Post-Maoist China: Fascism with Chinese Characteristics

Abstract

Of all the efforts that make up the contemporary search for neofascism, academic discussions devoted to the politics of the People's Republic of China have been among the most disappointing. For an extended period of time, particularly during the long years of the Second World War, a number of important Anglophone journalists and academics somehow chose to distinguish the “fascism” of Chiang Kaishek's Kuomintang from the “progressive” politics of Mao Zedong's Chinese Communist Party. It was a distinction that was to persist doggedly for decades after the war. Edgar Snow was perhaps the most notable among those who convinced Americans of the benignity of Mao Zedong. In the years immediately preceding the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Snow devoted his time and considerable talent to providing his readership with informed conjectures concerning what a communist revolution might bring to China. His work was considered so credible that it was recommended by some of America's most informed Sinologists. We were told that Snow was, in some real sense, “prophetic” – that he had accurately foreseen China's future. After a successful revolution undertaken by the Communist Party, that future would be one that included a “brief period” of “controlled capitalism” in which the “bourgeois democratic revolution” would be a preamble to the final “heroic democracy” to follow. According to Snow, the Chinese communist revolution was inspired by the “democratic Socialist ideas” for which so many Chinese had sacrificed themselves – ideas that presumably included the “rights of freedom of speech, assembly, [and] organization” that had previously been denied them by Chinese “fascism” and its agents.