CHINA AFTER MAO

Mao secured authority by way of peasant movement1 seeking revolutionary base in the rural areas. He saw the imperialist and reactionary forces strongly entrenched in the urban centres, and therefore chose to avoid struggle against the enemy in the cities. In the past China had experienced many peasant wars, particularly in the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries.2 These attempts generally failed because the rebels lacked strong bases. Mao learned much from these failures. He thought it necessary to build the backward villages into advanced, consolidated base areas, into great military, political, economic and cultural revolutionary bastions, so that they can fight the fierce enemy who utilises the cities to attack the rural districts.3 The unevenness of China's economic development (a localized agrarian rather than a unified capitalist economy); the immensity of China's territory, which gave the revolutionary forces sufficient room to maneuver in; the disunity inside China's ruling groupall these conditions enabled the Chinese revolution first to