The Final Collapse of the KMT: the CCP Assumes Power¶
Core Argument¶
Chapter Digest: The Final Collapse of the KMT: the CCP Assumes Power¶
This chapter examines the final years of the Chinese Civil War, arguing that the Chinese Communist Party’s victory was not the product of a Leninist revolutionary strategy but of a Stalinist apparatus riding a spontaneous peasant insurrection, ultimately constrained by Cold War geopolitics. The consolidation of Mao Zedong’s personal dictatorship was the central political development within the CCP. The 1943 Politburo meeting granted Mao sole authority to settle disputes, and by the Seventh Party Congress in 1945, a new constitution enshrined “Mao Zedong Thought” as the Party’s ideological foundation, while a resolution on historical questions exonerated Stalin and the Comintern by blaming earlier leaders for past defeats. By 1948, Party meetings required bowing before Mao’s portrait. Unlike Stalin, Mao had genuinely led the Party’s activities, but the cult was presented as discipleship to Stalin, whom Mao publicly hailed as the world revolutionary leader.
Militarily, the CCP’s victory was aided by Stalin’s shift in support after Churchill’s ‘Iron Curtain’ speech and the Truman Doctrine. The Soviet Army provided the PLA with Japanese weapons and sanctuary in Manchuria, while US aid to the KMT totalled nearly $60 billion in today’s money. However, the KMT’s internal collapse through corruption and mass desertions, combined with the PLA’s superior morale and tactics, proved decisive. The CCP’s land policy was deliberately reformist, not revolutionary. The October 1947 Outline Land Law formally sanctioned expropriation, but implementation was immediately reversed. Mao condemned “left excesses”, demanding rich peasants be reclassified as middle peasants and that poor peasant associations admit landlords. By August 1948, the agrarian reform programme was officially ended, replaced by reductions in rent and taxes, with the CCP enforcing payment to landlords to prove it was a better defender of private property than the KMT. This class collaborationist line, rooted in the theory of revolution by stages, directed the attack at feudalism, not capitalism—a classic Menshevik conception.
The revolution succeeded because of a seismic peasant insurrection born of mass hunger and desperation, which the CCP rode to power. The PLA provided structure, but the peasantry’s spontaneous expropriations were labelled a “left deviation”. The CCP deliberately discouraged workers’ and students’ uprisings, calling on them to wait quietly for liberation. After crossing the Yangtze, Mao promised protection for foreign businesses. The government that took power in 1949 would establish a workers’ state despite Mao’s declared goal of prolonged capitalism, because the international context—a world dominated by two superpowers—forced it. Had Stalin and Mao been Leninists, they would have proposed a Socialist Federation of the Soviet Union and China. Instead, only the Korean War and American aggression compelled the Mao regime to adopt socialist measures for self-protection.