Восточная Азия: факты и аналитика (Jul 2022)
A Destructive Autocracy Regime – China’s Experience in the Mao Zedong Era
Abstract
The article deals with the transformation of the authoritarian collectivist regime of the PRC into the authoritarian personalist regime of Mao Zedong. The author chose the dichotomy of rational and irrational, mind and will as a method of understanding and explaining the two varieties of the authoritarian regime of government as the methodological basis of the study. According to the author's understanding, the authoritarian regime of government in the PRC, which existed from the day the state was formed until 1956, provides an example of the struggle between two principles in the leadership of the CCP and the Chinese state – rational, based mainly on reason, striving for orderliness, planning and taking into account regularity, and irrational, based predominantly on the will, striving to control the elements and random. According to the author, China owes its successful development in 1949–1956 to the collectivist regime of government based on a rational principle, and the personalist regime of Mao Zedong, that replaced it, proved to be a complete failure, focusing the main efforts of the Communist Party and the state not on development, but on self-preservation. The article draws attention to the fact that an integral part of the process of transforming the collectivist regime into a personalist one was the change of "polarity" by a number of prominent leaders of the CCP and the state, who abandoned their commitment to the rational principle in politics in favor of the irrational principle. History shows that there was a political mimicry with different motives. For example, Deng Xiaoping, who served both regimes, eventually led a group of initiators to re-establish a collectivisttype government that generated successful reform policies.
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