After the ravages of the previous forty years, the disintegration of the imperial state and the failure of the Nationalists, the Communists had to deal with the daunting task of establishing a new ruling system. China, ever since the rise of the West, had been faced with a range of strategic choices concerning its modernization: it could reform the traditional imperial institutions, which was attempted unsuccessfully prior to 1911; it could imitate the Western model, an experiment which failed badly between 1911 and 1949; or it could develop new institutions, drawing on foreign examples where appropriate as well as on the past. [277] The last, in effect, became the Communist project, with inspiration being sought in part from the Soviet Union, although Maoism was largely a home-grown product rather than a foreign import. [278] The Communists had already acquired some initial experience of governance in the areas over which they had enjoyed limited authority during the late twenties and early thirties, [279] then in the expanding territory they controlled during the resistance against the Japanese occupation after 1937, and finally in the regions they governed during the Civil War between 1945 and 1949. One of the key problems that faced both the late imperial state and the Nationalists, under Sun Yat-sen and then Chiang Kai-shek, was a loss of control over government revenues. The People’s Republic of China (PRC) — as the new regime was known — quickly reasserted central control over revenues and disbursements. Although the actual expenditure of revenues was to remain in local hands, as it had been since the eighteenth century, central government once again determined how they should be used; there was, in this respect, a strong continuity with the late imperial state. [280]

The backbone of the new ruling system was the Communist Party. In many respects, it proved a highly effective mechanism for governing, certainly in comparison with the late imperial state and the Nationalists. The key figure was Mao Zedong. Notwithstanding his colossal abuses of power, which resulted in the deaths of millions, as the architect of the revolution and the founder of an independent and unified China, he played the central role in sustaining the popularity and legitimacy of the new regime, and he remains, even today, a venerated figure in the eyes of many Chinese, even more than Deng Xiaoping, who presided over the reform period from 1978. Prior to 1949, the Communist Party’s main base of support lay amongst the peasantry, who constituted the overwhelming majority of the population, rather than in the cities, where the Nationalists were strong. This was very different from the Bolsheviks in the USSR, whose support was concentrated in the cities and was very weak in the countryside. [281] The underlying strength and resilience of the new regime was demonstrated by the ability of the Communist Party to renew itself after the death of Mao. [282] Despite the calamities of the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution, both of which Mao had been responsible for, the Communist Party succeeded in restoring its legitimacy amongst the people and then embarking on a very different kind of economic policy, which led to a sustained period of extremely rapid economic growth and a remarkable transformation in China’s situation and prospects.

Judgements about the post-1949 era have — both in China and the West, albeit in differing ways — placed overwhelming emphasis on the extent to which it represented a new departure, a rupture in the continuity and tradition of China. The reasons for this are not difficult to understand. The Chinese Communists — like the communist tradition more widely — sought to underline the extent to which they represented an utterly new kind of regime marking a complete break with the past. That, after all, is what revolutions are supposed to be about, especially socialist revolutions. The Communist Party directed its venom against many Chinese traditions, from the long-standing oppression of women to Confucian notions of hierarchy, and carried out a sweeping land reform in the name of class struggle. Meanwhile the West, with the exception of a brief period during the Second World War, has, more or less ever since the 1917 October Revolution, regarded Communist regimes as the devil incarnate. As a result, too little attempt has been made to understand them in their historical and cultural context, to appreciate the continuities with previous history and not just the discontinuities. In sum, for a variety of reasons, there has been a tendency to overlook the powerful lines of continuity between post-1949 China and the dynastic period. As Bin Wong points out, while the overt differences between Confucian and Communist ideology are clear — hierarchy versus equality, conservatism versus radicalism, harmony versus conflict — there are also important similarities between the two traditions. As in the Maoist period, for example, the Confucian tradition also emphasized the need to reduce inequality, limit the size of landholdings and redistribute land. Similarly, as we discussed earlier, the state’s responsibility for moulding the outlook of the people is an old Chinese tradition, which the Communists have simply perpetuated in a distinctive form. The same can be said of the state’s role in economic and social security, which the Communists continued during the Maoist period in the form of the ‘iron rice bowl’, with state enterprises required to provide employees with housing, education and health, as well as lifelong employment. [283]

There are political parallels, too. Both the Confucian and Communist modes of rule involved an implicit contract between the people and the state: if the state failed to meet its obligations then the peasants had, according to Mencius (551–479 BC; the foremost disciple of Confucius), a right to rebel. In the imperial era this took the form of the mandate of Heaven; in the Communist era it was expressed, in the name of class struggle, in the right of the proletariat to resist and defeat the bourgeoisie, which during the Maoist era was the pretext for the many top-down mass mobilizations that eventually culminated in Mao’s own assault on the Communist state in the enormously destructive Cultural Revolution. The relationship between state and subject in both traditions was authoritarian and hierarchical, and very different from the Western tradition with its narrative of political rights and formal representative institutions. There are other examples of continuity. Confronted with the problem of the gulf between the cities and the countryside, both acknowledged the need to rule them differently. While the Confucian tradition recruited a governing elite consisting of the highly educated and literate by means of the imperial examination system, the Communists, faced with the same task, used the Party as their means of recruitment to the state. Finally, in the Communist as in the Confucian tradition, elites were seen as an appendage of the state rather than as independent groups with their own forms of organization and power. The absence of a civil society and an autonomous public realm in Communist China is not a new phenomenon: China has never had either.

There are, thus, powerful continuities between the Communist tradition and dynastic history. The PRC is an integral part of Chinese history and can only be understood in that context. [284] The historian Wang Gungwu argues that the new Communist state was ‘a replacement for the old emperor-state’, and that ‘Mao Zedong effectively restored the idea of a charismatic founder-emperor and behaved, and he was treated very much, like an emperor with almost no limits on his power.’ [285] Suisheng Zhao makes a similar point rather differently: