The most effective weapon in the hands of the CCP was propaganda with the most decisive element its land policy. It shattered the apparent inertia of the peasants by linking their aspirations to a means of achieving them. The promise of land reform brought the hitherto crushed masses into open revolt against the KMT regime.
By 1948, Chiang Kai-shek and the KMT were maintaining themselves in power by bribery and terror. The KMT was controlled by a clique so utterly corrupt that ministers lined their pockets by selling war materials supplied by the United States to the PLA.[53] Mayors of villages responsible for sending young recruits to the army organised a system whereby families able to pay an exorbitant fee could keep their sons at home. The missing soldiers were listed in the regimental books so that the officers could put their pay in their own pockets. The result was that many armed formations had no more than 60% of their listed strength.[54]
The PLA successfully transformed guerrilla warfare into positional warfare in a very short time. In the autumn of 1948, the PLA launched an all-out counter-offensive. In Manchuria, the big cities, one after another, were occupied without a fight as a result of the capitulation or disintegration of Chiang’s armies. The key battle was for Mukden (Shenyang, largest city in Manchuria). Its defenders, five well-equipped and well-trained armies, took their weapons and equipment and defected to the Communists. The city was occupied by the PLA on 1 November 1948.[55]
Thereafter, Communist victories tumbled one upon another. By the end of 1948 the PLA had captured all the cities of Manchuria including the capital, Changchun, and the big mining districts of Anshan and Fuhsun, where the Japanese had built a miniature Pittsburgh which, at its height, had mined 20,000 tons of coal a day. The Communist occupation of Manchuria was a mortal blow to Chiang’s government, giving the CCP a solid economic base bordering the Soviet Union and from which they would be almost impossible to dislodge.[56]
The advance of the PLA had a sympathetic resonance amongst the workers and the students, and gave them the confidence to challenge the KMT. There was a new wave of strikes, e.g. in Shanghai, protesting the banning of the sliding wage scale. The students played a notable role, representing the petty-bourgeoisie in general. Large-scale protests and demonstrations took place in the big cities: Chongqing, Nanjing, Shanghai, Canton, Beijing, etc. The slogans demanded democracy and peace, against KMT dictatorship, and against the persecutions conducted by the KMT. The CCP played a divisive role, keeping the workers and students as far apart as possible and using both separately to exert pressure on the KMT to accept peace talks. If the CCP had been responsive to mass pressure, it would have called on the workers and the masses in the big cities to join with the peasantry and students and rise in rebellion to overthrow the regime, it would have been as easy as knocking down rotten wood. But Mao called on the people to wait quietly for their liberation by the PLA.[57] His objective was to restrict the struggle as much as possible to the military plane and he was largely successful. The deliberate discouragement of workers’ struggles and the rapid advance of the PLA brought a period of quiescence in the labour movement.
In every village under PLA control, Communists were instructed to retain plots of land ready for any soldiers who deserted from Chiang Kai-shek’s army and joined the PLA. Coupled with the obvious fact that the KMT was rapidly losing the war, this proved to be highly effective, seen in the fact that Chiang’s army had probably the highest rate of desertion of any army in history. Evidence of this was clear in the great cities and important military bases north of the Yangtze River: at Tsinan the KMT troops rebelled against their own officers and surrendered to the Communists on 24 September 1948, at Tientsin (Tianjin) the KMT troops simply melted away and the city fell on 15 January 1949, Beijing surrendered later that month without a fight, and at Kaifeng the KMT army evaporated and the PLA entered on 19 June 1949.
The American Intelligence Services were unanimous that the Nationalist government was in its “death throes”. “The process of disintegration and fragmentation is so far advanced as to render almost impossible the establishment of a functioning government or even (one) capable of offering resistance to the Communists.”[58] Respect for the civil population and abstinence from plunder which distinguished the PLA from all KMT armies contributed greatly to winning the support of the population.[59] In its report the CIA mentioned this as a major factor in the welcome the PLA received from the peasants:
“the following major policies benefit the peasantry … (3) recruitment on a voluntary basis rather than conscription …. ; (4) close cooperation between the armed forces and the peasantry; (5) a high degree of economic self-sufficiency (on the part of the PLA).”[60]
Many of the bourgeois who had previously supported Chiang were in a state of despair. Anti-Chiang sentiment was disorganising the army and paralysing the government. Inflation was impoverishing the great mass of the population, including lower level government functionaries who, to stave off hunger, were forced to demand bribes and actively participate in the corruption of a regime that was rotten from top to bottom and decomposing. Commerce and industry was coming to a halt and the living conditions of the middle and lower classes (including the middle and lower functionaries in the government institutions) cast them into the pit of despair. Its only prop was US imperialism and when that was removed the regime collapsed.
As the PLA prepared to cross the Yangtse, an important political and psychological incident occurred which demonstrated decisively the end of imperialist gunboat diplomacy in China. On 19 April, HMS Amethyst was dispatched from Shanghai to sail up the Yangtse to Nanjing, ostensibly to relieve the destroyer Consort, but in reality as a threat to the PLA to leave British interests alone. After a shoot-out with PLA shore batteries, the Amethyst turned tail and made good her escape. From then on, foreign companies in China had to abide by the rules of the New Democracy. The Liberation Daily announced:
“foreign interests … under the jurisdiction of the People’s Government … have been deprived of their special privileges which they enjoyed in the past … if they can dutifully obey all ordinances and rulings of the People’s Government and engage in business which is beneficial to the livelihood of the people and the livelihood of our country, they will be permitted to exist and will be protected.”[61]
On 21 April 1949, the PLA crossed the Yangtze River and proceeded on a triumphal march southwards. Nanjing surrendered without a fight on 23 April. With complete victory in sight, to allay the fears of the most affluent peasants, the CCP took steps to reorient their policies even more towards moderation and class compromise. On 25 April 1949, Mao Zedong as Chairman of the People’s Revolutionary Military Committee, and Zhu De as Commander in Chief of the PLA, declared the new government to be a democratic (i.e. bourgeois) dictatorship and promised protection of property for every individual and of all privately-owned factories, stores, banks, warehouses, vessels, wharves, etc., except those controlled by “war criminals” and “bureaucratic capital.”[62] When Lenin addressed the Petrograd Soviet immediately after the October Revolution he ended his short speech with the words: “We must now set about building a proletarian socialist state in Russia. Long live the world socialist revolution!.”[63] One searches in vain for a similar sentiment in Mao’s pronouncement.
A seven point proclamation on land reform was also issued: “reduction of rent and interest should be carried out first and land distribution later … after the PLA has arrived and work (organisation and indoctrination) carried on for a comparatively long time.” The CCP was certainly not going to bow to mass pressure and allow China to follow the Russian model where peasants took the land and the Bolshevik Party legitimised the seizure after coming to power. Instead, the party would exercise a tight control and limit any changes. Bourgeois commentators praised Mao for his “cautious approach” and reported the “confusion” and “bewilderment” of the poor peasants when they did not receive the hoped-for land after liberation. Another cause of bewilderment was that in Article 4 of the 1947 Land Law, all debts had been cancelled but now only rent debt was cancelled, though interest on the remaining debts was supposedly limited to a maximum of 15%.[64]
Hangchow fell without a fight on 3 May, and Fuchow on 20 May. On 7 July, (birthday of the CCP), Lin Piao, top commissar in Central China, issued a directive to the Party membership, drawing attention to a serious situation in the countryside. Being an army man, Lin was blunt: peasants in the villages were being neglected and were taking the law into their own hands. Too many Party cadres believed they had earned the right to a comfortable urban life and were resisting being assigned to the countryside. These expectations were natural in a party based on privilege, and represented the conflict between cadres wanting to enjoy their privileges and the need to participate in the agrarian struggle to maintain Party control.[65]
On 20 August 1949, the New China News Agency reported that peasants across Hunan and Jiangxi provinces were again up in arms against the limits set by the CCP’s class-collaborationist land policy. The response of the CCP is very informative; naturally there was no error in the political line – the fault lay with local cadres who had been either insufficiently alert to head off the rebellion or not firm enough when carrying out punitive raids against the rebels. This bureaucratic response was in accord with the time-honoured practice of Mao’s mentor in Moscow.[66]
The question Lin did not address was why did the peasants in areas which were supposed to have been liberated, feel neglected? This occurred because once national power was within their grasp, the CCP moved from a policy of reliance on the middle and poor peasants, to actively courting the exploiting classes. Collaboration with the capitalists necessarily meant collaboration with the landlords too, for the two were entwined in innumerable economic and social activities. When Mao returned to his native province, it was not as a pioneer leader of peasant uprisings, but as a long-lost son of the landowners!
Shanghai offered token resistance but surrendered on 26 May. Mao Zedong proclaimed the People’s Republic of China (PRC) on 1 October 1949.[67] Article 1, which defined the nature of the state, was careful to describe the People’s Republic of China as a New Democracy or People’s Democracy with no mention of socialism. Article 3 made it clear that the new regime would protect the economic interests of the petty-bourgeoisie and the national bourgeoisie.
Canton (Nationalist capital for the previous six months) surrendered on 15 October. Chiang Kai-shek fled to Taiwan (Formosa).
The complete collapse of the Chinese Nationalists and the speed at which the CCP took over southern China astounded even them. The PLA did not conquer but rather was handed the cities. Here was a situation in which the objective conditions for revolution had become rotten ripe. The exceptional historic, national and international circumstances which prevailed at the time enabled a peasant army isolated from the urban working class, to take power from the bourgeois-landlord rule of Chiang Kai-shek.[68]
With its entrance into the big cities, the peasant PLA squashed all attempts by the urban workers to participate in the overthrow of the KMT regime and promised protection of private property, Chinese and foreign.[69] Only ‘bureaucratic capital’, i.e., only enterprises directly controlled by members of the Kuomintang government were affected; and even in these cases the investments of independent private capitalists were left intact.
The strategy of the PLA in north China had been to establish deep roots amongst the peasants in the liberated areas before taking the towns. The speed of its advance meant that in the south the situation was reversed. The PLA first took the towns and then extended out into the countryside. There were two consequences: substantial armed resistance by KMT units continued for some time, and the local power structure of gentry, landlords, rich peasants, merchants, and usurers remained in place, and land reform had to start from scratch.
The victory of the PLA was a magnificent military achievement but it was possible only because of the complete blind alley of landlordism and capitalism in China; all the propertied classes were inter-twined with each other and entangled with imperialism, forming a bloc so reactionary it was opposed to even the minimum changes which might have saved itself from the coming revolution.
In southern China, where landlordism was most developed, the CCP adopted the policy of forming Committees of Poor Peasants to mobilise mass support for agrarian reform. These committees unified the landless and poor peasants and were supposed to be tightly controlled by Party cadres but began to force the pace of agrarian reform in ways unacceptable to the Party. In a short time the Committees of Poor Peasants were replaced with Peasant Committees which middle and rich peasants could join and which were much more restricted in their functions. It is no surprise to discover the CCP complained that these Committees often did not include a sufficient number of rich and medium-rich peasants. There was also a constant stream of complaints by cadres that the poor and landless peasants “always want to control everything” and “violated the property of the medium-rich peasants.” The next step was for the Peasant Committees to delegate authority to the Village Congress of People’s Delegates which Mao demanded should “embrace all democratic classes, including workers, peasants, artisans, the free professions, intellectuals, entrepreneurs and enlightened landowners.”[70] An organisation based on class collaboration replaced the authority of the poor peasants.
The Stalinists pursued a conservative, reformist policy in a situation pregnant with the greatest revolutionary possibilities. For twenty years and more, since the defeat of the Chinese Revolution in 1927, the Stalinists had based their activity and then their programme almost exclusively on the peasantry. The peasantry, for all its revolutionary actions against the landlords, is a conservative social formation: the worker wants to socialise industry, but the peasant wants to own the land. The conservatism of the peasant was fed by almost universal illiteracy, by isolation and by the economic backwardness of rural villages, and by patriarchy and medieval social traditions and customs.
The Stalinists directed their attack at feudalism – not capitalism – in the belief that the feudal remnants had an independent social and political significance and the destruction of feudalism was necessary to clear a path for capitalist development. The conclusion that the main fight in China was against feudalism (and imperialism) led naturally to the CCP seeking to establish its political rule on the social base of the peasantry.[71] Such a perspective had a conservatising effect on the CCP itself because it drew it away from the proletariat, a process accelerated by the failure of the ultra-left policy of red unions.
Only after the flowering of capitalism would it be time to talk of the socialist revolution. This was a classic Menshevik conception of the historical process, using a schema in which history was chopped into arbitrary, predetermined stages which ignored actual class relations. Despite weighty feudal remains, the world market held sway over the Chinese economy. Property relations in China, even in the countryside were bourgeois property relations. To treat feudalism as the main enemy was to throw the class struggle in China off its true course and this was a core weakness at the heart of the CCP’s programme.
Despite the huge preponderance of the peasants and the great weight of agriculture in the economy, the agrarian problem could not be solved separately from China’s economic problems as a whole. Even after expropriation of the landlords’ excess land, a small plot remained a small plot, inefficient and primitive. This kept open the door to the village usurer and even the return of landlordism as richer peasants bought up the land of bankrupted peasants under Article 12 of the Land Law.
In 1950, the Regulation on Urban and Urban Fringe Land Reform stipulated that urban land was to become state land and would be managed by city governments. We shall see that the Stalinist nature of the CCP would mean this became a source of extensive corruption within local and national government.
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Grant, T. The Unbroken Thread, Wellred Books, 1989, p282-288.
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Belden, Op. cit., p376.
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North, Moscow … Op. cit. p239.
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Peng Shuzi, The Causes … Op. cit.
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Ibid.
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CIA Report, Developments in China 1949, ORE 44-49.
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Schram, S. Mao Tse-Tung, Penguin Books, 1966, p242.
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CIA Report, … Op. cit.
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Thompson, T. China’s Nationalisation of Foreign Firms 1949-57. University of Maryland, 1979.
-
Shao-Chuan Leng, Op. cit.
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Lenin, V. Report on the Tasks of the Soviet Power, 25 October 1917, CW26:240.
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Sullivan, Op. cit.
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Lui, C. An Aborted Revolution, Fourth International, 1950 11(1)3-7.
-
Ibid.
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North, Moscow … Op. cit. p205/240.
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Peng Shuzi, The Causes … Op. cit.
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Hsieh Yueh, Op. cit.
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Ibid.
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Ibid.