The communist party of China, the working class, and social change, 1920–1949

Abstract

The relationship between the Communist Party and the working class in producing broad-scale social change during the Chinese Revolution was ultimately limited before 1949. The working class could prove a formidable political force throughout, engaging in considerable collective action before the birth of the CCP, most successfully when it worked with the Party for two brief moments in the early 1920s and again the mid-1940s but even to some extent in the intervening years of Guomindang rule. For its part, when the CCP was able to do so in its formative years and the mid-1940s, it took its proletarian base as seriously as it could in its mobilizational exertions if not in its internal operations. But the alliance between the working class and the CCP did not – and indeed could not – produce significant gains for either. This had much to do with historical contingencies such as the infancy of the working class and the Party, Soviet meddling in Party affairs, ongoing civil war between the CCP and the Guomindang, and anti-imperial war between them and Japan. It also had to do with structural problems such as perennial economic crisis, the absence of functioning national political institutions, the disaggregation and weakness of all classes, and endemic conflicts among them, all of which made it possible for the working class to score local victories at best but only rarely regional, much less national ones. Thus, for almost two decades, the working class continued to suffer under despotic, chaotic Chinese (and, for a time, Japanese) capital, while the CCP achieved its triumphs in the countryside. The attenuated relationship between the Party and its class base, and the failure of the working class to achieve significant social change, had profound implications for politics and social change in the Maoist and structural reform decades.