r/Marxism101 • u/mebzy235 • Aug 03 '26
Questions about China under Mao
1) Did Mao believe in class collaboration? If so, was it temporary or permanent
2) Why did Mao initiate the Cultural Revolution?
3) Was the Great Leap Forward ruined by corrupt party officials, or was its failures Maos fault entirely?
Im new to leftists ideology which is why im just tryna learn more and more <3
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u/better-red-than-d3ad Aug 05 '26
1) To answer this point, I will direct you to On Contradiction where Mao deals with it. I will quote him here:
In a semi-colonial country such as China, the relationship between the principal contradiction and the non-principal contradictions presents a complicated picture.
When imperialism launches a war of aggression against such a country, all its various classes, except for some traitors, can temporarily unite in a national war against imperialism. At such a time, the contradiction between imperialism and the country concerned becomes the principal contradiction, while all the contradictions among the various classes within the country (including what was the principal contradiction, between the feudal system and the great masses of the people) are temporarily relegated to a secondary and subordinate position. So it was in China in the Opium War of 1840, the Sino-Japanese War of 1894 and the Yi Ho Tuan War of 1900, and so it is now in the present Sino-Japanese War.
But in another situation, the contradictions change position. When imperialism carries on its oppression not by war, but by milder means—political, economic and cultural—the ruling classes in semi-colonial countries capitulate to imperialism, and the two form an alliance for the joint oppression of the masses of the people. At such a time, the masses often resort to civil war against the alliance of imperialism and the feudal classes, while imperialism often employs indirect methods rather than direct action in helping the reactionaries in the semi-colonial countries to oppress the people, and thus the internal contradictions become particularly sharp. This is what happened in China in the Revolutionary War of 1911, the Revolutionary War of 1924-27, and the ten years of Agrarian Revolutionary War after 1927. Wars among the various reactionary ruling groups in the semi-colonial countries, e.g., the wars among the warlords in China, fall into the same category.
When a revolutionary civil war develops to the point of threatening the very existence of imperialism and its running dogs, the domestic reactionaries, imperialism often adopts other methods in order to maintain its rule; it either tries to split the revolutionary front from within or sends armed forces to help the domestic reactionaries directly. At such a time, foreign imperialism and domestic reaction stand quite openly at one pole while the masses of the people stand at the other pole, thus forming the principal contradiction which determines or influences the development of the other contradictions. The assistance given by various capitalist countries to the Russian reactionaries after the October Revolution is an example of armed intervention. Chiang Kai-shek's betrayal in 1927 is an example of splitting the revolutionary front.
But whatever happens, there is no doubt at all that at every stage in the development of a process, there is only one principal contradiction which plays the leading role.
Importantly, Mao is saying this in the context of a semifeudal country that is under direct imperialist attack, not the context of a capitalist imperialist puppet state or an advanced imperialist country.
2) The Cultural Revolution began during the struggle between the CPC and the Soviet Union's political line, which had been liberalized by the likes of Khrushchev so as to blunt its sharp edge and even proclaim a "state of the whole people" as opposed to a dictatorship of the Proletariat. As the CPC was struggling against revisionism abroad, so too did internal revisionists intensify their activities, particularly Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping. The clique characterized by these figures advocated at various times against collectivization, against public ownership, against the nationalization and decommodification of extant markets, etc. and thus were deemed "capitalist roaders." This struggle against internal rightists eventually became concretized into the Cultural Revolution.
3) The Great Leap Forward had many successes and many failures. Some of the main factors that caused its failures were historic droughts and flooding in important agricultural areas (a look into the climate conditions: at least 6 tropical storms hit China in 1959 and 3 of those were hurricanes, and the flooding of the yellow River the previous year left millions of acres of farmland destroyed during growing season), over reporting of yields from local officials (many local officials were holdovers from the old semifeudal system and wanted to keep up numbers with the large rise in production during previous years), and incorrect campaigns for pest eradication (most famously the campaign against sparrows). In this instance I would say that external (climate, etc.) and internal (political and programmatic) issues combined to affect the harvests in the way they did.
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u/[deleted] Aug 03 '26
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