According to Maurice Meisner’s Mao’s China …show more content…
Mao vision was to “Change the colonial form, semi-colonial form of society into an independent, democratic society.” In Marxism, it is crucial to go to a stage staring with a revolution lead by the bourgeoisies and after the democracy was established, then comes the revolution that is lead by the proletariat to establish a socialist country. Although Mao believed the bourgeoisies could help the revolution at the start of the revolution, in Stuart Schram’s The Thought of Mao Tse-Tung, Mao wanted “the participation of the proletariat in the leadership”. This was what Mao when he used the phrase “New Democracy”. “A very large section of the Chinese proletariat is older and more experienced than the Chinese bourgeoisies, and is therefore a greater and more broadly-based social force” (Schram 79). Though it seems that Mao was already in favor of the proletariat class the early years was still a mixed economy and it contained a small scale of capitalism. “Mao was cautioned land reform and redistribution would need to exhibit a certain inequality to ensure productivity” (Karl 61). …show more content…
Democracy is given to “the people” and this excludes the counter-revolutionaries. This was how Mao developed this “new” way of democracy. This democracy “depended on the ‘mass line’ and called for centralized rule” (Karl 74). Unlike earlier years when the bourgeoisies and the proletariats could join together and create a mixed economy, Mao now separates them clearly and promotes the proletariat into becoming the majority. Mao wanted this democracy to be centralized and granted to those who would perform his views. Mao said, “Both cadres and peasants will change about themselves as they learn from their own experience in the struggle. Get them into action themselves. They will learn while doing, becoming more capable, and large numbers of excellent people will come forward” (Meisner 139). Instead of being educated Mao wants the masses to be self-educated and continue the revolution themselves. By June 1950, Mao started land reform in China. This would be the demonstration of using the mass-line, while the people themselves started the to redistribute the land and the communist party helper. “The destruction of the gentry as a social class, although that process of class destruction involved more terror and physical violence that had originally been