The Chinese Revolution took place in a society so diseased that it was disintegrating. There was universal, bitter hostility to a ruling regime rooted in all that was rotten, that had again and again demonstrated it had neither the will nor the capacity to get China out of its blind alley. The great mass of the population was facing hunger and starvation, driven to despair and willing to make almost any sacrifice to save themselves and their families. This combination of exceptional conditions broke the fetters of conservatism and brought the masses to insurrection. The upsurge of the peasantry was of seismic proportions. The CCP rode this wave to power.
With imperialist support, the strength of the Nationalist forces was sufficient to crush the Jiangxi Soviet. With the internal collapse of the KMT, brought about by corruption and the loss of imperialist support, “Land to the Tiller” became a realistic option for KMT soldiers, undermined the loyalty of Chiang’s troops, and substantially aided the victory over the Nationalists.
The mass upsurge of the peasantry against hunger, starvation and KMT corruption was victorious due to specific and exceptional conditions. American imperialism was unable to intervene directly to support Chiang; Russia had invaded Manchuria and Mao gained an impregnable base and huge quantities of arms; the PLA was present to provide structure and the focus for that rebellion.[72]
However, while revolutionary peasant armies had a thousand-year-old tradition, in 1949 they were confronted by a quite different world from their forefathers; a world dominated by two super powers, one of which had given them much needed support at a critical time in the civil war, and the other which backed their enemy. The result of the victory of the peasant armies was bound to be shaped in fundamental ways by this international context.
The government that began wielding power in Beijing in 1949 would establish a workers’ state in China despite Mao’s declared goal of maintaining capitalism for a prolonged period. Of course, if Stalin and Mao had been Leninists they would have proposed the creation of a Socialist Federation of the Soviet Union and China in 1949. Instead, the Mao regime tried every which way to construct a stable bourgeois state until faced by the Korean War and the aggression of American imperialism. To protect itself it took measures that were socialist in principle.
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Belden, Op. cit., p330 and 341.