Kap Seol
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| Chinese Communist leader Mao Zedong addresses a meeting calling for even greater efforts against the Japanese, at the Kangdah (Anti-Japanese) Cave University in 1938. (Hulton Archive / Getty Images) |
Resenha de Wang Fanxi, Mao Zedong Thought (Haymarket Books, 2021)
Para muitas pessoas de esquerda, a natureza política e econômica da China continua sendo um enigma. As crescentes tensões entre a China e os Estados Unidos deram ao debate maior importância política e urgência. Essa rivalidade definirá o restante do século XXI, forçando a esquerda a adotar uma posição clara. Deveria tomar um lado ou outro nesta competição – ou alinhar-se com nenhum dos dois?
A questão da China atormenta persistentemente a esquerda global. Os socialistas tiveram que analisar uma série de eventos desafiadores desde a derrota de sua primeira revolução no final da década de 1920 até os dias atuais. Ao longo de todas as vicissitudes do período desde 1949, o Partido Comunista da China (PCC) permaneceu no poder. Com a efetiva indução de Xi Jinping como secretário-geral vitalício após a abolição dos limites de mandato, o partido entrou em um terceiro período em sua história após os inaugurados por Mao Zedong e Deng Xiaoping.
Apesar de todas as mudanças que sofreu desde que assumiu o poder, o PCC ainda tem suas raízes organizacionais no movimento que travou uma guerra de guerrilhas que durou uma década. Mao Zedong Thought, uma coleção de ensaios escritos pelo trotskista chinês Wang Fanxi no início dos anos 1960, lança uma nova luz sobre como o PCC estabeleceu seu controle sobre a China sob a liderança de Mao há mais de sete décadas. A primeira tradução em inglês deste livro deve trazer uma perspectiva vital sobre a história do PCC para um novo público.
Reflexões revolucionárias
For his part, Mao witnessed the failure of the first Chinese revolution at first hand. The bloodshed of 1927 did not break the CPC’s overall loyalty to the Comintern, which still derived its authority from the halo of the October Revolution. In the winter of 1927, Stalin claimed that the Chinese defeat was merely “a progression to a higher stage for the revolution.” His opponent Trotsky warned in vain against Stalin’s rash directives.
Trying to compensate for its defeat, the CPC organized a series of premature uprisings that led to the annihilation of its urban strongholds. The party then called on peasants to rise up in four provinces that were under its influence. These areas included Jiangxi, where Mao was commander in chief of the Red Army, a military arm of the CPC that it had hastily organized in opposition to Chiang’s coup.
The attempts at rural insurrection proved futile, particularly in Jiangxi, where smallholding peasants with their own plots of land constituted the majority. Mao and his thousand followers fled to the Jinggang mountain range, where he set up his first guerrilla base. Wang argues that this turned the traditional Marxist view of how to make a revolution on its head:
Mao’s reaction to the failed insurrection — which later became known as the Autumn Harvest Uprising — seems to have drawn upon his literary knowledge. He took just two books, both of which were Chinese classics, to the mountains with him. One was Water Margin (水滸傳) — also known as Outlaws of the Marsh — the tale of a band of 105 men and three women who overthrew a corrupt dynasty from their mountainous hideout during the twelfth century.
In 1927–28, Mao created his Jinggang soviet in the image of these righteous bandits and their hideout, known as Liangshan Marsh, instead of drawing up on the examples of the Paris Commune of 1871 or the Petrograd Soviet of 1917. He identified himself with the figure of Song Jiang, the wise scholar who led the bandits, rather than Karl Marx, Vladimir Lenin, or even Stalin.
Detached from the urban working class, he recruited peasants to his guerilla army. According to Wang, Mao’s great contribution to the Chinese revolution was “to switch the focus of power to the countryside... and wage revolutionary war.” However, that also meant substituting
Mao, Stalin, and Confucius
While Mao did not always follow Moscow’s directives, he refrained from openly criticizing Stalin in order to take advantage of Soviet material support. He gained control of the CPC in the late 1930s after a long struggle against the Wang Ming faction. Wang Fanxi argued that there was a fundamental difference of character between the two men:
Para muitas pessoas de esquerda, a natureza política e econômica da China continua sendo um enigma. As crescentes tensões entre a China e os Estados Unidos deram ao debate maior importância política e urgência. Essa rivalidade definirá o restante do século XXI, forçando a esquerda a adotar uma posição clara. Deveria tomar um lado ou outro nesta competição – ou alinhar-se com nenhum dos dois?
A questão da China atormenta persistentemente a esquerda global. Os socialistas tiveram que analisar uma série de eventos desafiadores desde a derrota de sua primeira revolução no final da década de 1920 até os dias atuais. Ao longo de todas as vicissitudes do período desde 1949, o Partido Comunista da China (PCC) permaneceu no poder. Com a efetiva indução de Xi Jinping como secretário-geral vitalício após a abolição dos limites de mandato, o partido entrou em um terceiro período em sua história após os inaugurados por Mao Zedong e Deng Xiaoping.
Apesar de todas as mudanças que sofreu desde que assumiu o poder, o PCC ainda tem suas raízes organizacionais no movimento que travou uma guerra de guerrilhas que durou uma década. Mao Zedong Thought, uma coleção de ensaios escritos pelo trotskista chinês Wang Fanxi no início dos anos 1960, lança uma nova luz sobre como o PCC estabeleceu seu controle sobre a China sob a liderança de Mao há mais de sete décadas. A primeira tradução em inglês deste livro deve trazer uma perspectiva vital sobre a história do PCC para um novo público.
Reflexões revolucionárias
Wang Fanxi era anteriormente mais conhecido pelos leitores de língua inglesa por seu livro Memórias de um revolucionário chinês, um relato vívido de suas três décadas de ativismo político entre 1919 e 1949, primeiro como membro do PCC, depois como militante trotskista. Ele deixou a China continental para Hong Kong pouco antes de o partido de Mao assumir o poder. As autoridades coloniais britânicas logo o deportaram para Macau onde, como escreveu em 1957, Wang teve “mais do que um pouco de tempo para pensar” sobre a história chinesa recente. Suas memórias e o Pensamento Mao Zedong foram o resultado desse período forçado de reflexão.
A maioria dos camaradas de Wang no movimento trotskista chinês foi presa pela polícia secreta de Mao no início dos anos 1950. Seu amigo íntimo Zheng Chaolin só foi libertado da prisão um quarto de século depois, depois de cumprir um total de 34 anos de prisão sob as sucessivas ditaduras de Chiang Kai-shek e Mao. Até então, o próprio Wang estava morando na Grã-Bretanha, tendo sido auxiliado na mudança pelo historiador Gregor Benton. Benton desempenhou um papel importante em manter viva tanto a memória de Wang quanto a do trotskismo chinês em geral.
Benton já traduziu Memoirs of a Chinese Revolutionary para o inglês e também foi responsável por esta edição de Mao Zedong Thought, que encurta o texto original chinês em cerca de um terço. O próprio Wang morreu em 2002, aos 95 anos, e Benton expressa a esperança de que ele “teria aceitado minhas excisões no espírito em que as fiz – para preservar a integridade de seus pensamentos enquanto os espalha para uma nova geração de leitores”.
A maioria dos camaradas de Wang no movimento trotskista chinês foi presa pela polícia secreta de Mao no início dos anos 1950. Seu amigo íntimo Zheng Chaolin só foi libertado da prisão um quarto de século depois, depois de cumprir um total de 34 anos de prisão sob as sucessivas ditaduras de Chiang Kai-shek e Mao. Até então, o próprio Wang estava morando na Grã-Bretanha, tendo sido auxiliado na mudança pelo historiador Gregor Benton. Benton desempenhou um papel importante em manter viva tanto a memória de Wang quanto a do trotskismo chinês em geral.
Benton já traduziu Memoirs of a Chinese Revolutionary para o inglês e também foi responsável por esta edição de Mao Zedong Thought, que encurta o texto original chinês em cerca de um terço. O próprio Wang morreu em 2002, aos 95 anos, e Benton expressa a esperança de que ele “teria aceitado minhas excisões no espírito em que as fiz – para preservar a integridade de seus pensamentos enquanto os espalha para uma nova geração de leitores”.
O livro inclui uma longa introdução de Benton na qual ele resume o curso da vida de Wang e presta homenagem ao seu personagem:
A maioria das pessoas que o conheciam o conheciam como gentil, sereno e acessível, sem nenhuma audácia e fanatismo frequentemente atribuídos a líderes de movimentos revolucionários. Ele fez amigos enquanto estava na Inglaterra com pessoas de todas as convicções políticas e nenhuma. Era cuidadoso e educado com os conhecidos, espontâneo e descuidado com os amigos e um ouvinte sensível e receptivo. Ele tinha uma rica vida interior e intelectual, e era fluente em várias línguas e amplamente lido na literatura mundial. Em outra época e lugar, ele teria se destacado como escritor ou erudito (assim como Zheng Chaolin teria se destacado como filósofo e poeta). No entanto, ele não tinha nenhuma obsessão do mundo acadêmico com publicação e estima, e todos os seus escritos foram publicados sob pseudônimos.
Como observa Benton, os estudos biográficos de Mao proliferaram desde que Wang compôs o Mao Zedong Thought, com base em uma gama mais ampla de fontes do que estava disponível para ele em Macau. Mas ele insiste corretamente que o livro de Wang “continua valioso e eficaz, não apenas como parte do registro histórico por direito próprio, mas como o ‘relato histórico abrangente e objetivo’ que ele pretendia que fosse e como uma boa história analítica e interpretativa”.
Caminhos divergentes
Mao e Wang foram ao mesmo tempo revolucionários no mesmo movimento, mas um morreu como um construtor de nação mundialmente famoso, enquanto o outro terminou seus dias como um virtual desconhecido no exílio. Como Wang lembrou, os dois homens nunca foram camaradas próximos, mas seus círculos de amizade se sobrepunham:
Nunca tive a chance de trabalhar de perto com Mao, mas não temos poucos amigos em comum, entre eles Xu Zhixing (amigo de infância de Mao) e He Zishen (que trabalhou em estreita colaboração com Mao por muitos anos e está preso sob seu comando desde 1952 ). Com eles aprendi muitas coisas sobre o caráter de Mao, seu aprendizado e sua maneira de pensar e trabalhar.
Foi o fiasco da primeira revolução chinesa de 1927 que fez com que seus destinos políticos divergissem.
O PCC foi fundado na esteira da Revolução Russa de 1917 e seus líderes formaram um partido jovem e vibrante com quase 60.000 membros no final da década de 1920. Ele buscou a direção política da Internacional Comunista, ou Comintern, com sede em Moscou. Na época da primeira revolução chinesa, o próprio Komintern estava firmemente sob o controle de Joseph Stalin, que subordinava os interesses da classe trabalhadora global às prioridades de seu próprio governo burocrático na URSS.
Na China, Stalin queria formar uma aliança com Chiang Kai-shek, líder do Kuomintang (KMT), um partido nacionalista que estava intimamente alinhado com os latifundiários e capitalistas chineses. Ele fez do chefe do KMT um membro honorário do Executivo do Comintern e instou o PCC a conter as críticas ao partido de Chiang e trabalhar como um bloco dentro dele. Stalin manteve essa linha mesmo depois que os militares do KMT expulsaram e desarmaram os membros do PCC.
O resultado foi um banho de sangue quando o Kuomintang se voltou contra seus antigos aliados. No meio da Expedição do Norte, uma campanha nacionalista-comunista conjunta com o apoio soviético para derrotar os senhores da guerra da China e acabar com a interferência de potências estrangeiras, Chiang lançou um ataque ao PCC em cidades como Xangai, massacrando milhares de comunistas e trabalhadores.
Este desastre sangrento fez com que alguns comunistas asiáticos duvidassem da sabedoria dos líderes soviéticos. Em 1927, Wang era um organizador do PCC de vinte anos. O partido o enviara, junto com muitos de seus jovens camaradas, para estudar na Universidade Comunista dos Trabalhadores do Leste em Moscou. Como Wang lembrou, ele se juntou secretamente à oposição bolchevique liderada por Leon Trotsky porque foram eles que "compreenderam melhor a derrota de 1927" e criticaram fortemente a maneira como Stalin lidava com os assuntos chineses.
Ele também ficou frustrado com “a maneira arbitrária e burocrática como os stalinistas conduziram a luta interna do partido”. Wang formou uma “facção rebelde” entre os estudantes chineses para resistir a Wang Ming, um fantoche leal de Stalin instalado na liderança do PCC que mais tarde retornou à China. Várias centenas de estudantes chineses em Moscou se alistaram na corrente trotskista, e também ganhou a adesão de Chen Duxiu, o primeiro líder do PCC.
Uma revolução tradicionalista
For his part, Mao witnessed the failure of the first Chinese revolution at first hand. The bloodshed of 1927 did not break the CPC’s overall loyalty to the Comintern, which still derived its authority from the halo of the October Revolution. In the winter of 1927, Stalin claimed that the Chinese defeat was merely “a progression to a higher stage for the revolution.” His opponent Trotsky warned in vain against Stalin’s rash directives.
Trying to compensate for its defeat, the CPC organized a series of premature uprisings that led to the annihilation of its urban strongholds. The party then called on peasants to rise up in four provinces that were under its influence. These areas included Jiangxi, where Mao was commander in chief of the Red Army, a military arm of the CPC that it had hastily organized in opposition to Chiang’s coup.
The attempts at rural insurrection proved futile, particularly in Jiangxi, where smallholding peasants with their own plots of land constituted the majority. Mao and his thousand followers fled to the Jinggang mountain range, where he set up his first guerrilla base. Wang argues that this turned the traditional Marxist view of how to make a revolution on its head:
If he had known about the relationship in Marxist doctrine between workers and peasants, town and village, the former leading the latter, he would have slipped back into Shanghai or gone into hibernation in Wuhan rather than climb Jinggang Mountains.
In fact, Mao knew little about Marxism beyond its rudimentary principles at that point in his life. It was only in the late 1930s that he began to study Marxist literature properly. This was in the context of his rivalry with Stalin’s puppet Wang Ming, who used the authority of Moscow and Marxist terminology to attack Mao. According to Wang Fanxi, it was Confucian teachings and classical Chinese literature rather than Marxism that inspired Mao throughout his life.
Mao’s reaction to the failed insurrection — which later became known as the Autumn Harvest Uprising — seems to have drawn upon his literary knowledge. He took just two books, both of which were Chinese classics, to the mountains with him. One was Water Margin (水滸傳) — also known as Outlaws of the Marsh — the tale of a band of 105 men and three women who overthrew a corrupt dynasty from their mountainous hideout during the twelfth century.
In 1927–28, Mao created his Jinggang soviet in the image of these righteous bandits and their hideout, known as Liangshan Marsh, instead of drawing up on the examples of the Paris Commune of 1871 or the Petrograd Soviet of 1917. He identified himself with the figure of Song Jiang, the wise scholar who led the bandits, rather than Karl Marx, Vladimir Lenin, or even Stalin.
Detached from the urban working class, he recruited peasants to his guerilla army. According to Wang, Mao’s great contribution to the Chinese revolution was “to switch the focus of power to the countryside... and wage revolutionary war.” However, that also meant substituting
backward villages for the modern littoral, peasants for workers, a small number of communists in command of peasant armies for the industrial proletariat’s influence over the peasantry, and armed secession and protracted war for propaganda, agitation, long-term organization, and revolution by means of a general strike.
Wang believed that this gave rise to a lasting separation between the CPC and the working class that it was supposed to lead toward socialist revolution: “For 24 years, from the autumn of 1927 to the spring of 1949, the party stayed away from the cities and the workers.” During this period, he argued, the CPC changed its behavior and way of thinking, becoming “corrupt, bureaucratic, aloof, and haughty.”
Under Mao’s leadership, a hierarchical military campaign supplanted the idea of revolution based on mass action from below. In this framework, nonmilitary revolutionary movements became a mere adjunct to guerrilla warfare. As Wang notes, Mao’s famous remark that “political power grows out of the barrel of a gun” encapsulates this mindset. The second Chinese revolution, which triumphed in the late 1940s, was largely a military takeover with the urban masses playing the role of spectators.
Wang believed that this gave rise to a lasting separation between the CPC and the working class that it was supposed to lead toward socialist revolution: “For 24 years, from the autumn of 1927 to the spring of 1949, the party stayed away from the cities and the workers.” During this period, he argued, the CPC changed its behavior and way of thinking, becoming “corrupt, bureaucratic, aloof, and haughty.”
Under Mao’s leadership, a hierarchical military campaign supplanted the idea of revolution based on mass action from below. In this framework, nonmilitary revolutionary movements became a mere adjunct to guerrilla warfare. As Wang notes, Mao’s famous remark that “political power grows out of the barrel of a gun” encapsulates this mindset. The second Chinese revolution, which triumphed in the late 1940s, was largely a military takeover with the urban masses playing the role of spectators.
Mao, Stalin, and Confucius
While Mao did not always follow Moscow’s directives, he refrained from openly criticizing Stalin in order to take advantage of Soviet material support. He gained control of the CPC in the late 1930s after a long struggle against the Wang Ming faction. Wang Fanxi argued that there was a fundamental difference of character between the two men:
Mao has never been a Stalinist in terms of faction. The Stalinists would never have recruited anyone as opinionated as Mao into their inner circle, and he is in any case by nature incapable of acting like a Wang Ming.
However, this did not mean that Mao was an opponent of Stalinism in principle:
Mao has all along remained outside the clique transplanted into the CCP from Moscow, but that has not prevented him from being a staunch Stalinist, just as it has not prevented the CCP from becoming Stalinized and the People’s Republic of China from being organized and constituted after an essentially Stalinist model. Historical and social factors are incomparably stronger than individual likes and dislikes in determining the character of states and institutions.
During the inner-party battle, Mao had appealed to nationalist sentiment by dubbing his own faction Tu (土: “earth” or “homegrown”) and its Moscow-educated rivals Yang (洋: “ocean” or “foreign”). Once he was confident that he could no longer be ousted from the party leadership, Mao embraced Stalin’s strategic thinking, according to which socialism was not feasible in colonial or semicolonial countries like China without first going through a bourgeois-democratic stage of development. He developed the concept of “New Democracy,” which sought to achieve a “joint dictatorship of the revolutionary classes” — the working class, the peasantry, the urban petty bourgeoisie, and the national bourgeoisie — over “imperialists, traitors, and reactionaries.”
Wang Fanxi saw Mao as an opportunist who fitted theory to practice and strategy to tactics rather than the other way round. This was intended to facilitate his control of the CPC and burnish his “school-boyish recitation” of the Soviet catechism. For Wang, Mao’s most famous work, On Contradiction, bore witness to this intellectual opportunism.
In this pamphlet, published in 1937 when the CPC entered into a second alliance with the KMT to fight against the Japanese invasion of China, Mao introduced the concepts for which he became later known. He distinguished between “principal” and “nonprincipal” (or secondary) contradictions. After discussing what he considered to be the philosophical aspects of this question, the CPC leader applied it to the political situation in China to justify the alliance with Chiang Kai-shek:
In a semicolonial country such as China, the relationship between the principal contradiction and the nonprincipal 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.
As Wang observed, Mao blended Marxist and Confucian terminology, referring to the final stage of his Chinese revolution as datong (大同: “Great Harmony”), a concept drawn directly from The Book of Rites (禮記) by Confucius, which did not necessarily refer to a classless society. Rather, it suggested that there would be a familial community in which each family took good care of their own members first and then looked after others.
This was a utopian form of patriarchy rather than a Chinese version of Marx’s proletarian dictatorship. The neo-Confucian ideal of a strong state and patriarchal rule remains deeply implanted in China today. The song “Guojia” (国家: “The State” or “The Country”), popularized by the kung-fu movie star Jackie Chan, contains the line “each family is the smallest state and the state is tens of millions of families.” Since 2009, Chan has brought numerous state-sponsored festivities to a climax with another line of the cloying song: “Only a strong state will enrich its families.”
Wang Fanxi believed that Mao’s opportunism had freed the CPC from the constraint of ideological doctrines. Indeed, that remains the case to this day. Such latitude has enabled Mao’s successors to implement a mix of ruthless free-market discipline and brutal state control in the name of “socialism with Chinese characteristics.” As Chen Yuan, former chairman of the China Development Bank, once remarked: “We are the Communist Party and we will decide what communism means.”
During the inner-party battle, Mao had appealed to nationalist sentiment by dubbing his own faction Tu (土: “earth” or “homegrown”) and its Moscow-educated rivals Yang (洋: “ocean” or “foreign”). Once he was confident that he could no longer be ousted from the party leadership, Mao embraced Stalin’s strategic thinking, according to which socialism was not feasible in colonial or semicolonial countries like China without first going through a bourgeois-democratic stage of development. He developed the concept of “New Democracy,” which sought to achieve a “joint dictatorship of the revolutionary classes” — the working class, the peasantry, the urban petty bourgeoisie, and the national bourgeoisie — over “imperialists, traitors, and reactionaries.”
Wang Fanxi saw Mao as an opportunist who fitted theory to practice and strategy to tactics rather than the other way round. This was intended to facilitate his control of the CPC and burnish his “school-boyish recitation” of the Soviet catechism. For Wang, Mao’s most famous work, On Contradiction, bore witness to this intellectual opportunism.
In this pamphlet, published in 1937 when the CPC entered into a second alliance with the KMT to fight against the Japanese invasion of China, Mao introduced the concepts for which he became later known. He distinguished between “principal” and “nonprincipal” (or secondary) contradictions. After discussing what he considered to be the philosophical aspects of this question, the CPC leader applied it to the political situation in China to justify the alliance with Chiang Kai-shek:
In a semicolonial country such as China, the relationship between the principal contradiction and the nonprincipal 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.
As Wang observed, Mao blended Marxist and Confucian terminology, referring to the final stage of his Chinese revolution as datong (大同: “Great Harmony”), a concept drawn directly from The Book of Rites (禮記) by Confucius, which did not necessarily refer to a classless society. Rather, it suggested that there would be a familial community in which each family took good care of their own members first and then looked after others.
This was a utopian form of patriarchy rather than a Chinese version of Marx’s proletarian dictatorship. The neo-Confucian ideal of a strong state and patriarchal rule remains deeply implanted in China today. The song “Guojia” (国家: “The State” or “The Country”), popularized by the kung-fu movie star Jackie Chan, contains the line “each family is the smallest state and the state is tens of millions of families.” Since 2009, Chan has brought numerous state-sponsored festivities to a climax with another line of the cloying song: “Only a strong state will enrich its families.”
Wang Fanxi believed that Mao’s opportunism had freed the CPC from the constraint of ideological doctrines. Indeed, that remains the case to this day. Such latitude has enabled Mao’s successors to implement a mix of ruthless free-market discipline and brutal state control in the name of “socialism with Chinese characteristics.” As Chen Yuan, former chairman of the China Development Bank, once remarked: “We are the Communist Party and we will decide what communism means.”
Legacies of 1949
Mao’s revolution was successful to the extent that it defeated Japanese imperialism and smashed the remnants of China’s feudal order. In the late 1940s, as it launched a determined bid for power, the CPC seemed like a progressive and visionary force when set against the corrupt KMT.
According to Wang Fanxi, Chinese Trotskyists were “shaken to the core” by the events of 1949 as they did not expect the CPC to emerge victorious. He concluded at the time that the Chinese revolution was the victory of “a collectivist bureaucratic party and in no way the victory of a Chinese proletarian party, that is, of proletarian revolution.”
Reflecting on the CPC’s triumph in the late 1950s, in an essay that Benton has included as an appendix in Mao Zedong Thought, Wang Fanxi put forward a different view:
In spite of its massive bureaucratic degeneration and its oppressive internal regime, its overwhelmingly peasant composition, its unprincipled manoeuvres, and its distortions of Marxism, it was still a working-class party of sorts, though it was more so in some periods than in others and it acquired a number of grotesque and repellent features.
However, this did not mean that Wang and his fellow Trotskyists were wrong to oppose Stalinism, he insisted, since “bureaucratic rule will never create a truly socialist society.” He described the main features of Stalinist rule that had been transplanted to China under Mao:
In practical terms, it means that all initiatives from lower levels of party and government organizations are stifled, that everything is done according to instruction, that political and social life is dominated by a frantic personality cult and a hierarchy of privilege, that all forms of thinking are controlled by the secret police, that all oppositions are purged, that all factions and parties are forbidden, and so on ad nauseam.
Whatever the social character of the Chinese system may have been in the 1950s, today it represents an authoritarian form of capitalism that fluctuates with the booms and busts of the global market and perpetuates inequality, rampant human rights abuses, and exploitation of labor. The Chinese version of state capitalism is not an alternative to Western free-market capitalism. It is both saddening and infuriating to watch the princelings of the CPC elite still use the language and narrative of socialism to rationalize their authoritarian rule.
Mao Zedong Thought will not be an easy book to read for those with little knowledge of Chinese history or Confucian philosophy — indeed, reading it was one of the few times when I have appreciated the formal Confucian schooling I received in South Korea. But it offers indispensable insights into the early history of the CPC as it embarked on the course that led it to rule China. Wang Fanxi’s work will remain relevant for as long as the state that Mao founded matters.
Colaborador
Kap Seol é um escritor e pesquisador coreano baseado em Nova York. Seus escritos apareceram em Labor Notes, In These Times, Business Insider e outras publicações. Em 2019, sua denúncia para o diário independente coreano Kyunghyang revelou um impostor que alegou falsamente ser um especialista em inteligência militar dos EUA enviado para a cidade sul-coreana de Gwangju durante uma revolta popular em 1980.
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