MAO'S IMPACT
Thomson, John S.
Mao's Impact CHINESE COMMUNISM AND THE RISE OF MAO, by Benjamin I. Schwartz. Harvard University Press. 258 pp. $4.50. Reviewed by John S. Thomson THE government of the mainland of China is today...
...Mao, a Marxist-Leninist Communist even before the founding of the party in China, stood almost alone in advocating the use of peasant support...
...Whether living experience will ever teach the Chinese Communist to doubt the Leninist theory that imperialism is a phenomenon peculiar to a certain stage of 'capitalism' is a question which only the future and their own interests can decide...
...Where Robert Payne in his biography has placed Mao in the perspective of a century of Chinese revolution, Schwartz documents Mao's specific role in the party's first decade...
...Its closest international ties are with Moscow, which proudly claims it a member of the Communist family of nations...
...Tracing the Chinese Communist Party development prior to Mao, from the founding of the party under Ch'en Tu-hsiu (1921-1927) through the leadership of Ch'u Ch'iu-pai (1927-1928), Li Li-san (1928-1930), and Wang Ming (1930-1932), Schwartz shows that the Party's primary efforts had been to organize the workers and to establish urban communes (at Nan- chang, Changsha, Wuhan, and Canton) and not to organize the peasants or, for that matter, to raise a Red Army...
...Each of the other Chinese leaders, except Ch'en Tu-hsui who was expelled from the party in 1929 as an "oppositionist," was sent to Moscow upon the failure of the movement under his leadership...
...Even so, the marked differences which do exist between the Communism of Russia and the Communism of China have given rise to the hope that China's party with its independent Red Army may yet turn "Titoist...
...He was ignored until his successes made it no longer possible to ignore him...
...Part of the hope rests on the fact that throughout the period from 1931 to its control of all of mainland China in 1949, the Communist party of China, claiming to be the party of the proletariat, has been in fact a party based entirely on the Chinese peasant...
...merely continued, unsupported, his unorthodox peasant- based movement and rose to party leadership by 1933 without, or in spite of, Moscow...
...The "side current" of Communist ideology that was to carry a Chinese Communist revolution to success came about through the independent action of an upstart Mao supported by the peasants...
...The book's main contribution is, of course, its analysis of Mao's impact on the development of Communist practice in China...
...Mao, repudiated by his own party and expelled from its Politburo for the failure of the Hunan harvest uprising of 1927...
...Schwartz quotes the apt remark of Li Ang: "Moscow itself had to buy 'face' through Mao Tse-tung...
...An interesting sidelight of Schwartz's book is the background material on Chou En-lai, Mao's able Foreign Minister, a flexible political figure who had been lieutenant to Li Li -san and held influential positions with each of the other pre- Mao leaders...
...As the proletarian-based movement of Shanghai, Tientsin, Canton, and the Wuhan cities sank into failure after the break between the Communists and the Kuomintang in 1927, Mao's successes in the peasant Soviets of the Hunan-Kiangsi area gave the Kremlin little choice but to accept his organization and leadership...
...How this deviation from the Russian pattern came about is the subject of Benjamin I. Schwartz's book, Chinese Communism and the Rise of Mao, a history of the Party to 1933...
...The existence of a dynamic Soviet regime operating under a Stalinist banner was a propaganda asset which Moscow could not relinquish no matter what the ideological cost...
...Its leader is Mao Tse-tung, a self- avowed orthodox Marxist-Leninist...
...Feeling his way with utmost caution through the available Communist documents in Chinese, Japanese, Russian, and English, Schwartz concludes that neither Moscow nor the leaders of the Chinese Central Committee, the official Communist organization in Shanghai, planned it that way...
...There is no one left to claim that the Chinese Communists are merely agrarian reformers, not Communists in the accepted sense— a claim that Mao at no time made for himself...
...The question Schwartz does not answer is: Will Mao, who has parted from orthodox Communist theory in basing his party on the peasantry and in choosing his leaders not from the proletariat but from every strata of Chinese life, ever part from Moscow...
...Reviewed by John S. Thomson THE government of the mainland of China is today Communist...
Vol. 15 • November 1951 • No. 11
