The Communist Takeover of Hangzhou

9. Conclusion

9 Conclusion The historical treatment of the Communist takeover of Hangzhou reveals a two-pronged approach toward socialism. First, in the new setting the Communist southbound cadres were saddled with all sorts of political and economic constraints and had to use the debris of the old order to build a new one. Second, in pursuit of their revolutionary goals, they initiated a gradual social transformation with policies that were acceptable if not attractive to a population with an outlook on life that had not yet been reshaped by Communist ideology. This approach was vital to both the survival and the development of a Communist regime in China. Moderate policies in the early 1950s were a pragmatic response to what were believed to be short-term political and social realities; they were intended to provide a platform for much more radical action later on and were not compromises that were manifestations of waning revolutionary fervor. The radical policies that followed were thus a natural outgrowth of the apparent temporizing at the start, not a sharp change of course. This direction not only challenges a seemingly universal pattern in which revolution dies out in the postrevolutionary era, but also explains the controversy over the ccp’s political behavior during different periods, a phenomenon that was observed by Meisner and other scholars.1 The official Chinese view has ascribed this unique direction to Mao’s doctrine of ‘‘permanent revolution.’’2 On the threshold of the People’s Republic, Mao Zedong proclaimed that the nationwide triumph was but the first step in a long march of ten thousand li.3 He pointed out that the ccp had just completed a ‘‘bourgeois-democratic revolution’’ and should waste no time in making all the necessary preparations ‘‘to transform it into a socialist revolution.’’4 Mao’s theory itself, however, could not provide effective models for coping with the immediate and massive problems of practical governance. To set the Chinese revolution on a continuous process, in which the socialist phase was the logical and ineluctable sequel to what had preceded it, the ccp had to demonstrate its ability to rule effectively. At the local level, this task had to be carried out by Communist cadres from the ccp’s poverty-stricken rural wartime bases. In 1949, it was by no means clear that these former guerrilla fighters would be capable of performing in the new role. Although the most popular and lasting expression of the dif- ficult but successful transition was Mao’s constant stress on the Party’s leadership and its overriding revolutionary goal, this study has shown that Mao’s opportunist approach and political ritual shared major credit for the achievements. For the majority of ccp members, the opportunist approach and ritual activities were not Mao’s creation but part of peasant culture. They already existed in their rural lives and were then transferred into the new, urbancentered regime. Less than five years after the founding of the People’s Republic of China, the ccp had made significant progress in rebuilding state institutions and changing people’s ways of thinking. In 1955, Mao and his colleagues decided to speed up agricultural collectivization and the socialist transformation of urban industry, reflecting their judgment that the conditions for socialist revolution were now right. This outcome was a result of the successful implementation of the new urban policy, combined with the upholding of the revolutionary tradition by Communist cadres , most of whom were of peasant origin. It suggests that in the early years of the prc, rural revolutionary culture contributed to the Communists’ new tasks even in a sophisticated urban environment. 246 The Communist Takeover of Hangzhou Opportunism At first glance, the prc appears in its early years to have pursued a gradualist approach to revolution: it executed a series of welldesigned political campaigns—each solving a specific problem and one following another—to reach the final goal of a fundamental reconstruction of China’s society.5 This study of the Communist experience in Hangzhou, however, reveals that the ends of policy were not immune to significant modification dictated by local conditions—in other words, those who were to be transformed in- fluenced the goals of the transformers in ways that had a significant effect on the ultimate transformation. Mao Zedong provided the new rulers of Hangzhou with a general vision of his objectives: a New Democracy, the predominance...