REVOLIUTIONS, said Marx, project themselves towards the future: seeing China’s rise today we might certainly consider how its revolutionary years not only changed the country but also changed the world.

Storming the Heavens brings into focus the central role of peasant mass power in China’s revolutionary transformation. Based on research for a PhD carried out back in the 1980s, the work remains relevant not least as ideas of mobilising the masses for change rise up today’s political agenda.

China in the 1980s was undergoing dramatic change with the break up of the communes: instead individual farmers were being encouraged to “get rich.” Had the Communist Party of China (CPC) all along overestimated the revolutionary potential in the countryside? A re-examination of the nature of the peasant movement pre-1949 seemed called for.

The research was literature-based, examining western sinology on pre-revolutionary China; the much overlooked analyses of Chinese Marxists, Chen Boda and Chen Hanseng; debates on the peasants, especially Lenin versus the neo-Narodnik Chayanov, on the “middle peasant” question; and the communist literature — Stalin, Trotsky, Mao, Zhou Enlai and Liu Shaoqi.

Case studies by non-Marxist Western scholars, notwithstanding their theoretical limitations, opened the door to the peasant world: Thaxton’s Taihang peasants who lived in the mountains in “violent non-conformity;” Perry’s peasants trapped in a cycle of banditry and protectionism in the inhospitable borderlands of east and central China; and Marks’s study of Peng Pai, a revolutionary student who ended up on a mountain top leading a so-called soviet, drawing thousands of cult followers. Above all it was Isabel and David Crook’s Ten Mile Inn and William Hinton’s Fanshen, case studies of village land reform in the 1940s, that were the most revealing of CPC-peasant relations, enabling deeper overall analysis.

Was China feudal? What made the peasants revolutionaries?

The first step was to establish the condition of the peasants and the nature of their exploitation so as to identify their revolutionary character. This meant challenging the Western misconception of China as a society of owner-cultivators, farming small parcels of land. In the absence of the large landed estates of European feudalism, it was assumed that traditional China had a peculiar Oriental or Asiatic structure under a centralised bureaucratic state.

Chinese Marxists, Chen Boda and Chen Hanseng, however, both put the landlord system at the centre as the determining factor in China’s economic stagnation and the peasants’ acute impoverishment. Whilst Chen Hanseng’s focus was on the fusion of the political and economic power of the landlords at the base of society, highlighting the grassroots nature of a revolutionary transformation, Chen Boda’s analysis of monopoly rent highlighted the concentration of land in the hands of a minority, the landlords and rich peasants, with the increasing dispossession and land hunger of the majority of rural households. In so doing, he identified the main force for revolution as the poor and middle peasant majority.

Ny bringing these analyses in to play, the argument established the case for revolution over Western arguments for reform, that is, the urgent need for revolutionary transformation of village power through land reform taking peasant mass activism as the main force.

The question of proletarian leadership
The question was then, given the small size of China’s working class, how was the CPC, as a proletarian party, able to lead the revolution? Was Mao just a populist, his party captured by the peasants?

Here the argument confronts the misconceptions of both Stalin and Trotsky who interpreted China’s peasant struggle along the lines of the Russian and European model where a rural bourgeoisie and proletariat emerged to challenge feudal power, when rather, as shown by Chen Boda, it was land hunger — subsistence — that drove the rural majority to revolution.

Mao’s Analysis of the Classes in the Countryside (1933) serves as the standout work in the sinification of Marxism. Applying Marxist conceptual tools to identify the different ways in which rural people got rich — through feudal and capitalist exploitation but also the application of their own labour — it underpinned a strategy which focused on the struggle on feudal relations, neutralising the rich peasants given their dual characteristics as semi-feudal and semi capitalist, whilst uniting the poor, too weak on their own, with the middle peasants.

The mass line then constituted not a populist but a class line — an exercise in proletarian leadership which managed the contradictions among the peasants in recognition of their differing conditions of production.

This enabled the peasants to maintain their own leadership over rural transformation even as the landlords endeavoured the use those divisions to cause the peasant movement to degeneration from within.

Problems within the party — commandism and adventurism, bureaucratism and spontaneism — similarly arose when peasants were disunited.

Mao’s methods of rural work, party rectification and mass organisation were to evolve over time, bringing party and peasant together in a dynamic relationship of mutual learning as the revolution followed its zig-zag course.

The Peasant Movement and the National Movement 
In 1927, mass risings of workers and peasants had swept across China — strikes, protests, land seizures — only to be brutally crushed as Chiang Kai-shek turned against the revolution. Trotsky blamed Stalin for compromising with the national bourgeoisie; Stalin blamed the CPC leader, Chen Duxiu, similarly. The fact was that the peasant and the national movement had ended up pulling in different directions.

Understanding why this first revolution failed goes a long way to understanding the reasons for the CPC’s success in 1949 in handling the contradictions between the agrarian and the national movements. Neither one could succeed without the other: the question was, with each struggle developing according to its own conditions, how did the two movements interact?

Bringing a new perspective to the Stalin-Trotsky controversy over the role of the national bourgeoisie, Mao saw them as vacillating, at one time under the influence of foreign capitalism; at other times anti-imperialist and open to accepting CPC leadership. A major factor affecting these vacillations in fact lay in the dynamics of rural struggle.

Situating the agrarian revolution in the context of the national situation, Mao identified rightist tendencies influenced by the national bourgeoise which favoured the better-off peasants supplying the towns whilst failing to mobilise the poor peasants, and leftist tendencies which went to extremes when the alliance with the national bourgeoisie broke down, failing to unite the poor with the middle peasants.

As a party of the working class, in whose interests it was to mobilise the poor peasants, the CPC sought to bridge town and countryside in a programme of land reform that, not aiming for equal land holdings, protected the interests of surplus-producing households at the same time addressing the subsistence needs of the poor peasants.

By stabilising urban supplies, the CPC were able to bring the national bourgeoisie on board whilst still keeping the poor peasants engaged in mutual aid teams with the middle peasants, thereby setting China on a new course of independent development paving the way beyond towards socialism.

Join Jenny Clegg and a range of experts for the book launch of Storming the Heavens at the Marx Memorial Library and online on Saturday February 14, 3-5pm; register at https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/book-launch-jenny-clegg-storming-the-heavens-tickets-1980588424293

Storming the Heavens is available from the Morning Star’s online shop.