The New Democracy¶
Core Argument¶
Chapter Digest: The New Democracy¶
Mao’s theory of the New Democracy, as articulated in the late 1930s and 1940s, represented a profound departure from revolutionary Marxism, adapting Lenin’s concept of the revolutionary democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and peasantry to a Stalinist framework. Mao characterised China as semi-colonial and semi-feudal, necessitating a prolonged bourgeois-democratic stage—expected to last ‘scores of years’—before any transition to socialism could be contemplated. The proposed state form was a coalition government of four classes: workers, peasants, the petty-bourgeoisie, and the national bourgeoisie, governed not through Soviets but via a Political Consultative Conference. The 1945 speech On Coalition Government, later rewritten, explicitly renounced any immediate advance to socialism. Real power, however, remained firmly with the People’s Liberation Army; bourgeois parties held ministries only at the sufferance of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), while workers were denied the right to strike and independent labour and peasant activity was crushed. The New Democracy was thus a transitional, distorted form—neither a bourgeois nor a proletarian dictatorship, but a workers’ and peasants’ government that had not broken from capitalism.
The CCP rapidly adopted the privilege structures of its Soviet mentors, with a strict hierarchy of villas, limousines, and exclusive amenities for the elite, while copying the Soviet police system to monitor citizens’ activities. Workers, hailed as masters, found trade unions transformed into ‘schools of production’, with compulsory arbitration and factory managers holding final authority. The Labour and Capital Consultative Conferences accepted industrialists’ proposals for lower wages and unpaid overtime, enacted into law in May 1950. The bourgeoisie were the primary beneficiaries, while workers faced wage controls, longer hours, and Stakhanovism. Peasant unrest forced a partial retreat: the Land Reform Law of June 1950 forbade violence against landlords but permitted struggle against ‘vicious autocrats’, and most landlords survived with holdings intact. Industry copied the Soviet model: in nationalised factories, a Control Committee was nominally in charge, but the manager could veto its decisions; in private enterprises, capitalists retained power. The Korean War then compelled a sharpened struggle against the urban and village bourgeoisie.
The New Marriage Law, which made wives equal to husbands and banned polygamy, was undermined by male peasant pressure, with women’s right to land often not enacted and widows’ land seized by local associations. Western academics idealised Mao, mistaking appearance for reality. In the UK, the New Left Review backed Mao, failing to critique his record to avoid internal splits. In France, Pierre Rousset claimed Mao adhered to revolutionary Marxism, citing a phrase about proletarian leadership added to the 1939 text only later. For revolutionary Marxists, such leadership requires urban proletarian mobilisation through Soviets; for the CCP, it meant party domination, with Soviets rejected. The CCP’s 1949 victory, which achieved national unity (except Tibet and Taiwan), resulted from a conjuncture of capitalist decline, Kuomintang disintegration, and peasant rebellion, not correct theory. The CCP’s petty-bourgeois nature was shown when PLA troops, mostly peasants, repressed urban workers, with strikes crushed by shootings and machine-gunnings, including 200 killed at Ching Hsing coal mines. Mao’s class-collaborationist method, applied in Indonesia in 1965, led to the slaughter of up to a million members of the Indonesian Communist Party.