Yang Kuisong, "Facing up to China's Revolution"

Yang Kuisong, “Facing up to China’s Revolution”[1]
 
Introduction and Translation by David Ownby
 
Introduction
 
Yang Kuisong (b. 1953) is Professor of History at East China Normal University in Shanghai, and is best known for his research on the history of the Chinese revolution and the Chinese Communist Party.  The CCP of course reviews and rewrites the history of the Chinese revolution on a regular basis as part of its self-appointed mission, a process in which Yang has himself participated, notably as an editor at the Central Party School of the CCP between 1982 and 1987, and then Professor of Party History at Renmin University between 1987 and 1990. 
 
At the same time, Yang, like other members of his generation, both experienced the Cultural Revolution as a teenager, and came of age as a scholar during the period of reform and opening.  Living through the Cultural Revolution and its aftermath sensitized Yang to the fallibility and flexibiity of the CCP.  Reform and opening brought globalization and scholarly exchanges between China and the West that allowed many talented Chinese researchers to equal or even surpass their Western counterparts in terms of methodology and sophistication. [2]  In other words, Yang and his like-minded colleagues study the history of the Chinese revolution as history and not as prophecy or the necessary unfolding of the dialectic.  Although not as critical as, say, Frank Dikötter’s The People’s Trilogy, Yang’s various works offer frank appraisals of Mao’s and the Party’s successes and failures, and one volume (which has recently been translated into English) offers a study of “eight outcasts”—people who were marginalized by the regime in the early 1950s. 
 
Yang’s goal, however, is not necessarily to criticize, but instead to be impartial.  In his own words: "One very important reason I wanted to rewrite the history of the modern Chinese revolution is that I believe that many mainstream accounts are too one-sided and do not give a complete picture of the course of Chinese history.”  The 2018 interview translated below conveys something of the flavor of Yang’s work.
 
As I have noted frequently on this blog, many establishment intellectuals, buoyed by China’s rise, have made considerable efforts to connect China’s burgeoning superpower status with the glories of China’s traditional civilization.  This effort to reestablish continuities between China’s past, present, and future has led certain Chinese establishment intellectuals to downplay the 20th century and its multiple ruptures and revolutions.  This is obviously not an option for scholars like Yang who focus on the revolution itself, and I don’t know how Yang addresses these larger themes in his work.  The titles of most of the articles available on his Aisixiang page strike me as quite scholarly, addressed more to a community of historians than to his fellow intellectuals or the public at large.  Those intrigued by Yang and his research can read a more detailed 2015 interview with him here (in English translation).
 
In any event, Xi Jinping’s attempt to impose ideological discipline on China’s thought world has not put an end to serious scholarship on China’s revolution.  My colleague Timothy Cheek at the University of British Columbia is preparing a volume of translation of this scholarship, a few chapters of which will be available in coming months.       

Translation
 
Interviewer: Beginning in the 1980s and continuing through roughly 2002, you did some twenty years of research on the history of the Chinese revolution. If you were to summarize it now, how would you explain the success of the CCP? Setting aside international background factors such as the assistance of the Komintern, and random factors such as the premature death of Sun Yat-sen, what do you identify as the choices the CCP itself made that led to their success?
 
Yang Kuisong: It is hard to generalize, because there were many factors involved. First, both the internal and the external environments played important roles, and of course Mao himself was also very important. His judgment of the situation was always clearer than that of other leaders, so many of his decisions or policies were often distinctive. I have studied many people in the Communist Party and found that at many critical moments, few people would have thought like Mao did, let alone acted like Mao did.  Most people were constrained by ideology and other types of dogmatic thinking, but Mao could often see past all of this.  In part, this has to do with his personality, but also, on many issues, Mao’s vision surpassed that of ordinary people.　　
 
Interviewer: According to your analysis, Mao Zedong had a very clear grasp of what he called the "intermediate zone" in which the Chinese Communist revolution was located.  Is that right?
 
Yang Kuisong: That's right. At that time, on matters dealing with both peace and war, arriving at a decision was extremely difficult.  After World War II, the U.S. and the Soviet Union both wanted peace, and neither wanted to fight a third world war. The fear was that some local trouble would spread, dragging the U.S. and the Soviet Union into a new war.
 
It was at this point that Mao Zedong came up with the clever idea of "intermediate zones."  What he meant was that there were vast zones between the U.S. and the Soviet Union where there were many backward countries and national revolutionary movements, particularly in the colonies and semi-colonies.  In order to attack the Soviet Union, the U.S. had to conquer these intermediate zones first, and China was the most important of these.
 
Mao Zedong made two major decisions in less than a few months around 1946.  The first was to raise the issue of "whether we dare to fight," and his opinion was the CCP should dare to fight the Kuomintang (KMT). He analyzed the situation and in the fall and winter of 1946, and first composed a brief text—only a few hundred characters—on the political situation within the Party, solely for the five members of the Politburo, in which he offered a broad analysis of the situation.  Because the country was at a critical point, hoping to advance to a new stage of peace and democracy at the end of the war, and because the CCP Central Committee had just issued a directive asking the Party to prepare to take the parliamentary road and hand over the army to the KMT, Mao did not at first dare to tell the whole Party, or even too many senior cadres, about his idea, and instead decided to first convince these major leaders in the central decision-making circle.
 
When the war with the KMT began in 1946, he raised a second major question—"Do we fight to win?" —that is, do we dare to fight to the end and try to seize national power? At the time, most CCP leaders had not thought about this, because just the idea of fighting was dangerous. In fact, until September of 1947, the CCP was very passive on the military front, defending everywhere and losing a fair bit of its base areas. The concern of many leaders was: should we continue to fight? Can we a win a couple of come-from-behind battles and make peace on the basis of these unexpected victories?
 
Mao clearly had other ideas. But in order to see the war to a victorious conclusion, the first thing to do was to convince Party cadres that it was possible. Mao told the whole party that not only should they fight on, but that they would be able to win. He did this by constantly sending telegrams to the whole party to analyze the situation and give an accounting of where they were in terms of the overall plan. By the end of 1947, his accounting proved to be true.
　　
Interviewer:  This is also true of his self-worship 自我崇拜, right? All these decisions increased his self-confidence. 
 
Yang Kuisong: Yes.  He later placed more and more influence on voluntarism, moving farther and farther away from the materialistic view of history that he had once professed to hold. Everything was determined by thought and will, so that politics came first, politics was in command, and even class was gradually defined by way of thought.　　
 
Interviewer: Why was Mao able to judge the situation so accurately during the revolution, but made repeated mistakes with serious consequences in the later years of his rule?
 
Yang Kuisong: There were big differences between Mao during and after the revolution—I talked about this in my book The Historical Process of the Sinicization of Marxism.  The most important distinction is that before the founding of the PRC, as Mao himself said, both he and the other leaders of the Communist Party were always "in a state of fear and trembling, as if treading on thin ice," fearing that the slightest misstep, or any strategic error, would send the Party into a deep abyss. This was based on Mao's principle of absolute strength, because in those days the Communist Party had too many enemies, and the situation was ever-changing, so a slight mistake could indeed cause big problems. Thus prior to 1949, Mao Zedong was always a cautious person, not very radical, not so "left." In fact it was quite the opposite, and in traditional party history, the Party had experienced three “left deviations.” At the time, everyone was left, and Mao Zedong was someone who resisted and criticized the left, and thus was more to the right.  Indeed Mao was always regarded as a representative of rightist and conservative tendencies by the representatives of the Komintern and the CCP Central Committee. At the time, the basic policy of the leaders of the CCP, including the representatives of the Komintern in China, was to attack, so it was natural that there were many conflicts between the two, and it was inevitable that Mao Zedong would be under pressure.　　
 
The biggest change in Mao Zedong after the founding of the PRC was that he was no longer cautious. It is not wrong to say that he was arrogant, but to be specific, what happened was that Mao Zedong's judgment of power differentials was increasingly wide of the mark.  In the early 1950s, he was still fairly conservative, even compared to many other cadres, because for the first couple of years he criticized those with more radical views and opinions.  He wrote a very famous report in June of 1950, which later appeared in Volume 5 of his selected works under the title "Don't Strike out in All Directions 不要四面出击." This idea basically represented the strategy behind all of Mao’s policies before 1952.
 
But after the summer of 1952, that is, after a series of successful campaigns and domestic and foreign wars such as land reform, the suppression of counter-revolutionaries, the "three anti-" and "five anti-" movements, and the wars in Korea and Vietnam, and finally the step-by-step strengthening of the new regime's power to control the economy, Mao’s caution gradually disappeared.
 
Interviewer:  What else contributed to the success of the CCP besides Mao’s personal qualities?  
 
Yang Kuisong: We should mention the social base of the Communist Party and the concept of class struggle. From the very beginning, the Communist Party saw itself as the party of the poor, so it paid special attention to putting its main cadres and forces at the bottom of society, among the masses. This was very different from the KMT. The KMT was similar to the traditional rulers in that in the countryside, its rule relied on the support of the gentry, and officials at all levels were expected to have relations with the urban and rural gentry.
 
This meant that the bureaucrats themselves were at some distance from society,  and there were all sorts of issues in the relationship between the gentry and the peasants.  And even if the gentry and the peasants stood together, the KMT could not harm the interests of the gentry because it still had to use them to recruit soldiers, collect grain, and collect taxes. This had one unfortunate consequence, which is that the KMT could not carry out the social reforms that the Communist Party could. For example, the Communist Party could carry out land reform, and even dare to "destroy the bullies and divide the land," and indeed to destroy all the basic elements of the existing ownership system.　　
 
Interviewer: Do you think the CCP’s deep social base is basically the result of land reform?
 
Yang Kuisong: Land reform was only one part of it. The Communist Party has always been engaged in agrarian revolution, and even in the late revolutionary period when it got involved in workers' movements, it continued to mobilize the peasants. The agrarian revolution had different goals at different times.   For example, they did not push land confiscation during the First United Front period, but waited until the Soviet period. But no matter the period, the first step was to mobilize the peasants and to provide them with benefits. During the anti-Japanese period, the Communist Party did not continue the land revolution, but only imposed rent and interest reductions, but the focus remained on the poor peasants, and they worked to build Party power and Party branches in the countryside, making as little use as possible of landlords and rich peasants. If these wealthy elements supported the Communist Party, they were counted as enlightened gentry and allowed to enter deliberative bodies with a united front status or a representative status. Based on their position as the party of the poor, and on the ideology of class struggle, the Party at all levels would do its utmost to have the peasants demand food, money, and all kinds of power from these wealthy classes in the event of any opportunity or any movement. So the Communist Party's process of building its own social base was completely different from the KMT's. The KMT did little to destroy the old, while the Communist Party both destroyed the old and built something new.　　
 
Interviewer: When the agrarian revolution was launched, was it just to mobilize the peasants to join the war, or was the idea from the beginning to destroy the original class order and class rule?
 
Yang Kuisong: To understand this clearly, you need to first understand the two-stage theory of the Chinese Communist revolution. The Chinese Communist revolution was a two-stage process, the first step being what was called the bourgeois democratic revolution. From Marx to Lenin and Mao Zedong, from the Soviet Union to China, the purpose and task of the democratic revolution were the same, that is, the belief that land should be nationalized or land holdings equalized, that the feudal system of land ownership should be broken up and the benefits given to the peasants. The purpose in doing this was theoretically to create the conditions for the development of capitalism and the liberation of the productive forces. Breaking up feudal land relations and allowing peasants to own their own land and operate it autonomously would accelerate class differentiation and land transfer in the countryside, which would facilitate the growth and development of the capitalist economy and make it easier for agricultural production as a whole to be gradually modernized.
 
At the same time, because it represented the poor, the Communist Party itself also had a class orientation, and the vast majority of Party cadres were of poor origin, so it instinctively gave benefits to the poor. This was true in times of war and in times of peace, and one must not simplistically muddle up agrarian reform and war mobilization, because many later Communist countries have carried out land reform in the absence of war. Of course, agrarian reform also had another function, as I said earlier, which was to topple the gentry class on which the KMT depended, or even topple them to the ground and step on them, which not only allowed the peasants to stand up straight without fear of the rich rising up and settling scores later on, but also, during the war years, the peasants who had benefited from the agrarian reform were bound to side with the Communists and support the Communist grassroots regime that protected their interests. So the two go hand in hand and it is hard to say which was the leading factor.
 
Interviewer: Today, on the one hand everybody hates the rich, and on the other, everyone wants to get rich, and lower-class people look down on one another. Is this also the consequence of destroying the old order?
 
Yang Kuisong: There are two sides to any revolution. The agrarian revolution or land reform certainly greatly helped the Communist revolution to succeed, but it did have considerable side effects as well. Any relatively stable social order that humanity has experienced has been based on existing, relatively stable property relations. The possession of property may be unequal, perhaps even widely disparate, between rich and poor, but the socially recognized legal possession of property is an inherent and inviolable right, both from a legal and a moral perspective.
 
Once this notion of rights is broken, it is easy to develop a concept of "absolute egalitarianism" in society - which the CCP itself later criticized – which insists that everything should be equal and which does not allow for differences or hierarchies, or property rights.  It insists not only that there are no differences between you and me, but the distinction between public and private becomes hard to sustain as well.  Almost all socialist countries have had problems trying to solve the problem of the abuse of the public purse by private interests, and for the same reason. In this kind of situation, when everyone is equally poor it is relatively easy to be at ease, but once you have both rich and poor, jealousies easily emerge and people hate the rich.　　
 
Interviewer: If the agrarian revolution was the way the CCP won over the peasants, did it win over the intellectuals mainly by propagating democracy? 
 
Yang Kuisong:  According to Sun Yat-sen's theory, the KMT should have taken the path of constitutionalism, but Chiang Kai-shek, who came to power through the use of armed force and maintained his rule in the same way, did not have much feel for or consciousness of democratic constitutionalism. During the war, the KMT had no way to pursue constitutionalism, and instead tried to consolidate its dictatorial rule. Beginning in the latter period of the anti-Japanese War, the battle between the two parties objectively turned into a conflict over democracy or dictatorship. This was not particularly complicated, and the KMT was bound to be in an extremely passive position and disliked by the various parties, while the Communist Party was instead well received by all sides.
 
Interviewer: The situation seems to have gotten worse after the war. The intellectual elite, including people like the journalist Chu Anping 储安平 (1909-1966), wound up mostly following the Communists. 
 
Yang Kuisong: First of all, the KMT had been really awful.  The war had gone on for so long, and the KMT always refused to fight when it should have fought, and fought badly when they finally did fight. The victory in the war against Japan, originally gave Chiang Kai-shek a good opportunity, but he made two mistakes. First, the return of the formerly Japanese-occupied territories to KMT control turned into enormous “robberies” that were obvious to everyone and prompted universal complaints, as all of the big officials sent to reestablish KMT control in those areas used any method at their disposal to line their pockets, engaging in shameless acts of corruption, and all of the government companies that were set up were in fact power plays in search of profit. 
 
Second, Chiang's decisions regarding war and peace in the post-war period were extremely wrong-headed.  Wars had been raging for almost 20 years, so the people finally had the chance to catch their breath, and no matter how bad the KMT was, everyone supported the rebuilding of the country under Chiang’s leadership. Under such circumstances, if he could have accommodated the various parties, he could still have maintained his position as leader and the position of the central government, but instead he insisted on opposing the coalition government, feeling that he was fully capable of defeating the Communists. At that time, the American envoy George Marshall (1880-1959) came to mediate and successfully convened the Political Consultative Conference, which passed a peace resolution and prepared to set up a coalition government. Chiang Kai-shek believed that the legal status of the KMT's one-party rule was being undermined and thus adopted an attitude of opposition to these measures, which pushed the KMT in the direction of looking to restart the war. 
 
This led to a series of serious incidents, such as the Jiaochangkou massacre 较场口惨案 in Chongqing, the murders of the poet Wen Yiduo 闻一多 (1899-1946) and the educator and politician Li Gongpu 李公朴 (1902-1946) in Kunming, and the tragedy at Xiaguan station 下关惨案 in Nanjing, in which peace petitioners from Shanghai were attacked and injured.  Subsequently, centrists and intellects lost all confidence in the KMT government.   In 1947, Chiang Kai-shek was determined to fight a civil war and issued a counter-insurgency order, declaring a state of military emergency in the country, dissolving the Democratic League and censoring the press. Therefore, people like Chu Anping, who had no choice, of course chose the Communist Party.
　　
There were at least three aspects of the Communist Party on which they could pin their hopes. First, the Communist Party was relatively clean, certainly in comparison with the KMT; second, the Communist Party was advocating a coalition government and participatory politics, which was better than Chiang's insistence on one-party dictatorship; third, the Communist Party could achieve China’s unification, and perhaps even strengthen China quickly by building up its industry, like the Soviet Union did. This was very attractive to many intellectuals. On the base of these intensely patriotic feelings, many intellectuals engaged in intellectual preparations to sacrifice some of their individual interests.  After the founding of the PRC in 1949, a large number of young overseas intellectuals, including accomplished scientists, chose to return to China, giving up their prosperous lifestyles and research freedom, which obviously speaks to this as well.　　
 
Interviewer: At the time, intellectuals wanted political democracy, but also admired what the Soviet Union had achieved by focusing on economic development. This is how some people think even now, right?
 
Yang Kuisong:  That's right, it depends on the perspective from you look at social progress and what you think is best for China or for all the Chinese people. A very obvious debate now is that some people think that without effective protection of basic human rights and interests, no matter how strong the country is or how rich life becomes, a large number of people cannot have a real sense of happiness. At the same time, a considerable number of people think more from the perspective of the state and the nation, and feel that first, the state must be strong, otherwise what is the use of individuals being rich? They think that using centralized power to mobilize all possible resources and develop modernization quickly should be affirmed no matter what. These are two kinds of value judgments, depending on from which perspective you look at the issue.　　
 
Interviewer: Setting aside opportunism, the serious and sincere scholars arguing for what they call the "China Model" or the "China Path" are also examples of this, thinking that China's economic achievements are more convincing.
 
Yang Kuisong: That's right. The Soviet Union also went through this process.  They were also a backward country at the beginning, and it only took them a decade or two to build up their industrialization. At that time, the Soviet Union was a great stimulus to all countries, and many Chinese intellectuals, even Hu Shi 胡适 (1891-1962), a staunch advocate of liberalism, went to the Soviet Union and were extremely excited , thinking that it was worthwhile to develop the country even if they had to suffer some sacrifices and one-party dictatorship. How you look at this kind of issue depends largely on each person's value judgment, on what you really want to achieve. If you want the country to develop fast and the industry to develop fast, of course the more centralized the power is, the easier it is to develop faster. But if you note from a historical perspective the price paid for the Soviet model and the end result, you might consider just how much we can or should afford to pay to reach that goal.
 
Interviewer: The problem with this model of development based on economic success is whether it can be sustained.
 
Yang Kuisong: Whether it can be sustained is a personal opinion. People always maintain hope in themselves. Many people wrote articles wondering why we couldn’t take a path different from the Soviet Union. Judging from the results of today's practice, what we are doing is different from the Soviet Union.  The Soviet Union collapsed, but we are still here, so why can't we continue for a thousand generations?
 
Notes

[1]杨奎松, “直面中国革命” published on Aisixiang on March 18, 2019.

[2]See for example, Yang’s long essay (in Chinese) on “How to Understand the ‘Historical Problems’ of Historical Figures,” based on the Charlottesville Incident and the various controversies it sparked concerning “rewriting history” and removing the statues of Robert E. Lee and other Confederate figures.