Page 295 - Encyclopedia Of World History Vol IV

1596 berkshire encyclopedia of world history

massacred the Communists, and brought the Nationalist and guerrilla war mentality that was not always well
Party under his control and formed a new government suited to solving problems of economic development on
with its capital in Nanjing. a national scale.
This marked an abrupt turn away from the radical The victory of the Communists in 1949 was in part the
agenda of the 1920s. Chiang abandoned most of the rev- result of the Nationalist government’s collapse from ram-
olutionary social and economic policies, including Sun pant corruption, administrative inefficiency, poor military
Yat-sen’s plans for redistribution of land, in favor of mil- strategy, and unsolved economic problems such as run-
itarily imposed political unification and nation building. away inflation. But it was also due to the Communists’
Chiang and the Nationalist government achieved some success in tapping into the main currents of modern
success with this course during the Nanjing decade nationalist aspirations for a strong, prosperous, and
(1927–1937), before a Japanese invasion brought the united country as well as the older socioeconomic griev-
government and the nation new challenges. ances of the peasantry. That mixture was a potent revo-
lutionary formula that seemed to have potential
The Communist application throughout much of the Third World.
Revolution, 1949
The Chinese Communist Party had been urban based in The Great
the 1920s, organizing industrial workers along conven- Proletarian Revolution
tional Marxist lines. After its defeat in 1927, it moved In the first two decades of the People’s Republic, the
into the countryside, where Mao Zedong (1893–1976) Communist Party oscillated between following the Soviet
emerged as the most successful leader of peasant-based model of a centralized, bureaucratic planned economy
revolution. After relocating from south central to north- and more populist, rural-based strategies for building a
western China in the famous Long March of 1935– modern, industrialized economy and an egalitarian,
1936, a reorganized party under Mao’s leadership was socialist society. The Great Leap Forward of 1958, with
positioned to take advantage of the withdrawal of Nation- its rural communes, backyard steel furnaces, and frantic
alist government authority from northern China to organ- mobilization of the masses, was the most dramatic exper-
ize the peasantry in broad areas there to resist the iment in the Yan’an-inspired unorthodox developmental
invading Japanese. strategy that Mao favored.A disastrous economic failure,
During the eight long years of war, while the Nation- it was followed in 1966 by the Great Proletarian Revo-
alists’ power and morale waned, the Communists grew lution. Mao, appalled by the loss of revolutionary fervor
in military power and popular support in the countryside in the Soviet Union and its new society of entrenched
of northern China. Combining anti-Japanese nationalism bureaucratic privilege, thought to prevent the same from
with social and economic improvements for the peasant happening in China by mobilizing frustrated students,
majority, the Chinese Communist Party, now free of low- and mid-level party members, and some elements of
Russian influence, was much more ready for renewed the military in a “revolution within the revolution.” This
conflict with the Nationalist government after Japan’s sur- would not only remove those high-ranking leaders who
render in 1945. The party’s experience during these were “taking the capitalist road,” but also revitalize the
years—the “Yan’an spirit” of self-reliance, political will entire revolution.
power overcoming material difficulties, and faith in the With the help of the politically ambitious commander
rural masses’ innate revolutionary consciousness—was of the People’s Liberation Army, Lin Biao (1908–1971),
instrumental in gaining popular support and overcoming Mao purged almost all the top party and government
Nationalist military superiority in the seizure of national leaders, inspired vast numbers of fanatically loyal revo-
power by 1949. It also left a legacy of populist activism lutionary youth (the various bands of Red Guards), and