Two Foxes Cross the Same Path

In the field of history, we often become submerged and mired in theories that misconstrue simple facts and events. For the most part, history does not occur between Marxian socio-economic struggle or Weberian superstructures, but through the dynamics of individual survival and human nature. In a real life social Darwinism, we witness the individual quest for power, authority, and control that would shape modern day China.
Enter Mao Zedong and Chiang Kai-shek, the two principle personages of 20th century who continued the theme of dictatorship in China following the fall of the Republic and Imperial era. An internationally trained military expert, Chiang Kai-shek began his ascent to power after heading the Wampoa Military Academy and the Northern Expedition. Following the death of Sun Yet-Sen, Chiang succeeded in usurping power under the banner of reactionary, and eventually, fascist ideals within the Guomindang party. His personality dominated Chinese politics during the Nanjing Decade while waging war on the leftist element of his party. Inducted to the Chinese Communist Party in 1921, Mao Zedong developed his own brand of peasant-based Marxism and came to lead the Red Army during the famed Long March. His success as an organizer and considerable military power led to his fame in the countryside and eventual domination of the CCP by the early 1940’s. By 1949, with the domination of the whole country of China by the Communists, Mao morphed into a political as well as cultural icon in a true Orwellian sense. Spawned out of the mouth of the May Forth Movement, Mao and Chiang appear to represent the polar leftist and rightist beliefs that many on both sides believed would save a beleaguered China.
These two seemingly opposite characters met in conferences in October 1945 to bridge the gap between their respective parties for the surrender of the Japanese (Schoppa 283). Ironically exchanging complements, Mao and Chiang were intersecting one another’s trajectories as the GMD was losing its hegemony over the Chinese population to the CCP. Indeed, China switched its banners from blue to red as Mao replaced Chiang, but the tyrannical yolk under which the Chinese suffer was hardly from a new egg. The Machiavellian ways of Mao and Chiang read as two leaders who follow the same methodology to achieve their power: military domination, systematic removal of dissent, and absolutism under the guise of ideological determinism through relatively new political ideas.
"Every Communist must grasp the truth, 'Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun.' Our principle is that the Party commands the gun and the gun will never be allowed to command the Party,” Mao explained to his comrades the relationship between power and force. Revered as an organizer of the rural lower-class, one often forgets Mao’s prowess as a military leader. Apart from his involvement and failure of mobilizing the peasantry during the Autumn Harvests uprising in 1927, Mao gained valuable field experience as a leader of the Red Army (Schoppa 194). His leadership during the revered Long March and his abilities in guerilla warfare gave Mao significant leeway within the Party and respect internationally. He was able to introduce several of his principles into the Red Army that, Breslin states, proved significant to the Communist victory in the revolution and secured Mao’s position in post-civil war China (35). These points surrounded the idea of reading Marxist literature and the indoctrination of Maoist thought within all ranks. Both these inspired the army and party to be on the same ideological level to arouse a sense of loyalty among the soldiers and an allegiance to himself.
The most important of these points was the “Eight Points of Behavior” and the “Three Rules”, which ensured the humanitarian treatment of people under Communist rule. A subtle but strategic move, this allowed Mao to usher in support from the countryside. This allowed him to hit two birds with one stones: the 28 Bolsheviks, his main ideological adversaries within the CCP who stressed proletariat rather than peasant revolution, and the GMD, who were notorious for robbing the countryside in the process of war. The CCP was increasingly becoming a rural based movement in the 1930’s, and as the civil war escalated in the 1940’s, the CCP found the majority of its strength in the rural areas. The numbers of the PLA swelled and the beliefs of the CCP swayed to Mao’s ideas. By showing his early commitment to the rural classes, Mao increased their mobilization and their loyalty to himself.
After the Communist takeover, Mao’s first initiative focused on developing an even stronger allegiance that could be successfully maintained between the Party, if not specifically Mao, and the People’s Liberation Army (Breslin). Mao created high-ranking positions for those generals who had served him well in the revolution, and put former soldiers into secure civilian posts. By giving former revolutionaries sure livelihoods, Mao guaranteed he had the loyalty of the army when he needed it against other party leaders, and ensured the military would not change allegiance to another government or individual.
This loyalty was a subtle but important asset to Mao, an aspiring leader who did not hesitate to use force, even in the early parts of his career and to the behest of his comrades and superiors. In October of 1930, after displacing local communists in his newly formed Jiangxi soviet, Mao faced an anti-Mao group. Following a revolt from a local commander, Mao arrested hundreds and massacred even more (Schoppa 222). Now regarded as the Futian Incident, Mao utilized his local military power to turn the event into an ‘ideological crusade’, a system Mao “would return to many times in his career” (Schoppa 222). Further, twice in the 1930’s, though his power within the party was weak, he ignored orders from the 28 Bolsheviks in Shangai without immediate rebuke because of the shift of power into the rural Soviets (Schoppa 222). Though he was removed as the army’s political commissar and placed into a bureaucratic position in 1931, Mao proved he would not sit quietly if power threatened to shift away from him or if opportunity arose to flex his muscle.
Chiang Kai-shek, though initially not as political inclined, began his career as a soldier and morphed into political power through military techniques. Like Mao, he spent the early 1920’s as an active GMD party member in the First United Front. Following the death of Sun and his leadership of the Northern Expedition, Chiang took his opportunity to take power in the power. This concluded with a preemptive strike against the CCP and the left wing during the Shangai Coup in 1927. With power solidified in his hands with military support of the GMD’s army, Chiang was free to take the foreboding title of Generalissimo.
Not to be forgotten from his early ventures was his involvement as President of the Wampoa Academy. Creating military trained and politically motivated students, these cadets would be the backbone of Chiang’s reign in the Nanjing Decade. Called the Blue Shirts, they were the mobilizing force of anti-Communist and anti-Leftist campaigns that retrenched Chiang’s power. Filling high military posts like the loyal Long Marchers in the PLA, Chiang exercised top to bottom control of the political system through his scare tactics and dominance of the military wing. Reminiscent of Mao’s anti-rightist campaigns during the late 1950’s and early 1960’s, both leaders relied on their personal ties to military power to execute political campaigns that placated their own political paranoia and reaffirmed their authoritarianism.
One can most clearly see the opportunism of both leaders once they achieved power through their various ideological inspired movements, the New Life Movement and the Cultural Revolution. We revisit Schoppa’s idea of Mao’s reoccurring ‘ideological crusade with the beginning of the Cultural Revolution (222). The Cultural Revolution was the indoctrination of the people, not necessarily to the tenets of Communism, but to Mao's personality during a time when his power was being questioned. Mao was paranoid. He was paranoid about his party, about the Russians, about the Americans and most of all about the support of the people. He thought if he lost his adherence from the workers and the peasants, the center of his power base, he would lose the ability to rule. To combat his fears of disloyalty, he created an environment akin to that of Big Brother in Orwell’s 1984. Mao’s face and name became almost God-like and the Chairman a mythological power that no one saw but everyone followed. He succeeded: Party membership grew; his opposition was openly attacked, and soon disposed of (specifically Lin Biao). Chinese culture became Communist and Mao-Centric.
Launched in February 1934, the New Life Movement was a program by the GMD to promote traditional values while moving to a modern fascist state. Though promoting infrastructure changes and construction projects, the New Life Movement was more concerned about propagandizing the population. An almost guide to living, the GMD described it as Chiang giving the Chinese people a ‘New Deal in the form of New Life Movement’ (Cheng 294). With such ideals as the Rules for Behaviour and advice on hygiene, the movement sought a German-like obedience from its population (Cheng 298). This lifestyle inflicted an Imperial Era like deification of Chiang, an almost omnipotent figure in the Nanjing Decade who controlled all aspects of Chinese society.
The Cultural Revolution and the New Life Movement were the conscious top-down actions carried out under the pretext of ideology but truly only reaffirmed the power of Mao and Chiang. The Blue Shirts and the Red Guard can be seen as the eyes and ears of a state that resembled those of Hitlers SS and Stalins secret police, the respective admitted ‘mentors’ of Chiang and Mao. These movements and the players involved reestablished, or in some ways, coercively reinforced the supposed legitimacy of leaders seeking absolute power. Involved in slogan creation, hero worship, and outright if not violent political suppression, Mao continued Chiang’s legacy as creating a state resembling that in 1984.
“The CCP did not only rise to power as the dialectical opposite of the Guomindang. There were important points of unity in the dialectic – areas where the Guomindang paved the way for the Communists… It makes far more sense to recognize that the revolution was not so much a process of liberation as a process where in a new structure of domination was created to do battle with, to defeat, and to replace another structure of domination” (Esherick 43 Ten Theses). Esherick illuminates the continuity of absolutism in Chinese history that one finds from Imperial Rulers and Yuan Shi’kai to Chiang Kai-shek and Mao Zedong. Though one discovers different contexts, ideologies, and situations enveloping the evolution of history, the true ways of Mao and Chiang parallel one another only for one to find greater success in his methods and madness then the other. The October 10th 1945 meeting between Chiang and Mao should be observed as the crossing of two foxes, one departing and one entering realms of Chinese supremacy.


Bibliography

Breslin, Shaun. Mao. Harlow, England: Longman, 1998.
Cheng, Pei-kai & Michael Lestz. The Search for Modern China.
Schoppa, Keith. Revoltuion and Its Past.
Wasserstrom, Jeffrey. Twentieth Century China: New Approaches.