Chinese Communist Party
| Subject: | 🏺 History |
| Type: | Expository Essay |
| Pages: | 8 |
| Word count: | 2256 |
| Topics: | Communism, China, Imperialism, International Relations, 💣 World War 2 |
essay ASAP?
Table of Contents
Introduction
The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) was formed in 1921 and rose to power in 1949 (brown, 2017). The party was formed to rebel against imperialism in the country. It was meant to bring revolutions in China. The party concentrated on gathering of masses for industrial action. The Chinese Communist Party is the sole ruling party in China. There exist other parties in China but the Chinese Communist Party holds the real power and leads the united front. The founding fathers of the party were Chen Duxiu and Li Dazhao. The formation of the party was greatly influenced by the Marxist theory and anarchism. The 1918 Bolshevik Revolution in Russia also greatly influenced the formation and success of the party.
The Soviet Union policies had a significant effect on the Chinese Communist Party. Communism manifestation in the Union of Soviet Socialists Republics (USSR) taught the Chinese a lesson in communism (Meisels, 2012). The Soviet Union policies influence the success of the Chinese Communist Party. The article will assess the effects of the Soviet Union’s party on the Chinese Communist Party by evaluating the manifestation and results of communism in Russia.
Communism
Communism is a political system that aims at the public ownership and control of the vital resources in the society such as the means of production and natural resources (Terence Ball, 2017). The private ownership of resources is converted into public ownership and all the production is communal. Communism promotes equality by eliminating social class, it also makes vital resources such as healthcare, employment, and education to the citizens. Communism also does not allow monopolies and hence there is no overpricing of commodities. On the other hand, communism provides for a dictatorship on the people. The government has full control of all resources and has the power to dictate and run the lives of the citizens. The system also denies financial freedom to the people. The citizens do not have personal investments in the means of production and so the entrepreneurs do not have the freedom and ability to make money.
Communism in Russia
The communist party of the Soviet Union was the ruling party of the USSR. It was the only ruling party of the Soviet Union in the 1990s. The party was founded in 1921 by a group of revolutionists who took over power after the revolution in October of 1917. The party was then dissolved in 1991 after a failed coup d’état. Communism in Russia began after the February revolution in 1917. The riots were against food rationing by the government of Tsar Nicholas II. The ideology of communism from Karl Max was taken up the Russian revolutionaries in the 1980s. The Russian Social Democratic Party embraced the Marxism ideology. The party split into two due to conflicts of interests. One of the leaders who came to be known as Lenin led one of the group and declared that the group was to wait for revolutions to happen but rather it would cause the revolutions. The declaration came into effect when his party the Bolshevik Party took over power during the World war I. the party began the development of the communist Russia and the start of the Soviet Union.
The private ownership of land was ended and the estates that were once owned by rich landlords were given to the poo. The working conditions were improved and equality for women was upheld by the women promised equal pay, the right to work and voting rights. The government was later unable to deliver on the promises due to internal opposition, external threat, and economic difficulties. Some of the negative effects that were as a result of communism in Russia include; the spread of communism around the world was the result of the World War II, 15 million people died during the crash of the Bolsheviks and anti-Bolsheviks (Farley, 2016). After the revolutions, people lost the freedom of expression and were forbidden to engage in religion as the churches were burned and destroyed. Communism in as a political system did not work in Russia, it was faced with a lot of challenges that included further revolutions, economic depravations, and internal opposition.
Communism in China. The rise of communism in China is attributed to Mao Zedong, a Chinese leader who rose to power and was largely influenced by Marxism ideologies on communism. The boxer rebellion in China in 1900 lead to exiling the missionaries, mass murder of Christians and Christian converts. The murder of innocent lives leads to starvation and grief among the Chinese citizens. It was during this times of grief that China experienced movements that were strongly considering communism. Mao started a society of for the study of Marxism and the members of the society later formed the Chinese Communist Party. Zedong viewed women as a resource that needed to be utilized outside the home. Zedong left out gender parity in his communist rule. His campaign to get women to work outside home led to many people being persecuted.
During economic reforms in China, the communist values were incorporated into the capitalist market system. Communism in China led to some changes; the marriage law abolished the traditional law of women to be always obedient to their husbands and for the girls to be always obedient to their fathers and the old women to obedient to their sons. The communist law abolished the killings of baby girls. The cutting and binding of the upper-class girls were abolished as well as child marriage. The communist law also banned the sale of girls to be sold as servants, concubines, and prostitutes. The communist rule impacted change on the health sector as well
There were teams of health specialists who went to the villages to explain to the villagers about the connection between dirt and disease. People were also given medical training for six months and sent to the villages to provide basic health care free of charge. The opium field was destroyed and the families of the addicts were put in charge to ensure that the addicts reformed. The communist government also made some changes in the education sector. The literacy levels increased and the government introduced a phonetic form of learning that made learning easy.
Chinese communism compared to Russian communism. The idea of communism is based on the idea of public ownership of all the vital resources in the country. Both China and Russia had their ideology and implementation of communism. The results from both countries were different mainly due to internal factors and character of the leaders. Some of the differences between the two forms of communism include; the Chinese communists embraced the capitalist system and the major state-owned corporations are run to make a profit with the heads of those corporations being appointed on the basis of business competence. The Chinese Communist Party has also drafted an effective succession system, after every 10 years the officials at the top step down and every official under them move one step upwards. The people at the top do not stay as the heads till they die. The relationship between the state and the party is different. Unlike in the Soviet Union where the parties could give orders to the state with no consequences, the Chinese government is integrated with the country and the president of China is also the General Secretary of the state.
In Russia, the CPSU was crucial in identifying the Soviet Union. The existence of the Soviet Union depended on the CPSU and without the party, people became just Ukrainians and Tajiks but not Soviets. China, on the other hand, has an identity that does not rely on the party. China is communist not by virtue of the party but because the country cannot be without communism. This aspect made it possible for China to create a free-speech special administrative area in Hong Kong. Creation of a free-speech area by the Soviet Union was not possible. The communist party of the Soviet Union had the intention of expanding communism to the rest of the world and turn all nations to communist’s states. On the other hand, China was only concerned about the welfare of its citizens and did not consider what the rest of the world was doing. The Soviet Union due to their desire to impose communism on the rest of the world, spent a lot of money on the military to maintain soldiers in other countries. The Chinese Communist Party did not spend as much money as the Soviet Union to maintain the military.
Generally, the Chinese communism was focused in the developing of the state. The empowerment of women, development of education and the improvement in health care. The Russian communism, on the other hand, was more focused on being a dominant force in the world rather than the development of the state. Revolutions in Russia were frequent with different leaders always taking to take over power. The Russian communism did not consider profit making in the state but rather it concentrated on giving land to the poor and redistributing the state’s wealth among its people. The Russian communism was largely political while the Chinese communism was largely developmental.
Fall of the Russian communism
- There were various factors that led to the fell of the communist Russia. The Soviet Union represented a communist Russia and there were several factors that lead to its downfall.
- The idea on Perestroika and Glasnost- the last leader of the soviet union, Mikhail Gorbachev, had plans for the future and his plans were based on his ideas on perestroika and glasnost. The leader wanted Perestroika to adopt a communist-capitalist system. In his plan, the government would allow the forces of supply and demand to dictate some of the development decisions. The president’s plan incorporated bringing the young people to leadership through democracy. The next plan of the leader involved freeing the citizens from oppression. The freeing of people acted against the opposite of maintaining the Soviet Union. The people through their freedom of speech criticized the government. The government lost its control over the people making economic and political reforms and appeared weak to the Soviet people. The people than organized themselves and successfully ended the Soviet Union.
- Loss of Lenin’s pure Marxism ideology- a more conservative approach on issues was taken by the generations of leaders that took over Lenin. The party elite gathered wealth while the citizens suffered from starvation. The youth refused to adopt the party’s ideology like their parents due to the hypocrisy of the party elite. The young people refused to stand for the Soviet Union due to the hatred for the party.
- Western aggression. – the United States mounted cold wars on the soviet union and regarded to the union as the evil empire. President Ronald Regan increased spending on the American military as well as research into better weapons. Regan supported the Strategic Defense institute which destroyed the Russian missiles. The United States isolated the Soviet Union from the rest of the world’s economy by aiding in taking the oil prices as low as they could go. The Soviet Union was impaired without oil and began to crumble.
- Military development rather than social welfare.- The Soviet Union concentrated more on developing the nation and directed most of the resources to development with a vision of being bigger than any other nations. The citizens were left with no consumer goods, they lacked access to clothing or shoes. The deprivation of basic needs led to the people resulting in a revolution.
- Nationalist movements.-the The Soviet Union was composed of 15 different nations. There were people from different cultures, ethnicity, and languages. Many of the cultures in the union did not get along well. The issue of the majority and minority came about due to oppression and victimization of the minority by the majority. The revolutionary change in Poland spread to the states of the Soviet Union and many of the members begun to split into ethnic lines. As the states pulled away from the Soviet Union, its central power was weakened which lead to the collapsing of the Soviet Union in 1991.
The success of the Chinese Communist Party could be attributed to the failure of the Russian communism. The Chinese learned the mistakes of the Soviet Union and avoided doing the same. The Chinese and the Soviet Union collided once under the leadership of Mao Zedong due to conflict of interest. The conflict was due to divisions in the Chinese communist system (Mao’s Role in the Sino-Soviet Conflict pg. 139)
Overall the Soviet Union’s policies under communism did not consider the people, instead, they focused on state development through infrastructure and military equipment. The ideology of communism faded away as different leaders came to power. The Chinese communism was different. Though both nations suffered under oppression, the Chinese communist party did not chain back the citizens by depriving them consumer goods. The Chinese communist party focused on social welfare through improved healthcare, improvement of literacy levels in the country and empowering the women. The party did not invest in the military but rather invested in the people. The country adopted communism, not because of the party but because it provided solutions from oppression and promoted human development.
- Brown, k. (2017). chinese communist party. Oxford BIBLIOGRAPHIES.
- Farley, R. (2016). How the soviet union and china almost started world war II. THE NATIONAL INTEREST.
- Geer, M (2012). what china learned from the soviet union’s fall. THE DIPLOMAT.
- Bll, T R. D. (2017). communism ideology.
Offered for reference purposes only.