How was the Red Army’s Long March (1934-1935) effective in portraying the vulnerability of Chiang and the Nationalist party?
A. Plan of Investigation
The investigation assesses on how the Long March is the key component in the development of the Communist party. The scope of the investigation is to analyze the Red Army’s success on the Long March as well as exemplifying the weaknesses of Chiang and the Nationalist party on failing attempts to cease the Long March from being successful. Books and a documentary are used to evaluate the Long March. The two of the main sources used in the essay, The Long March: The True History of Communist China’s Founding Myth and China’s Long march: 6,000 Miles of Danger are then evaluated for their origins,
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Values include Shuyun going to numerous individuals in China who have experienced and lived during the period of the Long March. Given the most significant stories related to the Long March, such as the battle of the Xiang River, were chosen from the text. The purpose of the sources is to show the varying perspectives and responses on events along the Long March, including the elderly’s perspective and his or her stories of what went on. The limitations do not address the direct moment of the Long March nor does it address the Kuomintang’s party perspective on the …show more content…
Chiang’s primary goal was to maintain the social class of China that still has always existed during the time period. With a peasant population large and widespread, the potential in gaining support for Mao and the Red Army instead was greater than Chiang.
The Red Army consisted of people mainly from the country side and lower class peasants. The idea of Communism was more appealing by the idea of wealth shared amongst the people, such as stripping away power from the landlords and the rich. Mao gaining peasant support was one of the reasons why the Long March was able to continue with the potential growth in support along the journey. Although poor and in poverty, peasants represented the majority of the country’s population at roughly eighty percent.
The success of the march would not have been successful without the peasants. “The support of the peasants was the secret weapon of success”. Chiang would never be able to gain the support of the people in numbers compared to Mao solely by the fact that peasants would out number any other social class in the time period, validating the fact that power still did hold in numbers rather than by wealth and
Rae Yang’s Memoir “Spider Eaters” is a poignant personal story of a girl growing up amidst the political upheaval during the establishment of People’s Republic of China under Mao Zedong’s Communist leadership. Yang describes the fascinating journey of her life from her early years as the daughter of Chinese diplomats in Switzerland to a student in an elite middle school then a fanatic Red-guard and eventually a laborer in a pig farm. Her experiences through the revolution serve as an eye-opener and lead to her eventual disillusionment of the Communist revolution in China. There are many factors that contributed to her growing discontent with communism such as the anti-rightist movement which was an effort to rule out any criticism against the government, corruption and violence of the party leaders who abused their power and continued to exploit the peasants, the false claim of proletariat dictatorship used merely to eradicate bourgeoisie and further the interests of party members.
That his desires to create equality amongst his people were good is not the argument here. Rather, the focus is that by seeking to destroy the bourgeoisie within China and to raise up the proletariat, Mao simply helped these two social classes switch roles.
The Communist revolution in China was loosely based on the revolution in Russia. Russia was able to implement the beginnings of Marxist Communism in the way that it was intended They had a large working class of factory workers, known as the proletariat, that were able to band together and rise up to overthrow the groups of rich property owners, known as the bourgeoisie. The communist party wanted to adopted this same Marxist sense of revolution, but they realized that there were some fatal flaws in the differences between the two countries. The first was that there was not the same sense of class difference between people, yes there were peasants and landowners but there was not a sense of a class struggle. The other difference was that China was not industrialized like Russia so there was no proletariat group, as defined by Marxism, to draw the revolution from. What the Chinese Communists needed to do is re-define the proletariat for their situation, who they looked at were the peasants.
This essay will concentrate on the comparison and analysis of two communist figures: Mao Zedong, leader of the Communist Party in China, and Joseph Stalin, leader of the Soviet Union. The main focus of this paper will be to explore each figure’s world view in depth and then compare and contrast by showing their differences and similarities.
Mao Zedong was a very influential man in history. He forever changed the face of Chinese politics and life as a whole. His communist views and efforts to modernize China still resonate in the country today. Jonathan Spence’s book titled Mao Zedong is a biography of the great Chinese leader. Spence aims to show how Mao evolved from a poor child in a small rural village, to the leader of a communist nation. The biography is an amazing story of a person’s self determination and the predictability of human nature. The book depicts how a persuasive voice can shape the minds of millions and of people. It also shows the power and strength that a movement in history can make. This biography tells an important part of world history-the communist takeover of China.
Gandhi and Mao Zedong had different ideas when it came to the use of violence. Mao believed that “Force is the midwife of every old society pregnant with a new one.” (reading packet, 12) What this means is that force is absolutely necessary and the outcome of force is violence. Mao is in total agreement with violence and sees the people opposing the movements he is favoring as “paper tigers”. As in, at first, these rebels might seem terrifying, but in reality, they are helpless and harmless. Mao actually blames the Hunan landlords and the higher, wealthier class for a bloody battle between the peasants and the landlords. He said that for a long time now, the wealthier class ha...
...ear and listen. That’s why most of the Chinese youth were inspired to join the army due to the books that were sold and the song that was written just for the Red Guards army. The book’s name is “Little Red Book.” The song’s name is “Red Guard Song.” For the members, the “Red Guard Song” reminds them of their purpose of why they joined the Red Guards. To add on, two young women had wrote their own memoirs to explain what their life was when the Cultural Revolution was happening and how their life was changed when they joined the Red Guards and started to rebel against their parents and their own teachers. As they grew older, they soon realized that everything that they’ve been doing the whole entire time was wrong and regret joining the Red Guards. They realize that all these time, they were killing innocent people that clearly was doing nothing to harm the country.
Mao's period of communal reform and the establishment of the Communist party from 1949-1976 was needed in order for Deng's individual oriented, capitalist society to thrive. Mao's period encompassed the structure of a true dictatorial communist government. It strove to concentrate on unifying communities to create a strong political backbone while being economically self-sufficient and socially literate and educated in Maoist propaganda. Under Mao's leadership individual wealth was seen as a hindrance to community goals in meeting production quotas and was crushed by such policies as collectivization, land reformation, and movements such as The Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution. Under his rule, modeled under the Stalinist USSR archetype, China raised its masses from poverty and starvation to a standard of living that was considered a substantial upgrade.
One of Mao Zedong’s motivations for beginning the Cultural Revolution was his view that a cutting-edge bureaucratic ruling class had surfaced because of the centralized authoritarian nature of the political system, which had little hope for popular participation in the process of economic development (The Chinese Cultural Revolution revisited). The motivations of Fidel Castro, on the other hand, were different in that he wanted all people of all classes to be equal. The notion that the poverty-stricken could live a life equal to all other humans was an immense sense of happiness and alteration. In China, Mao Zedong developed many things to entice people.
Walder, Andrew G. The Beijing Red Guard Movement: Fractured Rebellion. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009.
This essay has critically analysed and examined the effect of Communism on the Chinese Society during the period of 1946-1964. The overall conclusion that can be drawn is that the Chinese Communist Party managed to defeat the Kuomintang (Nationalist) Party and achieve victory in the Civil War, in spite of alienation by the Soviet Union and opposition from the U.S. This was primarily because of the superior military strategy employed by the Communists and the economic and political reforms introduced by this party which brought more equality to the peasants in the form of land ownership and better public services. This increased China’s production and manufacturing which not only boosted the country’s economy but also provided a more sustainable supply of food, goods and services for the Chinese people.
China’s ruling party at the time was the Kuomintang (KMT). They had toppled the Qing emperor, but they were unable to truly unite the country. In 1923, the KMT and the CCP briefly allied to defeat the warlords in Northern China, but this was not an alliance that we meant to last; the KMT leader Chia...
Dressed in the drab military uniform that symbolized the revolutionary government of Communist China, Mao Zedong's body still looked powerful, like an giant rock in a gushing river. An enormous red flag draped his coffin, like a red sail unfurled on a Chinese junk, illustrating the dualism of traditional China and the present Communist China that typified Mao. 1 A river of people flowed past while he lay in state during the second week of September 1976. Workers, peasants, soldiers and students, united in grief; brought together by Mao, the helmsman of modern China. 2 He had assembled a revolutionary government using traditional Chinese ideals of filial piety, harmony, and order. Mao's cult of personality, party purges, and political policies reflect Mao's esteem of these traditional Chinese ideals and history.
The Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, beginning as a campaign targeted at removing Chairman Mao Zedong's political opponents, was a time when practically every aspect of Chinese society was in pandemonium. From 1966 through 1969, Mao encouraged revolutionary committees, including the red guards, to take power from the Chinese Communist party authorities of the state. The Red Guards, the majority being young adults, rose up against their teachers, parents, and neighbors. Following Mao and his ideas, The Red Guard's main goal was to eliminate all remnants of the old culture in China. They were the 'frontline implementers' who produced havoc, used bloody force, punished supposed 'counter revolutionists', and overthrew government officials, all in order to support their 'beloved leader'.
Both the Nationalists and the CCP were setting out to control Shanghai as they understood that it would mean a definite political success for the party. Furthermore, the CCP had found an ally in the Nationalist Party, as leftist Wang Jinwei began to set up its own government with the support of the communists. All these developments shocked and aroused the suspicion of Chiang who eventually decided to act against the CCP and the union leaders. Another reason was that Chiang were being pressurized by the business community to stop the CCP from taking power. The support base of Chiang the landlords, wealthy businessmen, bankers and industrialists in Shanghai.