One subject that has come up consistently throughout this course is the idea of historical narratives, and the implications they have on our perceptions of history. It’s easy to imagine how the history of the Chinese revolution into a socialist state is one that is plagued with plenty of differing narratives. Yet to understand Maoism, it is essential to understand the history that helped it develop from other prominent theories at the time. The students of CSP2 were lucky enough to have Alexander Day–an East Asian Language and Culture’s history professor at Occidental–come to debunk some of the narratives surrounding the revolution and provide us with an unbiased depiction. Lenin believed that a socialist revolution had to take place within the cities in which the proletariat lived, and had to be instigated by a vanguard party and carried out later by the proletariat masses. There were two different schools of thought leading the socialist revolution in China: the Nationalist party, which believed very strongly in the Leninist methods of a revolution, and the Communist party, with members such as Mao Tse-Tung that began the revolutions with some of the same ideals. The two were both influenced by the cominterm, a committee sent to China from Russia to aid and influence the two parties into becoming a communist state. But this changed when the Nationalist party turned against the communist party in Shanghai in 1927. The Nationalist party controlled most of the cities, and Mao recognized that he needed to reevaluate Marxist theories and adapt them to fit the situation at hand. The communist party was forced to work solely in the countryside and depend strongly on the peasant population. It also developed the idea of “guerilla warfare” in an effort to beat the larger Nationalist Party. Mao’s also believed in the importance of squashing China’s gentry class to flip the status quo of the country. Only through complete social upheaval will one be able to reconstruct a socialist society. Indeed, Lenin’s own fault was that he did not have the support of the countryside peasants during his revolution, and they were perfectly aware of how their situation was better prior to a socialist state. Mao organized the peasants as well as the proletariats, making his movement more unified and equal. Mao came away from the revolution with a new revolutionary theory, because he rejected the dogmatism of Marxism and was able to alter them so that they were successful for his revolution.
The Revolutionary's Narrative 