Making China Modern by Klaus Mühlhahn

Author:Klaus Mühlhahn
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Harvard University Press

Governing China

In a country where the central government had been disintegrating since the late nineteenth century, political centralization and national independence were general hopes of the population. Building on developments of the republican era, the new state was designed as a modern nation-state. It penetrated society far more deeply, however, as its bureaucratic apparatus reached into even the most remote villages. This new state was thus able to wield far greater power than its republican predecessor or its late imperial counterpart in the nineteenth century.

The principles used to govern China in the first few years after the takeover, up until 1953, had been laid out by Mao Zedong in his 1940 speech “The Politics and Culture of New Democracy” (Xin minzhu zhuyi de zhengzhi yu Xin minzhu zhuyi de wenhua).18 Mao argued that the Chinese revolution historically fell into two stages: democracy and socialism. The former was a special Chinese type of democracy to be called New Democracy. In this period preceding the establishment of socialism, the new government would be required to manage a coalition of four progressive (or “democratic”) social forces. These were the same that constituted the United Front of the Yan’an era—the proletariat, the peasantry, the petty bourgeoisie, and the national bourgeoisie—but now, this coalition of social classes would be under the leadership of the Communist Party. The calculation behind the policy was that the alliance of the CCP with local or national capitalists (excluding counterrevolutionaries and traitors) would avoid economic collapse, and allow the CCP to draw on urban support.

Following its accession to power, taking into account the practical need to maintain political stability, the CCP at first assembled centrist political forces into what was formally a coalition government led by the CCP. Called the People’s Democratic Dictatorship, it was explained and advocated as a unified dictatorship of the revolutionary classes under CCP leadership. In one of Mao Zedong’s most influential and important speeches, “On the People’s Democratic Dictatorship,” given in commemoration of the twenty-eighth anniversary of the CCP on June 30, 1949, Mao Zedong talked at length about the emerging political and social order in the new China.19 In China’s new order, the people would exercise a dictatorship over the enemies of the people:

Who are the people? At the present stage, they are the working class, the peasantry, the urban petty bourgeoisie and the national bourgeoisie. These classes, led by the working class and the Communist Party, unite to form their own state and elect their own government; they enforce their dictatorship over the running dogs of imperialism—the landlord class and bureaucratic bourgeoisie, as well as the representatives of those classes, the Kuomintang reactionaries and their accomplices—suppress them, allow them only to behave themselves and not to be unruly in word or deed. If they speak or act in an unruly way, they will be promptly stopped and punished. Democracy is practiced within the ranks of the people, who enjoy the rights of freedom of speech, assembly, association and so on. The right to vote belongs only to the people, not to the reactionaries.

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