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A Land of Death

A Land of Death. May Fourth and Pluralism.

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A Land of Death

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  1. A Land of Death

  2. May Fourth and Pluralism • Without intending to, the May Fourth era and the political climate of the early Republic had managed to institutionalize difference, a space for people to disagree openly and freely with each other. The problem was that they did so in an unstable way, and without explicitly acknowledging that pluralism was a positive good – many, in fact, used that freedom to argue that if they came to power, they would end that pluralist culture. • These decades are inexorably marked by constant, endless, numbing death… One reason that this reality has not been at the forefront of the historical record is, perhaps paradoxically, that the numbers involved are so large.

  3. China Changes Shape, 1931-1937 • Manchurian Incident • Divided Country offered choice of political pluralism – Nationalist, Communist, Japanese, or Nationalist affiliated warlords • Nationalist dominance – Extermination campaigns • Long March 1934 – Chiang Kaishek’s New Life Movement • Japanese Imperialism and the emergence of the United front – Chiang Kaishek was convinced by Zhang Xueliang

  4. The Choices of the May Fourth Generation • Du Zhongyuan – Published anti-Japanese agitation against the Nationalists attempts to appease the Japanese – Eventually imprisoned • ZouTaofen – Opposed Japanese and traveled abroad searching for models – Zou found the Soviet model to be inspirational • Lu Xun – Disgusted with the Nationalist, eventually died of tuberculosis • Ding Ling – Fled to Communist controlled regions and discovered individual autonomy and feminism clashed with a party more concerned about class conflict and the anti-Japanese crusade.

  5. China Falls Apart, 1937-45 • Chiang Kaishek rejected May Fourth • Mao embraced May Fourth while rejecting its questioning nature

  6. War and Confrontation • Du Zhongyuan freed and became war correspondent. He was eventually executed as a CCP sympathizer in 1944. • ZouTaofen continued to be sympathetic to CCP but died of cancer by 1944. • The stories of these two will be used as symbols of the May Fourth movement by the CCP decades later.

  7. The New World • What, then, were the major changes under the rule of the CCP and of Mao? First, and perhaps most notable, was the far more explicit and widely penetrating influence of politics, both in rhetoric and in action. Mass campaigns in endless succession marked the most public face of Mao’s China. These could be practical in orientation, such as the land reform campaigns of the earliest years of the PRC, or the anti-opium and anti-prostitution campaigns of the early 1950s. They might be primarily ideological, such as the ‘Aid Korea, Resist America’ campaign of 1950-1, launched to support China’s intervention in the Korea War, or the Anti-Rightist campaign of the 1950s, or the Socialist Education Campaign of 1962. The CCP used its political control and ideological fervour to achieve the mass awareness of politics that eluded leaders such as Sun Yatsen or Chiang Kaishek. P. 186

  8. The Cold War • Mao’s China, though, could not be termed anybody’s client state after 1949, any more than Chiang’s had been before that date. Mao and his Party never ceased to take pride in the fact that their revolution had, effectively, been an internal one. The policies which had turned the Party from a bedraggled mob on the run from Chiang Kaishek’s Nationalists to the controllers of the world’s most populous nation, and in particular the policy of agrarian revolution, had often been carried out in the teeth of opposition from Stalin and the Soviet Communist Party.

  9. The Great Leap Forward • The Great Leap Forward was not officially repudiated until 1981. But the policy was in effect reversed from 1962, as the Politburo marked the changes by moving towards a more pragmatic policy in the countryside, breaking up the massive cooperative farms and allowing people to move back to smaller agricultural units. In 1959, Mao had agreed, somewhat under pressure, to give up one of his positions, as head of state, although he remained the head of the CCP. By the mid-1960s, food production had returned to normal levels. Yet Mao’s ideological ardour was by no means exhausted. Even while China recovered economically, Mao was gripped by two emotions, anxiety and resentment. He was anxious that ‘economism’, the concern both of his senior colleagues and the Chinese masses for personal prosperity, was blunting their collective revolutionary edge. At the same time, he was angered by his comrades’ attempts to lever him out of power, and despite his occasional wistful suggestions that he might retire to the ‘second line’, he seemed to have little inclination to withdraw from political life. P. 198

  10. Conclusion: May Fourth in Abeyance • …the Cultural Revolution became a reductio ad absurdum of what May Fourth could have been if China had not, in the 1920s, been weak divided, and unsure of its own path.

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