Rev Left Radio - [BEST OF] The Chinese Revolution: Chairman Mao, Cultural Revolution, & Communist China

Episode Date: June 6, 2025

ORIGINALLY RELEASED Jun 4, 2018 In this episode, Breht is joined by Yueran Zhang, a PhD candidate in Sociology at Harvard University, to discuss the Chinese Revolution and the legacy of Mao Zedong. Together, they explore the historical context of China's revolutionary transformation, socialist construction, contradictions in post-revolutionary society, and how Maoist thought continues to shape political struggles today. A nuanced and rigorous conversation grounded in historical materialism. Here are the recommendations Yueran gave at the end of the episode: - Mao's China and After: http://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Maos-China-and-After/Maurice-Meisner/9780684856353 Rise of the Red Engineers: https://www.eastwestcenter.org/publications/rise-red-engineers-cultural-revolution-and-origins-chinas-new-class The Cultural Revolution at the Margins: http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674728790 ---------------------------------------------------- Support Rev Left and get access to bonus episodes: www.patreon.com/revleftradio Make a one-time donation to Rev Left at BuyMeACoffee.com/revleftradio Follow, Subscribe, & Learn more about Rev Left Radio: https://revleftradio.com/

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Welcome everybody to Revolutionary Left Radio. I'm your host, Ann Comrade, Brett O'Shea, and today we have on Yoran Zang to talk about Mao in the Chinese Revolution. Yorin, would you like to introduce yourself and say a little bit about your background? Okay, sure. Thank you for having me. I'm Yuan, and I'm a grad student in sociology. at Harvard University, my primary academic interest is in political and historical sociology

and also Marxist theories. I in particular study political economy and class politics in China, and as a side project, I also study China's contemporary Maoism. And other than academic stuff, I have also been involved. in left activism and the labor organizing both in China and the U.S. Well, I'm extremely excited and honor to have you on. This whole topic, I think, is something that is sort of underrepresentative and sort of misunderstood on the U.S. left.

I think there are a lot more people are familiar with the Russian Revolution and the Cuban revolution, but there isn't a lot of real knowledge on the left about the Chinese revolution, and I've been getting really interested in Maoism and the Chinese revolution generally lately, and so I thought this would be an awesome episode and an educational one as well. But before we get into all the questions, because we have a lot to cover, what initially got you interested in Mao and the Chinese Revolution? Like for anyone who studies contemporary Chinese politics from a historical perspective, you know, making sense of Mao and the Chinese Revolution is just very important. And especially if we want to

project a alternative to China's contemporary regime, which is authoritarian capitalism, then critically engaging the legacy of Mao, and the Chinese revolution is an indispensable task. That's basically how I saw this as a very important question. And also, Maoism is still now a very strong ideological current in contemporary China, and And many Maoists are very active in many social and labor movements in China today. So engaging China's Maoists today also bring us back to understanding Mao and the Chinese revolution. Absolutely.

And there's big Maoist movements in India, in Afghanistan, in the Philippines. So Maoism is very much alive and well throughout the world today. And a lot of Maoist organizations are on the front lines of the global class war in the fight against U.S. socialism especially. So this is timely and it's fascinating. So let's go ahead and get into it. Again, this is going to be just because of the structure of the show, more of sort of an introductory analysis of Mao in the Chinese Revolution. We haven't done an episode on this before. So we're just going to try to hit the big points. It was really hard trying to narrow down, you know, half a century of history to, you know, a couple questions that fit within an hour framework. But I think we have

some good questions here today. So before we get into the events that actually led up to the Chinese revolution and the revolution itself, I just want to address the issue of Mao Zedong. In the West, he is always kind of simply portrayed as like a mass murdering sociopath on par with Hitler. Even people on the left have been so socially conditioned with this idea of Mao that they often parrot it. So based on your research, what sort of person and political leader was Mao and in what ways are the Western stereotypes about Mao wrong, in your opinion?

I think the most basic thing to get across is that Mao was a serious and genuine revolutionary, and the Chinese revolution he led was a serious and genuine attempt at socialism. The aspiration was to lead China out of semi-colonial and imperialist oppression and out of capitalist exploitation and to build China not only into a strong and egalitarian society, but also of front of world revolution. And of course, these aspirations didn't materialize, and the reason why these aspirations didn't materialize has to do with both the historical circumstances Chinese revolutionaries were

facing, and also the contradictory tendencies within Mao himself. I think the contradictory tendencies were well captured by. Mao himself. So for example, in a letter to his wife, Jiang Qin dated July 8, 1966. So that's on the eve of the Cultural Revolution, Mao Zedong remarked in the letter that I possess both some of the spirit of the tiger and some of the monkey. But it is a tiger spirit which is the dominant and the monkey spirit secondary. So, in the Chinese traditional culture, Tiger stands for power, force, other, and establishment,

whereas monkey stands for rebellion, restlessness, and a challenge of authority. So, yeah, so this is kind of a nice way to think about the contradictory tendencies within Mao, because on the one hand, Mao emphasized building powerful institutions and the parrotses that enforced order, but on the other hand, he also saw the oppressive potential of these institutions and wanted to rebel against them. So he sometimes fancied smashing the very institutions he built, but when these institutions were actually in danger of being smashed, he wanted to restore order and authority. He, you know, and he had utopian and radically democratic visions, but also

Machiavellian in mannuring elite power struggles. So this is kind of like a fundamental contradiction within himself. And I guess the last thing to note is that even though in the commonsensical understanding, Mao was seen only as a dictator and nothing else, actually Maoism and the Chinese Revolution had a huge influence on the Western left. Because this year is the 50th anniversary of 1968, and we all know that back in the 1968, in the global 60s, Maoism was hugely influential in France, in the U.S., and in many other Western countries, and it had a huge impact on the feminist movement in the struggle for gender liberation and also for race liberation.

like things like a Black Panther Party was hugely influenced by Maoism. So, of course, those movements were kind of like inspired by an overly romanticized version of Maoism, but still I think influence was there. And you touched on the idea that he is represented as a dictator, but he was very much interested in taking care of the masses and he is interested in democratic mechanisms. in what ways was he always in the back of his mind trying, I mean, I guess the question would be phrased this way. Do you think that Mao himself was more interested in liberating the Chinese people and industrializing the country and making a better China for the people? Or was he more interested as he is framed in the West as being just somebody that was purely

Machiavellian and purely after rule in authoritarianism? How do you think about that question? I think like those arguments could be kind of like a better, understood if we put them into the concrete historical context and episodes. But I think as a general sort of like conclusion, as I said, I still saw Mao as a genuine and a serious revolutionary, and the whole revolutionary project was very serious. but he clearly saw the revolutionary project as closely connected to a power struggle, which he sometimes had to deal with in a very Machiavian way. Well, let's go ahead and move on.

When we're doing historical revolutions and we're analyzing it, one of the good things is to analyze what came right before it. So I know this is a big question, but can you discuss the conditions and conflicts in China leading up to the revolution, namely the Civil War? So, yeah, I would just kind of like give a very brief summary of this kind of like a very peculiar period of turmoil. So between 1911 when the Qing dynasty collapsed and in 1921, when the Chinese Communist Party was funded, China was in a very chaotic position. The main line of political struggle had been between Republicans and a royalist, and many provinces were under the control of feudal warlords. And at the same time, the young generation was searching for something radically new, some kind of like radical transformation of Chinese culture and politics, which was manifested by the new culture movement between mid-1910s and early 1920s.

And this new cultural movement paved way for the rising influence of Marxist thought in China and the foundation of the Chinese Communist Party in 1921. And then the guiding theme between 1921 and the 1949 was the relationship, a very complicated one, between the Communist Party and the Nationalist Party, also known as Quarming Down. The Chinese Nationalist Party was really kind of like a party of kind of like catch-all nationalism and the republicanism led by bourgeoisie and landlords. And the communists also shared some nationalist and anti-imperialist aspirations, but it had a radical egalitarian agenda. So the nationalists and the communists were united in a platform against loyalists and the warlords, a platform for national unification and anti-imperalism,

but they also had very different political visions and class bases. So this is why they were in a very complicated relationship, in alliance twice, and in war twice. So between early 1920s and 1927, the communists and the nationalists were in alliance in their crusade against royalists and the warlords. The Communist Party was effectively folded into the ranks of the Nationalist Party. But in 1927, with the rise of the right within the Nationalist Party, especially Chang Keshank, the nationalist party started to violently purge and prosecute calmness. So basically, the nationalists were militarily struggling against the calmness between 1927 and in 1937, and in 1937, the two parties were in alliance again to fight against

the Japanese invasion. And this period of alliance lasted until the victory of the war. over Japan in 1945, and between 1945 and 1949, the two parties were in war again. So basically, twice in alliance and twice at war. Yeah, so that's really interesting. They came together, especially to fight, you know, the Japanese imperialists. They had certain, you know, ideas about China and how it should be sort of sovereign. And that was about the result of their coming together, but then quickly after they defeated Japan,

and they turned on each other and had a civil war. What was the long march? And what role did that play in Mao's rise in the Communist Party? So that happened before the Japanese invasion. So that's kind of like in the first civil war period between the communists and the nationalists. So basically, after the nationalist started to crack down on the communist in 1927, the communist fled to the rural and the communist. areas in Jiangxi and Fujian, building a political power based on rural communes there and

also a military base there. And then around 1933 and 34, the nationalists doubled down on the crackdown on the communist base in Jiangxi and Fujian and forcing the communists to go on a military retreat. So over a year, basically, the communists first marched west and then marched north all the way across China. And throughout the march, there were kind of like strategic disagreements and debates within the Communist Party regarding, you know, what the proper military strategy was and so on. And these battles eventually consolidated Mao's leadership within the party.

How long did the, like roughly, how long did the long march actually take to march all the way across China? So if you look at the map, so they started from the kind of like the southeast part of China and marched all the way to the northwest part of China. And if we kind of like see it in terms of a distance, so that's kind of like 9,000 kilometers. were of 5,600 miles over a year. Wow. Yeah, that is astounding. So how was the People's Republic of China ultimately founded and what ended up happening to the Nationalists after the Communist won?

So, as I said, the alliance between the Communists and the Nationalists in the Second World War was really unstable, you know, fraught with tensions. So, it was not surprising that after the Second World War, after the victory over Japan, a civil war between the two parties broke out again. And I cannot go into all the military details, but the main point is that the communists were able to prevail in this civil war, despite a relatively inferior level of a resource and the equipment. it was really good at mobilizing the masses, especially the peasantry into their support base. And the nationalists were more resourceful, but they were incredibly corrupt and couldn't mobilize

people. So after winning the civil war, the communists funded the People's Republic of China, the PRC, whereas the nationals fled to Taiwan, basically. And today that that relationship is still full of tension and fraught with sort of disagreement. And I remember when Trump was elected, there was a little beef between the U.S. and China after Trump took a call from the Taiwanese leader congratulating him on his victory. Is that right? That relationship still holds today. Yeah.

So that kind of like gave a very, gave birth to a very complicated history of the question of the political status of Taiwan in terms of, you know, like unification, separatism and stuff. Obviously, I couldn't go into that part of the history, but yes, it gave birth to a very complicated history. And did Mao made, correct me if I'm wrong, but Mao made sort of advancements in guerrilla warfare theory. You mentioned earlier how the Communist Party was sort of outfunded and outresourced by the Nationalists, but they still were able to win in part because of the masses having their back. And also, is it true to say that Mao's contributions to guerrilla warfare strategies helped also? I would say Mao's contribution there was kind of like was in his kind of like a creative combination. of guerrilla warfare and mass mobilization.

Because he coined term called people's war, which became famous subsequently. So there the idea is that guerrilla warfare couldn't really be waged on its own, but it had to always be combined with mass-effective mobilization of the people, basically. So without a mass popular support base, you couldn't win great warfare. So basically, I would say it's a combination between the warfare on its own and kind of like mass globalization on a broader scale. Fascinating, fascinating. And I think it's important to learn from that as well because there's lots of things we can take out of this history and we'll get to that towards the end. But in the early days of the PRC, what was the relationship specifically between China and the Soviet Union?

Union, and how close were they ideologically? I will say this relationship was very, very complicated. It switched back and forth, back and forth many times between sweet and sour, between the hot and cold, and beneath all those twists and turns, I think there is a fundamental tension. Because on the one hand, the Chinese Communist Party had a very close relationship with the Soviet and also the third international things, the very birth of the Chinese Communist Party. And the Soviet had supported the Chinese Communist Party immensely in the Civil Wars and the Second World War. So after the PRC was founded, the only kind of like a realistic way to jumpstart industrialization and economic development in China was to continue positioning itself in the orbit of the Soviet Union.

So the PRC and also the party needed both Soviet's material support and also the international market of the Soviet bloc. But on the other hand, Mao was clearly aware of the deficiencies of the Soviet model. So, first, the Soviet model relied really kind of like on a top-down bureaucracy. So even though the means of production nominally belonged to the people, they actually belonged to a state run by technocratic bureaucrats, not accountable to the world. they actually belonged to a state run by technocratic bureaucrats, not accountable to the workers. So this kind of like Soviet type of state socialism looked quite similar to state capitalism, and the state bureaucrats became a privileged class of quasi-capitalists. So Mao called this Soviet reformism, and he was quite troubled.

by this deficiency. And the second deficiency is that the Soviet Union did show a impureless tendency of kind of like a big brother type of bullying other countries within its orbit. And Mao was also very happy with that, obviously. And on top of that, there was also the question of who was going to be the leader of the World Revolution. The Soviet Union tried to position itself as the leader, but Mao's charisma and influence was clearly on the rise globally in the 1950s and 60s, and the leaders of the Soviet Union

after Stalin had no charisma to speak of. So there was kind of like a contention between the two powers regarding who was going to bear the flag for the world revolution, of course. So let's go ahead and move on. What were some of the big policies and reforms in the early days of the PRC, especially with regards to land reform and the construction of communes? What were the goals of these early policies, and how did they ultimately turn out? Let me talk about this.

Let me talk about what happened in rural China and urban China separately. So in rural China, the communist policy. party had always been carrying out land reforms in its rural base, even before it came to power nationally. So like in the Soviet communes, it established in Jiangxi in the 1920s and 30s, and also like its rural base in the anti-Japanese war period and also during the final civil war period. The specific goals of these land reforms varied a lot, but the main kind of point of those land reforms was mobilizational, basically to build popular support base, or in other words,

hegemony among the peasantry. So after the PRC was funded, the party continued these land reforms. The idea was to expropriate land from landlords and redistribute them to landless peasants with the foundational goal of establishing the party's authority in the rural areas. And in some places, it was conducted in a especially violent manner against the landlords. So the land reforms were basically completed around 1953. And by that time, many peasants were able to privately own land for the first time. But they were not able to hold on to private land ownership for long, because after 1953, the party immediately started to follow the Soviet-type rural collectivization, abolishing private ownership of land and forming rural communes.

So, the term from land redistribution to rural collectivization was understandable, but it proceeded so quickly that many peasants saw it as the party betraying them. And in urban China, the party basically nationalized all the land and nationalized all the private enterprises. So the Budrazi, who owned those enterprises, were in general treated much better than rural landlords and usually given managerial positions in these enterprises, which they previously owned but then nationalized. So basically the whole urban China was organized along the public sector work units.

and you were mentioning some of the backlash against the landlords that specifically is brought up quite often but you know many landlords is it true to say they were executed in the process of trying to redistribute the land yeah the actual process in which the land reforms unfolded and in which the landlords themselves were prosecuted were really messy and it varied a lot from different places different provinces, different counties, and different villages. So, you know, like, in some cases, what you mentioned was, in fact, happening. But, you know, like, the subsequent land redistribution led by the party kind of like pose some tension to the process which the land was initiated. But in some other cases, this was not the case. So there was kind of like no general discernible pattern in terms of like how the land reforms unfolded. It was kind of like really a lot going on depending on where that happened.

And that's something that we should always keep in mind when we're talking about this is just how huge China is and how big the population was then and now. And so, you know, things unfolded differently in different areas, depending on who was there, et cetera. So that's just something that comes up again and again. But two of the big sort of concepts or movements that people know about when it comes to the Chinese revolution is the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution. So let's just take them one by one. What was the Great Leap Forward? What were its goals and what were its successes and failures? Basically, the grape leap forward was a campaign launched by the party, and especially Mao himself, in the late 1950s and early 60s, to rapidly play economic catch-up and to dramatically increase industrial and agricultural output.

And I would say it was the result of two competing priorities on Mao's part. The first priority was, of course, to develop a strong economic base for China. That's quite understandable. And the second priority was to constantly mobilize the masses to maintain revolutionary fervor. So, this is why Mao took issue with the Soviet model of economic development, which was based on technocratic planning by kind of like managerial bureaucracy. So in that model, the masses were not actively engaged in the economic developmental project, and economic development was rather detached from political ideology.

And the revolutionary further was lost, according to Mao. So Mao really kind of like wanted to balance his economic and political priorities by rejecting the Soviet model of economic development and instead building economic development through mass mobilization campaigns. So basically, through ideological, revolutionary appeals that caught upon the masses to exercise their agency and fervor to increase economic output. So the success of this campaign was that the masses were indeed actively mobilized, and the political momentum was very high, basically.

The failure was that the economic side totally collapsed. The production targets were raised to unrealistically high levels because mass mobilization produced great revolutionary fervor. But because these production targets was so unrealistic, agricultural and industrial production was actually disrupted, which brought about huge economic recession and economic recession. and widespread famine in the countryside. And right there, I think it's also important to talk about the famine a little bit. Just because when people talk about Mao and the Chinese Revolution, especially in the West,

the famine and the people that died in it, which is a total tragedy. But it's laid at the feet of Mao as if Mao didn't care about the people or that he, even sometimes people will take it so far as to say that Mao actively wanted to butcher. sure that amount of people. So was the great famine a result of Mao's malice or was it a result of a policy program that had well good intentions but that ultimately failed for variable reasons and it was it was a tragedy even in Mao's eyes? I would say the group leap forward started as a serious but utopian project of combining economic development with political mobilization.

So I think the intention behind it was serious. I guess like good was not a good word to describe the intention, but I think serious was a good word to describe the intention behind it. So like I don't think it was Mao or the party actively wanting to sacrifice these massive amount of human lives, I don't think it's like that. It's kind of like a serious project which unfortunately didn't work out in practice and backfired in hugely tragic ways. Absolutely, absolutely.

That's essential to understand. So let's go on to the second part of that, which is the cultural revolution. What was the cultural revolution? Why did Mao ultimately launch it? And what were its successes and its failures? So, the cultural revolution, I would say, originated from Mao's concern with a fundamental issue, which is basically after a revolutionary party became a ruling party, after means of production were all controlled by state apparatuses filled with party cadres.

How could the party still be revolutionary vanguard instead of ossified bureaucratic chain of command? So in that situation, in that scenario, how could party cadres still be revolutionaries instead of a new privileged class of political elites out of touch with and unaccountable to the masses? And how could the revolutionary project be something that the masses could exercise their agency in instead of everyone being obedient to superiors and everything being top down? So I think this is kind of like the fundamental question in Mao's head. And we have talked about how this concern underlined Mao's disagreement with the Soviet model and how, how it motivated the grape leap forward, which I just talk about. But around 1966, Mao really felt that the party was seriously in danger of losing touch with the masses, and that many party officials were seriously becoming a privileged class

of bureaucratic state capitalist. So in 1966, he called on the masses to rebel against and attack party cadres in order to continue the revolution and purge the party of capitalist elements. So this is Mao's monkey moment, if you recall my previous rendering of this monkey versus tiger contradiction. So this is Mao's monkey moment. So basically, Mao, the supreme leader at the very top, called on the masses at the bottom to organize and attack the party apparatus in the middle.

So this was still a top-down revolution, but many rebels who answered Mao's call to attack party officials did feel that. they were liberated and had a great deal of agency in attacking the party apparatus. But after the party apparatus was attacked and effectively paralyzed, two things happened. So, first, in many places, the masses engage in very violent, factional fight among themselves to contend for political power. power in a vacuum in which the party was paralyzed. So, and many of those factional fights became hugely violent and destructive, and many lives were lost in that process.

And the second, economic production came to a heart as the masses were caught upon to struggle against the party. So, like, economic production really suffered as a side effect. So kind of like since late 1967, kind of like a year, a little bit more than a year after the Cultural Revolution was initiated, Mao started to reverse himself, to restore order and to suppress mass movement. So this became Mao's tiger moment, which kind of like came after a year,

which came kind of like a year after Mao's monkey moment. Yeah, and then, so between 1968 and then 1976 when he died, so in this kind of like eight year period, Mao explored various initiatives to increase the participation of the masses in party affairs, but only within the limit of maintaining political order. So, you know, the masses were caught upon to participate in decision-making, to supervise party officials, but self-organization and rebellion by the masses was no longer allowed, and it was no longer thing. So basically Mao at that time was kind of like trying to hold together an uneasy alliance on the top of the party apparatus between a pro-establishment party bureaucrats representing Mao's tiger moment, like Deng Xiaoping.

And on the other hand, the anti-establishment rebels representing Mao's monkey moment, like, the so-called gun of war. And these two factions were always in tension, and the Mao was kind of like jangling between the two, but the alliance was instantly broken up after Mao died. Right. And we'll get to that right after this. But one thing that I think about when I hear both about the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution was I think about Mao creatively trying to apply, you know, the Marxist

revolutionary science in China while simultaneously trying to deal with some of the excesses or failures or stagnation that he saw in the Soviet model. So what Mao did in both cases is his constant going back to the people themselves in an attempt to ensure that the state or the party itself does not become isolated and alienated from the people. He was constantly trying to inject into the party apparatus itself, this mass participation. And by doing that, inculcate in the people's minds. themselves, their own agency, as you talk about, their own confidence, their own ability to

carry out revolutionary momentum, even under the Communist Party and even under the process of revolution, because Mao understood that it was very much a process. And even after the Communist Party took over, there's still bourgeois elements in the party itself. There are still a cultural sort of revolution that needs to take place to hold those people accountable, et cetera. So although there were a lot of failures and tragic failures in many instances, and there was a lot of excess what Mao was really trying to do was really creatively address the problems of the Soviet Union and push the science of revolutionary Marxism forward. Do you agree with that basic outline? Yes, I think that's kind of like really the point I was trying to conway here.

And, you know, like, I guess kind of like one thing to caution against is that Mao was not like this great champion. of people's democracy, and he was always standing behind the masses, encouraging them to mobilize and attack the party. So, like, so I would say, like, he was kind of like always juggling between the two concerns. So on the one hand, how to maintain the parties of political power or rather the monopoly of the party of the political power, and, you know, maintaining order, ensuring that the economy was being developed and so on and so forth. So that's kind of like the tiger moment of him. And then, on the other hand, how to make sure that the party was not being ossified, how to we inject a popular momentum into it.

So he was kind of like going back and forth, back and forth between those two moments. So this is kind of like really a dilemma he attempted to address in a very serious way. But I would say in the end, he wasn't able to find a good solution to this dilemma. Absolutely. And I think your tiger monkey dichotomy is a fascinating and really informative sort of lens through which to understand, you know, Mao and the different sides of him and what he was trying to juggle. But when Mao ultimately did die, what was the response from him? his supporters, what happened afterwards, and specifically what happened with regards to Deng Xiaoping and his economic reforms?

So, I guess, like, before Mao died, he kind of knew that, you know, like, the two factions, basically the tiger faction and the Monty faction were going to break up after he died. And he knew that the tiger faction would win because it had kind of like a more political experience and more cloud and a stronger base and root within the party hierarchy. So kind of like in the last couple of years, before he died, he was kind of like really trying to reconcile the two. and especially trying to push the pro-establishment side, the tiger faction, to acknowledge the legitimacy of the cultural revolution, of this kind of like a rebellious political line. But, I mean, like, the tiger faction was never really going to give Mao that. And also, on the other hand, the monkey faction was kind of like constantly trying to mobilize new campaigns to take down the tiger faction to shake up the party establishment. So, Mao was kind of like, I mean, the alliance between those two factions under Mao was always uneasy, always unstable, and after Mao died, the two factions were struggling against each other instantly, just as Mao predicted.

And because the side of pro-establishment, and because the side of pro-establishment, a party bureaucrat had much more political cloud, it easily out-manured the rebel camp, the monkey faction. So, you know, like, essentially the gun of four were arrested and publicly tried. and many kind of like rebels associated with them were also arrested and persecuted. So after the pro-establishment faction won and after Deng Xiaoping consolidated his leadership within the pro-establishment faction, a series of economic liberalization and the market democratization reforms were launched, starting from 1978. So basically, these top party leaders felt that the power and legitimacy of the party was seriously in crisis, and the only way to maintain their power was to launch economic reform.

So this is kind of like a great historical irony, because allegedly speaking, Mao launched the Cultural Revolution to attack the capitalist loaders within the party to prevent the party from taking on a capitalist path. But that was exactly what happened after Mao died. Yep. Yep. And for anybody out there that is kind of interested in, you know, tendencies, which we cover on this program, that split after Mao died and Zhang Jiao Ping came to prominence and started

implementing liberalization and market reforms. That is a split between Maoists and Marxist-Lennonists to this day. Maoists see that as the end of socialism in China and the introduction of revisionism. And MLs see that Deng Xiaoping carried it forward and still today is a socialist state. We had somebody representing the Marxist-Leninist position on this program to argue for the idea that China was still a socialist state to this day. So that period of 1978 after Mao died is really a split between Maoists and Leninists on what China was and what China was to become.

And so I think that's just kind of interesting background knowledge for people to understand. But zooming out after covering all of this ground, what were the biggest accomplishments of the revolution, in your opinion, and what were the major theoretical contributions to Marxism made by Mao? I guess let me answer the second part of your question first. I think there are two major theories. theoretical contributions. First, I think Mao was kind of like the first major Marxist thinker that took the question

of peasants seriously. Because orthodox Marxism either saw peasants as kind of like reactionary petty bourgeoisie, like in the 18th premier kind of sense, or saw them as irrelevant as peasants. or saw them as irrelevant as peasants because these peasants were progressively absorbed into proletariat. So they were kind of like driven into extinction, basically. So for example, Kowski wrote a lot about peasants, but basically only about how they were driven out of existence by capitalization of agriculture.

Lenin talk about how peasants could be an ally in the working-class revolution, you know, following a working-class leadership, but never really theorized about the revolutionary role of peasants. Mao, on the other hand, seriously asked whether peasants could be seriously treated as revolutionary agents, and if so, how they could be mobilized as such. So, Mao opposed this question both theoretically and practically, and the whole process of Chinese revolution, the whole process in which the Communist Party mobilized the peasants to fight against the nationalist party to fight against Japan. That was kind of really a response to this fundamental question of the revolutionary role

of peasants. And second, Mao was one of the major Marxist thinkers to think about how a revolutionary party could stay committed to the revolutionary project and stay in touch with the masses after coming to power, and how to prevent a revolutionary party from degenerating into a privileged class of political elites. So in terms of the accomplishments of the Chinese revolution, there are, of course, a lot of material accomplishments, most notably in a great increase in life expectancy and literacy rates. And also class inequalities were drastically reduced, and there was some substantial progress

in gender equality as well. other than that, I think posing the two very important questions I mentioned above and experimenting with different ways to answer them was by itself a huge accomplishment. Absolutely, and yeah, it's worth noting that I think the average lifespan doubled under the Communist Party's kind of, you know, leadership, so that says a lot about some of the contributions they were able to make to everyday people's, you know, life, quality of life So, but, you know, analyzing the accomplishments is one thing, but as if we're going to learn from this, we also have to understand the failures and the excesses. So what were, in your opinion, the biggest failures and excesses of the Chinese Revolution?

I think the biggest failure was in addressing the second question I just talked about, basically the question of how to make a revolutionary ruling party stay revolutionary. All the potential solutions Mao has proposed and explored all failed miserably in practice and had huge unintended material consequences and human cause. And in the end, did not really solve the problem of the party becoming out of touch and abandoning revolutionary commitments. And, you know, like, I wouldn't say that the capitalist turn under Deng Xiaoping was a betrayal of Mao. I would say that this tendency was always embedded as one part of the contradiction in Mao's regime, which Mao was trying to address but never succeeded in doing so. And that's something that I definitely want to drive home is this broader notion of experimentation.

And if you take communism and the attempts to build socialism in many different capacities and many different parts of the world seriously, then it's really interesting to note just how creative these things need to be and how much these leaders and the people behind them really had to try new things. They have to experiment. And I think some people think of communism or socialism as in this utopian way that there's going to be one big revolution that's going to spread globally and we're going to win. But I think a better way to look at it is to look at the transition from feudalism to capitalism. There was not one big bourgeois revolution that just spread nicely across the world and took over.

The transition from feudalism to capitalism took centuries. It was in fits and starts. And some revolutions would win and take over a country. Some would win and get crushed. some would lose completely, and it was a long, long process, this transition from feudalism to capitalism, and the transition from capitalism to socialism will be similar. And when you see the Chinese revolution, the Russian revolution, all the other smaller revolutions around the world, you see an attempt to do this and build this socialist project. But in their failures,

I don't think we should just reject them completely, disregard them as authoritarian or tyrannical and just try to come up with new ways. have to do is learn from the successes and the failures and carry that forward and try to see if we can build a new project that learns from the past instead of rejects the past. And so that's what I really wanted people to, I really want people to take away from this. But I think the final question and a good way to wrap up this discussion is what can we as revolutionaries learn from the Chinese revolution today, in your opinion? So I guess that's kind of like one part of the broader question of like learning from the failure of the 20th century socialist experiments in general. And I think what is peculiar about the Chinese revolution is that it kind of like really seriously attempted to address the question of how a revolution. revolutionary parties in power stay revolutionary.

And, you know, I guess, like, now in today's world, it's kind of like really difficult to speak of a revolutionary force coming to power because basically, the revolutionary situation anywhere was not good, and we as revolutionaries have a long way to go before taking power anywhere. basically. But I guess still we should not lose sight of the question of what to do after taking power and to really seriously appreciate the gravity of the question of how revolutionary parties in power stay revolutionary and appreciate the immense challenge in addressing this question. and, you know, think about new ways to answer or transcend this question based on Mao's failure to address it. And many of the ideas that were later synthesized as Marxism, Leninism, Maoism, include the protracted People's War, mass line, the need for a cultural revolution,

and the idea that class struggle continues under socialism, that once you have a party in place and you have power, you're still going to have to work against bourgeois or right-wing elements inside that party itself. And it's always a continuing sort of thing. And the last thing I'd say before we wrap up is it's really important to realize that theory, political, radical theory is not something that you can do from an armchair completely. It's not something that you can abstract away from actual practice. And when we look at the Russian and Chinese revolutions, especially given the size and the scope of what they did,

we have to realize that theories born out of real revolutionary struggle, a real attempt to build socialism in huge countries in this world, that there's a lot to we can learn from, a lot that we can pull from. And to dismiss these traditions because of their messiness, because of their excesses, because of some of their failures, and to try to theorize in a vacuum away from the actual crucible of revolution is a mistake. And you're actually going to oftentimes repeat many of the mistakes

that have already been tried in the course of revolutionary history. So I would just want people to keep that in mind. And thank you so much, year, and for coming on. It's honestly an honor to have you here, and I'm so blessed that you came on. And this is a huge topic, and you did a wonderful job at really educating us on the process and that revolutionary history. So thank you so much before I let you go. Can you let listeners know where they can find you and your work online and maybe recommend a book

or a documentary to someone who wanted to learn more about anything we've discussed today? So, like, if you read Chinese, then I regularly write for several Chinese media outlets online, and those are easily searchable. And then if you are an English reader, then some of my work are listed on my Harvard student website. So this is also searchable by putting in my name. And I guess in terms of recommendations, I think in my mind, the greatest historian of the 20th century Chinese history is Morris Masoner. I guess, like, some people have heard of his name before, but I would say, like, everything he has ever written was very good and it's completely worth checking out, and especially his book, Miles, China, and After. So this is a great book I highly recommend. And then other than that, I also recommend two academic books that came out. recently within the past decade, the first book was titled Rise of the Red Engineers.

And that explored a lot of dynamics of how a privileged class of political and cultural elites came about within China after the PRC was funded and how the cultural revolution was trying to address this emergence of the privileged class in an imperfect way. And the second recent academic book I want to recommend is titled The Cultural Revolution at the margins. It looked at some of the rebels in the Cultural Revolution who took seriously Mao's call to radically transform and democratized the party and actually went further than Mao himself to propose a theory and a solution to the question of how a revolutionary party could stay revolutionary.

Even after Mao himself reversed his line and went to restore order and suppress those radical rebellious sentiments and arguments. So this is also a very good book to check out if you want to understand a deeper the cultural revolution. Awesome. Well, we will link to all of that in the show notes. Thank you again, Jhren, for coming on. We really, really appreciate it. Keep up your amazing work.

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