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The Chinese Revolution in Russian Perspective
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 18 July 2011
Extract
SPECIALISTS on Chinese communism are in the habit of brushing responsibility for strange or abhorrent phenomena off onto Soviet Russia. This may be largely justified; communism is clearly a foreign import in China, whatever the reasons for its success or the extent of its adaptation. But to an observer whose understanding of communism is based primarily on the study of Soviet Russia, the history of Chinese communism—now a full decade of national rule, following nearly thirty years of evolution—presents a number of peculiarities. Comparison with Russia suggests several lines of interpretation which may shed light on the past and present status of communism in China and the Far East.
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- Copyright © Trustees of Princeton University 1961
References
1 My debt to Brinton's, CraneAnatomy of Revolution (New York, 1938)CrossRefGoogle Scholar is obvious, but in addition I regard what I term the “post-revolutionary dictatorship” of the Cromwell-Bonaparte-Stalin-Hitler pattern as the natural conclusion of the process.
2 See, e.g., Holcombe, Arthur N., The Chinese Revolution, Cambridge, Mass., 1929, pp. 224–44.Google Scholar
3 My concept of Communist irrationality may cause some confusion among students of communism who are accustomed to view the Communist thought process as the rational application of a rigidly held doctrine. It is my contention that in the evolution of communism the doctrine has been broadly reinterpreted to justify practical action, despite the unyielding insistence that the movement represents Marxian orthodoxy. Doctrine then becomes not a rational guide, but a source of irrational self-assurance sustainable only by complete thought-control.
For further clarification of my approach, the reader may refer to some of my other publications, particularly the introduction to A Documentary History of Communism (New York, 1960) and chapters 12 and 13 of The Conscience of the Revolution: Communist Opposition in Soviet Russia (Cambridge, Mass., 1960).
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7 The 1951 program of the Viet Minh went even farther in the nationalistic alliance of all classes, with the guarantee of rent payments to “patriotic landlords.” See “Manifesto of the Viet-Nam Lao Dong Party,” People's China (Peking), May 1, 1951, Supplement, p. 3.
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