China's Way to Revolution

The political strategy of Mao Tse-Tung, indeed the entire early Communist movement in China, was not planned in Moscow; in fact, it ran counter to all the rules established by Lenin and Stalin. This is the main conclusion made by the author Benjamin Schwartz, Research Associate at the Russian Research Center and assistant professor of History at Harvard.

Schwartz traces Chinese Communist development from the Russian Revolution in 1917 to Mao's emergence as China's leader. Not once does he consider incidents or personalities, but grapples only with the growth of the Communist doctrine. Only through knowing this doctrine, he says, can anyone understand China's recent history.

Before the Russian Revolution, Schwartz points out, Chinese Communism had no more followers than Bertrand Russell or John Dewey. But the 1917 revolt had a mysterious transforming effect on China's intelligence, a force that Schwartz never fully explains. He continually states that intellectuals respond to "Lenin's messianic message," but does not discuss its total effect.

Even Ch'en Tu-hsiu, the leader of the early Communist party, was not a rabid Communist. He believed in secular Manchester liberalism, yet took Party control because he thought that revolution would sweep the world. But Moscow doubted that students could carry through a revolt of national scope. Russia wanted China as an ally and designed to combine the new Communist party with the older Nationalist Koumintang as the only way to make a solid front.

Schwartz calls this period of collaboration one of the most confusing and complex in modern history. He extensively analyzes the key trends of doctrine during this era in relation to the two opposing leaders, Chiang Kai-shek and Ch'en Tu-hsiu. Mao, at that time, was busily organizing the peasants--the class he believed would instigate the revolution.

Throughout this period, Mao remained a Man of compromise. Schwartz notes that he was a persistent fence-sitter and was unwilling to destroy potential rivals. Mao continued to organize the peasants while the Party itself lost more and more strength in the cities. As his power grew, Mao's conciliatory ways vanished: he murdered frequently to maintain control of the farm areas. In 1931, when the Communists lost all control of the urban sections, Mao took over the Party.

By basing the Party on the peasant class, by having a single base of operations, and by drawing an armed force from the peasantry, Mao led the Communists to final victory in 1949.

Schwartz makes a careful unemotional study of the Communists' rise in China. His analysis of Mao, however, is not revealing; he adds little to Edgar Snow's work. But the book as a whole is a scholarly, accurate appraisal of the doctrines that transformed China.