Politics in China: Were the events (June Fourth Tiananmen Square Crisis) of 1989 a counter-revolution?

Running Head : Were the Events of Tiananmen a Counter-Revolution

Were the Events of Tiananmen a Counter-Revolution

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The Chinese Revolution the road to Tiananmen Incident : An Introduction

When Mao declared the establishment of the Peoples Republic of China on October 1 , 1949 in Tiananmen Square , he did not declare to be initiating the autocracy of the proletariat . He stuck to Stalin 's two-stage theory which called for the continuation of capitalism and the construction of a "bloc of four classes " including the peasantry , the urban trivial

br bourgeoisie and the "national " bourgeoisie and allegedly led by the working class . In fact the working class had remained a bystander in the civil war and implemented no pressure on the government of the Chinese Communist Party

Thus CCP took reins of the country with a standpoint that represented a diverse mixture of Stalinism and peasant extremism . It had long since distanced itself from its earliest working class base . The new state set up by Mao provided no measures for either the working class or the peasantry to apply democratic control . It was bureaucratic machinery based upon the Red Army and its top officers and government commissar

The Contradictions of Maoism

At the same time as setting up police-state machinery to control the working class and peasantry , the CCP carried through revolutionary actions of a bourgeois character . The first , and still the greatest take-over of the Chinese Revolution was the liquidation of the landlord class , which had dominated China for two millennia . Their land was seized , and then distributed to the peasants as their individual property

More radical actions were taken in response to external pressures . The escape of capitalists to Taiwan forced the government to take over most industrial facilities . Agriculture was collectivized , and then the bulk of the rural population organized into huge agricultural communes

The Great Leap Forward was Mao 's endeavor at hastening the tempo of China 's industrialization by rallying the peasants to create backyard industries , without the needed technical training or infrastructure . Its failure exposed the incongruities of Maoism that have been the characteristic of the Chinese Revolution ever since

The preliminary achievements in the planned development of industry and agriculture themselves became the basis of new problems and crises , as it was impracticable to create an high-tech industrialized economy in China cut-off from the world economy and without the conscious and enthusiastic participation of the working class

Such a development was obstructed by the Stalinist outlook of Mao and his associates , including Deng , who abandoned the world socialist revolution in support of Chinese nationalism and strait-jacketed any role for the working class within the bureaucratic machinery

These difficulties were worsened by the role of Mao himself . He had always stood on the right wing of the CCP during the period in which it was based on the working class . He played a Bonapartist role maneuvering between groups , setting against "left " in opposition to "right " the military against the civilian , industry against agriculture...