The Early Chinese Communists

A final blog entry from J.F. Jenner's book The Tyranny of History - The Roots of China's Crisis (The Penguin Press, 1994) where he painted a positively upbeat picture of the early Chinese Communists (pictured).

When the civil war ended in 1949 the units of the People's Liberation Army that entered the cities "seemed very different" from the Nationalist forces they had just driven out.

"They behaved properly and did not loot or rape. The officials who came with them in shabby cotton uniforms evidently believed in what they were doing, and did not seem to be trying to enrich themselves," Jenner wrote.

It was hard to oppose a party doing such things as rapidly restoring an economy ravaged by over a decade of war, protecting the property of nearly everybody, including most business people, and addressing urgent pressing problems that were in obvious need of solutions.

"Even the widespread killings during the land reform in the villages were mainly of the more privileged and did not challenge the principle of private ownership of land. Raging inflation was brought down to imperceptibly low rates. Corruption, whether by officials or business, was harshly punished. And China's part in the Korean war showed that the Communists were capable of standing up to the world’s greatest military power. All these achievements were fired by a nationalism whose values were collective and very earthly Chinese," Jenner noted.

The Party had replaced "chaos with order, war with peace, weakness with strength, impoverishment with a modest turn towards prosperity, confusion with certainty, (and) aimlessness with purpose."

In almost all respects the Communists "were performing far better than any predecessor."

There was also a sense of everyone working together to bring about visible improvements in the lives of most people. The educated minority who had been exposed to American, Japanese and other overseas influences were "only too eager to win acceptance as authentically Chinese by rejecting foreign ways, and for a time they seemed to have found themselves places in the new order."

Jenner said that "the party's ideology was not complete nonsense" as it "offered a view of China's traumatic modern history that, while open to some criticisms, made a lot more sense than the incoherent nationalism of the Guomindang."

The communists "ran a more powerful, effective and honest dictatorship," Jenner concluded.