resulted in a movement that was capable and willing to fight the establishment-state on a more-or-less equal footing: unlike the other establishments in this video series, the KMT could hardly be said to have been complacent in suppressing the CCP, with Chiang Kai-Shek often possessing a resolve far ahead of even fellow Chinese anti-Communists. But thanks to Communist organization and KMT dis-organization, by 1948 even all of Chiang’s power could not prevent Mao’s victory.
These outcomes show why Organization and Ideological Mobilization will increasingly be the main – if not only – strategic directions for future social movement success: as technology advances, the ability of establishments to manipulate the political environment will only increase, which means that the only way for social movements to gain traction would be to manipulate back and better. Not only will overcoming modern state suppression require mobilizing the general public in an increasingly-intensive and frankly involuntary manner, but as we’ve seen with the Soviets throughout this video, modern media and informational techniques can also be weaponized to ideologically control the movement in a way that redirects its resources into unproductive and self-defeating work. If movements wish to take charge of their own destinies instead of waiting around for spontaneous establishment failure, they have little choice but to progress in an increasingly-Organized direction.
But as the CCP’s revolutionary history showed, Organizational development is no easy task, especially for movements with few starting resources to create or fund institutions. After years of trial-and-error, the CCP eventually found a method to reliably achieve such ‘bootstrap development’ in the form of Liu Shaoqi’s ‘3 Magic Weapons’: first, the CCP would align with, persuade or manipulate local elites in order to ‘borrow’ their resources, before quietly using them to build up its own organizations. Eventually, the Party would accumulate enough independent power to turn the tables on its initial patrons, smoothly subjugating or assimilating them to become the sole authority over society, all conducted with minimal disruption to daily life.
And since the end-product of the ‘3 Magic Weapons’ strategy was the establishment of a ‘Europeanized’ Party-State capable of fully accessing and mobilizing societal resources for the task of national development, the influence of the CCP’s experiences here extend beyond social movements and into the field of state-building. As we’ve seen, feudalistic decentralization was a major contributor to Chinese weakness throughout the 19th Century, and even today a lack of ‘Europeanization’ lies behind much of the fragility and underdevelopment seen in the so-called ‘Third World’. The Party’s success in constructing a centralized government is therefore a potential inspiration in this regard – modern China certainly uses it as a selling point for its so-called ‘Beijing Consensus’ – though it should be noted that it also enjoyed a few advantages that might not exist in other parts of the world, for instance the historical Chinese memory of being a unified polity.
Regardless, this emphasis on state-building at the expense of feudalistic elites does much to explain the popularity of Communism and socialism in the ‘Third World’, despite their theoretical orientation as ideologies for industrialized societies. Many nationalists, while caring little for the tenets of Marxism itself, see Lenin’s blueprints for state centralization as a direct, relevant and therefore attractive answer to their ‘Nationalist Questions’ of national defense, national integrity and state capacity, especially when weighed against capitalistic or liberal alternatives, which often neglect this aspect of development and therefore expose themselves to charges of ‘promoting foreign exploitation’ as a result.
At the same time, adopting Communism for nationalistic purposes leads directly to the ideological dilemma that plagued the CCP throughout this video series: a ‘Dual Issue’ that struggles to find a balance between nationalism and Communism, and moreover opens up multiple pathways for external actors to exercise Ideological Control over the movement. As we’ve seen, Mao eventually solved this problem by enforcing his own ‘official’ interpretation of Communism onto CCP cadres, leading to another frequent Communist occurrence that, on the surface, seems to be an ideological paradox: the ‘Cult of Personality’.
Contrary to the popular perspective that views them exclusively as a moral failing, Cults of Personality arguably serve a functional role in securing nationalistic independence against external influence or manipulation, particularly for ideologies where intellectual pedigree forms an important part of legitimacy, such as Communism. From the Kims of North Korea to ‘Chairman Gonzalo’ of Peru’s Shining Path to Stalin himself, Cults enable leaders to ‘nationalize’ Communism in a controlled manner, legitimizing pragmatic if non-Marxist methods of governance while immunizing cadres against other perhaps-more-legitimate forms of Communism.
Mao, of course, had one of the biggest Cults of Personality in history, which he used not only to secure the CCP’s ideological independence, but later, to even wage ideological warfare against the Soviets themselves through his own interpretation, known as ‘Maoism’. While many elements of Maoism – such as its emphasis on ideological maintenance and disdain for bureaucracy – were rooted in Mao’s actual experiences, a few of its aspects were revised in order to obscure some of the unorthodox actions that Mao took during his revolutionary journey.
Nowhere is this more evident than in the Maoist conception of guerrilla warfare, which differs significantly from the actual ‘guerrilla-ism’ that Mao practiced in Jiangxi and Shaanxi. Doctrinal Maoism, in particular, insists that peasant land reform is an essential component of guerrilla warfare, even though CCP guerrillas often achieved greater success in reality by shelving redistribution and allying directly with the local elite. While it’s evident why the latter strategy couldn’t be written into Maoism, its absence has handicapped the usefulness of Maoist military thought and brought many an aspiring guerrilla movement to its knees. After all, as the CCP’s experiences in Jiangxi and Shaanxi showed, violent social revolutions tend to undermine rather than support military efforts: far from ‘liberating’ resources for guerrilla use, aggressive moves against local elites usually only cause them to defect or flee, resulting in a socio-economic collapse that not only deprives the guerrillas of support, but also provides the establishment with the perfect pretext to legitimize and escalate suppression.
More generally, this dynamic highlights the need for strategymakers to walk a fine line between unreformed stagnation and uncontrolled chaos, whether at the social movement or state level. Perhaps nobody understands this dynamic better than the modern Chinese Communist Party, both rejuvenated and scarred by Mao’s revolution. For better or for worse, the CCP’s experiences between 1921 and 1945 lie at the heart of its institutional worldview, whether its belief that ‘political power grows out of the barrel of a gun’, or its insistence on qualifying any policy with ‘Chinese Characteristics’, or its general aversion to any sort of local or factional autonomy. Even the so-called ‘anti-corruption’ purges conducted by the current General Secretary Xi Jinping, which are often interpreted as a self-flagellating desire to relive the Cultural Revolution, seem to me to be much more inspired by the more orderly Terror of Mao’s Rectification Movement, though its implications are no less ominous given the role that Rectification played in preparing the CCP for war.
Two points deserve special attention. The first is ‘Ideological Control’, which plagued the CCP so much during the revolutionary period and continues to shape how it views foreign influence today. Of course, the ideological enemy nowadays has become the socio-political liberalism of the West, and the need to counter it underwrites almost every single CCP policy: from the notorious Great Firewall, to the drive to create indigenous Chinese economic substitutes, to its advocacy of global multipolarity as an alternative to US dominance.
It would be wrong to view this merely as Communist paranoia: such a view overlooks the profound fear many non-Western nationalists have of being ‘Ideologically Controlled’ into working against what they see as their own interests and heritage. Chinese nationalists, arguably, don’t even have to look far for an example: neighboring Taiwan has become one of Asia’s most progressive countries, enacting policies that, while perhaps moral, nevertheless track Western political trends. Neither are such fears unique to China: most notably, they also constitute the core of Russian nationalism’s ‘Eurasianism’ thesis, which calls for non-Western countries to resist Western hegemony in order to defend so-called ‘civilizational distinctiveness’. One can even argue that such discourse is inherent to non-Western societies and is unlikely to disappear from their politics even if they democratize.
The Second concerns the CCP’s ‘3 Magic Weapons’ strategy, which aims to subvert existing institutions and replace them with direct Organizational control. As noted in previous chapters, the Weapons are often referred to simply as the ‘United Front’, which is arguably a major labelling mistake: not only does the United Front make up merely one-third of the overall strategy, it also happens to be the part where the Party engages the most in consensus politics. This has sometimes created the impression amongst observers and even targets that United Front work is simply the Chinese Communist version of democratic accountability.
This is a major misreading of CCP goals: for better or for worse, the ultimate purpose of the ‘3 Magic Weapons’ is not consensus, but control, and the only reason why the Party engages in consensus through the ‘United Front’ is because control has not yet been achieved. The consequences of such naivete have perhaps been more visible in the geoeconomic sphere than in the political one, where many a foreign company initially invested in China as a ‘partner’, only to be forced out once the Party-State used those resources to successfully develop a controllable domestic champion.
Finally, we consider the lessons that the Chinese Revolution of 1921-1945 may have for even liberal democracies. The most obvious one has to do with the concept of ‘soft power’, which has rather gone out of fashion due to the recent resurgence in state-level military coercion. However, rather than soft power itself becoming obsolete, it seems more like what has actually become obsolete is, in fact, the concept of soft power that prevailed during the western unipolar moment of the 1990s and 2000s.
As we’ve seen throughout this video, the Soviets possessed enormous ‘soft power’ over Chinese intellectuals, not due to their liberalism or cultural exports, but because of their recognized achievements in state-building. The Soviets also weaponized soft power almost to the point of hard coercion, employing the Comintern to assess, legitimize and even replace national Party leaders based on their adherence to Soviet interests as expressed through Soviet Communism. Such forms of soft power run counter to the standard liberal depiction of people ‘naturally’ gravitating to a Western way of life, but I would argue that – much like many other aspects of modern Western strategy – this was more a reflection of the industrial West’s military, economic and cultural advantages, which collectively were so vast that they could overwhelm any opposing force with minimal policy work.
But this is now the post-industrial 2020s, and many of these advantages appear to have diminished significantly. This ought to prompt a re-assessment of Western liberal strategy, and in particular the ideological and institutional foundations that determine the direction and extent of such strategy. And if they are to maintain their lead in a rapidly-equalizing world, especially considering the many inefficiencies inherent to liberal democratic politics, Western states will sooner or later have to resume their long-dormant ‘Europeanization’ process, with central governments re-establishing control over resources that had, in easier times, been drained out to various elites and interest groups.
However, as Mao discovered more than a century ago, such re-Europeanizing efforts will inevitably clash with existing establishments that have vested interests in maintaining the status quo, and who will almost certainly justify them through various ‘interpretations’ of liberalism in an attempt to exercise Ideological Control. While liberalism’s commitment to individual rights and impartial procedure is undoubtedly central to its appeal, it is nevertheless true that such principles can be ‘interpreted’ in ways that are ultimately self-defeating, especially if they promote the dismantling, disempowerment or delegitimization of the state that, ultimately, must serve as the ‘defender of last resort’ for liberal values. While objectively, such interpretations might be intellectually legitimate or even moral, their adoption, especially on a systematic level, will only result in liberal democracies being outcompeted by political systems that have a better appreciation of state power.
In all of these ways, the epic revolutionary journey undertaken by the CCP and Mao Zedong offers timeless lessons for today – and may even spotlight the key political challenges of tomorrow. It is ironic that – nearly 100 years after the events of this video – China has emerged as an exemplar of Europeanized consolidation, while the West is at risk of falling into the administrative decay that eventually led to the creation of the CCP. We can perhaps use one of Mao’s later quips to sum up this past, present and potentially future history: “Those who fall behind will be beaten up.”
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