14 { China’s Quest
used to legitimize CCP rule were no longer persuasive with a wide swath of
the Chinese people. In this situation, the CCP effectively seized on aggrieved
nationalism and itself as defender of the nation to relegitimize its rule, while
waging unremitting struggle against bourgeois liberal ideas. China emerged
as a nondemocratic but leading world power in a world dominated by liberal
powers and swept by liberal ideas.
Act I of PRC foreign relations entailed the destruction of capitalism and
the establishment of Soviet-style socialism and dictatorship. This required
securing Soviet cooperation for this process and crushing opposition within
China to the “transition to socialism.” Confrontation with the United States
created an atmosphere of crisis and fear, of imminent foreign attack, condu-
cive to pushing through the monumental changes required to push China’s
revolution into the socialist stage. Confrontation with the United States also
made Stalin and later Soviet leaders willing to help make the PRC a strong
socialist power. Broad cooperation with the Soviet Union was essential to
swift implantation and development in China of “advanced” socialist institu-
tions. Then, once this new socialist economy and Leninist dictatorship was in
place, Mao used it to impose on China a forced-march hyperindustrialization
that he expected would move China rapidly toward the goal of utopian com-
munism. Mao used his new Leninist state structures in a massive attempt at
social engineering to guide the thinking of the entire Chinese people and
transform them into a new communist person. This was China’s totalitarian
experiment: an attempt at total control to achieve a total transformation of
society.^17 To proceed forward, that experiment had to overcome immense op-
position and simple weariness.
The imposition of a Soviet-style socialist economic system on China
entailed the elimination of private ownership and market-based economic
activity. China’s industrialists, bankers and financiers, and merchants, of
course, resisted this “socialist transformation of commerce and industry.”
So too did the many millions of shopkeepers and innkeepers, traders and
peddlers, restaurateurs, tailors, cobblers, barbers, and other skilled trades-
men, who operated businesses large and small and who had often accumu-
lated a modest amount of wealth. These were the sort of people who, over
China’s long history, had made it one of the wealthiest nations in the world,
and who after 1978 would do the same again. Yet these were the groups
that were “liquidated as a class” by the “transition to socialism.” Of course
they resisted and were bitter at the expropriation of their property by the
state. As Mao explained to his comrades in the aftermath of the Hungarian
anticommunist uprising of 1956, “the bourgeoisie” would resist strongly
their overthrow and would need to be dealt with by the sternest repression.
There were also people in the CCP leadership who believed that a longer
period of “transition to socialism” was necessary, one perhaps lasting even
decades.