and the party did not figure out their potential until after 1927. Once the revolution was successful (in 1949), the party could use its power to overtake peasant power with party objectives. But first things first; the party turned its attention toward undercutting nonpeasant political rivals such as the KMT and, during the war, Japan.
One item that caused problems for the communist party in the period was communist dogma, particularly utopianism. This is noted in a summary of Mao's attitude before World War II to the nature of problems in China.
Writing to a friend in the winter of 1920 21, Mao, then a
junior member of the nascent Chinese Communist Party,
portrayed the human race as divided into one billion
"proletarians" and half as many "capitalist" with the
former on the verge of shattering their proverbial chains.
And that was no more unrealistic than the early line taken
by the party itself. At its First Congress in 1921, the
party called for a purely working class revolution at a
time when there were only a million and a half industrial
workers in China. Later in that decade, when the Kremlin
played mentor to the Chinese party, Stalin vastly
underestimated the peasantry's potential; he imagined that
the Chinese revolution need only triumph in a few cities,
as happened in Russia. . . . Stalin's dream turned into a
nightmare with the unsuccessful Communist insurrection in
Canton (Guangzhou) in December 1927 (Landers, 1982, p. 37).
In other words, Mao was not always realistic about the true nature of social problems in China before the war. What he saw as worker sentiment among peasants was, really, only peasant sentiment. This lack of realism was going to come up after 1949 also, when Mao tried to impose a totally new industrialized system on a peasant farmer economy. The ...