History :The west and the World

HI 103 West & the World

The “Third World” – Communist Experiments

Primary Sources

#1 Mao Zedong – “The Chinese People Have Stood Up!” (September 21, 1949)

Mao delivered this speech shortly after the victory of the Chinese Communist Party over Chiang Kai-Shek’s nationalist party (the Kuomintang) in China’s civil war. How does Mao characterize that struggle? Why does he think it will prove to be significant in the history of China? What does he say will be the main goals of the Communist government of China?

[p.15] It is because we have defeated the reactionary Kuomintang government backed by U.S. imperialism that this great unity of the whole people has been achieved. In a little more than three years the heroic Chinese People's Liberation Army, an army such as the world has seldom seen, crushed all the offensives launched by the several million troops of the U.S.-supported reactionary Kuomintang government and turned to the counter-offensive and the offensive…. In a little more than three years the people of the whole country have closed their ranks, rallied to support the People's Liberation Army, fought the enemy and won basic victory….

Some three years ago we held a Political Consultative Conference with Chiang Kai-shek's Kuomintang. The results of that

[p.16] conference were sabotaged by Chiang Kai-shek's Kuomintang and its accomplices…. The only gain from that conference was the profound lesson it taught the people that there is absolutely no room for compromise with Chiang Kai-shek's Kuomintang, the running dog of imperialism, and its accomplices -- overthrow these enemies or be oppressed and slaughtered by them, either one or the other, there is no other choice. In a little more than three years the Chinese people, led by the Chinese Communist Party, have quickly awakened and organized themselves into a nation-wide united front against imperialism, feudalism, bureaucrat-capitalism and their general representative, the reactionary Kuomintang government, supported the People's War of Liberation, basically defeated the reactionary Kuomintang government, [and] overthrown the rule of imperialism in China….

Fellow Delegates, we are all convinced that our work will go down in the history of mankind, demonstrating that the Chinese people, comprising one quarter of humanity, have now stood up. The Chinese have always been a great, courageous and industrious nation;

[p.17] it is only in modern times that they have fallen behind. And that was due entirely to oppression and exploitation by foreign imperialism and domestic reactionary governments. For over a century our forefathers never stopped waging unyielding struggles against domestic and foreign oppressors …. Our forefathers enjoined us to carry out their unfulfilled will. And we have acted accordingly. We have closed our ranks and defeated both domestic and foreign oppressors through the People's War of Liberation and the great people's revolution, and now we are proclaiming the founding of the People's Republic of China. From now on our nation will belong to the community of the peace-loving and freedom-loving nations of the world and work courageously and industriously to foster its own civilization and well-being and at the same time to promote world peace and freedom. Ours will no longer be a nation subject to insult and humiliation. We have stood up….

The people's democratic dictatorship and solidarity with our foreign friends will enable us to accomplish our work of construction

[p.18] rapidly. We are already confronted with the task of nation-wide economic construction. We have very favorable conditions: a population of 475 million people and a territory of 9,600,000 square kilometers. There are indeed difficulties ahead, and a great many too. But we firmly believe that by heroic struggle the people of the country will surmount them all…. As long as we keep to our style of plain living and hard struggle, as long as we stand united and as long as we persist in the people's democratic dictatorship and unite with our foreign friends, we shall be able to win speedy victory on the economic front.

An upsurge in economic construction is bound to be followed by an upsurge of construction in the cultural sphere. The era in which the Chinese people were regarded as uncivilized is now ended. We shall emerge in the world as a nation with an advanced culture….

Hail the victory of the People's War of Liberation and the people's revolution!

Hail the founding of the People's Republic of China!

Hail the triumph of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference!

Citation: (Mao pg#)

Works cited:

Mao, Zedong. Selected Works of Mao Tse-Tung, Vol. V. Pergamon Press, 1977.

#2 “Decision of the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party Concerning the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution” (August 8, 1966)

The Cultural Revolution, which lasted from 1966 to 1976, was a period of great upheaval in Chinese society. In many ways it was a reaction to the disappointing results of the first two decades of Communist rule in China. According to this document, who was to blame for these disappointments? What were the main goals of the Cultural Revolution?

[p.311] The Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution now unfolding is a great revolution that touches people to their very souls and constitutes a new stage in the development of the socialist revolution in our country….

Although the bourgeoisie has been overthrown, it is still trying to use the old ideas, culture, customs and habits of the exploiting classes to corrupt the masses, capture their minds and endeavor to stage a comeback. The proletariat must do just the opposite: it must meet head-on every challenge of the bourgeoisie in the ideological field and use the new ideas, culture, customs and habits of the proletariat to change the mental outlook of the whole of society. At present, our objective is to struggle against and crush those persons in authority who are taking the capitalist road, to criticize and repudiate the reactionary bourgeois academic “authorities” and the ideology of the bourgeoisie and all other exploiting classes and to transform education, literature and art and all other parts of the superstructure that do not correspond to the socialist economic base, so as to facilitate the consolidation and development of the socialist system.

The masses of the workers, peasants, soldiers, revolutionary intellectuals, and revolutionary cadres form the main force in this great cultural

[p.312] revolution. Large numbers of revolutionary young people, previously unknown, have become courageous and daring pathbreakers….

Since the Cultural Revolution is a revolution, it inevitably meets with resistance. This resistance comes chiefly from those in authority who have wormed their way into the Party and are taking the capitalist road. It also comes from the force of habits from the old society. At present, this resistance is still fairly strong and stubborn….

The outcome of this great cultural revolution will be determined by whether the Party leadership does or does not dare boldly to arouse the masses….

[p.313] Trust the masses, rely on them and respect their initiative. Cast out fear. Don’t be afraid of disturbances. Chairman Mao has often told us that revolution cannot be so very refined, so gentle, so temperate, kind, courteous, restrained and magnanimous….

Who are our enemies? Who are our friends? This is a question of the first importance for the revolution and it is likewise a question of the first importance for the Great Cultural Revolution….

Concentrate all forces to strike at the handful of ultra-reactionary bourgeois Rightists and counter-revolutionary revisionists, and expose and criticize to the full their crimes against the Party, against socialism and against Mao Tse-tung’s thought so as to isolate them to the maximum.

The main target of the present movement is those within the Party who are in authority and are taking the capitalist road….

[p.315] The struggle of the proletariat against the old ideas, culture, customs and habits left over from all the exploiting classes over thousands of years will necessarily take a very, very long time. Therefore, the cultural revolutionary groups, committees and congresses should not be temporary organizations but permanent, standing mass organizations. They are suitable not only for colleges, schools and government and other organizations, but generally also for factories, mines, other enterprises, urban districts and villages….

[p.317] In the great proletarian cultural revolution, it is imperative to hold aloft the great red banner of Mao Tse-tung’s thought and put proletarian politics in command. The movement for the creative study and application of Chairman Mao Tse-tung’s works should be carried forward among the masses of the workers, peasants and soldiers, the cadres and the intellectuals, and Mao Tse-tung’s thought should be taken as the guide to action in the Cultural Revolution.

Citation: (“Cultural Revolution” pg#)

Works cited:

“The Cultural Revolution in China.” In A Documentary History of Communism: Vol. 2 Communism and the World, ed. Robert V. Daniels. I. B. Tauris, 1985.

Secondary Sources

#1 Pamela Crossley et al. – Global Society

Crossley discussed the Communist regimes of both Cuba and China. How does she depict the role of the United States in the formative years of Cuba’s communist regime? What does she say were the main motivations of China’s Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution?

Cuba

[p.335] For half a century before [the Cuban Revolution], Cuba had been under American domination. Part of it was (and still is) an American military base at Guantánamo Bay, and since the island was wrenched from Spain in 1898, it had been increasingly integrated into the American economy. The Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista y Zaldivar had done little for the local population during his various periods in power since 1933, but he was an effective guardian of American economic interests in Cuba, most of which were connected to sugar or to gambling.

Batista was frequently opposed by peasant leaders and guerrilla fighters. Many of the rebels who had been imprisoned by him were released in a general amnesty in 1955. Among them was Fidel Castro, a law student and part-time guerrilla fighter from a wealthy family, who was constantly criticizing Batista's contempt for the Cuban constitution. After being released, Castro took refuge in Mexico, but he returned to Cuba in 1956 to attempt revolution again…. [Castro] eventually defeated Batista's armies, and in 1959 forced the dictator to flee to the Dominican Republic.

At first, officials of the Eisenhower administration thought that the young, dashing Castro would come under the influence of the United States. They knew that the Cuban economy depended upon U.S. tourism and upon selling agricultural goods in U.S. markets. Castro spoke of being "neutral" in the bipolar system, but

[p.336] Eisenhower's advisers dismissed this as evidence of Castro's naiveté. When Castro made his first visit to the United States as head of state, Eisenhower went to play golf and left Castro to Nixon. Castro refused to promise elections, but he also said that he believed in a free press and did not favor communism.

The United States did not offer aid or any other friendly gesture. On the contrary the head of the CIA advised that Cuba should be punished with tariffs on its sugar sales in the United States until it agreed to become a U.S. ally. Embarrassed and insulted, Castro welcomed the Cuban communist party into his government when it asked to join. Within months of his accession to power, he declared himself a communist and began to court economic aid from the Soviet Union. The United States was startled to have a communist republic within 90 miles of its own shores, and it sought ways to warn the Soviet Union off the Western Hemisphere, while continuing attempts to intimidate Castro or to work with right-wing anti-Castro Cubans to overthrow him….

Kennedy's apparent intention with regard to Cuba was to try to reach out to Castro through acknowledgment of the brutality of Batista. With renewed talks of economic aid, it might have been possible to sway Cuba out of the orbit of the Soviet Union. But before Kennedy could revise U.S. policy toward Cuba, he was informed by the CIA that a plan to finance and organize an invasion of Cuba by anti-Castro Cuban exiles was already in progress. They would overthrow Castro and establish a government that would be friendly to the United States.

Kennedy and his advisers were shocked by the plan and, along with many others, were doubtful that it could succeed, either militarily or politically. Nevertheless, they were told by the CIA leadership that either exposing or abandoning the plan would be disastrous. Kennedy said both privately and publicly that the campaign must have no direct American involvement. When the invasion of Cuba by the anti-Castro forces occurred at the Bay of Pigs in April 1961, the invaders were turned back (though the losses were greater on Castro's side than on theirs).

Despite Kennedy's demand that no American forces be involved, those who were relaying messages from the U.S. government to the anti-Castro forces had failed to make that clear. The invaders thought that Kennedy had at best abandoned them and at worst betrayed them. For his part, Kennedy took public responsibility for the fiasco [and] enacted the long-threatened trade embargo against Cuba, depriving it of income from the sugar sales to North America….

China

[p.350] In the early 1950s, China was not committed to being a client state of the Soviet Union….

[p.351] In the late 1950s … Mao … initiated [a] radical program of "self-reliance." Their idea was that a fundamental restructuring of agriculture and industry, along with suppression of foreign trade, would insulate [China] from interference by the Soviet Union, and also from the dangers of a nuclear conflict between the Soviet Union and the United States…. These extreme programs were accompanied by severe policies suppressing dissent and imprisoning large numbers of intellectuals, farmers, and industrial workers who might resist….

Mao proceeded to reorganize agriculture, moving all farmers into massive "communes," where they were to run their own factories, hospitals, schools, storage facilities, and garages. In some areas there was resistance and violence, particularly in northwest China, where Muslim nomads hoped to preserve their pastures and religious buildings from being absorbed.

The immediate effects of the policies at the end of Mao's first radical transformation, the "Great Leap Forward" (1959-1961) were, we now know, disastrous. Perhaps as many as thirty million people died as a result of agricultural failures, inability to move food where it was needed because of infrastructure inadequacy, or violence as troops and villagers fought over the little food that was available.

Mao was unimpressed by this human cost, considering it part of the process of socialist transformation. As he once said, "A revolution is not a dinner party," and he did not consider individual human lives important in relation to huge historical changes. The campaigns became violent in the later 1950s: Farmers were forced at gunpoint to give their paltry crops to starving residents of the great cities of Shanghai and Tianjin, nomads were driven off their lands in order to allow attempted agricultural development, ethnic communities throughout China that attempted to preserve their religious schools and libraries were arrested and persecuted as "counterrevolutionaries," and in 1959 Tibet came under direct military occupation because of its resistance to agricultural reorganization and cultural suppression….

[p.353] When the full extent of the human disaster caused by the agricultural radicalization of 1958 to 1961 was realized, Mao finally had to appear to share power with his moderate rivals. But by 1962 he was plotting to return to full power, with a stronger base than ever. His new push … would be based upon an appeal to youth, a demand that the national revolutionary spirit be renewed, and a call for China to make new efforts toward his ideal, self-reliance….

[p.407] In 1962 Mao initiated the political campaigns that became the "Cultural Revolution" (1966-1976) and reestablished him as the supreme political leader. This began as a student movement (instigated by Mao) that was opposed to supposedly archaic methods of teaching. Mao believed that intellectuals should not have a distinct place in society; but should be merged with the mass of workers, all of whom would be both highly educated and fit for hard manual labor. There should not be a choice between being a devoted communist and being a highly trained professional—one should be "both red and expert." But Mao claimed that the "counterrevolutionary" mentality of teachers and other intellectuals was preventing this cultural transformation from occurring. These people would rather preserve their special place in society (and avoid manual labor) than identify themselves with the mass of the Chinese people.

Mao encouraged students to identify counterrevolutionaries personally; beginning with their teachers but spreading out to anyone who appeared to be an opponent of socialist transformation. These could be the students' own parents, CCP

[p.408] members, and of course those who had been educated in some professional capacity before 1949. In public demonstrations, identified enemies were paraded before crowds and humiliated, then taken to huge public meetings where they were expected to confess their sins and beg forgiveness, usually by requesting to be made manual laborers. These scenes frequently degenerated into violence. Supposed counterrevolutionaries were beaten, sometimes to death. They were tossed out of windows, strangled, or deprived of food and water until they expired…. Chinese lived in terror of having a neighbor, a family member, or a rival report them for having said counterrevolutionary things. The economy degenerated as the urban centers were dismantled and their professional elites dispersed. A social and economic chill gripped China until Mao's death in 1976 and the subsequent arrest of his closest supporters, the "Gang of Four."

Citation: (Crossley et al. pg#)

Works cited:

Crossley, Pamela Kyle, Lynn Hollen Lees, & John W. Servos. Global Society: The World since 1900. Houghton Mifflin, 2004.

#2 Michael Hunt – The World Transformed - Required

Like Crossley, Hunt deals with both Cuba and China. According to Hunt, what were the larger goals which motivated the policies pursued by Mao? What does he say were the successes and failures of Cuba’s attempts to build a communist society?

China

[p.240] In the course of the 1950s the Communist leaders of the People's Republic of China (PRC) came increasingly to disagree over how to translate their general vision of building a "new socialist China" into concrete measures. The majority of Mao's senior colleagues favored strong central bureaucratic control and carefully planned economic development. A poor China desperately needed to build on its most advanced sectors—the cities and the more industrialized coastal provinces. Mao's colleagues' vision included using the talents of the bourgeoisie—the better-off and educated people living in cities—and foreign trade opportunities to restore the economy and stimulate growth….

On the other side, Mao as the national leader and voice of the revolution argued for a strongly populist, revolutionary strategy. He wanted to maintain the equality personal sacrifice, and popular mobilization that had marked the party's pre-1949 period of struggle. Mao was haunted by the fear that China's revolutionary spirit would die away and remnants of the old society would reappear. He saw the major danger coming from bureaucrats and technical experts and from

[p.241] the vestiges of the bourgeois class, which seemed to him to have almost magical powers of regeneration. In Mao's view, periodic campaigns against state and party officials and "the intellectuals" (by which Mao meant the educated and politically engaged among the middle class) were needed to prevent the rise of a new, privileged class. In thus setting his sights on continuously rejuvenating the party's and the people's revolutionary commitment, Mao looked to the rural poor and educated youth as his most reliable allies….

[In the early 1950s] he resolved to push peasants toward fully collectivized agriculture. By 1955-1956 peasants had handed over their private land, tools, and farm animals to shared enterprises that paid them in relation to their labor contribution measured in work points. Only the land on which their houses stood remained private.

In pursuing this path Mao acted on his faith that tapping the spontaneous energy and socialist instincts of the peasantry would unleash new productive forces in the countryside. His skeptical colleagues objected to his insistence on haste and on a single policy applied to China's diverse agricultural conditions. This "adventurism:' they warned, had China racing toward socialism faster than the country's still short economic legs could carry it. Mao dismissed these objections for their excessive caution. "Some of our comrades are tottering along like a woman with bound feet, always complaining that others are going too fast."

By the late 1950s Mao's discontents had reached a boiling point. He blamed an ossifying and privileged party and state bureaucracy for favoring urban intellectuals and the experts, while the rural poor lagged ever farther behind…. Mao was also turning against the Soviet model of economic development, formally copied in 1953 with the PRC's first five-year plan and backed with Soviet aid and advisors. Instead of slavishly copying the Soviets by nationalizing private enterprise, building up state-controlled heavy industry, and promoting technical expertise, Mao wanted a distinctly Chinese model of development….

[p.242] In 1958 Mao took an even bolder step by launching the Great Leap Forward, a visionary economic plan for accelerating China's industrial production. He ordered a still higher, communal form of organization in the countryside with newly formed "people's communes" containing on the average 20-25,000 peasant families. Peasants now shifted to shared living, eating, and childcare arrangements as well as production responsibilities and resources. They were to start up small-scale steel making as a demonstration of an alternative to the Soviet model of centralized, large-scale industrial production. With the Great Leap Forward, Mao sought to launch the peasantry into a world of previously unimagined abundance. He argued that rapid socialist development could occur only if "the boundless creative powers" of the masses and their "inexhaustible enthusiasm for socialism" were brought into play. Properly led and inspired, the "poor and blank" could become the main builders of his new society. Within fifteen years a mobilized people could catch up with the West, while the communes with their rigorously egalitarian rules would create a classless society and thus take China to communism even before the Soviet Union.

At first hailed as a magnificent success, Mao's experiment ended disastrously. The Great Leap disrupted planting and harvesting. Flood and drought compounded the crisis. Worst of all was distorted information reaching leaders at the top. Lower-level officials under heavy pressure to meet targets perpetrated various frauds on their superiors to convince them misguided policies were actually working. They passed off specially prepared model plots as typical, and they reported soaring production at a time when it in fact was in free fall. Belatedly Beijing realized that it faced a calamitous situation. Between 1959 and 1961 an estimated twenty million people died as a result of starvation or hunger-related disease. It was perhaps the greatest human disaster in Chinese history or in the annals of a century no stranger to disaster….

[p.243] The Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution marked Mao's second major attempt to promote a distinct, Chinese revolutionary way….

To help cleanse the party and revitalize youthful idealism, the army distributed millions of copies of the "little red book" containing the quotations of Chairman Mao. He used the new text, which acquired almost holy status, to mobilize youth known as Red Guards against party members whose lack of ideological fervor revealed their preference for "following the capitalist road'…. The first Red Guard revolt erupted at Beijing University in 1966 and soon spread throughout the country, setting off ever more severe attacks on party leaders, educators, factory managers, newspaper editors—indeed, against almost every kind of authority. Mao believed that a little dose of anarchy was just the tonic that China's backsliding revolution needed.

But as authority declined, Mao got more anarchy than he wanted. Local conflicts and resentments led to torture, executions, damage to cultural monuments, and general insecurity…. The Cultural Revolution had degenerated into virtual civil war, with loss of life estimated in the tens of thousands and with millions subjected to persecution….

Cuba

[p.262] In December 1961 Castro publicly embraced socialism as the best way to promote the popular welfare. But there is some doubt about when his conversion actually took place—indeed, even how thorough a conversion it was…. Like other third-world radicals, including Arbenz and Ho, his values were as much populist and nationalist as Marxist. His domestic program aimed to eliminate abject poverty, promote literacy, make medical care widely available, and reduce the birth rate and infant mortality. He expropriated wealthy property owners (both foreign and Cuban) and moved toward collective agriculture. As in China, the new regime limited migration from the countryside into the capital, Havana,

[p.263] to head off out-of-control urban growth. And it expanded rights for women. The positive effects of Castro's policies quickly became evident. Economic redistribution raised ordinary Cubans' purchasing power and closed glaring gaps in welfare. But badly formulated economic policy and the flight of foreign capital plagued the revolution from the outset.

Expensive domestic policies and U.S. hostility turned Castro toward the Soviet Union. He became increasingly reliant on that country as a military and economic patron. In fact, Castro saw friendly relations with the USSR as a way of demonstrating his independence from the United States while also garnering the economic assistance not available elsewhere….

[p.264] Castro's revolution offers the sobering reminder that even successful programs for radical change cannot easily solve the political and economic problems that provoked the effort in the first place. The Cuban revolution struggled to create a prosperous, just, and truly independent Cuba. On the plus side it made gains in social welfare matched by no other country in the region, dramatically improving life expectancy and literacy rates and significantly lowering infant mortality.

[p.265] But these achievements in social welfare have to be seen in light of the relatively high standard of living and high literacy rates that Cuba already enjoyed before the revolution. Still, advances in social welfare under Castro were, by any standard, impressive. But Castro's revolution carried a cost. The continuing confrontation with the United States and the large Cuban exile community determined to bring Castro down forced him to spend heavily on his armed forces. In addition, an embattled Castro would not allow real democracy and had little tolerance for public expressions of political dissent. In this one-party state, activists demanding political rights were jailed or otherwise restricted.

Economic development was yet another area in which the revolution did not live up to its promise. Cuba remained tied to a single export crop—sugar. The only difference was that under Castro heavy dependence on the United States had given way to heavy dependence on the USSR…. Relentless U.S. sanctions and Castro's shifting policies resulted in an economy defined by cycles of crisis and recovery from the early 1960s on. In the late 1960s Castro experimented (much as Mao Zedong had done in China's Great Leap Forward) with a shift in emphasis from industry to agriculture and reliance on mass mobilization to dramatically increase production. This strategy failed. Verging on economic collapse, Cuba became more dependent than ever on Soviet support. Castro retreated to a more moderate, market-oriented policy to revive the economy, but by 1985 he shifted again out of fear of emerging "capitalist" tendencies.

The collapse of the USSR in 1991 plunged the Castro regime into a crisis of unparalleled severity. Now without a powerful patron, Castro had to face alone the continuing U.S. policy of economic blockade, diplomatic isolation, and military threat. The Cuban leader sought new trading partners and sources of investment, but the attraction of a better life in the United States, made evident daily in television beamed from Miami, challenged the regime's legitimacy and worried Castro about how he would keep the spirit of revolution alive for the next generation.

Citation: (Hunt pg#)

Works cited:

Hunt, Michael H. The World Transformed: 1945 to the Present. Oxford University Press, 2014.

HI 103 West & the World The “Third World” – Communist Experiments 9