attracted to the party because of its consistent opposition to colonialism and its promise to provide an alternative to imperialism/capitalism. Further, compared with the policies of the Guomindang, to broad swathes of the rural population, the proposition of progressive agrarian reforms appeared to be a welcome development.
The successful national liberation of China in 1949 embodied an anticolonial revolution. Nevertheless, Mao’s assumption of power did not equate to a “socialist” revolution although it was accompanied by peasant revolts and social movements in some cities prior to 1949 (Spence 1995, 575–615). Rather than a revolution where the masses strive, through their own efforts, to bring about a fundamental reorganization of society, this revolution mostly stemmed from military actions originating in rural regions. It was effectively based on the creation of a counterstate:
A revolution can break the monopoly of the state’s power by destroying the legitimacy of its rule, so that coercion cannot be exercised to repress the movement against it…. Alternatively, a revolution can pit an insurgent violence against the coercive apparatus of the state, overwhelming it in a quick knock-out blow, without having secured any general legitimacy. This was the Russian pattern, possible only against a weak opponent. Finally, a revolution can break the state’s monopoly of power, not by depriving it from the outset of legitimacy, nor rapidly undoing its capacity for violence, but by subtracting enough territory from it to erect a counter-state, able in time to erode its possession of force and consent alike. This was the Chinese pattern. (Anderson 2010b, 64; see also Osterhammel 1989, 343–47)
The struggle between two collective actors with quasi-state structures—the CCP and the Guomindang—over the succession of the Chinese Empire was ultimately not won by the Guomindang with its superior military power, but by the CCP with its greater legitimacy. The result was less a democratization of power or even a partial dissolution of domination per se but more a transfer of power to a group of military actors and CCP leaders who declared themselves representatives of the socialist construction yet effectively commanded a development dictatorship in an undeveloped agrarian country.
The revolution represented liberation from foreign imperial powers and the reactionary nationalist Guomindang. In the long term, it created a degree of nationwide unity that was unprecedented over the last century. The Communist Party forged ahead with a land reform in which it broke the hold of the “parasitical landlord families” (Osterhammel 1989, 357); the CCP succeeded in halting inflation and, for the first time, reestablished a central state authority that maintained order across China.6
From then on, the CCP established a bureaucratic party-state. The party’s leading staff regarded Marxism-Leninism as an ideology of national modernization and ruthlessly forged ahead with this latter objective using various means. “Inasmuch as the CCP came to power through a popular, anti-imperialist revolution, the very essence of the legitimacy of the communist state was not Marxism but nationalism” (Zhao 2004, 209).7 Of course, the CCP’s nationalism was not solely a result of a national ethos: it was also an attempt to adapt, dictated by external circumstances, to survive in a world that was dominated by far more developed countries.8
In contrast to ruling parties in postcolonial Africa and the Middle East, for example, the CCP drew on a rich tradition of statist ideas. “The Maoists never paid much attention to the liberal and democratic elements in the teachings of Marx and Engels, such as those dealing with free development of the individual and the relationship between the individual and the state. In fact, it can be argued that Mao drew more inspiration about governance from Chinese classics such as Shi Ji (Historical Memoirs, by Sima Qian) [from around 145 BC to around 90 BC] and Zizhi Tongjian (Compendium on Governance, by Sima Guang) [1019 AD to 1090 AD], which he reread dozens of times” (Lam 2006, 260).9
Similar to other developing countries at the time, which were partially established on a foundation of “socialist” principles, partially on the basis of “capitalist” norms, this new society displayed features that were far more reminiscent of the primitive accumulation of capital discussed by Marx than socialist or communist ideals. These included the separation of manual and mental labor, a subsumption under state capital, highly pronounced hierarchies in the workplace and in everyday life, and the suppression of opposition, as well as patriarchal family structures, nationalism, and censorship of the arts and sciences.
The key institutions of the Maoist era such as work units (danwei) which isolated the industrial labor force, people’s communes (renmin gongshe) that enforced rural self-sufficiency, job allocations (fenpei) that rendered intellectuals dependent upon state favor, labor insurance (laobao) that bestowed generous welfare benefits upon permanent workers at state-owned enterprises while leaving the majority of the workforce unprotected, personnel dossiers (dang’an) which marked citizens with “good” or “bad” political records, household registrations (hukou) that separated urban and rural dwellers, class labels (jieji chengfen) that categorized people into “five kinds of red” (hong wulei) and “five kinds of black” (hei wulei)—all served to divide society and foster subservience to the state. (Perry 2007, 11)
In order to challenge the established perception of what has been dubbed “anti-bureaucratism,” Whyte distinguishes between two distinct aspects of bureaucratization. On the one hand, he sees the term as referring to a process by which more and more elements of social life come to be governed by large hierarchical organizations (Whyte 1989). On the other hand, he draws on the finding that these organizations approximate the ideal type of bureaucratic organization based on legal-rational authority and formal rules and procedures rather than charismatic or other traditional types of authority. Because Mao and his supporters predominantly attempted to stave off this latter form of bureaucratization but effectively advocated charismatic instead of legal-rational relations, yet still overall wanted to increase state regulation of societal relationships, with the exception of the Cultural Revolution years, we cannot really describe Maoism as essentially antibureaucratic. At the same time, the Maoist concept of antibureaucratism was also the expression of an interelite conflict. The notion of a “class war” against, inter alia, “bureaucratic excesses” that formed the backbone of political campaigns was mainly devoted to attempting to oppose the old political and economic intellectual elites who still possessed cultural capital after 1949 (Andreas 2009; see also Selden 1993, 7–13). Consequently, collectivist ethics and efforts to level class differences targeted technocratic and/or bureaucratic groups.10 However, this “Red-over-expert power structure … in which incumbent managers and specialists were relegated to subordinate technical positions” (Andreas 2009, 269) became less important over time. Following the peak of this interelite conflict, the Cultural Revolution, the Maoist and technocratic elites converged under Deng Xiaoping and became the new ruling elite (Andreas 2009, 269–76; also see Walder 2015).11
A final feature of Maoism I would like to outline here is the link between nationalism and a rural populism that led to Mao’s voluntarism, that is, the attempt to “leap over” the country’s material backwardness by appealing to the morality of the people (Lieberthal 1995, 62–70). In contrast to the USSR, the party-state had neither a proletarian nor a liberal legacy to deal with.
Consistent with the absence of the class structure postulated in Marx’s writings, and with the role of the intelligentsia, free from loyalty to a particular class … Maoism is essentially “voluntarist”: that is, the aims of the leadership are seen as feasible provided they work hard, rather than provided the objective situation permits. The role of theory is thus changed from that suggested in Marx; for Mao theory is a somewhat eclectically selected element in public relations work, in the propaganda necessary to change consciousness, rather than itself a more or less accurate analysis of reality to guide practice. (Harris 1971, 174; see also Harris 1986, 170–86)
Voluntarism and its counterpart, the Mao cult, advocated hierarchical decision-making methods as well as the valorization of intuitive actions of the country’s leaders. The prevailing institutionalized voluntarism
