This chapter seeks to document and interpret the development of Mao Tse-tung's thought during the first three decades of his active political life. Manifestly, Mao Tse-tung's was able to work effectively in such a formal context because he attached primary importance to national unification and China's struggle to throw off the domination of the imperialists, and accepted that, for the moment, the Kuomintang and its army were the best instrument for achieving this. Mao had already in 1939-40 characterized the regime to be established after the war as a 'joint dictatorship of several revolutionary classes', and had made it fairly clear that this dictatorship was to be under the effective control of the proletariat, or of its ' vanguard', the Chinese Communist Party. Mao sought to promote, in the period from 1939 onwards, a 'new democratic' revolution in China which would be a kind of functional equivalent of the capitalist stage in the development of European society.

Religion in Chinese Society

Mao Tse-tung's thought to 1949

China's top foreign policy goal was to develop good relations with its socialist "elder brother", the Soviet Union. The newly established People's Republic of China was soon faced with the outbreak of the Korean War in June 1950. The Sino-American antagonism fueled by the Korean War set the pattern for the subsequent Cold War in Asia. Consequently the potential friction between China and the Soviet Union was played down by both sides. In the mid-1950s China's foreign policy thus followed what might be termed the Bandung Line of peaceful coexistence. China's prestige and influence rose steadily, and at one point Peking seemed to be emerging as the champion of the world's newly independent nations. Mao Tse-tung witnessed the signing of the Sino-Soviet Treaty of Friendship and Alliance, and the treaty was basically a military pact designed to display the monolithic unity of China and the Soviet Union against any resurgence of Japanese militarism.

Foreign relations: from the Korean War to the Bandung Line

The war with Japan was surely the most momentous event in the history of the Republican era in China. During the Nanking decade, Chiang had particularly stressed modernization of the armed forces. Most dramatic of Nationalist China's several acts of wartime mobilization was the removal of population, government, schools and factories from the coastal areas to the interior. General Wedemeyer similarly insisted that ' the Nationalist Government of China, far from being reluctant to fight as pictured by Stilwell and some of his friends among the American correspondents, had shown amazing tenacity and endurance in resisting Japan', whereas 'no communist Chinese forces fought in any of the major engagements of the Sino-Japanese war'. The Ichigo offensive had inflicted terrible losses upon Nationalist China. The demoralization of Nationalist China was largely due to the corrosive effects of inflation and the changing political and military aims of the government.

Nationalist China during the Sino-Japanese War 1937–1945

INTRODUCTION The late Ming period is taken here to begin in the 1520s and cover the final six reigns of the dynasty before it collapsed in Peking in the spring of 1644. There were several moments of significant change in what might be called the political standing of those engaged in the sort of intellectual activities which attracted contemporaries' and historians' notice. In the 1520s, the newly enthroned Chia-ching Emperor succeeded in asserting his will over the leadership of the bureaucracy and alienating a significant cohort of officials and literati in the process. In the same decade, Wang Yang-ming gathered large numbers of followers to his new teachings before he died in 1529. Wang's ideas were criticized while he was still alive for deviating from the imperially sanctioned version of Neo-Confucianism. Twenty-five years later, his ideas were being taken more seriously than the official version by thousands of literati. In 1553 and 1554, for the first time in the North, large gatherings of literati and officials in Peking discussed Wang's teachings. The years 1529 to 1554 witnessed continued growth of the influence of the ideas of Wang and his disciples. During the next twenty-five years, from 1554 to 1579, there was a proliferation of versions of ideas stimulated by Wang's teachings. Men who were barely literate, as well as literati and officials, became involved in discussions of these teachings in all provinces, although they were most influential in Chekiang, Kiangsi, and the Southern Metropolitan Area (Nan Chih-li). In 1579, the powerful Grand Secretary, Chang Chu-cheng (1525–82), sought to suppress much of what he disparaged as vain philosophic chatter about morality.

Confucian learning in late Ming thought

The late Yuan popular rebellions began in 1351 when two independent White Lotus Societies, in north and south China, both purveying a chiliastic Buddo-Manichean ideology, recruited to their cause a following of socially miscellaneous elements who called themselves Red Turbans, and provoked an empire-wide attack upon the landlords and the local officials. One key to the failure of the rebels to rise above the rioting phase lay in their inability to gain massive and sustained peasant support. The result was that the landlord gentry, leading peasant militia (i-ping), were able to contain and suppress these riots by 1353–54 in cooperation with the Yuan bureaucracy. However, when the Yuan Chancellor Toghto was for political reasons cashiered in January 1355, the dynasty lost control of the pacification process. In these circumstances, new leadership emerged from both of the original rebel organizations, and stepping into the control vacuum left by the Yuan, pressed an entirely new policy of cooperation with the landlord gentry and their i-ping. The main leaders in this were Ch'en Yu-liang and the future Ming founder, Chu Yuan-chang. Chu's victory over Ch'en, his chief rival, is due largely to the tighter centralization of his embryonic imperial regime.

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Religion in Chinese Society

Citations

Mao Tse-tung's thought to 1949

Foreign relations: from the Korean War to the Bandung Line

Nationalist China during the Sino-Japanese War 1937–1945

Confucian learning in late Ming thought

The Transformations of Messianic Revolt and the Founding of the Ming Dynasty

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