History Is the Chinese Communist Party’s Worst EnemyThe deciding battle for the fate of the CCP may be waged over its history, rather than in the political, economic, or even military realms.by Francis Grice
September 9, 2018 In conventional accounts of the Chinese Revolutionary Civil War (1926–1949), Mao Zedong is shown towering heroically above a great throng of adoring peasants, who have surged up in a great wave to defeat their imperialist foes and propel the Communists into power. Commonplace during Mao’s reign, this depiction remains a major keystone in Chinese Communist Party (CCP) propaganda and claims to legitimacy today. Yet, its truthfulness has come into question in recent years and this directly threatens the survival of the Party.
A growing number of historians—both in China and abroad—have begun to unpick the myth. Among the most prominent are Jung Chang and John Halliday , who wrote a scathing retelling of Mao’s life and actions, with the thesis that Mao and his followers were bloodthirsty thugs who bullied their way into power through anti-civilian violence, sinister manipulation and dumb luck. Chang and Halliday’s revisionism has been demonized by the CCP (and condemned by some Western Sinologists), but their core claims about the cruelty and fundamental unpopularity of the CCP during this early period have been correlated by numerous other researchers.
One particularly revealing investigation was conducted by the Chinese historian, Sun Shuyun , who retraced the footsteps of Mao and the Communists during their infamous “Long March†retreat from the Jiangxi Mountains to Yan’an in 1934–5. Throughout her journey, she interviewed veterans of the March and local residents who had been alive at the time, and found that they presented radically more negative versions of events than those propagated by the CCP. The research of Jean-Louis Margolin , Frank Dikötter and Rudolph Rummel into the extensive atrocities and inhumane treatment of civilians committed by the Communists during their rise to power also deserves special mention. Nor should the work of Otto Braun , who documented many of the abuses of Mao and his followers firsthand during the 1930s, only to have his reports be put aside by his superiors back in Russia for reasons of political expediency, be overlooked.
The findings from these and other investigations are bringing the real truth about the Chinese Revolutionary Civil War to light. Contrary to CCP propaganda, Mao and the Communists were mostly unknown for much of their early existence, and those people who had heard of them tended to view them with either ambivalence or outright hostility. This latter emotion came about in no small part because, under Mao’s leadership at the time, the CCP deliberately killed millions of people during two major purges in the 1930s and 1940s, as well as through ongoing mass killings and maltreatment of civilians. Unsurprisingly, this dramatically suppressed the recruitment and retention of supporters to the Communist cause.
<..snip..>
https://nationalinterest.org/feature/history-chinese-communist-party%E2%80%99s-worst-enemy-30832
