Mao Zedong and the Conquest of China

Abstract

By the summer of 1937, the situation in republican China had taken on portentous properties. Insistence that the government mobilize resistance to Japanese aggressions had matured to the point that nominal allies of the Nationalist Party leadership chose to force Chiang Kai-shek to modify his policies. There was a constant drumbeat for a fully committed patriotic War of Resistance against Japan—and it is clear that Chiang’s decision, in that summer, to move against Japan was not entirely of his own choosing. Nonetheless, the very fact that Chiang was prepared to modify the temperate policies that he had pursued for seven years with respect to Japan reflected his conviction that he had completed at least the minimum preparations for mounting a plausible defense against the modern armies of the Empire of Japan.²

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In spite of certain unavoidable weaknesses, for instance, its smallness (as compared with the peasantry), its youth (as compared with the proletariat in the capitalist countries) and its low educational level (as compared with the bourgeoisie), the Chinese proletariat is nonetheless the basic motive force of the Chinese Revolution. Unless it is led by the proletariat, the Chinese Revolution cannot possibly succeed.

—Mao Zedong¹