Government and Administration in China Today

Wl THEN the Chinese Communists created a central government in the autumn of i949, they were able to draw on a background perhaps unique in the history of revolutionary regimes. Their responsibility, over a twenty-year period, for the administration of growing segments of the nation's territory had given them rigorous, if specialized, training in government as well as a continuing opportunity for testing their theories in practice. Although they have been and remain orthodox Marxists, a combination of trial-and-error procedure and flexibility in modifying theory on the basis of experience allowed them to develop a political and economic program-given concrete expression by Mao Tse-tung in his treatise, New Democracy (i940)-which effectively adapted Marxism to Chinese conditions and needs. With victory in the civil war, these policies could now presumably be applied to all of China. But this program, which emphasized multi-class coalition rule under the leadership of the Communist Party, based on a mixed economy of socialized, cooperative and private enterprise, with major stress on agrarian reform and organization of the peasantry, now had to meet much more severe tests. Though the application of their agrarian program had been largely responsible for their marked success in the war against the Japanese and in the subsequent struggle for power with the Kuomintang, until I949 the Communists had been able to apply other aspects of their program only to a limited degree. Based mainly on a backward rural economy, they had had very little opportunity to test their concept of furthering controlled private capitalism as part of a new democratic economy preceding the introduction of full socialism; and while they had very successfully organized popular local governments on the coalition principle, this had been done almost wholly among a politically unsophisticated peasant population and thus gave no indication whether the coalition method would prove to be a

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