The Long March was a major factor in consolidating the peasant/soldier brand of Maoism with its authoritarian and privileged command structure, and confirmed the lack of any genuine orientation by the CCP towards the urban working class.
This chapter shows how the so-called Second United Front in China was the Chinese version of the Popular or People’s Fronts being implemented in Europe, America, and elsewhere under the direction of the Comintern. It describes the abrupt about-face from adventurism to social patriotism, and the abasement of the CCP before Chiang Kai-shek in order to achieve a temporary and false unity with the KMT against the Japanese invasion. Mao’s New Democracy synthesised this class collaborationist doctrine, would threaten the creation of a Chinese workers’ state, and would eventually form part of the conceptual basis for capitalist restoration.
After arriving in northern Shensi in 1935/6, the Chinese Communists under the direction of the Communist International made a strategic shift climaxing in the formation of a so-called United Front with the Nationalists. In a parallel move intended to bolster Chiang against the Japanese, the USSR signed a non-aggression pact with the KMT on 21 August 1937, and began delivering military supplies to it.
Under the terms of the agreement with the KMT, the Chinese Soviet government was renamed and notionally replaced by a Border Regions’ Authority, nominally under the Nationalist regime. The CCP continued to promulgate its own laws and regulations, but now these were based on the Nationalist codes and in many cases simply adopted relevant and useful Nationalist laws, such as those against opium and banditry. During the Yenan period, the primary task of the people’s courts in the border regions was to defend the anti-Japanese Popular Front and the Party bureaucracy; to punish traitors, criminals and other harmful elements.[1]
The agreement with the KMT required the CCP to halt the seizure of landlords’ lands (which caused many peasants to fear that the land that had been distributed might be taken back), backtrack on women’s rights (which was strongly opposed by the more radical elements in the Party), and propose an alliance with the NRA (which was seen by many soldiers as a shameful betrayal of the sacrifices they had made in ten years of civil war). To overcome this opposition the CCP would launch a rectification programme of structured political indoctrination that sought to “unify the thinking of the entire membership” and give the leadership a degree of control much greater than Stalin had exerted in the Soviet Union.[2]