CONFIDENTIAL
lace.
There
But
humiliations of that century, in the Opium Wars and at the hands of the Japanese and others, served to discredit the philosophical basis of the Chinese society, but put nothing in its
ere attempts, in the muddled Christianity of the Taiping rebellion for example and the impotent demands of certain intellectuals for Westernisation, to provide something else. the Chinese Government was too conservative, too arrogant and too corrupt to recognise reality and make the wholesale adjustment that their Japanese neighbours accomplished. Even Sun Yat-sen, who is revered as the man who tried to held socialist and democratic ideas with Chinese ways and who achieved power briefly after 1911, could not turn China about; and he himself was turned out by warring factions in the warlord era.
4.
It was to this chaotic situation tht the Chinese
Communists addressed themselves. They laid hold of Communism in the first place as the latest and most advanced form of Western political technology and in true Chinese fashion soon produced their own" and allegedly superior variety. Mao's early grasp of Marxism may have been tenuous, and anyway heretical in the view of the Communist International. But in looking for a socialist way forward for China he recognised the importance of the peasant population and went for a rural brand of Marxism which genuinely suited the circumstances. In the intervals of fighting off the Japanese and Chiang Kai-shek's attempts to destroy him, Mao in his Yenan redoubt carried through a revolution which was the basis for his subsequent victory in the Civil War. Western Marxist ideas, transformed into a Chinese version, thus triumphed in 1949. Before long Mao manoeuvred himself into a position in which he was no longer the pupil Marxist but the teacher and in which in terms of
/political
CONFIDENTIAL
No comments yet.
Private notes are available after approval.