Comrade Kotka
I guess my question is a history sort of one. It's sort of about why the CCP were able to harness nationalism but the Nationalist Party was not. xD 'Harness' isn't really the best thing to say... more like 'create'.
Anyway, one short answer is: peasants, probably.
Well, that comes down to the question of 'Permanent Revolution.'
With the capitalists scared of a peasant rebellion and proletarian revolution, while gaining material benefits from the imperialists, they were unable to make a bourgeois-democratic revolution, like those succesful in the UK, US and France (this is the same reason the general European Revolution of 1848 failed as well). Being scared of the peasantry, but also being connected to the landlords in the country side, the capitalists could not carry out the democratic task of 'land to the toilers.' The CCP appealed to just this very sentiment, albeit in a half-hearted, military way.
With the Long March, the CCP left the cities and was forced to rely on the peasantry, and in the war against the nationalists, they confiscated the lands of opposing landlords (though landlords who sent a son to fight for the PLA were exempt) and distributed the lands to the peasants.
This willingness, however half-hearted and forced by circumstances it was, was way more than the nationalists offered, which was continued subjection to the landlords and money lenders without respite.
This is why. I could look for some stuff if you like. But it won't be available too soon, and may have to wait until tonight. I feel like s**t.
This is summed up in a story by a Chinese woman (Xin Ran maybe?) who wrote a book I forget the name of... Anyway, she is a principled defender of the PRC, and is really big on the woman question in China. This story is from the 90's, I think:
Anyway, she was able to become the newsreader on a local radio station in some rural hellhole. Needless to say, it sucked. But she was good at it, and cnsidered politically reliable, so they gave her and another person a little more room for free expression on another programme where people could call in.
So she heard about this problem with the women in tonnes of villages getting really sick. she researched it and found out it was because of the women being stuck inside all day during winter with the fire and the smoke heating the place up. Now, these peasant houses had no windows or chimneys, so there was no way for the smoke to leave, and so yeah, the women got sick.
So she went around to the villages in the region it was happening and was trying to explain to them that they need to put windows, or better, chimneys on their houses. They thought she was well meaning, but how could they do that? If they made a hole in the roof, the spirits of the ancestors could get loose, and that would bring bad luck on the family for generations!
Well, she had this local cop as a guide, and he said "let me try this." So he went off and told a few villagers at the next village, and they set to work straight away.
When they arrived at the next village the peasants were already at work, and as they continued their trip, more and more villages had completed the modifications. So she asked the cop what he said. "I told them that while going through the archives, they found an old proclamation by Mao saying that all the peasants in this region need to put chimneys on their houses." She was all 'WTF?' at him, so he explained: "The peasants are very practical people: they only believe in the gods that work for them."
Now, some would take this as just more evidence that Mao was just the next 'emperor' in the Chinese Imperial tradition. This is most certainly not the case. This shows something extremely important: The peasants realised that the revolution had benefitted them greatly, and this was personified in Mao, and their reverence for him. As much as the Stalinists held back, the fact is that this was a real social revolution, and not only that, but a people's revolution, though misled and with distorted expression due to the Stalinist misleaders. That is something that cannot be erased.
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