Fateful Embrace of Communism } 15
The CCP’s and Mao’s efforts to impose socialism were further complicated
by the fact that socialism was not what the CCP had promised when it was
contesting with the Chinese Nationalist Party (Kuomintang, or KMT) for
popular support from 1945 to 1949. In fact, during that period, when it still
needed to court public opinion and before it had gained power and consoli-
dated its dictatorship, the CCP had promised capitalism. Mao’s April 1945
political report “On Coalition Government” to the Seventh Congress of the
CCP, one of the key programmatic documents of the post–World War II
CCP-KMT struggle, for instance, lauded the role of private, capitalist enter-
prise in China’s future economic development. In it, Mao wrote:
Some people suspect that the Chinese Communists are opposed to the
development of individual initiative, the growth of private capital and
the protection of private property, but they are mistaken. It is foreign
oppression and feudal oppression that cruelly fetter the development
of the individual initiative of the Chinese people, hamper the growth
of private capital and destroy the property of the people. It is the very
task of the New Democracy we advocate to remove these fetters ... and
freely develop such private capitalist economy as will benefit ... [t he peo-
ple] and to protect all appropriate forms of private property. ... It is not
domestic capitalism but foreign imperialism and domestic feudalism
which are superfluous in China today; indeed we have too little of cap-
italism ... in China it will be necessary ... to facilitate the development of
the private capitalist sector of the economy.^18
The program advanced by the CCP prior to the seizure of power, on the
basis of which it had garnered popular support, ended once power was in its
hands. After seizing power, the CCP program of “removing the fetters” on
“private capitalism” quickly disappeared. Mao and many of his CCP com-
rades believed that both China’s advance toward communism and the rise of
China to a position of wealth and power required that the revolution move
rapidly into its “socialist stage.” The CCP dropped the 1945–1949 programs on
which it had appealed to the Chinese people and instead implemented a very
different and far less popular program. This too generated bitterness that had
to be swept aside.
Then there were China’s farmers, who with their families constituted prob-
ably well over 90 percent of China’s population in 1949. The CCP’s appeal to
China’s peasants during the 1945–1949 contest was “land to the tiller.” Mao in
“On Coalition Government” had said, “ ‘Land to the tiller’ is correct for the
present period of the revolution . . . ‘Land to the tiller’ means transferring the
land from the feudal exploiters to the peasants, turning the private property
of the feudal landlords into the private property of the peasants.” Mao contin-
ued, “The overwhelming majority of the peasants ... all except the rich peas-
ants who have a feudal tail, actively demand ‘land to the tiller.’ ”^19 In practice,