How Flexible Ideologies Contribute to Political Success
The Chinese Communist Party is not a model for democratic movements, but the CCP's history shows how political movements succeed or fail.
The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is one of the most powerful political parties in history, but it didn’t begin that way. It and its leader, Mao Zedong, were almost wiped out in the 1930s.
However, the CCP benefited from a war with Japan and incompetent opponents. The Nationalists did most of the fighting against the Japanese while the CCP consolidated its position in northern China. The Nationalists also threw their weight against the CCP, spending too many troops on an unbreakable region.
Tony Saich’s book From Rebel to Ruler tells the story of the CCP from its humble roots in the countryside to the totalitarian behemoth it is today. Learning from its rise isn’t an endorsement of the party, its beliefs, or its tactics. Instead, it’s a way to identify the shortfalls of political movements today that could be effective if they could focus on acquiring power rather than only railing against it.
Flexibility in Surprising Places
The CCP may not be known as an ideologically flexible organization, but it has gone through periods during which the party drifted far from the doctrine of communism it hoped to implement. Saich wrote:
“Before 1949, the CCP survived where it dealt with local politics and adapted central dictates to suit the local environment. In fact, local Communist Party leaders went even further by using traditional rituals and symbols to attract the residents to their cause and to oppose the traditional powerholders. By contrast, the party was unsuccessful, often with disastrous consequences, when ideology and central dictate dominated and attempts were made to change reality on the ground too quickly or too radically.”
Millions died during the Great Leap Forward, when Mao starved the countryside to feed the cities, which were forced to produce greater amounts of steel and industrial material. The Cultural Revolution was completely detached from any real wrongdoing beyond imagined infractions from the CCP.
However, Saich points out that the reform period following 1979 and even the days of China’s civil war were periods of greater success for the party. Locals were able to live under the CCP without being crushed by the whims of the party’s chairman.
That’s a valuable lesson for political parties in democratic societies to learn. The United States has had leaders obsessed with imposing their own vision of society on American voters, whether they liked it or not. Whether it’s party activists in charge of strategy or a president drunk on power and enablers, disconnects with voters are surefire ways to either remove a party from office or keep a well-meaning party out of power.
Ideology Should Be Built from the Ground Up
By the mid-1910s, China had lost a war against Japan, and the proud empire of China was re-evaluating the foundations of its civilization. Saich credits that period of re-evaluation with allowing the communists to gain such a strong foothold before the Long March.
China had several champions of liberalism during this time, including Hu Shi. Saich recounts a debate that Hu had with an early CCP partisan:
“Rejecting the Bolshevik total solution, Hu wrote about the need for ‘more study of problems, less talk of isms.’ He rejected the all-embracing solutions proposed by the radicals, as he felt that China’s problems stemmed from many different causes. For Hu, the adoption of such all-embracing ideologies would lead to disaster. Any doctrine had to be based on an in-depth analysis of specific practical problems.”
Hu’s criticisms would be vindicated decades later. Communism as practiced by the Bolsheviks made party doctrine a solution to all policy problems and all ideological differences. If societies would just properly collectivize and people fell in line, then an egalitarian utopia would emerge.
However, that accounting of human nature leaves out every important detail for decision-making. No country will ever get total compliance with an ideology. There’s also no “theory of everything” that can solve every novel problem that comes across a leader’s desk.
Politics Has No Theory of Everything
Seeking a “total” solution to politics is a lost cause, and while totalitarian ideologies can always find support, many voters in democratic countries remain allergic to leaders professing to have all the answers to unrelated problems.
But many voters are also allergic to bureaucrats who can’t express why the narrow solution they have proposed will benefit their countrymen.
Finding a balance between policy and messaging shouldn’t be a novel insight, but several modern political leaders have failed to do it. Hillary Clinton ran on the message that she thought she’d do a good job without tying her campaign to some greater meaning. Donald Trump thinks only of himself and has lost touch with a country relearning that it values competence in its federal bureaucrats.
The CCP is not a model for American politcal parties. But its history should be informative to whoever takes power in an election cycle in which both parties will have to rally around new leaders.