Maoism

When the CCP seized power in 1949, Mao announced to the whole world that "we the Chinese people have stood up." Yet he also emphasized that this was merely "the completion of the first step in the long march of the Chinese revolution," and that carrying out the "revolution after the revolution" represented an even more fundamental and challenging mission. How to prevent the revolution from losing momentum emerged as Mao's primary concern.

Mao's "post-revolution anxiety."

In the mid-1950s, as the nationwide "socialist transformation" (nationalizing industry and commerce and collectivizing agriculture) neared completion, Mao sensed that many of the Party's cadres were becoming less enthusiastic about furthering the revolution. After the failure of the "Great Leap Forward" in 1958–1959, Mao realized that his revolution was losing crucial "inner support" even among the party elite. In the last decade of his life, when he pushed China into the "Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution," Mao found that a majority of the CCP elite were unable—or unwilling—to follow the development of his thinking. Mao was preoccupied by a pivotal challenge: how could he bring about transformations "all under heaven"? Facing him was a paradox deeply rooted in the challenge itself: he had to find the means for transforming the "old" world from the very "old" world that was yet to be transformed. This profound "post-revolution anxiety" played a crucial role in shaping Maoism's post-1949 development.

In search of a Chinese model of socialism.

A major theoretical challenge facing Mao after 1949 was a question that he had previously had little time and opportunity to contemplate: What is socialism, and how could one build socialism in China? In Mao's initial search for answers, he paid special attention to the "Stalin model"—the only existing model of building socialism from which he could learn.

With completion of land reforms and elimination of the gentry-landlord class in 1953, Mao and the CCP immediately followed the "Stalin model" for carrying out "transition to socialism." By 1956, a highly centralized system of "planning economy" had emerged following the introduction of the First Five-Year Plan. The CCP's Eighth Congress announced in September 1956 that, with the Communist state now possessing the major means of production, class struggle no longer figured as the principle contradiction in Chinese society. Therefore, China had entered the stage of socialist construction.

While many Party cadres were excited about this "great victory of socialism," Mao sensed a decline in revolutionary vigor among his comrades. In order to create new momentum for the continuous revolution, as well as to pursue China's central position in the international Communist movement, he was determined to go beyond the "Stalin model" and to push for a more aggressive and unconventional model of socialism. In the wake of the Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev's (1894–1971) de-Stalinization campaign and the Hungarian revolution of October 1956, Mao introduced his theory that "class struggle exists in a socialist society." He contended that the conflict between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat continued in the sphere of the superstructure even after the economic foundation had been transformed. This formed the context in which Mao turned the "Letting One Hundred Flowers Blossom" campaign into the "Anti-Rightist" movement in the summer of 1957, in which more than 300,000 intellectuals were branded as "class enemies." He also brought this "ideological struggle" to the Party leadership itself and criticized Zhou Enlai (1898–1976) for his opposition to "rash advance in socialist construction." Still with no clear definition of socialism, Mao was ready to launch in China the most radical experiments in the name of socialism and communism.

The Great Leap Forward.

The year 1958, which witnessed the dramatic "Great Leap Forward," was pivotal in Maoism's development. Early in the year, Mao formally introduced the thesis of "one revolution after another … being carried out uninterruptedly." In explaining why China should and must be elevated rapidly to a higher stage of social development, Mao referred to two basic conditions: the revolutionary enthusiasm of the masses and the backwardness of the Chinese economy. Revealing again the voluntarism and romanticism at the root of his conceptual world, Mao proclaimed: "China's 600 million people have two remarkable characteristics: poor and blank. That may seem like a bad thing, but it is really a good thing. Poor people want change, want to do things, want revolution.… The newest and most beautiful picture can be painted on a blank sheet with no blotches on it" (Jianguo vilai Mao Zedong wengao, vol. 7, pp. 177–178).

In the summer of 1958, Mao and the CCP leadership announced that "the realization of a Communist society in China is not far away." For the purpose of rapidly increasing China's industrial and agricultural production, Mao and the Party mobilized millions and millions of ordinary Chinese to make steel in "backyard furnaces," and to work on miscellaneous construction and irrigation projects. What excited Mao most was that tens of thousands of "people's communes" were founded throughout the country. In Mao's vision, these communes, by combining "economic, cultural, political, and military affairs" into one entity, and by practicing "compensation according to need" through a public dining system, opened the door to a communist society. At one point, Mao even raised the question of abolishing the "bourgeois right," arguing that it was time to eliminate the inequality caused by the practice of "compensation according to work."

In order to enhance popular support for his extraordinary mass mobilization efforts, Mao ordered the Chinese Communist artillery forces to bombard the Nationalist-controlled Jinmen islands in the heyday of the Great Leap Forward. Although this caused a serious international crisis between China and the United States, Mao was unafraid, arguing that international tension had a "good side of it" as it could "bring about the awakening of many people" and was therefore beneficial to the revolution.

Mao's utopian expectations collapsed with the failure of the Great Leap Forward, which caused one of the worst human tragedies in twentieth-century history. It is estimated that 20 to 30 million people starved to death in a nationwide famine during the 1959–1961 period. For the first time in Communist China's history, the myth of Mao's "eternal correctness" was called into question.

The great Sino-Soviet polemic debate.

The disastrous consequences of the Great Leap Forward resulted in a major setback in Mao's political career. With Mao relegated to the "second line" in 1960–1962, the CCP leadership adopted more moderate and flexible policies designed for economic recovery and social stability. However, Mao never intended to abandon the theory and practice of continuous revolution. When the Chinese economy began to recover in 1962, Mao called upon the Party "never to forget class struggle." This time, he was determined to turn the party and state that he himself had created and ruled into the target of his revolution.

Within this context the great Sino-Soviet debate erupted in the early 1960s. In the mid-1950s, Mao had already charged that Khrushchev, with his de-Stalinization efforts, risked discarding the banners of both Stalin and Lenin. Mao had further criticized Khrushchev's strategy of "peaceful coexistence," claiming that it obscured the fundamental distinction between revolution and counterrevolution, between communism and capitalism. Meanwhile, Mao also contended that Moscow had long carried out a policy of "great power chauvinism" toward China, characterizing Moscow as a threat to Chinese sovereignty and independence. Thus Mao effectively linked his challenge to Moscow's leading position in international communism to the theme of safeguarding China's national security interests. During the Sino-Soviet polemic of the 1960s, Mao further asserted that socialism in the Soviet Union had been gradually eroded by an emerging "bureaucratic capitalist class." With such "capitalist roaders" as Khrushchev controlling the party and state, he concluded, capitalism had been restored in Soviet society. In elaborating these "lessons of the Soviet Union," Mao emphasized that China also faced the danger of "restoration of capitalism" if its own "capitalist roaders" were not exposed and rooted out. With Mao's push, China's domestic politics and social life were again rapidly radicalized along with the escalation of the Sino-Soviet debate.

The Cultural Revolution.

Mao's efforts to instill a new social order in people's hearts and minds reached new heights when the "Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution" began in the summer of 1966. Mao initiated the Cultural Revolution for two interrelated purposes. First, he hoped that it would allow him to find new means of promoting the transformation of China's party, state, and society in accordance with his ideals. Second, he sought to use it instrumentally to enhance his much weakened authority and reputation. Both in real life and in Mao's conceptual realm, those two purposes were interwoven—for Mao believed that his preeminent leadership would best guarantee the success of his revolution.

By carrying out the Cultural Revolution, Mao easily achieved the second goal, making his power and authority absolute during the Cultural Revolution years. But the Cultural Revolution failed to bring him any closer to achieving the first goal. Although the mass movement released by the Cultural Revolution destroyed Mao's opponents and, for a period, the "old" party-state control system, it proved unable to create the new form of state power that Mao so much desired for creating a new society. When the mass practice of "fight self, criticize revisionism" turned into superficial "ritual procedures," and when Mao acted to restore and enhance the state's harsh control over society, millions of ordinary Chinese developed a profound "crisis of faith." Consequently, the economic stagnation and political cruelty prevailing in China made the people disillusioned with the ultimate benefits of Mao's ideals and plans. By Mao's own standard, the legitimacy of his continuous revolution was called into serious question as it failed the test of ordinary people's lived experience.

In the last years of his life, it became evident that Mao's revolutionary enterprise had lost the people's inner support. Even Mao himself realized this. To the visiting American journalist Edgar Snow he lamented that he was "a lone monk walking the world with a leaky umbrella."