Communist Policies (1945-1949)

For almost thirty years after the founding of the Communist regime People's Republic of China, Mao Tse-tung was the supreme leader of that country (1949-76), a position he held, not without contest though, until his death. Mao's prestige was established during the Long March (1934-35), during the war against Japan, and during the civil war with the Nationalists after 1945. Mao was a supreme strategist and adroit at applying guerrilla warfare to the Nationalist troops. In 1947, when Chiang Kai-shek, head of the Nationalist government, bombarded Yanan aerially, Mao quickly decided to evacuate from Yanan, which had by now had served as the center of the Chinese Communists for over ten years and become the symbol of Chinese Communism. But within three months, the tide started to turn and Communists began their counter-offensive. Mao's strategic use of offensive and withdrawals, something he had learned from experience and from reading the ancient Chinese philosopher Sun Tzu, won him high prestige among the Chinese Communists. Mao's writings became classics and Mao was ranked with Marx, Engels, Lenin, and Stalin as one of the original Communist thinkers by the Chinese Communists.

But perhaps even Mao did not foresee the rapid speed of Communist success over the Nationalists in 1948-1949. In the three documents written by Mao for our reading here (Spence 18.4 & 18.5), Mao showed a significant change of policy from April to June of 1949. The two documents written in April, Order to the Army for the Country-Wide Advance, before the takeover of Nanjing from the Nationalists, and the Proclamation of the Chinese People's Liberation Army, published two days after the takeover of Nanjing on April 25, 1949, show both Mao's emphasis on a resolute advance of the Communist troops and non-compromise with the Nationalists, and a continued emphasis on the United Front (second document). But in the speech written on June 30, 1949, On the People's Democratic Dictatorship, obviously foreseen a very quick Communist victory at hand, Mao evidently started to shed the United Front stance, and emphasized, well, a proletarian (working class) control of China, instead of an alliance with so many other social classes. It emphasized the People's Dictatorship against those who were opposition groups. All who opposed Communist rule were classified as oppositional social classes and to be reformed or even purged. Here, it was not just not to compromise with the Nationalists, but also certain social classes that the Communists had tried to work with during the United Front years.

After the Communist takeover, Mao's On the People's Democratic Dictatorship became a classic, and was used to carry out a series of policies that deprived the rights and property of certain social groups by others. The political intolerance of the Communists, after they became the government, often could match the political intolerance of the Nationalists, the regime they had overthrown.