China 1949
by Graham Hutchings
(Bloomsbury, £22.50)

THE MORE perspective we gain on the 20th century, the more the Chinese revolution must be considered as perhaps its most significant political development.

The 1949 victory of the Communist Party of China (CPC) was at once a connection with the world socialist revolution which had begun

in 1917 in Russia and emblematic of the great tide of national liberation which eventually freed Asia, Africa and the Middle East from formal dependence on imperialism.   

And it did, of course, change the system under which a quarter of the world’s people lived. This well-researched, clearly written and politically balanced book tells the story of the year in which the CPC came to power.

As the year started, the internationally recognised government of the Guomindang (nationalists), led by Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek, still controlled the south of the vast country and most key cities on the eastern seaboard.  Peace talks to end the civil war which had resumed three years earlier had faltered.

The speed of the nationalists’ collapse over the next 12 months is vividly explained by Hutchings, a former Daily Telegraph China correspondent, and now an academic. Corruption, inefficiency, endemic factionalism and authoritarianism all played a part, as did a failure to secure as much US support as the Guomindang leaders felt they had a right to expect.

As 1949 ended, Chiang only held the island of Taiwan, a hundred miles distant from the Chinese mainland.

That is one side of the coin.  On the other, the CPC had a strong and united leading group centred on Communist Party Chairman Mao Zedong and its armed force, the People’s Liberation Army (PLA). It benefited from superb military leaders like Lin Biao — later Mao’s designated successor and later still disgraced —  and from Soviet backing.

Most of all, the CPC offered a more compelling vision of China — modern, unified, efficiently and cleanly governed and, perhaps above all, free from interference and domination by the detested imperial powers. It had won over much, probably most, of the masses.

While the establishment of the People’s Republic of China, proclaimed by Mao in October that year, was the work of a communist party it was not, at that moment, an explicitly socialist project, as Hutchings rightly emphasises.  

The “national bourgeoisie,” those capitalists not tied to imperialism, were invited within the popular tent, and many preferred communist government to the corrupt rule of the nationalists, at least initially.

The influence of the Soviet model on CPC cadres was strong, of course, reinforced by Mao’s decision to “lean to one side” and support the Soviet government in the unfolding Cold War. The book contrasts Mao’s journey to Moscow to meet Stalin for the first time at the end of the year with Chiang’s final flight to Taiwan.

But the new government in China differed from the Bolsheviks in two major respects, which Hutchings could perhaps have given greater attention to.

First, the CPC was an overwhelmingly rural, peasant-rooted organisation from 1927 onwards, with only a precarious underground connection to the urban working class. The party’s “proletarian” character derived mainly from its ideology and its international context as part of the world communist movement rather than its actual social roots.

Second, the balance between party and army was rather different from the Soviet experience. In Russia, the Red Army was only established after the seizure of power by the party and always remained under civilian party leadership.  

In China, party and PLA were entwined for a generation and most party leaders served in the PLA, with military leaders wielding great authority within the party.

Both these differences assumed much greater importance in the subsequent history of the People’s Republic and their significance was perhaps not so obvious in 1949. However, 72 years on the CPC remains in charge and China has risen to the level of a world power with an international authority greater than it has ever had in its history.

Indisputably, China has “stood up,” as Mao proclaimed that year.  The hopes that it would swiftly become a model socialist state belong to the past but so too do the expectations of Western governments that China would adopt their socioeconomic model and “come to its senses.”

That is all beyond the scope of this excellent book, which confines its focus to the pivotal year which ended 30 years of chaos and civil conflict and opened a new chapter in China’s history — and the world’s. Well worth reading.