How Did Mao Zedong Criticize Marxism?

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Topic 6: An Analysis of the Peasant Nationalism, Maoist Marxism, and the Second United Front in the Communist Victory of the Chinese Civil War

This historical study will define the themes of peasant nationalism, Maoist Marxism, and the Second United Front in the communist victory in the Chinese Civil War. The civil war between the Kuomintang (KMT) of the Republic of China and the Communist Party of China (CPC) from 1927 to 1950 involved lengthy battle between capitalist and communist forces. The KMT often relied on “modernization” in a primarily urban focus in contrast to the CPC’s focus on galvanizing the peasant classes in the rural areas of China. Under the leadership of Mao, the peasant classes were far more numerous and impoverished
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In comparisons to the urban cities of China, the massive populations of the rural agrarian sectors provided a strong base to counter the more exclusively urban populations that often alienated the poor working peasants in the countryside: “Mao Zedong’s policy during the before and during the Civil War continued to be peasant support: “The main body of the masses”, he noted, “ consists of the workers, peasants, and other working people” (Girling, 2015, p.103). This aspect of the communist view of the working classes and peasantry define the collectivism of mass-revolt, which was successful in recruiting larger rural populations to fight the KMT during this …show more content…
This communist point of view was essential to the success of Mao in altering the uneducated and impoverished mindset of the rural peasant classes, which were now politically empowered to take back farming land and other foundations of economic resources. Mao’s communist leadership defines the unique adaption of Marxism in a rural setting: “For out of Mao’s version of Marxism one found a state of grace. He projected himself both as the translator of Marxism to Chinese conditions, and the creator of a generalized theory of third world Marxism” (Apter & Saich, 1994, p.17). these aspects of political life in rural China in the 1930s and into the 1940s, defined the successful implementation of Marxist policies that inspired the peasant classes to organize large scale armies and political movements to support the rights of the majority; hence, the working classes and the peasant farming classes that were the dominant population in China. Mao had exploited this major weakness in the KMT urban revolutionary methods, which allowed him to succeed through the tenets of a people’s popular revolt in rural areas under the political banner of the

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