Question: So this brings us to the Chinese Revolution in 1949. Could you say something about how the communists came to power there?

Raymond Lotta: This was a vast social and political upheaval, a mass revolutionary armed struggle of extraordinary daring and sacrifice. Mao Zedong led this epic revolution. But to understand how this revolution came to power... we have to understand its historical setting.

In the 19th century, the major world capitalist powers began to penetrate China, pushing their way in militarily and economically... and by the end of the century came to dominate China. They imposed treaties that gave them commercial advantage. They sliced China up into foreign spheres of influence, which meant that one power would be controlling, plundering, and exploiting one part of the country... and another doing the same in another part.

China had long been ruled by a monarchy. It was brought down by a revolt of insurgent military officers and civilian opponents in 1911, and a republic was declared in 1912. But the Republic was weak... and was weakened by the corrupt old order. Warlords divided the country up into their own mini-state-like fiefdoms. All this made it easier for imperialism to continue to batter its way into the country, especially Japanese imperialism.

A Revolution Is Born

Question: So where do Mao and communism come in?

RL: There had been different attempts by the Chinese people to cast off this foreign control, often involving huge upheavals; there had been courageous peasant risings. But these did not succeed in fundamentally changing the conditions of Chinese society.

The Bolshevik revolution dramatically changed the equation. It awakened and inspired a section of Chinese youth and intellectuals to take up communism. The Chinese Communist Party was formed in 1921. Beginning in 1927, there was a fierce battle between the Guomindang, which had started as a nationalist party-government but had been taken over by reactionaries backed by different imperialist powers, and the Chinese Communist Party. The communist movement suffered huge bloodbaths and persecution at the hands of the Guomindang. In this setting, Mao developed and then fought for a correct political and military strategy to actually win liberation.

A major turning point was the Long March, one of the most extraordinary military feats of the 20th century. In 1934, Mao led 100,000 Red Army fighters and communist organizers on a 6,000-mile long march to regroup and reorganize forces for revolution. They trekked through dangerous swamplands and treacherous mountains. They fought warlord and reactionary armies. They spread revolution wherever they went. When the Long March reached its destination, only 10,000 people had made it. But because of the Long March the revolution was able to go forward.

In 1931, Japanese imperialism began to aggressively expand into China... and in 1937 it went to war with China. The Japanese military forces captured Shanghai and also took the capital city of Nanjing where they carried out one of modern history’s worst atrocities... systematically raping, torturing, and murdering 300,000 civilians. Japan ravaged China for raw materials... for industrial production by slave labor... and carried out horrible war crimes, including the use of chemical weapons. This was happening in the context of World War 2 of 1939–1945... as the imperialist powers sought, once again, to violently re-divide the world.

The Chinese communists were determined to fight the Japanese invasion and occupation, as part of the fight for national and social liberation. By 1940, their military forces had grown to some 500,000. Mao and the communists rallied and led the Chinese people to stand up to and fight the occupying forces of Japanese imperialism. And in 1945, they inflicted defeat on the Japanese forces in China.

But the country was devastated. Some 14 million Chinese died as a result of World War 2! Most of China’s rail network, major highways, and factories were destroyed. And just as the war ended in 1945, civil war broke out between the communist-led forces and those of the Guomindang... equipped and financed by the U.S. imperialists. After four years of intense combat, the Chinese revolution triumphed in 1949.

But the U.S. imperialists were soon moving up the Korean peninsula and threatening to invade China itself and threatening to use nuclear weapons. The U.S. 7th Naval Fleet was stationed in the Far East. All that was during the Korean War, which started just nine months after the victory of the revolution.

The revolution came to power in these conditions. In winning this incredible victory, the Chinese revolution was a beacon to the oppressed of the world... and a target for imperialism. The conventional wisdom in the communist movement at that time was that it was not possible in an economically backward country like China with hundreds of millions of peasants to make an anti-colonial revolution leading to communism. Mao applied and further developed the science of communism in forging a revolutionary path for oppressed nations—developing both the political program and the military strategy for making a liberating revolution in such countries. And Mao’s breakthrough has had great implications for revolution throughout the world.

China on the Eve of Revolution

Question: What was Chinese society like in 1949?

RL: China was a semi-feudal society. The great majority of the population were destitute peasants, subjected to the cruel and arbitrary rule of landlordism.

The peasant rented land from the landlord who, when crops were good, might take half of the wealth created by the peasant... extracting grain as rent. In bad crop years, the extraction would be higher. The peasant kept what was left, and even in good times this generally wasn’t enough... so the peasant had to borrow from money-lenders, paying interest anywhere from 30 percent to 100 percent. And on top of this, the peasant had to pay taxes to government authorities. In famine years, which came often... peasants would be reduced to eating leaves and bark, and were often even forced into the horror of selling one of their children so others could survive. You know, famine was considered part of the normal life experience... one of the things a peasant might expect to die of... like sickness or old age.

For women, life was a living hell. I’m talking about wife beating, arranged marriages, and forced prostitution. One of the most oppressive and hideous customs in Chinese society was the practice of foot binding. Seven- and eight-year-old girls had their feet tightly wrapped and bent until the arch was broken and the toes permanently bent under. This horrible practice was done to keep women’s feet small and forced women to sway when walking... considered erotic and aesthetic in patriarchal Chinese society. The intense pain and suffering were summed up in an old saying: “for every pair of bound feet a bucket full of tears.” Foot binding became the symbol of the circumstances of Chinese women before the revolution.

In the cities, the situation was desperate. In Shanghai, before the outbreak of World War 2, 25,000 dead bodies were collected from the streets each year. In the textile factories, young women workers were locked in at night. Shanghai had also been carved up by different foreign powers.

China had an undeveloped industrial base... mainly producing light manufactured goods, like cigarettes and textiles. This was a country of 500 million people, but there were only 12,000 doctors trained in Western medicine. Four million people died each year from infectious and parasitic diseases. Life expectancy was 32 years. People were so desperate that you had this huge scourge of opium addiction... 60 million opium addicts.

This is why people make revolution. This is why it is necessary to overthrow the old exploiting classes, and destroy their state system.

Mobilizing the Masses to Transform All of Society

The Chinese revolution did just that. It established a new state power, a form of the dictatorship of the proletariat, based on the alliance of workers and peasants. This new state power protected the rights of the people, suppressed counter-revolution, and made it possible to carry out the all-round transformation of society and to support world revolution. In the cities and rural areas, new institutions were established at every level of society... led by the Communist Party... but involving millions and millions of the formerly exploited in taking initiative to transform and administer society.

You know, for millennia, the oppressed had been treated as no more than a pair of laboring hands. Now they had the right and capacity to stand up... and the backing of a people’s liberation army to transform economic, political, social, and cultural life.

Under the leadership of Mao and the Chinese Communist Party, the Chinese revolution immediately set out to change conditions.

Question: Where did they begin?

RL: One of the first measures was land reform. By the early 1950s, the new revolutionary state power had distributed 30-40 percent of China’s cultivated land away from landlord-exploiting classes... to some 300 million peasants. The Chinese land reform was the most massive expropriation and distribution of property and repudiation of debt in world history. This was truly a mass movement from below, led by the Party. It was different from the more top-down way that change often took place in the Soviet countryside under Stalin.

Throughout China, peasants divided up the land, tools, and animals. They confronted the old landlords. They held mass meetings to talk about how they had suffered under the old society and how they would farm in the new society. They came into political life, overturning the old appointed village magistrates, replacing them with elected councils. They began to throw off superstition and to study science. In a country where women had never been treated as equals, not just the men but women received land. The revolution had decisively broken the back of landlord oppression.

Question: You mentioned women getting land, but how else were things changing for women?

RL: Let’s step back here for a minute. I talked earlier about what was done in the Soviet Union, especially in the first decade or so and in comparison with the rest of the world. And we have to really grasp that this question—I’m talking about the oppression of women more universally—wasn’t even seen as a “question” until the late 1700s when the first major works taking this up were written. Marx and Engels saw this as integral to the communist revolution right from the beginning, and Engels wrote a major work on it—The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State—detailing how this oppression arose and, in very broad strokes, how it could and would be eliminated in the struggle for communist society.

So this was the most advanced understanding and practice on the planet, on the one hand, but there were still ways in which all of this—Engels’ pathbreaking theoretical work, the transformations in the Soviet Union, and even the initial breakthroughs I’m going to talk about in China—were still the first steps. First steps... but giant steps. Even something like the right to have land—this was major in the context of a country that in many ways had not yet fully emerged from feudalism.

So in liberated China in 1950, a new marriage law put an end to child and arranged marriages. The new law guaranteed the right to divorce for women as well as men. But the revolution, Mao emphasized, was about more than new laws. People were changing society through mass mobilization, but this was deeply connected with the struggle to transform oppressive social relations and backward ideas, to change values and thinking as well.

Where there was land reform, there was struggle against the treatment of women as objects of male authority, struggle against the narrow confines of the family, against the authority of the clan. Something very important in this: the Party developed a practice of relying on widows and orphans even in waging the struggle for land reform and cooperative forms of agriculture—drawing in the most oppressed and in the process drawing women much more fully into public life, and in a very dynamic way.

In society broadly, there was ideological struggle against the notion of the inferiority of women. Mao popularized the slogan “women hold up half the sky.” It was not simply a declaration of equality but a call to take on all that stood in the way of that. In less than a decade, prostitution disappeared as a major social phenomenon; the shame was lifted from those previously forced into this and a new, productive life was possible, and women could walk down the streets in major cities without fear. The practice of foot binding was ended once and for all. And all this then went even further in the Cultural Revolution, which erupted in 1966—and which I’ll speak to a little later.

Question: You had said that China was devastated after the war. How did the new power deal with that?

RL: Mass campaigns were launched to clean up the cities. Cholera and other epidemic diseases were eliminated or brought under control. New factories and housing for workers went up. Hospitals and medical schools were constructed. By 1965, China had trained 200,000 regular doctors. A new countrywide educational system was created. Mass literacy campaigns were launched. All kinds of volunteers went to the countryside, and by the end of the 1950s most peasants had acquired a basic reading knowledge. This is what the revolution made possible.

The scourge of opium addiction was wiped out through mass treatment and education. People who had been addicted were now able to work productively... because a whole new economy based on meeting social need was established, including the ability to cultivate agricultural crops for the good of society. The most important thing, the most precious thing, was people and their ability to be healthy, to learn, to contribute.

An Unsettled Question: What Direction for Society?

Question: So these were great advances.

RL: Yes, but the direction in which society would go... that was not settled.

Question: What do you mean by that? They had power, didn’t they?

RL: Let me go back for a second. When the revolution came to power in 1949, Mao gave this famous speech in Tiananmen Square in Beijing. He declared to the crowd, “The Chinese people have stood up.” But he also looked beyond the moment and declared that this was “but a beginning... only a brief prologue to a long drama.”

It was Mao’s poetic way of saying that the revolution couldn’t stop. It was entering a new stage of socialist transformation of the economy, the creation of new political institutions, and the forging of new values of working for the common good. The revolution had to continue.

The goal of communist revolution is to overcome the division of society and the world into classes and to create a world community of humanity. Marx used this very descriptive phrase to capture the essence of communism: “the two radical ruptures”... with traditional property relations and with traditional ideas. That’s why these early changes that I was describing, amazing as they were... were just “the beginning.”

But there were powerful forces in the Chinese Communist Party who had a very different vision. They saw revolution as a vehicle to overcome China’s economic backwardness and dependency, and to turn China into a modern, industrial power. China had been humiliated and dominated by foreign powers. They saw socialism as a means for, and in the context of, achieving national liberation and national independence.

And they came to the opposite conclusion as Mao. From their perspective, the political-social revolution essentially ended in 1949. The task now, as they saw it, was mainly economic modernization.

They were basing themselves in part on shortcomings of the Soviet Union when it was socialist. They advocated a program of rapid industrialization. Development, in their eyes, would then trickle down to the countryside. Their vision drove them in a certain direction: to concentrate resources on big and modern factories and advanced technology... to build up a big centralized planning apparatus... to create armies of experts... to motivate people through wage and bonus incentives. But here is the rub: much of their thinking actually reflected the dominant understanding of socialism in the international communist movement. They were adopting the Soviet model of development.

Question: And Mao disagreed?

RL: Yes. Mao saw the need to build up industry... but he was against the idea of rapid industrialization based on concentrating resources in the urban areas, and at the expense of peasants in agriculture. He was for developing technology, especially for technology appropriate to China’s conditions... but was against the idea of putting technology and expertise above people and their creativity. He was for improving people’s livelihoods... but against motivating people by narrowly appealing to people’s immediate material interests.

He saw this approach of the other leaders in the Party as one that would lead to the reinforcement and widening of inequalities and one that would be robbing the masses of initiative. He was searching for an approach that would actually enable the masses to gain all-around mastery of society, and to prevent new elites from forming.

You had to plan economic development, but there was a need for a different, for a more radical, dynamic, and participatory system of planning than what had existed in the socialist Soviet Union. For one thing, if China was going to be able to withstand imperialist attack and invasion, it had to decentralize industry and not concentrate development in the vulnerable cities and coastal areas; but I’m actually talking about a more profound point, having to do with drawing the masses of people more deeply into the actual process of knowing and transforming society.

So there was this contention between two camps in the Communist Party over the direction of society. These conservative forces had strength and influence in the Communist Party and in society. In the 1949–76 period, intense struggle raged at the highest levels of the Party over the direction of society, over going forward to communism... or back to capitalism.

And there’s a further dimension. In the mid-1950s, Mao and the revolutionary forces were struggling against two legacies. Bob Avakian has spoken to this. First and foremost they were struggling against the continuing threats and influence of capitalism and Western imperialism, which had historically dominated China and which was encircling and pressuring China. Second, Mao was struggling against the political and ideological legacy and influence of the Soviet model of development, which even before its degeneration into state capitalism had significant problems. By state capitalism, I mean a system where the factories, mines, transportation—the means of production, in short—are owned by the state, but are run according to capitalist principles of “profit in command” rather than supporting revolution and meeting social need.

Question: I know we’ve talked about this a bit, but why was this not a model for socialist development?

RL: Well, one of the problems of the Soviet approach, or model, was the view that once you had achieved state ownership of the major productive resources of society, then the key task was to develop the productive forces, to go all-out and really build up the economy. But Mao looked at it differently. He argued that this view did not actually lead to the masses changing material conditions and changing themselves... changing all the social and ideological relations of society. Instead, this model of just “produce your way” to communism, will actually lead to the emergence of a new privileged stratum that will begin to install itself in a position over the masses.

Now Mao did not have a fully formed theorization of this at this time. And there would be big struggles over the next years, culminating in the Cultural Revolution. These struggles were crucibles through which Mao began to forge a pathbreaking understanding of the nature of socialist society and getting to the goal of communism, an actually new understanding of what communism is. But at this time in the early and mid-1950s, Mao was already seeing real problems with what I am calling “the Soviet model.”

So, this was the situation confronting the revolutionary leadership in China. Would China be able to stand up to the pressures of Western imperialism, the U.S. in particular? Would it be able to resist pressures to come under the wing and control of the Soviet Union? Or could it go a different way, a liberating way?