The Politburo meeting of March 1943 appointed Mao its Chairman, with the authority to single-handedly settle disputes. On 8 July 1943, the Liberation Daily used the phrase “Mao Zedong Thought” for the first time, after which it began to be widely used within the Party. By the end of the 1942-44 Rectification Campaign, “Long Live Chairman Mao” had become an acceptable slogan within the CCP. Liberation Daily began to carry headlines such as: “Comrade Mao Zedong is the Saviour of the Chinese People!”.[2] All bureaucracies require a supreme leader to arbitrate between conflicting groups. Mao was on the point of achieving that position within the CCP.
Having completed the Rectification Campaign, Mao convened the 7th Party Congress in Yenan, from 23 April – 11 June 1945. Germany had surrendered in May and it was certain that Japan would soon be defeated. Mao’s ideas and theories would guide the Party on the major task of how to deal with KMT regime. Mao delivered the main report On Coalition Government and dominated all the sessions.
The CC meeting immediately prior to the Congress adopted a Resolution on Certain Historical Questions which re-wrote CCP history and elevated Mao to omniscience. The catastrophes suffered by the CCP prior to the Tsunyi Conference became a chain of deviations from Mao’s correct line. Chen Duxiu was blamed for the defeat of the 1925-27 revolution; Ch’u Ch’iu-pai and Li Lisan were blamed for the defeats during the adventurist Third Period; Wang Ming was held responsible for the defeat of the Red Army in Jiangxi which made the Long March necessary. Stalin and the Comintern received no rebuke whatsoever.[3]
A new Party constitution was adopted at the Congress. This was proposed by Liu Shaoqi in a fawning report exalting Mao and naming Mao Zedong Thought as the ideological foundation of the CCP. The preamble of the constitution read “The CCP takes the theories of Marxism-Leninism and the combined principles derived from the practical experience of the Chinese revolution – Mao Zedong Thought – as the guiding principles of all its work.”[4] By 1948 at the start of village and CCP meetings all those present would stand, face a portrait of Mao and bow their heads three times exactly as had been done with the emperors.[5] In the primary schools the children were taught to sing: “Mao Zedong is like the sun; He is brighter than the sun; Little brother, little sister; Everyone clap hands, come and sing.”[6]
At the First Plenum of the Central Committee of the CCP following the 7th Congress, Mao was elected chairman of the CC, of the Politburo, and of the Secretariat. At the end of August 1945, he finally and formally concentrated all power in his hands when he was elected chairman of the newly reorganised Military Council of the Central Committee.[7] Stalin rose to leadership over the bodies of Lenin’s Central Committee and the bureaucracy sustained itself only with a police state and by burying an entire generation of Bolsheviks. The major achievement of Stalin’s policies was the rise to power of Hitler in Germany; no wonder then that free discussion and dissent were impermissible in the CC of the AUCP(B). This was not the situation for Mao. True he had been favoured by Stalin and the ECCI, but he had genuinely played a leading role in the activities of the CCP. This gave a very different character to CCP Politburo and CC meetings; there could be genuine discussion and dissenting opinions tolerated (within a Stalinist framework) – at least for a time.
We should note that over this period the CCP was making every attempt to show the political lines of Stalin and Mao as being essentially the same:
Comrade Mao Zedong’s views on the nature and tactics of the Chinese revolution were based on the teachings of Stalin and were identical with the views of Stalin. … Comrade Mao Zedong is Stalin’s … outstanding disciple and has been able to lead China’s revolution to victory because his method of work and his way of reasoning are those of Stalin.[8]
Po-ta also quotes Mao on Stalin:
Stalin is the leader of world revolution. This is of paramount importance. It is a great event that mankind is blessed with Stalin. Since we have him, things can go well. As you all know, Marx is dead and so are Engels and Lenin. Had there been no Stalin, who would be there to give directions? But having him – this is really a blessing. Now there exist in the world a Soviet Union, a Communist Party and also a Stalin. Thus, the affairs of the world can go well.[9]
In the spring of 1950, Stalin sent Academician Pavel Yudin, Rector of the Institute of Red Professors, part of the Department for Agitation and Propaganda, to edit a new version of Mao’s Selected Works to be published in Russian. Yudin was charged with checking the ideological content, and after two years in Beijing during which time he had a number of nocturnal meetings with Mao to thrash out doctrinal issues, he reported to a private meeting of the Russian Politburo: “They are Marxists, Comrade Stalin.”[10]
Stalin died 5 March 1953, and in his funeral oration, Mao said: “All the writings of Comrade Stalin are immortal Marxist documents. His works, The Foundations of Leninism, The History of the CPSU (Bolsheviks), and his last great work, The Economic Problems of Socialism in the USSR, are an encyclopaedia of Marxism-Leninism, the summation of the experience of the world Communist movement in the past hundred years.”[11] The list embodies Stalin’s betrayal of Leninism, his falsification of the history of the Bolshevik Party and the Theory of Socialism in One Country. It was these texts that CCP members, the cadres of every organisation (teachers, students, trade unionists, women’s groups, etc.) were instructed to study as the ideological underpinnings of Mao’s leadership.
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Sheng, M. Mao, Stalin, and the Formation of the Anti-Japanese United Front: 1935-37, The China Quarterly No. 129, 1992, p149-170.
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Peng Shuzi, Some Comments on Mao Tse-tung, 1968, w.m.org.
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Ibid.
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Hinton, W. Fanshen, Pelican, 1972, p378.
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Belden, J. China Shakes the World, Gollancz, 1951, p121.
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Pantsov, A. and Levine, S. Mao, Simon & Schuster, 2012, p340-342.
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Chen Po-ta, Stalin and the Chinese Revolution, 1953, FLPH.
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Ibid.
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Pantsov and Levine, Op. cit., p373.
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Schram, B. Political Thought of Mao Tse-tung, Praeger, 1963, p295.