 The Chinese Revolution is one of the greatest events in human history, in the course of which, which spanned really over two decades if you want to encompass the whole process. The world's largest country was turned upside down, social relations were transformed, and the country was finally freed from the humiliation of western imperialism. And also the revolution stands as an enormous validation of the theories of historical materialism in general and permanent revolution in particular. Because despite the peculiarities of the Chinese Communist Party's line and what I would consider to be a mistaken position pretty much throughout the course of the two decades of the revolution, despite that the revolution was still victorious and I think that really underlines the objective necessity of revolution in that particular country. And the revolution was peculiar, really peculiar for two particular reasons. First of all it did not take place in the typical working class way that we might expect as Marxists in which an urban proletariat organises itself and stages mass demonstrations and ultimately an insurrection. That did not take place. The revolution when it was victorious came in from a peasant army from the countryside which surrounded the cities and then conquered power which is highly peculiar. And secondly also the other reason it was peculiar was the fact as I've mentioned that the Chinese Communist Party's line throughout the revolution was kind of almost a non-revolutionary line. Even up until the eve of taking power they pretty much opposed taking power and said that they didn't plan to abolish capitalism even if they did take power and yet both of these things took place. So the revolution really began in the 1920s and the Chinese Communist Party was extremely young at that point. It was formed officially in 1921 and at that point it was a kind of a classical Marxist party if you like basing itself on the working class in the cities. In fact it established the trade unions that within a few years would go on to be mass organisations that were leading that particular revolution in the mid 1920s. However the line that was given to this young Chinese Communist Party by its parents organisation in Moscow was unfortunately an extremely bad one essentially. Stalin insisted that there was no way the Chinese working class could come to power and that the Chinese Communist Party could only facilitate a bourgeois revolution. China hadn't had its bourgeois revolution like Britain and France and therefore it was the role simply to be the handmaiden to that to passively support essentially the Guamandang and Chiang Kai Shek which was the nationalist party and its leader. This was a completely false line that Trotsky pointed out and this was proven in practice when in 1927 Chiang Kai Shek betrayed his supporters in the Communist Party and massacred them in their thousands and drove them out of the cities and the reason for this Trotsky explained that the Chinese capitalist class was not a revolutionary class as in many other colonial countries it was a class that was created by imperialism and really a servant of imperialism. It had no interest in kicking out the imperialists and establishing democracy and so it proved and the revolution was totally botched as a result and the defenceless Communist Party fled into the surrounding countryside. Now you will meet today many people in particular Maoists who will tell you that this, that Maoism is a kind of genius adaptation of Marxism to Chinese characteristics because it understood that this is a rural economy, it's a peasant society largely and therefore it was brilliant to change Marxism and to base itself on the peasantry and that essentially he foresaw this. I hope to explain in the course of this discussion why that line was mistaken even though they did come to power. But also I'd just like to point out at this point how it was not an anticipation on Mao's part. Even up until 1935 that is almost ten years after they were massacred and fled into the countryside the official position of the Communist Party was that they were to return to the cities and the working class was to lead the revolution. And they only stayed in the countryside because basically of the mistakes that they made following Stalin's orders essentially prevented that created an obstacle to returning to the cities and they basically adapted to the countryside to the rural conditions. And although it may seem as if it was successful it very nearly was absolutely disastrous for the Chinese Communist Party. In fact in 1934 they had to flee their initial rural base in the south of the country because they were about to be destroyed by Chiang Kai-shek's military and go on the famous long march in which they marched from one length of the country to the other in which 90% of the membership died. So you know the entire party was very nearly absolutely wiped out and really probably would have been if it weren't for the Second World War. And with this or that minor alteration essentially the Communist Party maintained the same line even up until 1949. In other words they supported Chiang Kai-shek essentially claiming that he was a patriot in the struggle against the Japanese. In fact in 1937 when the war with Japan started they actually organised a pact with Chiang Kai-shek at gunpoint. I don't have time to go into the bizarre details of that affair but they organised a pact with Chiang Kai-shek. They managed to capture him essentially and instead of killing him which they probably should have done they said you know what why don't even though you're the dictator of China who's been massacring us in tens of thousands why don't we join our forces together and fight Japan in a great patriotic war if you like. And at the time they said the following, the aggression of imperialist Japan can only be overcome by the internal unity of our nation. All our fellow countrymen, every single zealous descendant of Huangdi that is the first Chinese emperor must determinately and relentlessly participate and mouse dressed it is a united front of the whole nation of all parties groups and classes. So they continued essentially with Stalin's line of in other words supporting the bourgeoisie, class collaboration policies essentially denying their own independent role as a communist party. And the fact that they were able then to actually have another crack at it with another revolution in 1949 in which they were successful you might think that that shows that this was the correct line. I would argue the opposite, I would argue that it was precisely the erroneousness of this line, it was precisely how utterly counter-revolutionary and reactionary the Chiang Kai-shek regime was that they were able to come to power. So the fact they came to power actually proved the opposite of what they were saying. But the Chinese Communist Party didn't recognise this throughout this period and it made enormous sacrifices in both the war with Japan and in the civil war. And it's like the objective circumstances were so revolutionary if you like that the need for revolution was so great that a revolutionary role was imposed onto the Communist Party even against their will. I'll give a couple of examples to demonstrate that. So in 1941 in the middle of the war only four years after they signed this pact with Chiang Kai-shek in which they basically gave him everything. They promised to not only support him but they promised to give over control of their own armed forces to his generals for example. They promised to change the name of their armed forces to a more neutral less communist name etc. Many other examples but only four years after this in which by the way Chiang Kai-shek's regime did nothing to fight the Japanese even after this pact. They abandoned 15 of 18 provinces in doing so killing thousands of their own people by kind of scorched earth policy in which they would just destroy the countryside so that when the Japanese got there there was nothing to use. So it was an absolutely disgraceful for a so-called nationalist party which is what they are apparently. It was a disgraceful position. But in 1941 there was the New Fourth Army incident in which the Guamandang forces turned on Chinese Communist Party forces and killed them in thousands and completely destroyed that particular army. Betraying their pact. Now you might think that what the effect that that would have had would be to discredit the Chinese Communist Party in the eyes of many Chinese people because they were promoting Chiang Kai-shek saying that he was a patriot and their ally in the struggle with China. And this surely at least from our point of view as Marxists we think well surely that's an embarrassment for them because it's completely disproven their position. But in truth it led to the opposite because the hatred of Chiang Kai-shek was so deep in Chinese society that it just led to sympathy for the Communist Party. Basically people thought that you are the people who want to fight Japan and look Chiang Kai-shek's turned on you and killed you. I'll give another example. After the end of the Second World War obviously there was an end of hostilities and no one was quite sure what was going to go on between the Communist Party and the Guamandang regime. The Chinese Communist Party once again was keen to sign a truce so that there wouldn't be a civil war or at least the civil war wouldn't break out immediately. And so such a truce was signed in 1946 at the Chinese Communist Party's initiative by stress. And in this time once again they kind of associated themselves with the Chiang Kai-shek regime and in a certain sense promoted it. In fact Joe Enlai who is one of the major leaders of the Chinese Communist Party actually took on the position and appointed position of Deputy Minister of Political Training which had no real power behind it but all of the association got all the responsibility for the crimes of the dictatorship of Chiang Kai-shek for taking on that role. It's the exact opposite of what you should be doing. And they also launched the People's Political Consultative Conference which was essentially a kind of pseudo parliament, a pseudo because it wasn't even elected in which all of the parties of China, in reality there were only two meaningful parties, the Guamandang and the Chinese Communist Party but all these other tiny little parties of liberals basically who had no membership. They were invited to this conference and the number of delegates was selected in advance by the parties themselves so it was completely undemocratic. No one got the ordinary people had no say in this whatsoever. And it was supposed to discuss how they could kind of gradually move towards democracy. And so once again they were kind of associating themselves with the regime. I compare that to the policies of the Bolsheviks for example under the Tsar. Occasionally the Tsar would organise another kind of sham parliament in which it was just a rubber stamped parliament that had no power whatsoever. He remained obviously an autocrat. But when these were organised sometimes the Bolsheviks did participate in elections to them. They never took on the responsibility for these parliaments. And it caused a lot of controversy within the Bolsheviks and they did often boycott them as well. But what they would do is they understood that because there were actually elections to these parliaments they would participate in those elections as a means of gaining an echo in the working class. Because the working class did actually vote in these elections and so they felt it was necessary to participate to get their name out there. But then they always exposed that this was a fake parliament, that the Tsar needed to be overthrown etc. Whereas in China they took the initiative to create such a parliament and then having created it it was created in an undemocratic way as well. So it wasn't even the one element of democracy that you had in the case of Russia. So I think again a completely false policy. Yet again Chiang Kai-shek betrayed this. In 1947 he broke the truce and started the civil war. So it was Chiang Kai-shek that started the civil war, not the Chinese Communist Party. And again they got sympathy for that because basically people were projecting onto the Communist Party what they wanted it to do. They wanted it to fulfil a revolutionary role. They saw it as revolutionary despite its actions. So why did Chiang Kai-shek break that truce and why did the civil war start? Given that he lost it within only two years you might think it was a foolish move. Indeed it was a foolish move. He was a foolish man to be honest. Probably one of the most inept leaders you ever read about. The main reason that he broke the truce was that he could not tolerate the existence, didn't matter what its behaviour was, he could not tolerate the existence of something called the Communist Party with thousands and thousands of members with arms and occupying territory. And to be honest any bourgeois regime would not tolerate that. Can you imagine if there was a Communist Party that occupied Wales armed to the teeth? I don't think the British state would tolerate that for very long. But obviously he was also a dictator and dictators are not generally known for their toleration of different political tendencies. To be honest it was inevitable he was going to break it and it was naive of the Communist Party to offer him that truce. However he also has to be said, oh where is that? Maybe I'm skipping ahead. Anyway that was one of the reasons that he ended the truce and began the war. So why did he lose the civil war so rapidly then? First of all we have to consider the enormous unbelievable levels of corruption and rottenness that his regime represented. He represented this because it was really the continuation, although the events of 1911 and the 1920s had changed the regime, the last emperor that ended in 1911. But in reality he represented a continuation of this. The same old rotten ruling class that had capitulated the country to Western imperialism and was thoroughly discredited. He represented a capitalist class that had no interest in developing the means of production, no interest in competing on the world market. It was a corrupt class that was created essentially by Western imperialism and got rich simply really by looting the country and trading with the West. Under his watch there were constant economic crises, there were constant famines, there was a famine in 1942-3 which killed millions of people. Inflation was absolutely out of control, prices rose two and a half thousand times during the war. Living standards for workers on average fell by a half and for some workers fell by 90%. In fact for the more middle class professions they fell particularly far. So it was a deeply hated and discredited regime. And also there are endless absurd taxes that were just laid on to workers and especially peasants. And really backwards reactionary taxes from feudal days essentially. For example there was the lichen or lichen tax which you would have to pay a tax to transport goods from one part of the country to the other. You know kind of like a feudal kind of tax between different principalities which is very much depresses trade as you can imagine. And there was also other tax like the Contribute Sandals to War recruits tax, the Comfort recruits families tax, these are the actual net. They just invented taxes for everything that they needed and it just proliferated and proliferated. And you know although people again people will tell you that it was correct of Mao to base themselves in the countryside because you know the peasantry is really the equivalent of the working class in a country like China that's what people say. But actually there were mass movements in the cities throughout this time but unfortunately the Communist Party had very little relation to. There were mass student movements throughout the war and throughout the civil war. You know enormous of an enormous scale not just sort of like what we might expect in Britain occasionally like you know earth shattering staggering size very revolutionary. There was also many many strike waves in particular towards the time of the overthrow of the regime. For example in 1936 there were 278 strikes recorded nationwide. By 1946 10 years later there were 1,716 strikes in Shanghai alone and in 1947 a year later in Shanghai alone there was 2,538 strikes. And Doug Barnett who wrote a good book about a journalist who went across the country on the eve of the revolution he quoted a Shanghai newspaper editor who said the following Nobody can control the trade unions in Shanghai right now. The government is extremely weak and wary about the possibility of antagonising labour even though trade unions were illegal. And union members together with their families include over half of the population of Shanghai. The sheer size of the labour movement makes some people in Shanghai apprehensive about it. So basically there was a mass and militant working class movement but unfortunately the Chinese Communist Party wasn't able to connect with it. In fact they actually discouraged it. They essentially said listen we're organising the country, the struggle in the countryside just wait for us basically. We're doing it for you essentially is the line that they put across. But in the beginning of the civil war had the Chinese Communist Party issued a call to the workers of China saying you should help us come to power by organising a general strike and to bring down this rotten regime. I am absolutely convinced that the regime would have collapsed like that. It was that discredited, that unpopular. A vast proportion of society hated the regime and with the military in the countryside to back them up as well with the Red Army I think it would have undoubtedly been successful. But unfortunately they failed to connect with this. In fact when they did recruit workers and students in the cities they would actually take them out of the cities into the countryside to help them in that struggle. So they really failed to build a base in the cities. Of course the civil war is the most political of all wars. It's the kind of war in which the class struggle has the most direct bearing. So it's not surprising that this social crisis affected the regime and affected its capacity to fight the Communist Party. Not just because generally it was very unpopular which politically weakened it but also this had a reflection in the military. Certainly any military of the ruling class is like a mirror of society. It has all the social contradictions of society within the army. In other words the rank and file of the army is typically working class or peasant based and of course the leaders are much richer probably from the ruling class. And therefore if the ruling class is a thoroughly rotten and corrupt one with no future then that would be reflected. You would expect to find that reflected in the army as well and indeed it was the case. So this is another reason that Chiang Kai-shek started the civil wars because he was overconfident. He had a five to one numerical advantage in troops and he actually received 60 billion dollars of aid in today's money from the United States. Half of it was aid and half of it was actually weapons. So he had a very modern military actually. So he was overconfident. He thought he could easily destroy the Communist Party. And he certainly had initial successes when he broke the truce. Initially they had some big military successes. Although these were misleading because in reality the Communist Party which was adept at guerrilla warfare by this point didn't really suffer many losses in these defeats. They just kind of melted into the countryside as they were so good at doing. But he was overconfident because these figures this five to one figure. First of all as I said a civil war is a political war. And of course if your rank and file has absolutely no desire to fight for you don't believe in the struggle. In fact if they despise you then they're not going to be very effective fighters. And indeed they weren't they couldn't be effective fighters because of the way they were treated. First of all it was widespread that officers would under recruit essentially. So basically they could claim the wager. They would be given an expected number of people to recruit and they could claim the wages for all of those people. So what these officers would do and of course they were corrupt. I mean everyone was corrupt. It was normal in the ruling class of why wouldn't they be. They would only recruit about 60 to 70% of the numbers allocated to them. And then they would just keep the rest of that money for themselves. Of course all any wealthy family and you didn't have to be that wealthy could avoid conscription by bribing people. So actually the army was only about 60% of its advertised strength. So suddenly a five to one numerical advantage is more like a three to one numerical advantage. And because the well off could avoid conscription of course the army was composed of the particularly poor layers. And indeed they were very poor and they were very ill and underfed and appallingly treated. The recruits to the army would be rounded up from villages literally with ropes tied around their necks and marched to the training bases. They had their clothing taken off them so that they couldn't escape. The officers would frequently steal their food in order to sell it on and make even more money. And they wouldn't be given water. They had to drink from roadside puddles which would frequently lead to illness as you can imagine. But they were denied medical treatment until they actually got to the training base. They weren't officially soldiers until they got there. And they were expected to walk on this march in which they were tied by the neck. Hundreds or even thousands in some cases of kilometres. So unsurprisingly a huge number never even made it. In fact by some estimates almost half of them died or fled before they even got to the training bases. So you know it wasn't exactly, again it's five to one advantage on paper. In reality it was barely even a numerical advantage. And in fact the Guam and Dang's army under Chiang Kai-shek in the Civil War suffered probably the most desertions of any army in history. Partly for the reasons I've described obviously the appalling way they were treated. But also because of, and we have to hear be positive about some of the positions of the Communist Party because of their genius position which they could offer because of the fact that they did control parts of the countryside. They offered any soldier who defected from the Guam and Dang to them a plot of land. And of course most of these soldiers were landless peasants. So to be offered a plot of land to desert a regime that you despise anyway is quite an attempting officer. So you can imagine that a lot of them would have deserted. And actually so I should also explain that whilst the Communist Party occupied these rural bases which they had been doing ever since 1928, they had practised land reform. So they had given land essentially to landless peasants from rich peasants which of course made them enormously popular. Although we have to be realistic about this it was very moderate land reform and today again you'll see Maoist celebrating this saying that Mao is this amazing guy who fought the landlords. Actually most of the time they're in these rural bases they didn't really fight the landlords. Partly because their political line as I said wasn't actually that revolutionary but mainly for survival. Because they were forced into the countryside they had to rely upon, they didn't have an industrial urban base to provide them with the equipment that they needed. So in order to get that equipment they had to trade essentially and to trade with the cities they needed to keep the merchants with the right connections and the richer landlords who produced food more abundantly. They had to keep them sweet essentially in order to be able to survive essentially. So actually although they said they did a lot of land reform the land reform was pretty moderate actually. Usually it was constantly varying in degree how radical it was but in general it was pretty moderate and they didn't end landlordism where they were based. However it was far more than what the Guamandang was doing which was a regime essentially of landlords and warlords. So it was an enormous in the eyes of Chinese peasants this was an enormously progressive and exciting thing. It didn't have to do that much to stand out essentially and that paid dividends for them in the Civil War. I should also explain that Mao was also I think a tactical genius in the Civil War. I think the political line was pretty weak as I've said but the tactics of how to fight a Civil War or how to fight guerrilla warfare were fantastic and there were many examples of amazing battles that they fought in which they were hugely outnumbered but they were very good at being flexible, at moving very quickly concentrating their forces very effectively in certain weak spots of the enemy and defeating them. Whereas the Guamandang leaders were craven, lazy, brutal all the things I've described they treated their own soldiers appallingly as you know and they generally weren't prepared to fight. In fact being a warlord's regime which is ironic because he was a nationalist and Chiang Kai-shek was supposed the bourgeois revolution is supposed to create the nation state it's supposed to knock down feudal barriers but actually he found himself having to rely upon the old warlords because he was basically the candidate of anyone who wanted to destroy the Communist Party that was his role in society. So he based himself on the most reactionary layers, the warlords and so actually the country fell back into warlordism which was a huge step backwards and that also inhibited both the war against Japan and the Civil War because these warlords often didn't want to fight they wouldn't even allow the forces of the Guamandang into their province so that would also undermine their efforts. By 1948 the Chinese Communist Party was able to move from guerrilla warfare into positional warfare meaning occupying large cities and defending them and to be honest this was astonishingly easy by this point there were so many defections that they actually had a numerical advantage and they just took city after city because it was just abandoned essentially especially in Manchuria which were the first cities they took in the north of the country the Guamandang just abandoned key cities like Beijing, Tianjin and then further down south in Nanjing and the only big city that really did put up any resistance to the Communist Party was Shanghai but even then that fought terribly because the officers just kept everyone in a rigid formation so although they had a numerical advantage when the Communist Party attacked one part of the city all of the soldiers stationed in different parts of the city would just stay put they wouldn't move into that area so they also defeated them quite easily there so yes it was a thoroughly corrupt and discredited regime however many regimes that get overthrown in fact probably all regimes that get overthrown in revolutions are thoroughly corrupt and discredited so why was the Communist Party able to overthrow them in this peculiar way from the countryside which you can't normally do to be honest first I think the main thing here is the existence of World War II which is a rather exceptional circumstance I'm sure you will agree World War II created a very chaotic and unpredictable situation and it was a situation in which all of the major capitalist powers of the world Germany, Britain, America, Japan were tearing each other to pieces essentially and no one could predict what the outcome of that would be and capitalism kind of came close to being destroyed the Soviet Union was able to massively increase its power and sweep in all the way to Central Europe in fact even taking parts of Germany which is an astonishing development that nobody predicted and really in a sense you could say a similar thing happened in China I think Japan invading China really in a sense ironically rescued the Communist Party it distracted, to be honest I think they were about to be destroyed by the Guamandang as I said 90% of them had died in the long march which ended in 1935 so only two years before Japan fully invaded but by invading it completely distracted the Guamandang it massively discredited the Guamandang because it was so pathetic at fighting Japan and didn't really want to fight them and it was quite obvious that that was the case and so the Communist Party again had this role kind of almost forced upon them I mean they were very admittedly to their credit they were very loud about wanting to fight Japan but to be honest they actually very rarely did fight Japan because they didn't have the capacity to do it and a couple of instances where they did actually launch battles against the Japanese they were absolutely smashed but that obviously won them a lot of credit amongst Chinese people so at least someone is standing up to these imperialists so that really I think did rescue them and there was a very specific thing that came out of it which is that right at the end of the war when Japan was about to be defeated the Soviet Union suddenly declared war on Japan and it invaded Manchuria the part of China that the Japanese had particular strengthened and within about two weeks had fully taken over and in doing so they captured 700,000 Japanese weapons both heavy and light weapons which they gave over entirely to the Chinese Communist Party which was obviously an enormous boost and to be honest if that wasn't given to them it's very likely that they wouldn't have been able to win the war so that's clearly not a generalisable thing you can't generally say well Mao was correct we can launch revolutionary civil wars from the countryside all over the world and to do so we'll just get 700,000 weapons from the Soviet Union that's not a normal circumstance it was very exceptional situation and finally it also meant that America was not able to intervene America was exhausted by the war it fought a war on two fronts and it had won of course there was no real appetite for opening up a second front if you look at where similar guerrilla struggles were attempted in Latin America and in Africa the CIA quite effectively intervened from the beginning to nip them in the bud especially after the experience of Cuba and that's actually how Che Guevara died in Bolivia so in general they found it quite easy to get rid of guerrilla struggles when they had the energy and the resources to do so but on a country the size of China when they had just fought the biggest war in history they weren't really prepared to do so and that combined with the rottenness of the Chiang Kai-shek regime which they realised I mean the Americans were tearing their hair out at Chiang Kai in fact they were even proposing that he form a coalition government with the communists because they thought well first of all they didn't really believe the communists were real communists there's various wires from people in the CIA saying it but they're not real communists so they're fine but also they thought they just had no other option they just thought Chiang Kai-shek was an utter joke and basically to win the war against the communist party America would have had to have intervened in a full way like they did in Vietnam with hundreds of thousands of troops and obviously this would have been like Vietnam times 100 because China is absolutely immense and in fact this is also proven by the fact they couldn't even win the war in Korea only a couple of years later so that essentially is how the regime fell and in quite a sort of straightforward manner in the end in 1948 and 9 they just kind of marched into these cities with no real resistance and in a kind of final act of corruption if you like just to prove how rotten they were Chiang Kai-shek and the leading members of the bourgeoisie his crony capitalists fled the country into Taiwan that's the reason that Taiwan is no longer part of China taking 300 million dollars of the state's gold reserves with him and also all of it or not all probably not all of it but as much art that he could carry and also during the war I should also point out that many of the generals in Chiang Kai-shek's army actually sold American weapons on to the Chinese Communist Party to make some money so basically they were a class that realised their time was up I don't think they really had much of a belief in their struggle they just wanted to make some money essentially and they gave up the fights pretty quickly but nevertheless we have to say despite all of my criticisms the Chinese Communist Party did win and of course it was an absolutely epic and heroic struggle so you might conclude that this was ultimately justified and in a sense it was and the country did take enormous strides afterwards which we will discuss but also it came with a big, big price the reason that we're against making guerrilla warfare the main method of struggle in revolution is not just because it's dangerous and you're unlikely to win and you'll get wiped out but it's also because it's no basis for establishing a healthy worker's democracy which is what you need to build socialism you can't build socialism on a top-down basis from a bureaucracy and that is the lesson of Stalinism and that was made inevitable by coming to power in this way because if you think about it, first of all they're basing themselves on what? on the peasantry the peasantry you might think is the rural equivalent of the working class because it's very, very poor but it isn't really scattered and a heterogeneous class whereas the working class lives in big cities and works in large workplaces collectively the peasantry generally has its own private plots of land they live in a very scattered and far away way the means of communication are very, very poor it's very, very hard to travel anywhere to have like a mass meeting of peasants for example and actually their interests are different because we call them the peasantry they're one class but actually there's rich and poor peasants there's an enormous amount of social stratification in the peasantry in most countries so many people that are called peasants actually would be relatively well off by their standards and would employ landless peasants on their farms and of course then you have the landless peasants who obviously are more like the working class because they don't have any property so it's a heterogeneous class and it's a scattered class that makes it politically impotent and all of history has shown this that the peasantry can play a very, very important role with the weight of numbers by backing one side or another in revolutions and in wars but they're not able to play an independent political role for the reasons I've outlined they can't have mass meetings they can't really form effective trade unions and hold their leaders to account when they've got divergent interests and when they live so far apart and also of course the Red Army had to occupy different bits of territory and they would move from one place to another quite quickly in order to evade the Guam and Dang when it was attempting to wipe them out and they actually had to get fed by the peasants so there are actually some cases where the Communist Party had to leave areas because the peasants got fed up with them because the peasants were having to feed themselves and the Red Army but also they were armed to the teeth obviously and they were moving from territory to territory so that also makes it very difficult to exercise any kind of democratic control over this Red Army and this Communist Party if they just move into your territory one week uninvited because they've got to because they're fighting to survive and they've got a lot of weapons you're not really in a position to establish a democratic structure and recall members of the Communist Party and put different people in their place it's just not viable and then they would leave again quite quickly afterwards in order for military purposes so it was impossible to have any real democratic control over the leadership and therefore as you would expect from a military it was a very top-down, commandist kind of structure used to issuing orders and getting what it wants and of course it came into the cities in 1949 as kind of a foreign power to the workers as something that was very alien to them most workers did support it because they despised the regime they did welcome it but they were very passive they hadn't staged their own revolution in which they'd created their own organs of struggle like workers councils, factory committees and defensive organisations of struggle and strike committees and all the rest of it they hadn't done that because there hadn't been that kind of revolution so the working class wasn't organised it didn't have its own leaders, its own structures really and then suddenly this incredibly powerful military force comes into the city that is used to issuing orders once naturally of course it was not really something that the working class could hold to accounts and indeed when the workers did after the Communist Party came to power when the workers did attempt to form their own democratic organisations their own trade unions or have strikes the Communist Party put them down pretty quickly and of course also you have to add that they were modelling themselves on Stalin's Russia so naturally it was also for that reason as well inclined to go in a Stalinist direction however actually when they first came to power they didn't do so with the idea of ending capitalism and I've already explained how throughout the course of the revolution their position was one of basically supporting the bourgeoisie or the so-called national bourgeoisie the sort of progressive liberal bourgeoisie their position was I guess a little bit like if well in fact it was very much like a lot of the Labour Party's positions in a sense it was essentially a coalition with like the remainers the sort of liberal bourgeoisie against the right wing kind of bourgeoisie it was kind of a position like that essentially that was kind of they said that we support the liberal progressive bourgeoisie that was their position up until taking power and when they did take power they continued that position they called it new democracy actually and this is how they described it they said it is a law of Marxism that socialism can be attained only via the stage of democracy meaning bourgeois democracy and in China the fight for democracy is a protracted one it would be a sheer illusion to try to build a socialist society on the ruins of colonial semi-feudal order without a united new democratic state without the development of the state sector of this economy and of the private capitalist and cooperative sectors Liu Xiaoqi also elaborated he said the immediate policy of the communist party is to realise completely its minimum programme it is known that the communist party of China has in addition to its minimum programme a maximum programme which means socialism which is not included in the common programme now in the course of consultation some delegates and this is quite interesting proposed to write the future socialism of China into the common programme that is their programme for power but we deem this to be out of place because the taking of serious socialist steps in China is a thing of the far, far future they also issued flattery towards the United States for example they said China must industrialise this can be done in China only by free enterprise and with the aid of foreign capital Chinese and American interests are correlated and similar they fit together economically and politically the United States would find us more cooperative than the Guam and Dangwa so be afraid of democratic American influence in fact we welcome it that was their initial policy and for the first four years after taking power they helped capitalism actually so what happened, why then did they turn and abolish capitalism which really started in 1953 well basically because again they didn't anticipate how counter-revolutionary the bourgeoisie is in particular in this case the international bourgeoisie they had this naive idea I don't know to what extent they necessarily actually believed it but that's what they put forward that we can kind of win the bourgeoisie to us by flattering them and offering them sweet deals and things but various things happened the US basically blockaded China because it couldn't tolerate the biggest country in the world being under the control of the Communist Party and it was called the Communist Party and it had close relations with the Soviet Union the Cold War was beginning they weren't going to allow that to happen so they blockaded them and that kind of forced them in a certain direction there was also the Korean War which pushed everything to the left because America was fighting against Communists right on their doorstep and so that also helped them to draw the conclusion they needed to move away from capitalism and to shore up their own industry by nationalising things but also the reality of the Chinese capitalist class most of them had actually fled to Taiwan because the big capitalists had fled to Taiwan with Chiang Kai-shek and actually they nationalised the property of the big capitalists that were around Chiang Kai-shek right from the beginning that was always their idea to nationalise his associates property but in doing so they discovered they'd nationalised four-fifths of China's industry because it was concentrated in very few hands and they then tried to run it as a nationalised capitalist entity but they ended up by 1953 basically going with a plan of production and there was also another reason for it which is in many respects similar to the reason that Britain nationalised a lot of things after the Second World War the economy was absolutely wrecked by the war and you needed to be honest massive state intervention and protectionism to help build it up which is a big part of the reason that my time is up I assume that that atly and then even after him the Conservatives actually nationalised quite a lot of things that's part of the reason anyway we should say that after they did so the initial results were extremely good the first five-year plan in 1953 onwards to 1958 was a huge success wages rose by a third life expectancy increased from 36 to 57 in only eight years the number of children in school doubled and housing improved massively there was a massive programme of the building of social housing in the cities and in the country side and you have to remember that China was pretty much the poorest country in the world in 1949 and there were many pro-working class and progressive policies they ended casual labour actually from 1949 onwards they did grant a lot of land reform to poor peasants and they granted women absolutely transformational rights that they had the role of women in Chinese society beforehand was incredibly oppressed they ended foot binding for example they abolished the buying and selling of wives and made it far easier for women to divorce their husbands which were huge steps forward so we have to pay homage to these sacrifices that were these victories that were gained through the enormous sacrifices of literally millions of people who fought in this epic struggle between the counter-revolutionary Chiang Kai-shekha and the Communist Party this immense hardship they did transform the country and I would say they laid the basis for the current success of China admittedly Chinese capitalism but by establishing a strong state apparatus free of the domination of imperialism they laid the basis for that as well however ultimately the fact that they didn't establish a worker's democracy in this way for the reasons I've described the fact that it was a bureaucratic dictatorship wasn't just an unpleasant thing in many ways didn't just cause a lot and I should say there were a lot while there were successes of the planned economy there were absolutely staggering mistakes and appalling things that were carried out that led to the deaths of millions but as well as that the inability to build socialism without democracy in a top down way has led to the present restoration of capitalism in China and all the evils of capitalism that have come back with that