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China Under Mao: A Revolution Derailed

ANDREW G. WALDER
Copyright Date: 2015
Published
by: Harvard University Press
Pages: 440
https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctvjf9wzk

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Front Matter
(pp. i-vi)

Table of Contents
(pp. vii-viii)

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Preface
(pp. information, please see our Cookie Policy.
1 Funeral
(pp. 1-14)
At 3 P.M. on September 18, 1976, Beijing’s vast Tiananmen Square was filled with rows of
uniformed workers and soldiers, standing silently with heads bowed. Across this nation of
almost one billion people, in public squares, villages, factories, schools, and offices, Chinese
citizens assembled as part of a nationwide memorial meeting for Mao Zedong, who had died
nine days earlier at the age of eighty-two. All were instructed to stand in place, heads bowed,
for three minutes of silence. Mao’s designated successor, the relatively unknown Hua Guofeng,
read a speech filled with extravagant praise for the deceased Chairman, who had...

2 From Movement to Regime

(pp. 15-39)
After surviving two disastrous setbacks in its early years and overcoming initially long odds in
the civil war with the Nationalists, the victory of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in 1949
was remarkable, and to many of its members must have seemed miraculous. The first setback
was the ferocious purge launched by Chiang Kai-shek in the spring of 1927, which ended the
early alliance with the Nationalists and decimated the Communist Party’s urban networks.
Party membership declined from 58,000 in April 1927 to 10,000 four months later.¹ The
survivors withdrew into underground cells in the cities, but most retreated to...

3 Rural Revolution
(pp. 40-60)
Although they often begin as insurgencies against oppressive rule, major social revolutions
typically create larger, stronger, and more powerfully centralized states. They do this by
transforming old social structures, destroying the power of old elites, and establishing new
bureaucratic organizations that reach directly into the grass roots.¹ During its first decade in
power, the Chinese Communist Party carried out this agenda with speed and thoroughness. In
the countryside, this task was completed in two distinct stages. In the first stage, a
revolutionary land reform, carried out as a compulsory form of staged class struggle, destroyed
the economic and political foundations...
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4 Urbanprovide
Revolution
(pp. 61-81)
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From themore
lateinformation,
1920s, the Communist
please see ourParty’s strategy
Cookie Policy. for revolution focused on rural China.
Mao’s early doctrine about class struggle was applied in regions that the party controlled, and
as the PLA rolled south and west in its military conquest of China after 1947, CCP cadres
orchestrated revolution in villages according to a well-practiced script. The cities, however,
were another matter entirely. Not until April 1946 did the party take control of a major city,
when they took over Harbin from departing Soviet forces. The first major city that the PLA
occupied outside of Manchuria was Zhangjiakou, in northern Hebei,...

5 The Socialist Economy

(pp. 82-99)
After the split with the Soviet Union in the 1960s, China became famous for deviating from the
Soviet model of development. As the primary architect of the Great Leap Forward and the
Cultural Revolution, Mao became a symbol of China’s quest to forge a unique road to socialism.
Mao’s later reputation, however, obscured his earlier enthusiasm for the full-blown Soviet
model. From the outset of the People’s Republic, Mao was one of China’s most enthusiastic
supporters of Soviet economic practice, and pushed to impose central planning faster and
more thoroughly than many of his colleagues were inclined.¹ Mao’s ideas about...

6 The Evolving Party System

(pp. 100-122)
Since the late 1920S, the CCP had been a revolutionary organization, governing far-flung and
isolated rural base areas, organizing villages behind Japanese lines, operating underground in
cities controlled by the Japanese or the Nationalists, and mobilizing forces to fight a civil war.
We have already seen that the party transformed both city and countryside during the 1950s as
it consolidated its new regime. However, the party itself was changing inexorably as it
established a new state. Before 1949 it was an organization designed for political and military
combat. To administer China it expanded drastically in size, recruited new kinds of...

7 Thaw and Backlash

(pp. 123-151)
By 1956 china had almost completed a series of revolutionary changes. Land reform was
followed by the rapid formation of collective farms. Private industry and commerce
disappeared as productive assets were nationalized. The foundations for a bureaucratic
economyITHAKA
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8 Great Leap
(pp. 152-179)
The antirightist campaign merged seamlessly into the Great Leap Forward, a gigantic
production drive that failed disastrously. The Leap’s failure was inevitable, but disaster was not.
The economic reasoning behind the Great Leap Forward was fl awed and would not have
achieved its lofty goals under any circumstances. Disaster, however, was created by the politics
of the Leap: it was launched and sustained through two massive campaigns to root out
disloyalty within the party. The Antirightist Campaign was not directed solely against those
who had criticized the party from the outside in the spring of 1957; it also victimized many...

9 Toward the Cultural Revolution

(pp. 180-199)
A disaster of the magnitude of the Great Leap, attributable directly to Mao’s bullying and erratic
leadership, was bound to create serious political fallout. Surprisingly, it did not lead to efforts
to remove him from office, nor did it seriously weaken him politically. But Mao was forced to
retreat from his unrealistic views about the speed of economic development. Other leaders,
even those who had initially supported the Leap and who acquiesced in Mao’s attack on
Marshal Peng Dehuai and his “antiparty clique,” took this opportunity to rein in the political
excesses of the period. They subtly tried to steer...

10 Fractured Rebellion
(pp. 200-230)
Mao’s cultural revolution began with the leadership purges of May 1966. But what was the
Cultural Revolution? In answering this question, we can only refer to what the Cultural
Revolution eventually became. Mao appears not to have had a clear plan in mind at the outset,
and he was repeatedly forced to improvise and change course. At crucial junctures he was
frustrated by events and by the behavior of his loyal subordinates. The struggles that he set in
motion repeatedly moved in directions that he had not anticipated, forcing him to react and
reconsider. Other than the destruction of the...

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11 Collapse information, please231-262)
Division
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The repeated headaches created by the Red Guards eroded Mao’s confidence in the students.
He and the Central Cultural Revolution Group (CCRG) had to intervene repeatedly to keep them
relatively uni-fied and on message, but each time they solved one problem, another took its
place. University students, after all, were a very small elite. There were fewer than 675,000
college students in a nation of 740 million. They were too small a group, and too divided, to
have the desired impact on the national party hierarchy. These considerations spurred Mao
and the CCRG to turn to the mobilization of industrial...

12 Military Rule
(pp. 263-286)
After the violent upheavals of 1967 and 1968, it is tempting to think of military control and
revolutionary committees as “the restoration of order.” Nothing could be farther from the truth.
This new period brought radical and wrenching social changes and new persecution
campaigns of unprece dented scope and ferocity. Huge numbers of students and bureaucrats
were transferred from city to countryside to engage in manual labor. Universities were closed
and government offices were emptied of their staffs. The Mao cult escalated to the point where
it resembled organized religious worship. Millions were imprisoned, interrogated, tortured, or
executed in campaigns...

13 Discord and Dissent

(pp. 287-314)
Before his spectacular demise, several of Lin Biao’s subordinates were in political trouble, a
sign that Lin himself might soon face demotion or worse. Unlike other prominent victims of
Mao’s unpredictable judgments, Lin did not quietly exit the political stage. The sensational
story about his death—a plane crash while apparently en route to defect to the Soviet Union—
had major political implications. This was especially true because of the way that Lin’s demise
was explained to the nation: his flight was the result of a failed plot to assassinate Mao in the
course of a political coup. According to...

14 The Mao Era websites

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(pp. for different purposes, such Cookie Settings
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basically intact. But both were severely damaged. Mao left China with a divided party
 organization riven by factional discord and a government that had yet to recover from the
sustained assault of the past decade. The industrialization drive had stalled. Rural poverty was
still widespread. Urban living standards had stagnated and in some...

Notes
(pp. 347-376)

References
(pp. 377-398)

Index
(pp. 399-413)

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