From Rebel to Ruler: One Hundred Years of the Chinese Communist Party
Tony Saich
Belknap Press (an Imprint of Harvard University Press): 2021
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China’s Leaders: From Mao to Now
David Shambaugh
Polity: 2021
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My training is in history, and my first book focused on the pre-1949 era, so it may seem unsurprising that I prefer taking a long view. But there is more than that to my preference for going back to 1921. I feel there are important clues for unravelling the riddle of the CCP’s extraordinary run in power—over seven decades and counting—in the almost three decades it spent in opposition.

I also feel that a complete consideration of Chinese Leninism requires attention to what another organisation did both before and after 1949: the Nationalist Party. The Nationalists adhered to Leninist political principles, even if its founder, Sun Yat-sen, rejected Marxist economic ideas. So, too, did Chiang Kai-shek, the Nationalist leader who succeeded Sun after the founder’s death in 1925. Chiang was the first head of a Chinese one-party state, since he led the Nationalists to national power in the late 1920s. He remained head of a one-party state, just then of an island country, from the time the Nationalists retreated to Taiwan in 1949 until his death in 1975. Decades after that, the partial Leninist extinction that never reached Beijing made it to Taiwan, and the Nationalists changed to a party that had to compete in elections, which is what it remains to this day.

How exactly is the CCP’s time in opposition relevant for making sense of the post-1949 era and contemplating the party’s future? Consider these key elements of the last decades. In the process of surviving existential threats, its leaders have shifted gears ideologically, engaged in bold policy experiments and benefited from international developments. An example of shifting gears came when CCP leaders took to celebrating the ideas of Confucius—someone Mao had derided as a ‘feudal’ thinker. An example of experimentation came when, after an economic boom made entrepreneurs a potentially problematic force, the party brought some into the CCP. An example of benefiting from an international development came in the 1990s, when Moscow’s leaders lost control over territory and Russia’s economy and stature plummeted, events the CCP presented to domestic audiences as evidence of how quickly countries can lose hard-won gains when one-party rule ends.

There are pre-1949 precedents for each phenomenon. The first existential threat the party faced came in April 1927. Chiang initially continued the anti-imperialist, anti-warlord united front with the CCP that Sun had forged. Two years later, though, he had Nationalist soldiers and thugs carry out an anti-red purge that left many CCP members dead or in jail. That same spring, Mao, shifting gears as dramatically as his successors did when they embraced Confucius, proposed that peasants, dismissed in classical Marxism as a reactionary group, could lead the revolution. This was followed by a related early policy experiment: the CCP began focussing on mobilising in rural areas rather than urban ones.

As for international developments, they figured in the CCP’s pre-1949 survival in two ways. First, Moscow sent aid. Second, Japanese military moves into China from 1931 on limited Chiang’s ability to carry through his goal of exterminating the CCP. They even led to a second united front period (1937-1945), after a regional strongman had Chiang kidnapped and made his release contingent on the Nationalist leader agreeing to join forces with the CCP against Japan.

There are also some specific intriguing pre-1949 precedents for what we find in Xi’s China, which illustrate the value of making the story of Chinese Leninism a tale of two parties. Xi is not the first leader to defend his organisation’s monopoly on power, warn that people in a foreign capital want to undermine his party and celebrate Confucian values. This cocktail was first served up by Chiang during the New Life Movement of the 1930s, long before Xi began using a similar mixology in the New Era—similar, not identical, as Moscow was the foreign capital to be wary of in Chiang’s recipe, while Washington is in Xi’s.

Turning to the four books, I will begin with the one I find most appealing: Tony Saich’s From Rebel to Ruler: One Hundred Years of the Chinese Communist Party, the only work in the quartet that moves forward from 1921. I will end with Roger Garside’s China Coup: The Great Leap to Freedom, which focuses on the Xi era. In between I will discuss two books by political scientists based at George Washington University: David Shambaugh’s China’s Leaders: From Mao to Now, and Bruce Dickson’s The Party and the People: Chinese Politics in the 21st Century, which take 1949 and 1989, respectively, as their starting points.

I find value in all four books, even if I think each could have benefited from its author having more to say about a Leninist party other than the CCP that rose to power during the twentieth century but ultimately lost its monopoly on power after a long stretch. I do not mean a Communist Party that was part of the former Soviet bloc. I mean instead the anti-Communist Chinese Nationalist Party, whose members were, in Saich’s terms, ‘rebels’ and then ‘rulers’ but lately have had to do something that the CCP’s leaders have never had to do: compete for power in open elections.

The strongest chapters in From Rebel to Ruler, an engagingly written and conventionally structured narrative history, are its early ones. This is to be expected. For even though in his current position—he teaches at Harvard’s Kennedy School—Saich often focuses on recent events, his first book was on a Dutchman sent to China by Moscow to help the fledgling CCP. He later co-wrote an important book on the Yan’an base area in the 1940s, a time when Mao first encouraged people to speak freely about what the CCP could do better and then moved against those who expressed dissenting views—a pattern that would be repeated to tragic effect after 1949. While the book’s ‘rebel’ parts are the liveliest and richest, the ‘ruler’ ones are solid and informative. This is not a book for those in search of self-confident forecasts. Saich makes none. He simply presents the CCP as a ruling organisation that has weathered major challenges successfully so many times in the past that it would be dangerous to assume it will not continue to do so.

I would be proud if I had written From Rebel to Ruler, and I could easily imagine writing a book quite like it except for one thing: I would have to possess, as I do not, the sort of deep detailed knowledge of the personalities and policy shifts of CCP history that Saich has acquired. If I did write such a book, however, I would make one important change: I would bring the Nationalists in more. Saich has plenty to say about the CCP’s complicated interactions with its great frenemy. I would have also liked, though, to see him compare and contrast factional tensions and ideological struggles within that other Leninist party with the CCP ones he dissects so skilfully.

China’s Leaders, in which Shambaugh cautiously claims that the party will likely either engage in major political reforms or fall in the medium if not necessarily near future, also impressed me but left me hungering for more on the Nationalists. A highly regarded and experienced specialist in the study of Chinese elite politics, Shambaugh is in his element delineating the overlaps and divergences in the leadership styles of Mao and four of his successors. A particularly strong part of the book presents the order-obsessed Xi’s personality cult as both building on and breaking from the earlier one of the chaos-loving Mao. It is that section, as good as it is, that could have benefited from bringing in the Nationalists, for there, too, we have a founder and a successor who had personality cults.

There are contrasts between the pairs, including the fact that Sun was never the object of the same millenarian adoration that Mao was, and Chiang took power right after Sun died, while Xi took power decades after Mao’s death. Still, there are parallels that Shambaugh could have explored. In each case, we see a mix of continuities and divergences. In each case, the successor is not venerated to the same degree as the founder, but while this suggests something being diminished, there is also an addition: each successor brings a new theme into a Leninist creed. Sun’s cult was not connected to anti-Communism, but Chiang’s cult combined themes from Sun’s ideology with themes from the international anti-red crusade. Mao’s cult was not connected to promoting China’s classical tradition, but the Xi cult blends appeals to both ‘red’ and ‘Confucian’ values.

This is the second of a three-part essay to mark the centenary of the Chinese Communist Party. Next: The party people

• Tags: China, Free to read, Jeffrey Wasserstrom, Notebook