EL ARPA SUENA EN TAILANDIA

The legacies of the 1911 Revolution and Sun Yat-sen, as defined by CCP writers during the Civil War, shared many similar traits. The legacy of the 1911 Revolution was also intertwined with

were seen as helping only those industries owned by government officials or their associates; Suzanne Pepper, Civil War in China: The Political Struggle, 1945-1949 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978), 118-131. After 1949, while the CCP lacked clear support from urban populations, the Nationalists had so ruined their image in the cities through mismanagement and corruption that many were hopeful for any change the CCP might bring; Meisner, Mao’s China and After, 77-79.

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that of Sun Yat-sen because Sun led the 1911 Revolution. One message that particularly stood out in the legacy of the 1911 Revolution was the idea of unity with the masses. CCP writers all admitted that the unity of the revolutionaries with the masses during the 1911 Revolution was incomplete, but that the failure of the 1911 Revolution had taught China the necessity of complete unification with the masses. All the 1911 Revolution’s successes were due to the initial unity between the masses and the revolutionaries; conversely, all later failures were due to the revolutionaries’ failure to rely on the masses. This narrative developed from the themes of class analysis and the United Front in Mao Zedong Thought. For example, Chen Boda wrote:

The [1911] Revolution mainly relied on a voluntary party structure of peasant masses, which achieved some certain victories, but the bourgeoisie did not and could not possibly agree to incite the peasant masses completely. It could only incite the peasant masses to a limited degree and within certain patterns, and was prepared to end the movement at any time, so the revolution could not work out to be truly in the peasants’ favour. The bourgeoisie’s weakness, incapability and conciliatoriness was really revealed in the 1911 Revolution’s weak answer to the peasant problem. This made the revolution abortive halfway through… and allowed the Beiyang military rulers like Yuan Shikai to take power.66

Chen argued that the bourgeoisie did not have the peasants’ class interests in mind and therefore could not truly create a United Front with them. While the two classes worked together in a United Front during the times that their interests coincided—such as

overthrowing the Qing dynasty—once the alliance had accomplished that task, the two classes no longer shared any interests. Therefore, only a class that shared interests with the peasants could solve the problems of the peasantry: the proletariat and their representatives in the CCP. Hu Sheng argued that modern Chinese history proved the need for establishing true unity with

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The degree of the breadth and intimacy with which the intellectuals and masses unite is the deciding factor in the degree to which the revolution heats up. The mass movements prior to the 1911 Revolution had these sorts of defects [a lack of intimacy between intellectuals and the masses], which affected how fragile the results of the 1911 Revolution were. However, if the revolutionary intellectuals did not establish any degree of unity with the masses, then the successes of the 1911 Revolution would be unimaginable.67

A limited unity between the intellectuals and the masses produced a few results, such as the 1911 Revolution’s overthrow of the Qing dynasty. The CCP argued that a greater unity could have accomplished even more, and thus Mao’s United Front with total unity between the intellectuals and the masses could complete the goals of the 1911 Revolution, and rebuild the nation. Even military strength paled in comparison to unity with the masses, as one editorial claimed:

No matter that the Manchu Qing court’s rule was described as ‘established on an awesome scale with severely written codes’ by Chiang Kai-shek in China’s Destiny, at the time the armed forces standing on the side of the people had but to try and the Qing would come tumbling down. Even Yuan Shikai’s forces could not save the Manchu Qing from their elimination. The history of the 1911 Revolution proves that rulers who oppose the people and oppose the revolution can struggle to delay their fate for a time, but that the outcome of any struggle rests on the side of the people, whose armed forces (no matter if they appear to be too few) will always defeat the

126 armed forces of the counterrevolution.68

The lesson of the 1911 Revolution was that any revolution engaging in a United Front with the people based on shared class interests had access to a greater force than any reactionary military force. The 1911 Revolution also provided an example of a failure when the

Revolutionary Alliance negotiated with and gave power to Yuan Shikai rather than unite with the masses and carry out the revolution completely. The lesson of completely relying upon and unifying with the masses was the major lesson the CCP took from the 1911 Revolution. According to the CCP, the person behind the 1911 Revolution’s initial unity with the masses was Sun Yat-sen, so creating a United Front with the masses was both a legacy of the 1911 Revolution and of Sun Yat-sen.