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Simply a Strategy To make the story short, the article discussed how Mao Zedong seemed to have bias over the peasants. In his strategy to overthrow the government, Mao Zedong supposedly relied on the peasant class more so than he did the proletariat thus contradicting his beliefs as a Marxist. There are many ways to view his favor of the peasants over the working class. For one, the peasants might have taken up most of the population in China similar to how those on the poverty line and below overcome the number of people in the bureaucrats in the Philippines.
Number always matters when it comes to this and he might have simply picked the lower class over the working in terms of numbers. Another is his “admiration for the innate wisdom of the peasantry’ as Maurice Meisner stated in the article. Of course, the peasants must have been wiser than those in the working class having experienced more hardships. Also, he may have found stronger elemental forces to use against the government in the countryside than in the urban areas.
Finally, there is the matter of how Mao Zedong grew up in a family of peasants. He knew of the hardships and the challenges of the peasants more than anyone and how their class had been denied of the privileges that the higher classes received. Maybe he knew this was Just a spark waiting to be ignited by the right person. However, Mao Zedong did not betray his belief in Marxism for he too, took revolutionaries from the working class, having them fill in the empty spots as leaders.
Why was this? This was for the reason that he knew that no matter how powerful and resourceful the peasants were, he was well ware that they could never visualize a more industrialized society for China having been living in the rural area ever since, away from civilization and modernization. If he chose to make them the leaders of the revolution, China would remain stagnant and unindustrialized.
Because the capabilities of peasants were limited, his visions for a better China in the future, he knew, would be limited as well. To me, whatever reason Mao Zedong had for choosing the peasantry over the proletariat (if he really did so) could not have been personal. Whether he chose them for their wisdom, resources, number or trivial childhood bitterness, whatever the result was going to be, he was not the only one to benefit from it. The revolution was not for him.
It was for the good of China. And if he thought that igniting the long-ignored spark among the peasants would do the trick for his country, he certainly was not wrong about it. And while the lower class was Just as capable as the working class in strength, they would never be able to overcome them when it came to visualizing a more industrialized future for China. Mao Zedong was right to use the working class as the king and the peasants as pawns in nationwide chess game.
It was all simply a strategy. I am not an activist or communist or anything close but I find strategies in warfare and revolution very interesting. It takes a lot of skill and intellect to organize a revolution against institution, let alone the whole government. This paper might not have made sense as a whole but I would Just like to state that despite his failure in his first few attempts for an uprising, Mao Zedong is definitely a very admirable