The Communist Takeover of Hangzhou

Introduction

Introduction The Communist takeover of China in 1949 brought the promise of fundamental political, social, and cultural transformation. This was to be accomplished through national unification under a government with an idealistic vision of the future mated to discipline and confidence borne of victory after twenty-eight years of bloody struggle. The West, for its part, was skeptical of the capacity of the Chinese Communist Party (ccp) to govern the newly created People ’s Republic of China (prc) effectively, let alone implement an ambitious program of national integration and modernization. The new regime had to help the legions of starving and homeless, win over the cynical hearts of urban dwellers, and create a solid institutional base for its revolutionary program. There was good reason to doubt whether revolutionaries from mostly rural backgrounds had the knowledge and skill required to consolidate political control and establish economic stability. Nevertheless, in the early 1950s, the Chinese Communists accomplished these goals. In the initial period of the new republic, Mao Zedong and his Politburo colleagues agreed that in the first few years in power they would postpone radical revolutionary programs and work with the established urban elites through compromise. It is believed that such an approach suffers from the drawback that the possession of power corrupts the revolution; it is a common pattern of post-revolutionary society that ‘‘revolutions die when revolutionaries become rulers.’’1 To explain this pattern of post-revolutionary society, Maurice Meisner writes that when ‘‘the new rulers compromise with the traditions and survivals of the past, they . . . , consciously or not, come to preside over historical processes that betray their own ideals and hopes for a radically new society.’’2 The modern revolutions in France, Russia, and other countries all offered similar stories . Surprisingly, the Chinese Communists succeeded in keeping their revolutionary ideals alive, although they made more concessions to the former upper classes than had the Russians. Why did China present a radical departure from the common pattern of post-revolutionary society? What explains this unique experience of the Chinese revolutionaries? Both Western and Chinese scholarship has yet to provide satisfactory answers to these questions. The Chinese literature is in large part an exercise in partisan history that stresses military victory , idealizes the ccp’s organizational and economic achievements , and ignores the social tensions and crises of the 1950s. Writings that criticize Mao’s radical revolution in his later years present the early 1950s as a perfect ‘‘golden age’’ that brought the Chinese people hope for a modern state.3 Similarly, Western literature fails to explain why there is a gap between the ccp’s cautious realism of the early 1950s and its utopian fanaticism in the later years and why the promising beginning of the People’s Republic was followed by economic stagnation, political disillusion, and leadership corruption. What is necessary is a thorough reevaluation of the Communists’ early governing methods, seeing them as a long-lasting dynamic rather than a temporary expedient, with ultimately large effects on what was to come. The purpose of this book is to carry out the required comprehensive and systematic investigation of these methods and then assess their consequences. More specifically, this study will try to expand our understanding of the cultural dimension of the 1949 revolution. Why should the study of the Communist takeover be placed in a cultural context? The simple fact is that many of the ccp’s efforts in the post-1949 years were focused on the cultural front—the ‘‘struggle against the enemies without guns,’’ as Mao Zedong put it.4 Without a close examination of the ccp’s effort to change the 2 The Communist Takeover of Hangzhou basic worldviews of the population, we cannot understand how it successfully made the majority of Chinese people identify with the new regime and its revolutionary goals. To study the cultural dimension of the Communist takeover, this book will examine how the Communists used state power to transform the urban culture and how they employed cultural weapons to consolidate the new regime. As early as 1948, Mao Zedong realized that the forthcoming military victory of the People’s Liberation Army (pla) would not by itself establish the national legitimacy of Communist authority. Unlike the millions of peasants who had rebelled against the Guomindang (gmd) government, most urban people had not struggled for the ccp’s victory. To make the urban populace identify with the new...