The Great Chinese Revolution Stage 1: New Democratic Revolution 1911-1949
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 IB - Topics in 20th Century History The Great Chinese Revolution Stage 1: New Democratic Revolution 1911-1949
Big Ideas on Stage One of the Revolution in China
IB Topics in 20th Century History The Great Chinese Revolution Stage 1: New Democratic RevolutionT Chen Jian 
his emphasis on “carrying the revolution through to the end” was a long-standing preoccupation in Mao’s thinking. As early as 1939 and 1940, Mao stated in The Chinese Revolution and the Chinese Communist Party and On New Democracy, two of his most important works, that the Chinese Communist revolution would be divided into two stages: the stage of new democratic revolution, and the stage of socialist revolution. During the first stage, the revolution had to overthrow the rule of the bureaucratic-capitalist class, wipe out foreign influence, eliminate remnants of feudal tradition, and establish a Communist-led regime that would unify all patriotic social classes in China. The second stage of the revolution would transform the Chinese society. including the economic system, political structure, and social life, under the leadership of the Communist regime. The transformation would lay the foundation of China’s transition into a socialist and later Communist society. In Mao’s view, the two stages in the revolution were closely linked: without the first stage, the second stage of the revolution would be impossible; without the second stage, the first stage of the revolution would become meaningless. When Mao called for “carrying the revolution through to the end” in 1949, he was thinking about leading the revolution into its necessary second stage.1 Part 1 – The Origins of the Chinese Communist Party and the Leadership of Mao Zedong
O Karl Marx 
ne of the problems historians must deal with is the conflict in specialties. Historical study is divided into specialties: time periods, regions, and topics. At times these areas begin to overlap and create conflict. An example of this is the study of the Chinese Civil War and the rise of the Chinese Communist Party. The 1911-1949 period has traditionally fallen within the purview of the China studies community (also known as area studies). The China studies community works on placing the rise of the CCP into the context of broader Chinese history with emphasis on the continuity of Chinese culture, language and traditions. The problem is that outside forces played a significant role in the development of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) during the 1911-1949 period. The end of World War II, the power competition between the United States and the Soviet Union, and the role of the United States in Chinese affairs – all of these were significant forces in the outcome of the Chinese Civil War. With these forces come advocates of the historical specialties that deal with each area, and conflict arises over what forces played what role. Students of this period of Chinese history must be willing to look across areas of specialty to make judgments and develop arguments. They must also be aware of the limitations that specialty places on authors.
“Despite the breadth and depth of the writings of Karl Marx and Vladimir Lenin, the crux of communist ideology can be reduced to four essential tenets (and one corollary):
After the establishment of the first Chinese empire, there existed a Chinese world order that was described by scholars as "a Sinocentric hierarchy." The "International" relations of China with surrounding areas, and with non-Chinese peoples generally, were colored by the concept of Sinocentrism and the assumption of Chinese superiority. Sinocentrism and the Chinese world order was a set of ideas and practices developed and perpetuated by the rulers of China over many centuries. In an abbreviated and somewhat oversimplified form, Sinocentrism and the traditional Chinese world order were portrayed in Chinese classics by a framework of the following four dimensions. First, the Chinese world system was a closed system with a limited understanding of China's place in the world. … China's self-sufficiency and imperial position was never seriously challenged from the outside world. Until modern times the Chinese empire was able to maintain the Chinese ethnocentric worldview and did not care whether people outside the Sinitic world knew about China. Second, the Chinese world order was hierarchical and anti-egalitarian. … Third, China's centrality in the world order was a function of her civilization and virtue, particularly the virtue of China's ruler, although military means were used constantly to defend as well as to expand the Chinese empire. Lucian Pye's study of Asian power indicates that "the Chinese with all their Confucianism, created an elaborate intellectual structure of an ethical order which all enlightened peoples were expected to acknowledge and respect." … In the Chinese world order, a hierarchical power relationship, therefore, was by definition more "moral" than in the West. And finally, international society was the extension of internal society. As John K. Fairbank put it, "The Chinese tended to think of their foreign relations as giving an expression externally to the same principles of social and political order that were manifested internally within the Chinese state and society.3
[N]ationalism … is a pathological form of self-protective resistance … [by] groups which feel humiliated or oppressed, to whom nationalism represents the straightening of bent backs, the recovery of a freedom they may never have had (it is all a matter of ideas in men’s heads), revenge for their insulted humanity. … It animates revolts … for it expresses the inflamed desire of the insufficiently regarded to count for something among the cultures of the world.4
Whether you see Mao as a Marxist or not essentially depends on your view of Marx and his works – was it a blueprint, or merely an approach?5
Mao’s creation of thought is a continuing process without any foreseeable conclusion. Unification of theory and practice continues, adding to thought. The new revolutionary generation is instructed to do more than read the thought of Mao Tse-tung. It is urged to use it as a model for combining theory and practice, and so develop an outlook in which ideology becomes a central part of everyday living and working. THE PROCESS OF CREATING IDEOLOGY T  heory + Practice Thought
“Truth of Marxism-Leninism” + “Practice of Revolution a Mao Tse-tung
Those who see Mao as being part of the Marxist tradition do not dispute these major differences between Mao and Marx, and even between Mao and Lenin. However, they argue that the ‘Maoists’ miss the point about Marx and Marxism, even if they are correct about Mao. Marx, they argue, was less of an economic determinist than they suggest, and that he did discuss the importance of willed ‘cultural’ change. Reducing Marx to a simple economic determinist is over-simplifying the thousands of words that Marx wrote.7
… At the risk of oversimplification, those who argue that Mao did create a new distinct ideology argue three main points. The first, perhaps least significant, revolves around the class-based nature of Mao’s revolutionary strategy. With no real proletariat to speak of, and no bourgeois revolution in place, then how could you get a proletarian revolution? Second, can a peasant-based revolution be Marxist? The third point is the most substantial and pertinent. By defining class more as a state of mind than as an economically determined state, surely Mao moved too far away from Marx’s original work? …Mao then is a ‘voluntarist,’ who turns Marx on his head by emphasizing the primacy of willed social change as a precondition for economic change.8
The debate will continue. But does it matter? Does the peasant dying from starvation at the end of the Great Leap Forward accept his fate more readily because it was a Marxist Policy which led to his fate? The answer to the second question is no, but the answer to the first question is a resounding yes for three main reasons. First, Mao was convinced he was right and convinced that his was the correct Marxist approach. While it is true that Mao wanted power, he did not want power for its own sake. He was also motivated by ensuring that his correct Marxist ideas were followed, and if people got in the way and relied on inappropriate Russian models, then those obstacles had to be removed. Second, and following from above, we return to the importance of Sino-Soviet relations, and Mao’s attitude towards Soviet Marxism. In the international communist debate, it was important for Mao to ascertain that his ideas were not only part of the Marxist canon, but also the best model for others to follow in promoting revolution in the third world. Third, and more important for this study, Mao had to argue that his ideas were correct Marxist ideas in competition with those Chinese leaders who instinctively and ideologically looked to Moscow for their inspiration. Unable to dominate the specifics of policy-making on a day-to-day level within the party-state bureaucracy, Mao’s major way of reasserting himself in the political arena was to maintain the importance of ideology on the political agenda. By continually keeping the ideological debate alive, and by continually emphasizing the correct Marxist approach of seeking truth from facts and asserting the primacy of the Chinese experience, Mao could reassert his views over and above those of his colleagues, and use the Marxist debate as a tool to attack his opponents. Defending his ideas as the only correct interpretation of Marxism in the Chinese case was a crucial component of Mao’s political strategy.9
Dr. Sun Zhoungshan 
… In a country like China, where the rigid discipline of democratic centralism has been superimposed upon strong Confucian traditions of patriarchal authority and group conformity, party members and cadres are constantly – indeed compulsively – constrained to look to higher levels for cues as to what is necessary, appropriate, or even permissible language. Under such circumstances, even seemingly minor shifts in prevailing terminology may prove extremely important.10
The Chinese nation-building efforts in the early years of the present century were, as argued by Mary Wright, ‘directed toward action and change in three different, though related spheres.’ They were, first, resistance to imperialism as reflected in China’s assertion of its sovereignty along the frontier areas and in the watchword ‘recovery of sovereign rights;’ secondly, organization of a modern centralized nation-state, capable of forcing back the imperialists and forwarding China’s aspirations in political, social, economic and cultural life; and less important, the overthrow of the Manchu Dynasty. These were in fact the responses China developed to the imperialist danger it was faced with. It is interesting to note that the Nationalist Revolution in 1911 only accomplished the least important task of Chinese nationalism.12
The outbreak of World War I in August 1914 was both a blessing and curse for China. It was a blessing because, as almost all European Powers were deeply involved in the War, they had to loosen their grip on China, and the war gave China a breathing space to develop its own infant industries. It was a blessing also because, probably unseen at the time, it meant the breakdown of the European system of balance of power and it carried a prospect of reorganization of the international system after the war, an opportunity for China to readjust its relations with the Powers and to find its own legitimate standing in the new international order. It was a curse because the war immediately spread to East Asia and because, as was soon proved, Japan was out to entrench itself and to bid for its supremacy in China at the expense of the interest of the other Powers.13
After the armistice of November 11, 1918, ended the war with Germany’s defeat, anticipation in China ran high. There were triumphant parades in Peking, and an exuberant crowd demolished the memorial that the Qing (Manchu Dynasty) had been forced to raise in honor of the Germans killed by the Boxers. The Peking government was now headed by yet another Beiyang-faction president and premier; Duan Qirui had resigned in October 1918, but before doing so had used the huge Japanese loans to enhance his own military power and had continued to build a network of secret deals with the Japanese. The Chinese delegation to the postwar treaty negotiations at Versailles, sixty-two members strong, was headed by five capable diplomats who had never been fully briefed on what to expect. They were greeted at Versailles by the shattering announcement of the chief Japanese delegate that early in 1917, in return for Japanese naval assistance against the Germans, Great Britain, France, and Italy had signed a secret treaty ensuring “support [of] Japan’s claim in regard to the disposal of Germany’s rights in Shandong” after the war. As if that were not bad enough, the Japanese also announced that they had come to secret agreements with Duan Qirui in September 1918, while he was still premier. These agreements granted the Japanese the right to station police and to establish military garrisons in Jinan and Qingdao, and mortgaged to Japan, in partial payment for its loans to China, the total income from two new Shandong railroads the Japanese planned to develop. The Chinese delegates seem to have been genuinely unaware of these humiliating secret agreements. President Woodrow Wilson, who had earlier been sympathetic to China’s desire to recover its Shandong rights, now felt that Japan had staked out a firm claim to them on the basis of international law. On April 30, 1919, he agreed with David Lloyd George of Britain and George Clemenceau of France to transfer all of the Germany’s Shandong rights to Japan.14
The news of the Big Three’s decision in Paris to transfer Jiaozhou and former German interests in Shandong to Japan, when reaching Beijing, immediately threw the Chinese from pious hope to deep despair. ‘Young’s China’s faith in Wilsonian idealism was shattered to dust. “The New World Order” was no more!’ This frustration and exasperation was soon transferred into a national protest against the Paris decision on Shandong. An ‘unpremeditated nationalist movement’ was started by students in Beijing on May 4, 1919. … …
… Mao Zedong 
At the second Comintern congress, held in July 1920, Lenin took the position that the capitalist stage of development need not be inevitable for backward nations if they were aided by the Soviet Union. Peasant soviets would be encouraged in such cases, along with “a temporary alliance with bourgeois democratic parties.16
Summing up the experience in December 1935, Mao wrote: “The Long March is the first of its kind in the annals of History. It is a manifesto, a propaganda force, a seeding-machine. … It has proclaimed to the world that the Red Army is an army of heroes, while the imperialists and their running dogs, Chiang Kai-shek and his like, are impotent.”17 Part 2 – The Rise to Power of the Chinese Communist Party
For the Leninists within the party [the CCP], the primacy was on economic recovery and development. Changing the way people think was not unimportant, but as China was a backward and underdeveloped country, they argued that the main task was to (re)build the economy. Once this was completed, then the party could move on to other tasks. For Mao, this approach was anathema, and was based on an over-strong acceptance of what he called ‘dogma’ and the rejection of the Chinese experience. He too believed that China should develop, and develop as quickly as possible. It was not the goal that Mao objected to but both the methods and the underlying principles that guided these goals. Mao warned that whilst the Leninist proposals might lead to economic development in China, it would be to the detriment of building communism. The methods they planned to use would generate new forms of oppression, control and authority that would leave the Chinese masses as powerless as they had been before the revolution. If managers and experts controlled the revolution, then they would come to see themselves as superior to the workers (and the workers would perceive themselves as inferior). If bureaucrats and planners took control of the revolution, they would come to see themselves as superior to the proletariat, and the proletariat would either through coercion or habit develop a passive acceptance of the party’s right to dictate.18
… Thus Mao’s China dramatically enhanced the theme of decolonization in the Communist Cold War discourse that had been overwhelmingly dominated by class-struggle-centered language. As a result, the emerging anti-imperialist / anticolonialist movements in non-Western countries became more tightly connected with the “proletarian world revolution.”19
… In other words, from 1921 to 1937 Communism failed in China because the Chinese people, in general, were indifferent to what the Communist Party had to offer. After 1937, it succeeded because the population became receptive to one particular kind of political appeal; and the Communist Party – in one of its many disguises – made precisely that appeal; it offered to meet the needs of the people for leadership in organizing resistance to the invader and in alleviating war-induced anarchy in the rural areas.20
Politically, therefore, the CCP’s victory was as genuine as the KMT (GMD)’s21 defeat. In the cities, both were tempered by fear among intellectuals and capitalists that the Communists would in certain respects be worse than the KMT (GMD). In the countryside, the alienation of the ruling class was more than balanced by the strength of the mass base mobilized and organized in the process. In terms of their ability to cope with the problems that had undermined public confidence in the KMT (GMD) Government, the CCP’s record was clearly positive. The Communists did not just happen to be in the right place at the right time to benefit from the KMT (GMD) debacle. They did not win an unqualified mandate in 1949 to establish one-party Communist rule in Mainland China. But their achievements had been substantial enough to provide a basis for the transfer of popular allegiance to the new Communist-led Government.22
Invoking the Boxer Protocol of 1901 which permitted foreign signatories to station troops between Peking (Peiping) and the Sea, the Japanese garrison in North China in early July 1937 held a field exercise outside Peiping, near the Marco Polo Bridge. On the pretext that a soldier was missing, the Japanese demand to enter the nearby city of Wanping before midnight of July 7 to conduct a search. When refused by the local Chinese garrison – the 29th Army under General Sung Che-yuan – the Japanese army bombarded the city and occupied it at 4:30 on the morning of July 8, thus precipitating an undeclared war between the two countries.23
The Yenan period of wartime resistance (1937-45) provided Mao and the CCP with the much needed time to restructure the party and the army, organize the masses, and develop new social, political, and economic institutions. Mao was at the peak of his creativity, ingeniously reconciling the universalist Marxist-Leninist principles with the particularist demand of the Chinese conditions and the Chinese revolutionary experience. Hence, the Yenan experience was of seminal importance to the development of Chinese Communism; in it was planted the seed of Mao’s ultimate success. The heart of the Yenan Way was the perfection of the mass line and the sharpening of revolutionary nationalism in the countryside, which became the twin pillars of Maoism. …26
The Big Three at Yalta 
On February 11, 1945, Joseph Stalin, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and Winston Churchill, then in conclave at the Crimean port of Yalta, signed an agreement for disposing of Far Eastern questions. Stalin had conditioned the Soviet Union’s entrance into the war against Japan on that agreement, which would ensure the expansion of Soviet supremacy in Asia. The accord stated that the status quo in Outer Mongolia (the Mongolian People’s Republic) would be preserved, and that the “former rights of Russia violated by the treacherous attack of Japan in 1904” would be restored. In addition to validating various Soviet claims against Japan itself, Yalta gave Moscow extraterritorial rights in China and prescribed the conclusion of a treaty of alliance between Moscow and the Nationalist government in Chongqing (Chungking). The security equation for Stalin was simple: subordinate the interests of weak states (including China) to those of the powerful, divide the strategic regions of the world into spheres of influence, and widen the buffer zones along the periphery of the Soviet State. His was the diplomacy of imperial Russia.27
…When the Americans made it clear that they would exercise exclusive control of the occupation of Japan, the Soviets immediately decided to harden their policy toward the United States in East Asia and the GMD in China. The Soviets were now willing to break their obligation under the Sino-Soviet treaty. Beginning in early October their attitude toward the Northeast issue changed further in the CCP’s favor. The Soviet Red Army began to create barriers against the GMD troops’ movement into the Northeast, claiming that until an overall solution of the Northeast issue had been worked out, they would not allow GMD troops to enter areas they occupied. In the meantime, the Soviets increased their support for the CCP. On 4 October, the Soviets advised the CCP Northeast Bureau that the Chinese Communists should move as many as 300,000 troops into the Northeast in one month’s time, and the Soviets would provide them with large numbers of weapons. On 19 October, the CCP leadership decided to “go all out to control the entire Northeast.”28
Whether or not they knew of changing Western attitudes, the Soviet leaders feared that Britain and the United States might conclude the war with Japan before the Soviet Union was able to enter. The secret Bulletin of the Central Committee Information Bureau reported in its issue of July 1, 1945 that reactionary circles in Britain wanted a compromise peace with Japan in order to prevent the Soviet Union from strengthening its influence in the Far East. The same question, it noted, was being raised in American newspapers and journals as well. Stalin was afraid that if the war ended before the Soviet Union entered, the United States and Britain would renege on the Yalta Agreement, which was contingent upon Soviet participation in the war. “Stalin was leaning on our officers to start military action as soon as possible,” Nikita Khrushchev later recalled. “Stalin had his doubts about whether the Americans would keep their word. … What if Japan capitulated before we entered the war? The Americans might say, we don’t owe you anything.”29
This decision [by the GMD to give automatic wage adjustments based on increases in the cost of living/inflation] not only accelerated the upward wage-price spiral; it also compromised the KMT’s (GMD’s) long-standing alliance with business and industry. The Government was in effect obliged to trade a fitful peace on the labor front for the resentment of entrepreneurs, who argued that the concessions to labor were contributing to soaring production costs. High wage payments were only part of the problem. But the Government seemingly could not win, since it was responsible, either because of the inflation itself or because of the inadequate attempts to minimize its consequences, for virtually all other components of the problem as well. The resentment culminated in the August , 1948, reforms which finally brought the Shanghai Chamber of Commerce and the Shanghai Industrial Association into open denunciation of the Government’s policies.30
The impoverishment of the academic community did, of course, inspire one of the major themes of the student anti-war movement. The professors themselves precipitated the Anti-Hunger Anti-Civil War demonstrations in 1947 with their demands for, among other things, an increase in basic salary and automatic wage adjustments geared to the rise in the cost of living. The economic deprivations caused by the Government’s use of the printing press to finance the war provided one important issue for those who argued against the Civil War, and obviously helped to undermine support for it within the intellectual community. But unlike the labor movement, which fed directly on the economic chaos created by the inflation, the intellectuals’ aversion to the Civil War was based on a more complex assessment of the nature of KMT (GMD) rule and the sacrifices the nation as a whole should have to bear in order to preserve it. The intellectuals own impoverishment was only one of the considerations apparent in their assessment. They opposed the Civil War because they reasoned it was too high a price to pay in order to keep in power the KMT (GMD) as it was then constituted.31
… The printing press may have been the government’s chief source of revenue, but the Government depended also on a land tax, on the compulsory purchase of grain at lower than market prices, and on the collection of grain on loan. These levies, together with requisitions to support local needs, the abuses associated with conscription, and the disruptions caused by a poorly disciplined and underpaid army in the field, created insupportable burdens for the peasantry. Finally, an increasingly militaristic government, and increased political alienation among the public, were also condemned as direct results of the war. For all these reasons, the Government’s insistence on fighting it, while failing to implement any of the reforms that might have made it more acceptable, provided the strongest possible evidence to support the charge that the KMT (GMD) Government did not exist “for” the people; that, to the contrary, it was willing to sacrifice the interests of the nation as a whole in pursuit of its own selfish aims; and that it was basically incapable of serving that end effectively.32
First, the Communists had built a record of credibility which served them well in 1949. The KMT (GMD) had a habit of saying one thing and doing another, of promulgating reform measures and never implementing them. The Communists, by contrast, had a reputation of keeping their word, for actually implementing their policies, and for correcting their mistakes. The Communists said that their ultimate goal was the realization of communism in China. No one doubted that this was their goal. But the Communists also said that it would take many years to achieve it, and that in the meantime they planned to build a New Democratic society in which there would be a place and a need for everyone, bourgeois intellectuals and national capitalists as well as worker and landowning peasant. Since the Communists said this, intellectuals and capitalists were inclined to believe it.33
… The repudiation was formalized, toward the end of 1947, with the campaign against left adventurism. At this time, the Party’s orientation toward business, industry, labor, and the intelligentsia shifted towards maximizing production and creating an alliance of the greatest possible number in the interests of achieving total victory. The new line stressed cooperation with private capital, the rationalization of management in public enterprise, and the necessity of winning over the intellectuals regardless of their ideological differences with communism… The anti-leftist campaigns of 1948 provided the basis of the successful take-over of urban China in 1949.34
The winning formula had emerged during the war with Japan. Having abandoned violent land confiscation in the interest of the anti-Japanese united front, the Communists were obliged to look for new ways of transferring wealth from those who had it to those who did not. This shift was particularly significant in north China, where tenancy was not the dominant problem and a majority of the peasants owned the land they tilled. As a result of their search, the Communists’ rural land policy had expanded by 1945, through the “settling of old accounts” tactic, to encompass the full range of issues that would provide benefits to the “basic masses” of north China. In addition to the material incentives provided by the redistribution of wealth derived through the settling accounts struggle, the Communists could offer a solution for what the peasantry as a whole perceived as its most immediate grievances: the corrupt and arbitrary use of political power and social position within the village community. In exploiting these issues, together with all the others associated with the ownership and use of land, unpaid labor, and indebtedness, the CCP had discovered a formula for “mass activation through class struggle” even in areas where landlords were not a problem that concerned the village masses. In the process, the Chinese Communists had not only found the means of destroying the rural system of economic and political power; they had also discovered how to mobilize peasant support for the construction of a new one.35
T 
Mao and the Creation of the PRC October 1, 1949
The relationship between land reform and the prerequisites for implementing it was one that was mutually sustaining. Land reform was significant as a means of mobilizing the peasants to participate in the Struggle against Chiang Kai-shek. At the same time, the purpose of the armed struggle was to make possible the realization of land reform. …36
Mao and the CCP leadership attached even greater importance to the problem of maintaining the inner dynamics of the Chinese Communist revolution after victory than they did to political consolidation and economic reconstruction. This emphasis was to play a decisive role in shaping Communist China’s foreign policy. Mao titled his 1949 New Year’s message “Carry the Revolution through to the End.” According to him and other CCP leaders, the “end” of the revolution must be understood at two different levels. First, the CCP was determined to eliminate the GMD military forces and to overthrow the GMD regime so that “the Chinese reactionaries would not be able to come back, by taking advantage of the compromise of the revolutionaries, as had happened during the 1911 revolution and the North Expedition [of 1927].” Second, Mao was contemplating how to push the revolution forward after its victory. In his report to the Central Committee’s Second Plenary Session, Mao pointed out that the CCP’s seizure of power was only the completion of the first step in the long march of the Chinese Communist revolution, and that “the road after the victory would be longer, the work greater and more arduous.” Mao warned the members of the party: It will not require much time and effort to win the nationwide victory, but to consolidate it will. The bourgeoisie doubts our ability to construct. The imperialists reckon that eventually we will beg alms from them in order to live. With victory, such moods as arrogance, self-styled heroism, inertia and unwillingness to advance, preoccupation with pleasure-seeking, and a distaste for continued hard struggle may grow within the party. With victory, the people will be grateful to us and the bourgeoisie will come forward to flatter us. It has been proved that the enemy can not conquer us by force of arms. The flattery of the bourgeoisie, however, may conquer the weak-willed in our ranks. There may be some Communists who were not conquered by enemies with guns and were worthy of the name of heroes for standing up to these enemies, but who cannot withstand the sugar-coated bullets; they will be defeated by sugar-coated bullets. We must guard against such a situation. This emphasis on “carrying the revolution through to the end” was a long-standing preoccupation in Mao’s thinking. As early as 1939 and 1940, Mao stated in The Chinese Revolution and the Chinese Communist Party and On New Democracy, two of his most important works, that the Chinese Communist revolution would be divided into two stages: the stage of new democratic revolution and the stage of socialist revolution. During the first stage, the revolution had to overthrow the rule of the bureaucratic-capitalist class, wipe out foreign influence, eliminate remnants of feudal tradition, and establish a Communist-led regime that would unify all patriotic social classes in China. The second stage of the revolution would transform the Chinese society, including the economic system, political structure, and social life, under the leadership of the Communist regime. This transformation would lay the foundation of China’s transition into a socialist and latter a Communist society. In Mao’s view, the two stages of the revolution were closely linked: without the first stage, the second stage of the revolution would be impossible; without the second stage, the first stage of the revolution would become meaningless. When Mao called for “carrying the revolution through to the end” in 1949, he was thinking about leading the revolution into its necessary second stage.37 IB Topics in 20th Century History Log Requirements & Reading assignments The Great Chinese Revolution Begins Required Reading: 1. Shaun Breslin, Mao – Introduction – Due September 29th
Paper #1: The Emergence and Development of the People’s Republic of China (PRC), 1946-1964 See Page 18 – The completed DBQ is due on 23rd for Red Day classes and the 24th for Blue day Classes. The DBQ must be turned in both to Turnitin.com and a copy to the instructor at the beginning of your class meeting the day it is due. Possible Paper #2 Questions: |
nd construction of China” The Thought of
