The purpose of this research is to examine the growth of the communist movement in China in the 22 years before the 1949 revolution. The plan of the research will be to discuss how the party gained mass support for social revolution, with reference to specific policies pursued by the party, as well as problems and opportunities that staying with those policies created.
Following the victory of the Communist rebels in China in 1949, the government of China was reconstituted as the People's Republic of China under the leadership of Mao Tse tung. The rural peasantry scattered throughout the many Chinese provinces appears to have been an important element of the Communist victory, hence a key to the structure of post revolutionary society. The victory of 1949, then, was the outgrowth of nearly 25 years of political struggle and careful political planning. The long term connection of Mao with the peasantry has been noted by a number of commentators. Initially an urban revolutionary, Mao "grasped the peasants' revolutionary possibilities" (Solomon, 1971, p. 191) in the mid 1920s. Solomon quotes Mao's view of the central role of the peasantry in revolutionary theory:
Formerly I had not fully realized the degree of class
struggle among the peasantry, but after the May 30
[1925] Incident, and during the great wave of
political activity which followed it, the Hunanese
peasantry became very militant. I left my home, where
I had been resting, and began a rural organizational
campaign. In a few months we had formed more than
twenty peasant unions (Solomon, 1971, p. 192).
Mao's intent appears to have been to help peasants challenge the power of the bourgeois landlords and thereby complete a communist revolution in the mid 1920s. But his view of the peasantry must be seen with reference to the uses to which Chinese political activists sought to put peasants, ...