The Rise and Impact of Mao's China Regime: a Historical Analysis

China is rich and vibrant, with a history and culture stretching back over three millennia of recorded time to the Shang Era of 1250BC. Their philosophical values and traditions have narrated the complexities and intricacies of Chinese development, are older than the Western World, dating to Confucius and the warring states period of 600BC. In contrast, Mao's China was a temporary period of the mid-20th century, where Mao tried to reject the millennia of cultural history, and the influences of Western Democracy and Japanese Imperialism, in favour of a new 'Maoist' regime. Today, there still are many misconceptions about China Today, many people assume that the Chinese Communist Party of today inherited the mantle from Mao. But the temporary values of Mao's Regime, and the ideas through which he ruled, have been dismissed as aberrations of the past, and the Chinese Communist Party is reverting back to the ingrained cultural tradition of Confucius values. Mao's China was a brief moment of escapism from the Chinese historical tradition, but in all aspects, economic, political, social and cultural, Mao's China was a departure from the norm that has already been relegated to history.

Historical Background of Mao's China Period

Mao's China encompassed the period from October 1st, 1949, when Mao declared the establishment of the People's Republic of China, to his death on September 9th, 1976. 'China' generally refers to the People's Republic of China, a territory that covers a similar expanse to the Qing Dynasty, or around 9.6 million square kilometres. This period of Chinese history can also accurately be defined in terms of the ideology through which it was created. Known as Maoism, or Mao Zedong thought, this was a variety of Marxist-Leninism that was used to realise the social revolution in pre-industrial China, defined as 'the communist doctrines of Mao Zedong as formerly practised in China, having as a central idea permanent revolution and stressing the importance of the peasantry, small-scale industry, and agricultural collectivization'. It was these ideas that were used to push Mao and the Chinese Communist Party (hereafter CCP) into power, how they held onto it and the ideas through which they attempted to revolutionise China.

Maoism was the starting point for the fundamental change that occurred within China, and where the rejection of other values and ideologies originated from. Young Mao was a nationalist and had held strong anti-Western and anti-imperialist sentiments, even before he joined the CCP. These sentiments were a product largely of the 'May Fourth Movement', the 'intellectual revolution and sociopolitical reform movement that occurred in China in 1917-21' originating with the iconoclastic revolutionary Chen Duxiu, and the protests following the Treaty of Versailles. The strong sentiments of nationalism and anti-Confucius ideals had a strong impact on Mao, and later Maoism, which became a building block for the transformation of China. Once Mao was exposed to Marxist thought, he attempted to combine these ideas with the idea of a permanent revolution of the agricultural 'proletariat'. These ideas were further developed in retaliation to the Guomindang, or the Nationalist party that entered power under Chiang Kai-Shek in 1928 until 1949, and their New Life Movement, which was supposed to be a spiritual renewal of the nation through a modernised version of Confucius thought. This was something that Mao and the CCP polarised themselves against and rejected throughout this period as an attempt to formulate their own renewal of China.

These ideas were in polar opposition, however, to the previous schools of thought within China. The idea of 'Chineseness', or the concept of shared national identity was flexible. People often identified as 'people of the Ming' or 'people of the Qing' as opposed to the concept of being Chinese. The word 'zhongguo', meaning China or 'middle Kingdom', only originated in the late 19th century but it was grounded in the idea of a common nationality that existed through shared rituals and values, namely those of Confucius from the 6th Century BCE. Any peoples who adopted these ideas could become 'people of the dynasty or Chinese. Mao rejected Confucianism and with it this set of commonalities that had unified the Chinese people for nearly three millennia and attempted to replace it simply with a strong sense of national identity. He rejected the idea of a Confucian

'gentlemen' or 'junzi', which for a long time had been the ultimate ideal for a Chinese man. He believed that China instead was progressing towards a new, dynamic culture and future and that traditional hierarchies and structures such as the family unit needed to be broken down.

However, without Mao as a unifying concept, or more aptly, without Mao's fierce and uncompromising anti-Confucius policies, Confucius values have returned, and the CCP has re-embraced the Confucian tradition and ideals, abide in a new light. For instance, in June 2015, 200 senior officials from the CCP went to study at a training academy to understand the 'revolutionary idea at the heart of President XI Jinping's vision for China' . They heard a lecture from Wang Jie, a professor of ancient Chinese philosophy who proceeded to encourage senior officials to reincorporate traditional Confucian concepts such as filial piety and moral rectitude into their lives. This effort is gaining more urgency and sustenance within China, 'It's like the prodigal son returning' say Guo Yingjie, University of Sydney's Chinese studies professor. It is clear that Maoism, the defining ideological movement that encompassed Mao's China was a rejection of both the past and future, and it failed to gain traction in a post-Mao world. This is a true reflection of the question, the word aberration meaning, 'the act of deviating from the ordinary, usual, or normal type'. The 2500 years of Chinese history founded in the Confucian tradition, and the return to it following Mao's death is clear evidence of the deviance from this normality within Mao's China. But this deviation wasn't unique to the values of China, it was reflected in all other walks of society, the economy, and the political sphere.

The Song Dynasty (960-1276) contained one of the largest transformations in the Chinese economy, instigating a trend that lasted until Mao. Although until this moment, from the Han Dynasty, 221BC, the Chinese agricultural industry had largely been composed of sustenance farmers, by the end of the dynasty they had become specialists in producing cash crops and producing market goods. Under the Song Dynasty, China became the most progressive economy in the world, its 'carbon' or 'coal' industry had developed to levels that wouldn't be mimicked until England in the 16th century in the 'Elizabethan leap'. A paper and metal economy thrived, which despite being unstable and prone to crashes, and increasing wealth inequality, grew the Chinese economy significantly. The international market within China only grew throughout the following Ming and Qing dynasties, but particularly during the Yuan, which expanded and strengthened trade routes along the silk road to make China an equal, or more progressive economy than in Western Europe. These economic developments only continued through much of the early modern history of China, tea, silk, paintings, pottery, metalwork, ivory and gunpowder all becoming significant international exports. Furthermore, the brutality of the 19th-century Opium wars was only further testament to China's international personality and economic importance.

However, under Mao, we can once again observe a clear departure from this economic tradition. Mao's China is often characterised as isolated, from the West but also other communist powers following the Sino-Soviet split of 1956. Mao was determined to make China self-sustaining and no longer dependent on Western imported produce, as well as to reorganise the distribution of land and the basis of agricultural farming and the proletariat. Mao cut off foreign exports and expelled businessmen, and following the failure of a soviet economic system, he moved to an agricultural collective system. Mao believed that the key to the Chinese revolution was the 'agricultural proletariat', as opposed to the 'urban', and 'revolution is an insurrection, an act of violence by which one class overthrows another'. Mao also turned to the idea of collective plots, as opposed to the individual basis of earlier years to try and use the power of socialist economics to boost the economy. The breaking down of the family unit, the redistribution of land and the withdrawal from the global economy all clashed directly with earlier Confucius thoughts, and ultimately culminated in two policies, the earlier land distribution, and the later Great Leap Forward. The early period of land 'reform' in 1949-50 saw 40% of Chinese land being redistributed with 60% of the population benefitting, and the Great Leap forward was implemented with the stated goal that the Leap was to 'Surpass Britain in 15 years in industrial development'. Individual plots were subsumed into larger collective farms, family structures broken up into communal dining halls, all in an attempt to increase production of steel, coal and electricity. But fundamentally, both of these policies failed, the 'land reform' leading to a campaign of terror for landholders, even those with plots as small as 23 an acre. The Great Leap Forward was considerably more disastrous, culminating in a massive famine dismissed by Mao, with at least 20 million deaths. These economic policies were disastrous for China, and again, following Mao's death were quickly abandoned.

Mao's fervent successor Deng Xiaoping recognised that the Xenophobia and anti-intellectualism that had characterised Mao's China was economically harmful and instigated the reform and opening-up period under the 'Four Moderations', setting China 'in the right direction' by developing, agriculture, industry, science and technology, and national defence. During this period, post-1978, Mao's collective agricultural farms were broken down and abandoned, crops were sold on the free market, and Urban and Rural areas were encouraged to set up local enterprises, nearly 12 million of these were registered by 1985. With the abandonment of Mao assumptions, and the rejection of the goal of economic equality, China's economy quickly began to grow. Deng Xiaoping is famous for his summary quote of this era, 'to get rich is glorious'. These policies have been successful, plunging China into an unprecedented era of double-digit growth, with its economy poised to become the largest in the world. The clear abandonment of Mao-era economic ideas and ideals, that culminated in defining events of Mao's China, further present the idea that Mao's China was a temporary aberration, and that this view is perpetuated within China itself. Mao's ideas were revolutionary, and in polar opposite to traditional, or normal Chinese policies, and have since been reverted. And the clear disastrous effect of these policies only further adds to the negative connotation of the aberration with which we associate Mao's China.